IGN Publishes New Interview on Sins of a Solar Empire

Stardock's Next New Game Coming in February 2008

Published on July 26, 2007 By Yarlen In GalCiv II News

In February 2008, Stardock will be publishing its first third-party game called Sins of a Solar Empire. Sins is currently under development by Ironclad Games and mixes some of the turn-based aspects of titles like Galactic Civilizations II, with the real-time strategy genre.

Today IGN.com has published an interview with Ironclad Games' Blair Fraser on Sins of a Solar Empire. The six page article goes into some fantastic detail on the current state of development, the backstory, and many upcoming features. Give it a read at: http://pc.ign.com/articles/807/807956p1.html

If you'd like to participate in the Sins of a Solar Empire beta program, you can pre-order the game at:

https://www.sinsofasolarempire.com/store.aspx

Comments

pdesrivieres@yahoo.com

on Jul 26, 2007

To put the fighter's size in perspective, capital ships are up to 1000m long (100x that of the fighter), planets are up 10,000m and the distances between solar systems are up to 250,000,000m (25,000 planet diameters!) apart.

Is this a typo? Shouldn't it be "planets are up to 10,000km in diameter and the distances between solar systems are up to 250,000,000km (25,000 planet diameters!) apart"?
For comparision Earth's diameter is ~12,750km, average distance from the Sun is 1AU=~150,000,000km, and is 4.22 light-years (266,873AU or 3.99x10^16km) from the next nearest star, Alpha Centauri C. Space is huge and very empty!!! It is very difficult to realistically represent such immense scale in a video game!

One of the most interesting problems we encountered is actually due to a property of computer hardware. We had these great size scales between objects, but then we wanted to spread them very far apart so that planets, stars and star systems gave the impression of being realistically separated (note: impression is the key word here; the distances aren't even close to true astronomical scale). Unfortunately, even at our mock-realism distances, we exceeded the bounds on how accurately a computer can represent a number. Even once we solved the root of this problem there were hundreds of related artifacts that propagated into the most basic assumptions you make while programming a 3D engine.

This game looks very promising!

Martok

on Jul 26, 2007

Nice. This interview definitely re-whets my appetite for Sins.

Jarod Silverstar

on Jul 28, 2007

Yarlen,
You did state that people could be part of the beta by pre-ordering the game.

Are you planning to have any type of open beta or demo version of the game?

My reason for asking, is I have never been that big a fan if R-T Sim games but I would be interested in trying this one out still.
But as a family man, I absolutly cannot afford to drop $45 on a game that I am going to be not playing in a week.

In other words, if you would have a way of someone to at least try out the game before dropping the money on it, you might have a new customer.
If not, I guess I will just buy that box of diapers after all.

Jarod Silverstar

kryo

on Jul 28, 2007

Are you planning to have any type of open beta or demo version of the game?

I can't speak as to any official plans on the matter, but I wouldn't count on a demo until close to or after release, as was the case with GC2.

Campaigner

on Jul 30, 2007

With all the automatation and stuff that reduces micromanagement it start to sound like Galactic Civilizations 2....

I'll try a demo but StarCraft 2 and Universe at War are still my top RTS games to look out for.

Yarlen

on Jul 30, 2007

I believe the scale info is correct and Sins handles this quite fluidly. You can see it in-game when you zoom in - if you follow a phase lane with your camera, it takes forever to reach the destination (i.e., another planet). However, as you zoom out, the speed increases and the same trip takes much less time. It's actually pretty cool.

Jarod - You'll need to wait for the demo version. We've got one planned but it won't be out for a month or two after the game ships.

Jarod Silverstar

on Jul 30, 2007

Jarod - You'll need to wait for the demo version. We've got one planned but it won't be out for a month or two after the game ships.

This is more or less what I would expect from a demo. And that is fine with me.

As time goes on, I am finding that many of the games I am looking at are disappointing to me one way or another. I am almost getting to the point of where I would not even think about buying a game unless it a demo I can check out first.

Thanks for the reply.

Jarod Silverstar

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