
Supreme Commander – Graphics Study - mariuz
http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/06/23/supreme-commander-graphics-study/
======
jaytaylor
What a phenomenal writeup.

What I'd really like to understand about SupCom is how the zoom in/out views
are so smooth and seamless.

At one point during the beta I remember talking to a dev on IRC who told me
the zoom was very challenging in this game, and that a novel approach had been
devised and successfully implemented.

The scale of the range between micro and macro views in SupCom is unlike
anything else I've encountered. For example, you can start zoomed in on a
specific character on a ship, and then you can zoom out all the way until you
can see the entire map. And the whole interaction is for all intents and
purposes seamless and smooth as the view changes.

It's akin to the intro part of the film "Contact" where it zooms out from the
Earth all the way into the deep universe.

Such a gem of a game -- too bad it takes so long to play a round! (3-6 hours+)

~~~
nacs
This is mentioned in the linked article but a lot of the rendering work is
done in the Level of Detail system that is standard in most game engines now.
As the player camera moves further from an object, lower resolution versions
of the 3D model replace the default high resolution model. Supcom takes this a
step further, and at the furthest zoom levels, switches to a 2D sprite (a
single quad with texture applied) for unit meshes.

Other games have implemented this sort of thing now, like Planetary
Annihilation, which was created by some of the original SupCom developers
(warning: don't buy PA unless it's at a severe discount however as it's buggy,
has poor game balance, no good single player campaign and a tiny multiplayer
community).

The Kerbal Space Program game's devblog also contains some interesting
writeups regarding this kind of thing, like this one:

[http://kerbalspace.tumblr.com/post/9056986834/on-
quadtrees-a...](http://kerbalspace.tumblr.com/post/9056986834/on-quadtrees-
and-why-they-are-awesome)

------
test1235
This blows my mind - how many years of programming must you have under your
belt before you can even comprehend writing something like this?

Are these established methods that you can google and pick up anywhere, or is
there a lot of experimentation going on to see what works?

~~~
gambiting
I finished an MSc course in Games Engineering and we covered 90% of things in
this article. For the final project we had demos with pretty much everything
covered there + post process shaders + deferred lighting + DX11 tessalation
shaders + ambient occlusion.

So yeah, I think you can find very good uni courses which cover those things,
but they are not very common - I know I can certainly recommended mine, I got
a job in the games industry straight away after it.

~~~
mentos
Which course was that?

~~~
gambiting
[http://www.ncl.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/degrees/computer-g...](http://www.ncl.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/degrees/computer-
game-engineering-msc/#profile)

Literally every person that I knew who was on this course is now either in a
job(in games industry) or doing a PhD.

~~~
mentos
Ah thank you for sharing. Wish I had access to something like this when I was
in college. Might I ask what the textbook/s were for this course?

~~~
gambiting
Textbooks? Seriously, I finished a BSc Computer Science degree then did MSc in
Games Engineering and never had a single textbook. Lecturers would hand the
notes out(but they were also available online as pdfs), that was all that was
needed.

Edit: obviously there were books which were "recommended reading" but very few
people bought them, they were all in the library anyway if someone needed one.
I think you can see the list if you click on "modules" and then click on a
specific one, it tells you the structure of the module and recommended
reading.

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corysama
If you like this, you'll probably also appreciate this earlier study by the
same author:

[http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/03/10/deus-ex-
human...](http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/03/10/deus-ex-human-
revolution-graphics-study/)

------
squeaky-clean
At my first internship, I handled the GUI for an application used to simulate
networks on a large scale (I remember 20,000 machines being the "small" test-
case we used). There was a view where you could watch all of the devices in
the network, and could zoom in/out to see the entire network at once, or
individual devices.

I remember playing a lot of SupCom to help me get an idea of how to zoom
smoothly and how to handle the overlays/information density at every scale
(also because it was a badass game).

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59nadir
This write-up is very interesting and very well structured.

I can't help but think about the fact that the SupCom engine performs horribly
while reading this, though.

It does worse in almost every respect compared to even the engines that came
before it and while SupCom is definitely massive scale, that's not the root of
why the game's performance is very poor.

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mehwoot
Awesome game, and a very detailed writeup too.

~~~
ionised
Agreed. It's a shame the sequel was such a step back in every respect.

~~~
bergmann
What do you think of Planetary Annihilation?

~~~
13years
It was a disappointment for myself. The 3d planets was interesting, but not in
a big way during actual gameplay. It actually made the UI a little more
annoying and just didn't reach the level of the professional UI of Supreme
Commander.

Supreme Commander is still the best I've played and it is still going strong
under the Forged Alliance Forever community.
[http://www.faforever.com/](http://www.faforever.com/)

FYI: Chris Taylor now works for Wargaming. There has been no word yet on what
project he may be doing there.

~~~
theandrewbailey
> FYI: Chris Taylor now works for Wargaming. There has been no word yet on
> what project he may be doing there.

Wargaming bought Gas Powered Games in 2013, thus Chris Taylor works for them.
Within months, Wargaming additionally bought the Total Annihilation rights
from the THQ bankruptcy auction. Taylor is likely working on a TA sequel.

[http://www.pcgamer.com/total-annihilation-franchise-
bought-b...](http://www.pcgamer.com/total-annihilation-franchise-bought-by-
wargaming-the-owners-of-gas-powered-games/)

------
smutticus
There's still a very active community of Supcom Forged Alliance Forever
players. If you want to watch some great gameplay check out Gyle's channel on
Youtube.

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wodenokoto
As a non-graphics guy the complexity of 3D games rendering is just mind
blowing.

~~~
lmm
Makes me feel a bit guilty that I play it in the 2D view.

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lectrick
It's articles like this that make me sad that I never took linear algebra (I
would have loved it, but I flunked the advanced calculus course prior, so that
ended any major ambitions that had a math requirement)

~~~
stuxnet79
I took linear algebra, performed adequately, and the only time I ever found it
useful was when I was trying to get a grip on OpenGL. After hanging around a
lot of indie developers I discovered that having knowledge of low level
graphics programming is not as useful as say, being artistically capable. A
lot of devs rely on content creation engines like Unity so being proficient at
low level graphics programming isn't exactly an asset.

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bcheung
I remember that game being very playable and fun. I especially liked the zoom
feature. It is missing in modern RTS games. It really adds a lot. I loved how
it switched to icons as you zoomed out.

