Not only is Sins of a Solar Empire a blast to play, it also looks great. Care to expound a bit about the engine powering this game?
The engine is called the Iron Engine and its primary objective is to handle incredibly large game environments and very large differences in scale. We actually had to redesign how 3d engines are normally done in order to make this work because standard practices will lead you into problems with limitations of 32-bit CPU’s when you move onto this scale. The Iron Engine also boasts the ability to handle a VERY large number of units. Some screenshots taken by Multianna, a prominent member of our community, shows the engine dishing out over 20,000 ships. I’ve also seen maps of over 10,000 planets. It’s also very scaleable; it allows Sins to run on quite old machines (laptops included) and also rewards those with high-end uber machines. Some of the key graphical features include per-pixel specular lighting, dynamic fractal generation, post process bloom filtering, high resolution compressed textures, environment mapping, custom pixel and vertex shaders for all meshes and effects, an advanced particle system. extensive bump mapping and more. Perhaps the most important feature is it is VERY stable. We’ve been in open beta for almost a year and throughout the entire process we’ve heard regularly that even in beta the Iron Engine is more stable than most games at release. It’s even more so now.
Fan base is very important to this type of undertaking. How have the fans been supporting Sins? And how does Sins plan to support its fans during and after the launch of the game?
They have been and still are incredible. We’ve had a steadily growing fan base since the day the game was announced a few years ago and it really picked up when beta 1 started last March. They’ve been helping us with everything from testing, marketing, balancing, bug fixing, technical support and so on. I can pretty much count on entering any major gaming forum and find at least a couple Sins fans leading a discussion on the game. And how do we support them? I think the best way so far has been our constant, day-to-day interaction with them on the forums and the Sins IRC channel. They are in direct contact with us and they know what they say makes a difference – we’ve proven it to them with Sins’ progression. Anyone who has been with us through this process can play the final product and say “Hey, I remember the discussion about that and I remember being able to play test the result of that discussion.” We will continue to hold contests, release free new content on a regular basis, regular patches, balance upgrades, tutorials, new features, new tools, ICO tournaments and more.
Definitely. Modding Sins is so easy that people have been doing it since the second day of Beta 1. Already we’ve got experimental new mods, new maps, new ships, new abilities, new races, fan built map editors, fan built mesh editors, fan built map sharing utilities, various popular science fiction projects well into development and more. And we haven’t even released all our tools and tutorials. Galaxy Forge, our offline map editor, is the only one out so far and it’s free for anyone to check out from the Sins downloads page. We’ve got map and mod upload and download pages already up so it’ll be easy to share with other players; and the Iron Engine supports integrated mod organization, loading and enabling. Sins was built with modding in mind.
After Sins of a Solar Empire’s release, what do you see in store for the future?
A lot of sleep, some Bioshock, Mario Galaxies, Rock Band and cleaning house in Sins (I don’t get to play online much). As I mentioned a couple answers ago, we have a lot of Sins support and extended content to continue on; I definitely want to get started on finalizing the direction we want to take on some key features for our new project.
What tips do you have for first time players? Anything advance players might find useful?
New players should play through the four tutorials to get the basics down and at least take a quick look at the main sections of the manual so they know what new concepts to look out for. One common mistake is not upgrading the population centers of new founded colonies. These will drain money from the imperial coffers, so keep an eye out for “red” income values in the empire income summary - this means they are costing you. Another common mistake is not accounting for the pirate raids. When the skull starts flashing, make sure you place more bounty on someone else’s head then on your own. You don’t want the pirates coming after you – unless of course you have defenses ready and you’d like to earn some valuable capital ship experience turning the pirates into space sludge.
Advanced players? That’s a tough one – some of those guys can probably beat me. I’m noticing that in many online games even the advanced players aren’t taking advantage of some of the special ways of earning money. Raiding enemy trade and refinery ships can be quite lucrative. After being reduced to a single crappy asteroid, I bootstrapped my way out of imminent death by doing this to forge a mighty empire bent on revenge. Players also have to remember to watch the black market price graphs. If they see the prices are climbing, they should put some of their own metal or crystal up for sale and make a killing selling it anonymously through the market to other players. They won’t even realize they are funding the very fleet you will use to squash them with.
I’m sure you’re all extremely busy with the last-minute polishing and tweaks. Any final words before you go?
I really feel Sins is a very fun game that will keep you up very late more than once and will entertain for a long time to come. Despite its depth it’s very easy to learn the basics, it runs great on all sorts of machines and there are a lot of really cool new ideas in it that most people feel is a breath of fresh air in a genre often criticized for lack of innovation and creativity. Besides can you really lose with giant battle fleets, massive interstellar empires and monstrous planet sucking floating cities in space?
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