How Total War: Rome II's Ambition Was Almost Its Undoing | War Stories | Ars Technica

we had a total of 55 settlement battles 690 possible costal engagement locations two and a half thousand river crossing about all locations 20 thousand possible ambush battles could occur and with that probably a hundred fifty thousand possible land battle locations it was a hugely ambitious project my name is Pavel voice and I was a leader battlefield artist on tour war room to I plan to integrate Lance Ian siege forces to create some groundbreaking tech and we managed to ship just in time [Music] total war is very much unique it's a real-time strategy game that combines both turn base statecraft and on the campaign map with real-time fully realized 3d battles we've run we set out to kind of realize that epic setting as we had in the previous row game but but really bring it forward and try and really bring in a lot of the details that we've had in game since the original room and also bring a lot of new ambition to it such as incorporate the naval battles in Roman warfare which we've not had before bring in settlements whole cities combining that with the naval and the land the leap that we were trying to make from outside looking in perspective yes it's a leap from Rome 1 to Rome 2 because for the fans of Rome it's the next room right for us it's a leap from Shogun 2 right Rome 1 was in a different time different different engine different place we've made so many moves forward in terms of Technology and in the game itself the main technological progressions the things that we wanted to do with Rome - I believe the pillars were kind of you know rebuild the game but also bring in settlements have fully realized cities you know with a wall surrounding them multiple attack directions have that real strong connection between campaign and battle and naval battle naval warfare it was the first game where we wanted to bring in combine battles where not only do you have you know two navies meet and see you have a naval battle but you also have navies attacking land where you have enabled Assam park' Chinon two coastlines land and naval engagements sieges where you have units on land units on sea in the siege fully combined buttons really crazy that is our teams were very small I mean room two is a huge game and we had a very small team I think at a time we had maybe three graphics programmers and we had two artists dedicated to the terrain system we had a guy specializing in vegetation and a few few other places but essentially was a very small team so the system that we had to develop was one where we could we could create a set but also kind of have all of this variation and diversity throughout the map which was which was crazy big undertaking so the way we did this do you achieve this is we we something that was new from Shogun to introduced us this concept of a global low frequency height map which which is basically satellite data with some from us that gave you the lay of the land for the entirety of Europe meaning that this was one of those kind of you know unique aspects it would give you unique visual information in every single possible battle location because there was a one-to-one height map of Europe that was wasn't tiled or repeated anywhere so you know that the south of Italy had its own height parameters compared to the north of England so you know it was a subtle difference but it was a very unique difference wherever you went and then what we had on top of that is the tower system where we had a huge set of tiles that we'd create the number was only limited by the time that we had and these tiles were anything from hills to forests to planes to swamps to settlements and these basically we developed a Photoshop pipeline where we'd paint pixels in color each tower had a different color each pixel was 156 by 256 meters with I think 128 meters by a hundred twenty eight meters usable playable area we'd paint this in Photoshop and that would give us the world that would basically cede all of these tile sets so let's say a Hills tile set would have 20 tower variants you'd paint the color for the hills and we would seed a random combination of tiles from that set into the area that we'd paint it which would give us this kind of broad strokes of you know of this data with lots of variation just naturally coming through yeah problems yeah you know when whenever you you're overly ambitious and have a relatively small team there's you know that's a recipe for trouble but the I think the biggest problem that we came across is just the vastness of possible battle locations you know the the fact that like I say we had a possible hundred and seventy thousand possible battle locations with and testing each one of those is just unrealistic for example if if a unplayable faction is suddenly taken over the entire entirety of Europe some Celtic faction is suddenly waging war on everyone and winning then that's a problem is that there's a balancing issue there for example you know a faction such as Greece strong and diplomacy is potentially succeeding through just not fighting any battles but winning through diplomacy then again that shows a floor in and the diplomatic in negotiations and we shipped with still quite a few instances of safe floating buildings or there might be a location where we may be missed we didn't see ourselves maybe we passed over it where the height would just spike up and you'd end up having a battle on almost forty five or more degrees or sheer cliff and you could you know you could still have these battles so it's it's definitely that was probably one of the biggest challenges which you know led us to actually develop new tools and ways to actually try and address these issues the testing effort was was it was huge to try and actually test and find issues and unlock them correctly so we we started developing tools during this during the the project one of which is our auto testing system which which we used to this day I think at the time when we we developed our auto testing I don't think there was we didn't see it anywhere else so I'm you know again not an engineer but I'm pretty sure at a time we couldn't see anyone else using it so the way it works is that essentially the auto test basically runs scripts and routines on the on the game on everybody's machines in downtime so after our or if machines were idle the auto test sends off to the build to all the machines at free so 500 machines plus and and the game just plays out so we can test for you know we can we can specify the things we want to test be it battles or just the game right so the the AI will just play out the game and all of the factions will will will play the game and compete against each other fight against each other so we can actually see you know we can spit out the data to show us for example region ownership so we can do a little time-lapse of the visual data they're going to kind of shows us region ownership over 200 tons and and this kind of informs us of which factions are rising to power which is up dying out quickly and it's essentially just whether we simulate gameplay out of hours and it gives us stacks and stacks of data which is super useful some of the statistics as well as obviously that you know the crash data call stacks memory instance usage and that kind of stuff the other testing system is also grateful for balancing because when we run the simulations were on the game we fight all of these battles we can get stats back on you know which units are overpowered which was underpowered and we can find any kind of anomalies and balance for the battles themselves we thought of a way of basically getting heat map data from that from the maps with the heat map data there was there was actually a it was surprising and also slightly depressing because we you know we went to all this trouble to to create this this this huge and and and varied representation of Europe and then when we get a data back we have such concentrated pockets of combat and battles where there are huge huge waves of the world that players were just not seeing there were just the gameplay of the campaign just wasn't taking them there for whatever reason because the combat was very much concentrated around the capitals of the major factions concentrated in the you know in the connecting regions that connect major factions to other major factions and literally that's all that players saw which again is useful because that means that we can go back and look at the campaign you know tough finding look at the way the campaign design and logic kind of takes the players you know around the map and and maybe make amendments to it to kind of improve that [Music] ultimately I think what we what we managed to do with that with the tech it was great I mean the one thing that doctor this day I'm I'm super proud of as the it's just that kind of immersive immersive quality of the game and the connection you get as a player playing on a campaign map getting accustomed to your surroundings your your place in the world you look at your location and then when you actually go into the battlefields you recognize landmarks you recognize you you have your kind of connecting points and you know and places that you recognize from the campaign map you know the coastlines the you know the cities in the in the distance you really get a feel for this world that you're in it doesn't feel so much of as an abstract as it might have done in a previous games it doesn't feel there isn't as much repetition and obviously you know some some elements are because you know it's a game but but it's far more kind of compelling and immersive as an experience and I think that's for me the most kind of the best achievement I'm most proud of I'm gonna cringe when older all the programmers watch this they're like why the [ __ ] is he talking about generalizing beyond just bloody artists

Channel: Ars Technica

Views: 267,375

Keywords: culture, entertainment, gaming, rome, video games, ars technica, total war: rome ii, ars, war stories, total war, total war rome, rome 2, rome ii, rome total war, making of rome total war, rome total war making of, rome ii total war, rome 2 gameplay, gameplay total war 2, total war rome ii war stories, total war rome 2 war stories, total war making of, making of rome 2, total war battles, total war rome gameplay, total war rome making of, technology

Id: b8-PRhz1UU4

Length: 9min 48sec (588 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 18 2018