IRISZOOM"We wanted to have huge battlefields with lots of units to control so you feel like the general," says Girard. "This is powered by a brand new technology called the IRISZOOM engine. It is basically like Google Earth in 3D and in real-time."
Watching the game in action, you can rapidly zoom from single unit views amongst trees or city blocks out to expansive regional views that show the grand sweep of a major encounter, with stunning 3D terrain. Even aircraft sweep across the landscape just as you would think they should if they were closing in for the kill.
Stylistically, when you push out to this maximum view, the world itself changes into a war room perspective, with the map seamlessly becoming part of a table with all the hallmarks of a real war room around the edges of the perspective view onto the live field of play.
"Since we want the players to feel like true strategists, we have given them the tools and environment of a general: a war room with a command table," says Girard. "In most RTS games, your best overview of the battle is a 200 pixel wide square, with some small flashing dots. The battle plan is displayed full screen, with army concentration, arrows to show given orders; everything is clear."
"This design is also used in the single player campaign for the narration of the game," says Girard. "Where several general masterminds will collaborate to dominate the enemy."
The Tech of IRISZOOMThere isn't much information about the IRISZOOM engine, which is the new technology under the hood of RUSE. Add some awfully vague statements like its ability to "handle a billion polygons" and we could just dismiss this as living in the land of FUD. But seeing is believing, and it's clear there is a stunning number of polygons being rendered here, with smooth yet rapid zoom capability to quickly move between god view and unit level interaction. This looks and feels like nothing we've seen before.
Data streaming is playing a big role here, with a database of textures and models being rapidly accessed and rendered into the geometry.
At this stage final system requirements are yet to be revealed, but we're told configuration minimums will not be "too high". That said, IRISZOOM will definitely take advantage of any number of cores in a multi-core system. And not in an unnatural way that groups tasks by type, either. The engine is built to treat every computational package organically, as discrete small tasks, so whether it is physics, AI, or texture, distribution across cores will be about finding available capacity and getting all jobs done quickly.
So be careful not to play RUSE first on your neighbours OctoBeast or you may not want to see it ever again on your dual-core.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012