• Build up your economy

• Produce monks, traders or soldiers

• Invest your special settlers to race for victory

Economy Puzzle• Establish good chains

• Decide building composition

• Arrange for efficient transport

• Time construction

• Use food boost

Monks• Research technologies

– Production

– Construction

– Offense

– Defense

• Convert sectors

• Strengthen defense

• Questing

Traders• Generate money

– buy instead of produce

– Trade expeditions establish new trade options

• Buy sectors

• Questing

Soldiers• Conquer and crush

• Questing

Settlers 7• Free Camera

• Thousands of animated objects

• Highly detailed game world

• Simulation

Iteration

Lesson: Iteration

• Quality of your game is proportional to the amount of work you discard

You have to be fast at trying out things and throwing them away. Once in a while you actually end up with something that is fun.

Game Design and Prototypes

• Game designers write first prototypes– Enforces stringency by requiring attention to detail

– Shortest possible feedback cycle for game design

– You can go a long way with tools like BlitzBasic

• Tech guys ready engine for production during prototyping

Once the concept matures you must be ready to prototype in the engine

Turnaround: Build

• Proper coding

• Blob build

• Ram disk

• Incredibuild

Turnaround: Restart

• Dynamic reload

• Preprocessed data

• Low detail mode

Creating Playable Maps Fast• Make a map playable fast

• Collect feedback on map

• Let artist spend time after a map is proven to be fun

Map Sketch

Planning Overlay

Map Editor

• Planning overlays• Full undo support• Replay support for crash recovery• Objects can be freely scaled

– Non-uniform with automatic texture adaption

• (Almost) zero user interaction for movement blocking• Copy and paste support for landscapes

– Copied landscape can be rotated and translated– Copied landscape can be mirrored

• Template tool: create landscape with a single brush stroke

Measure Game Behavior

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VP

@ 1

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Victory points over time

Measure Game Behavior: AI

Fancy Food

Lesson: Iteration

• Quality of your game is proportional to the amount of work you discard

You have to be fast at trying out things and throwing them away. Once in a while you actually end up with something that is fun.

More is More

Lesson: More Is More

• Understand your engine

• Beware of cache

• Stay in control of resource usage

Artistic resource hunger is insatiable. Technology enables and must enforce limits.

Standard Stuff

• Keep object representation small• Simple and regular scene division• Visibility culling• Spatial locality of iterated data• Stream to stay in memory budget• LOD wherever you can• Compact/compress vertex/texture/animation data• Imposters• Sort objects by materials to save pipe state changes• Instancing• Write efficient shaders• …

Introspection

• The better you understand your engine the more you can squeeze in.– Cpu usage

– Memory usage

– Texture and geometry data

– Render targets

– AI goals

– Spatial partitioning structures (quadtree, …)

– …

Trajectories needed

Introspection

2GB Virtual Address Space

• DirectX 9 managed resources add to virtual size

• Differences between XP and Vista

• Address space fragmentation can be critical

– Rule of thumb: leave at least 1/3 unused

• Managed textures: 144 MB

• Render targets: 121 MB (way too much)

• Default textures: 440 MB

• Managed geometry: 150 MB

• Default: 88 MB

• System geometry: 19MB (way too much)

• Animation data• Streaming buffer• Quadtree• …

Processor Memory Gap

Memory Hierarchy

Use the Force

• Where performance matters treat your game loop as a series of data transformation steps

– Exploit multiple cores

– Exploit SIMD

– Exploit GPU

Automated Data Preprocessing

• Support multiple platforms

• Prepare parallelization

• Compact data in order to squeeze more into the game

• Stay in control of resource usage

• Keep artists happy: they want to work with native formats only

• Enforce data consistency

• fully automated: server monitors jobs for changes

• decentralized: runs on every developer machine bad data does not block others

• lives in perforce data for any version can be rebuild any time

• fast: parallelized, incremental archive update

• extensible: jobs are just command line tools programmers do not need to deal with framework APIs

Resource Handling

Dynamic Reload

Lesson: More Is More

• Understand your engine

• Beware of cache

• Stay in control of resource usage

Artistic resource hunger is insatiable. Technology enables and must enforce limits.

What’s Next?

The Settlers Online

Act 3: Expert Economy

Logistics

Advanced troops

Advanced defense

Supplies for armies

Act1: Basic Economy

Supplies basic needs

Food

building materials

Act2: Advanced Economy

Mining

Metals

Basic troops

Support chains

Exploit Expand Explore Exterminate

The Settlers Online

Expanding his social network,

a player will become more

powerful at a faster rate

Buff your friends production

Send gifts to your friends

Trade with your friends

Help defending your friends kingdom

Earn hard currency by inviting new friends

into the game by Email, Facebook, or Twitter

Q & A