Empires Apart - An Old-School medieval RTS for PC/Mac

Community Showcase Game Development
1

Hello guys,
I’m Gian Paolo Vernocchi, Co-founder and Creative Director at DESTINYbit.
We’re really excited to show you the first trailer of our new game: Empires Apart.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=S24KnZ1n7Ao

Empires Apart is an old-school medieval RTS for PC/Mac.
The project is only 4 months old but we’re doing some pretty cool stuff with UE4 that I hope we can share here in the coming months, especially relatively to networking, making the simulation as deterministic as possible and some interesting use of blueprints.

UPDATE 05 (19/12/2016)
Fourth Devlog with a brand new look, Civilizations, new UI, procedural maps and more!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=baurylrQTq8

UPDATE 04 (11/04/2015)
Third Devlog with multiplayer, UI (all done in UMG), new buildings and units, sound effects and more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7rr-fy-j4w

UPDATE 03 (09/12/2015)
We recently had to grab some screenshots for the September’s feature of Indie Game Mag and so here they are!

http://i.imgur.com/TQsZix1.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/x0Vu0VB.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/WzoTPrd.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/xFULtFd.jpg

UPDATE 02 (08/05/2015)
Second Devlog with combat gameplay, resource depletion, berries and much more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik2M2Itl9vk

UPDATE 01 (06/14/2015)
First Devlog video showing some gameplay!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S7HNpqybNo

2

Great work! I love this style, keep it up.

3

Being that it’s an RTS and the style instantly made me think of AoE Online. But not as cartoony so that’s good ;D

4

Stronghold with UE4 ? More please :smiley:

5

Looks great, I like the style and concept.
Do you use the built-in navmesh pathfinder and AI/behaviour-tree system of UE4 or a custom one?

I ask it because I started to port my custom RTS system to UE4 from another engine (I found the performance of UE4 system not really suitable for high unit quantity RTS), and really interested in the opinion of other developers in similar game genre (there are not too many) :slight_smile:

8

As of right now we’re using the built-in navmesh but we know it’s a temporary solution… We are already planning implementing a custom solution.
Behavior Trees is something we want to experiment with but they pose an issue when it comes to multiplayer and keeping many simulations in sync. We’ll most likely implement our own solution for that as well.

9

sounds fine, please keep us informed, also with the interesting technical details!
especially how you solve the multiplayer issues!
good luck!

11

I’d also be curious to know what do you mean by “high unit quantity”, since for some RTS it’s hundreds and for others is thousands. Having worked with other engines out there though, I’d never attempt something like this on any of them. The only real alternative would be writing our own engine.

12

@franktech: I’m porting from the good old 3D Gamestudio this RTS battle system (not a classic build and fight RTS): - YouTube I made it a year ago, thus shows early state. The engine is old, unoptimized, but flexible enough for an RTS, so in theory I could complete a game with it, but not really developed further, and my bad habit is finding engine bugs :smiley: moreover I failed to establish a good enough team last year, I think I have much more chance here. some pics about the map decomposition: clusters: http://s26.postimg.org/3tsufm5zd/RTSMap_Decomp_shot0.jpg and tiles: https://imageshack.com/i/gvwl7tj nearly similar concept to the system of Company of Heroes 1.

@vernocchi: I thought of only a few hundreds, e.g. max. 400-500 units, thousands would require a custom engine as you wrote. At least it is my plan what I could manage in my above mentioned wip project. I think it is the max limit in UE4 too due to my tests and the engine’s animation handling (increasing skeletal mesh quantity results in a massive performance decrease). In case of 200 characters with a very simple navmesh pathfinding in a simple environment I get no good performance: http://s26.postimg.org/cni6og05l/testshot_standalone_2.jpg (without navmesh pathfinding it is better of course), but my pc is just above min. engine requirements so I don’t panic :slight_smile:

13

Hey folks, we posted our first devlog showing some gameplay action.
We also show a glimpse of our grid and slot system that we use to move units especially in regards to resources and buildings. We’re still in pre-alpha but things are looking good :slight_smile:

14

nice progress, I like especially the debug view. do you use procedural material for that?

15

We feed a custom dynamic texture that we update every frame to a dynamic material. It’s a 1024x1024 texture with each pixel being half of a in-game square. This allows us to have 2x2 pixels for each square with each pixel being a potential slot. The average 1v1 map in the game is 72x72 squares (144x144 pixels). We only use the portion of the texture that we need and it allows for maps up to 512x512 squares.

Each channel of the texture is used to debug something (slot occupied/not-occupied, slots available and so on).

16

thanks!
(I have to do a similar debug view to test my existing map-decomposition, maybe after my holiday (in Italy))

17

Hey folks, here’s some more gameplay from our second development vlog! We improved our pathfinding (still using UE4’s own pathfinding), added melee and ranged combat, resource depleetion, control groups and a lot more! Check it out!

18

I like the artstyle and the mechanics already seem nice, keep it up!

19

We recently had to grab some screenshots for the September’s issue of Indie Game Mag so here they are!

20

This project looks really awesome, I love the art style you guys are doing great work so far keep it up!

21

Hell Yes! This reminds me of late nights playing AoEII in highschool! I love this style of RTS and really can’t wait to play yours! I hope you get to go wild with ancient civlization’s style influence.

22

Looking Awesome!!! Liked the art and style :smiley:
keep up the good work

23

Woah - that looks fantastic! I’m really looking forward to play it.