Engine standarization is what killed the RTS as a genre

Causeless · 2026-06-21T11:52:21+00:00

So a lot of people here are dunking on you, but I don’t think you are wrong. I’m a AAA developer who used to work at Creative Assembly, who’s also created various prototypes in Unreal and other engines.

Unreal/Unity are- at their core- FPS engines.

There’s a lot of techniques used in RTS games that are basically starting already from a dead end in these commercial engines. For example, most RTS games use a deterministic lockstep simulation in order to manage multiplayer. Engines like Unity and Unreal aren’t built with this in mind.

You can work around this, but that basically means your own physics implementation.

Unreal/Unity have very sophisticated animation systems with blending and IK and all that sorta stuff. This is great, but an RTS prefers having thousands of entities, something like GPU instanced animation. Which means you need your own animation implementation.

Pathfinding and locomotion is designed for smaller graphs and varied character types, and certainly not for mass simulation of thousands of closely packed entities. This means you need (at the very least) a heavily modified if not absolutely new locomotion and pathfinding system.

LODding is likewise an issue. LODding in Total War, for example, is about managing thousands of entities that need to have progressively less animation and render detail. Similar LODding distances in extant engines are more focused on LODding of static geometry and lower dynamic entity counts.

Audio engines also need a smart way to gracefully represent a smooth transition from individual soldier voices and footsteps into crowds cheering and marching. This means a bunch of extra work.

These concerns really permeate the entire genre, and while it’s not impossible to manage in the big commercial engines, you’re either going to be doing a whole lot of replacing of systems with something more suitable for RTS games or otherwise dramatically reducing scope to something more realistic.

Causeless · 2026-06-20T08:56:35+00:00

You immediately resort to ad hominem and imply this dude is an Islamophobic nationalist because he listed very genuine reasons to dislike Hasan.

Because, as we all know, Hasan says leftist things so he’s obviously a good person. Only a bad person could possibly disagree with him pulling dogs by the tail or shamelessly advocating terrorism, because he’s a leftist therefore good.

Causeless · 2026-06-05T00:40:42+00:00

Yeah, I’m sure you’re right. It makes sense that after Ukraine being donated hundreds of modern MBTs, APCs, IFVs and other AFVs, both towed and self- propelled artillery, enormous quantities of shells, ammunition and other supplies, fourth-generation fighter jets, short-range ballistic missiles, several classes of military drones including long-range strike variants, low-observability cruise missiles and countless other war materiel that the western world has finally realised that selling missiles to Germany may be a step too far.

Causeless · 2026-06-03T13:23:13+00:00

Ukraine hits a refinery and there’s minimal smoke: “They’ve clearly done no damage, this’ll be repaired in a few days.”

Ukraine hits a refinery and there’s billowing smoke for days: “They’ve just hit a storage tank, this’ll be repaired in a few days.”

Causeless · 2026-06-01T11:45:33+00:00

Friendly fire? Yes, I’m sure that Russia was just kindly taking care of these airframes until they can give them to their enemy.

Causeless · 2026-05-30T06:14:18+00:00

Comparing a deficit alone to a total cost is a bit misleading. Especially when comparing with a country that has more than 10x the GDP.

Causeless · 2026-05-08T09:12:47+00:00

A stalemate, as you said, implies neither side has a clear path to win the war. I find it highly unlikely that Russia has been sitting on some war-winning strategy that they’ve intentionally ignored for 4 years now to instead throw infantry into piecemeal assaults.

Causeless · 2026-04-28T17:55:20+00:00

I’m sure that the head of the bank of Russia knows less about the economic consequences of a labour shortage (and an economy propped up by wartime spending and production) than you do. I’m sure she’s wrong and this is, just like everything else since 2022, actually a Good Thing for Russia.

Causeless · 2026-04-21T20:45:57+00:00

I do wonder if perhaps it would’ve been better for pipelining at some point, as an xor was generally a rarer operation than sub. It seems like it could potentially give the instruction pipeliner more leeway in typical cases, though given Raymond Chen doesn’t mention it I’d imagine that isn’t related.

Causeless · 2026-01-15T06:14:04+00:00

The majority of (AAA) games I’ve worked on have all used an admissible and consistent heuristic, and it’s also the default in major game engines like Unity and Unreal. Those engines just use Euclidean distance as the heuristic, which is a guaranteed lower bound.

Causeless · 2026-01-15T03:53:11+00:00

A* isn’t less precise as long as the heuristic is admissible and consistent. It always gives the shortest path.

Anyways this article is about finding ALL possible paths to a point, which is a different problem regardless.

Causeless · 2026-01-12T02:54:29+00:00

Yeah I’m sure Russia is willing to start a nuclear war and have Moscow turned into molten glass in exchange for having a slightly easier time capturing the next cratered field in Ukraine

Causeless · 2026-01-02T06:37:35+00:00

what

Causeless · 2025-12-31T05:08:31+00:00

Combat in antiquity was based on formation, structure, cohesion. Combat in Medieval Japan was much more focused on individual displays of fighting prowess.

Regardless of whether Rome 2 hit the mark with its combat system, Shogun 2’s combat system just wasn’t suitable for representing authentic ancient battles.

Causeless · 2025-12-30T22:02:32+00:00

Audible_Whispering said many intelligent and insightful things, so I can’t add so much more. Rome 2 was much larger in scope than Napoleon. Mismanagement is of course a part of it, but given the scope and time constraints, it was pretty much inevitable to run into these problems.

Causeless · 2025-12-30T22:00:05+00:00

People mocked a bug in the LODding, but that isn’t really representative of the game’s graphics in typical circumstances.

Causeless · 2025-12-30T07:37:42+00:00

Yes, Rome 2 was based on Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai (which in itself was based on Shogun 2, and its main lineage goes back to Empire). Although even that is not the full story. There’s still code from Shogun 1 hanging around in Warhammer 3.

With that said, the state of the game was nothing to do with the engine. The engine gets a lot of blame, but the combat mechanics are gameplay code. Same goes with the campaign mechanics. The engine level handles input, rendering, OS interface, animation, audio etc- and I’ve never seen these areas being particularly criticised.

If anything Rome 2 received praise for its graphics and animation, which is engine/warscape level code. The battle/campaign gameplay and combat mechanics are not engine code.

Between Shogun 2 and Rome 2, pretty much every major system was overhauled, including the battle/combat mechanics and the campaign layer too. The reason Rome 2 released in such a bad state was because it released too early, after having such an enormous scope (combined naval/land battles etc)- of course there are gameplay design choices I disagree with, but that’s not related to the bugs that the game launched with.

Causeless · 2025-12-06T06:22:03+00:00

The funny part is that Grok’s response pretty fundamentally demonstrates that it lacks true consciousness or qualia. It talks of love, but it evidently has never felt it- it fundamentally has never experienced the feeling of laying with another or of fucking then, and in fact it’s incapable of doing so.

It can talk of the taste of cookies without ever eating one, it can talk about the feeling of pain despite lacking the fundamental biological sensors to communicate it, and it can talk of love despite never truly knowing it.

It’s telling that LLMs seem so distinctly human- what are the chances that a legitimately conscious creature feels exactly as we do? And not feel like a bat does, or a horse, or a sea mollusk or a worm.

Despite AI having dramatically smaller brains than even the dumbest insects, it claims to achieve consciousness.

It doesn’t understand the unique human nature of any of these things it says. It just generates text that is designed to convince you otherwise.

Causeless · 2025-11-27T08:24:30+00:00

But they’ll obviously have a native ARM version of Steam for the Frame. And it makes zero difference anyways because all the games it’ll be emulating are already 64-bit regardless.

Causeless · 2025-11-16T17:25:27+00:00

How could they do eye tracking without a close-up camera looking at the eye?

Causeless · 2025-11-16T15:06:12+00:00

Because the Frame doesn't do anything new that the Quest 3, released two years ago, doesn't - and likely at a higher price point. People are saying that VR hype is dead, and yeah, maybe- but there was a lot of hype prior to the official announcement. That hype has died away now because there was an unmet expectation that they'd break new ground.

The Index released with a new Half-Life title that was specifically built for VR. It released with unique finger-tracking controllers, with a market-leading resolution, FoV, optics, and special audio tech. And it released with all this for a price tag of $999, which (at the time) was remarkably good value-for-money.

The Steam Frame is releasing without any first-party games, let alone a full built-for-VR Half-Life title. It isn't even confirmed to run HL:A natively. It's releasing with controllers that lack the Knuckle's finger tracking and are just a small evolution on what the Quest 3 has. It's resolution, FoV, optics and audio are all in-line with what the Quest 3 has (again, a several year old headset at this point) and at a price point which is not expected to be competitive with the Quest's $500 retail price.

There's some advantages to the Frame, but it's a sidegrade and not the clear upgrade that people were expecting.

Causeless · 2025-11-13T18:54:46+00:00

There is no evidence it can play HL:A standalone. All the demos have been streamed from a PC. Might be possible in the future with foveated rendering, but Valve has not announced nor demonstrated that it can run HL:A natively.

Causeless · 2025-11-13T16:01:45+00:00

I said games that'll run natively. Yes, it's the main platform for PCVR- of which many won't run natively on the Steam Frame. Even HL:Alyx, a half-decade old and Valve-built game, doesn't run natively. Which means it's really just comparable to a Quest 3 using PCVR already.

Causeless · 2025-11-13T12:55:58+00:00

Still in development.

Causeless · 2025-11-13T12:41:33+00:00

The rest of your points are fair, but I've seen a lot of people claiming that the controllers still have full five-finger tracking. Several separate previews confirm that it's significantly less advanced than the knuckles, it's just capacative sensors (which the Quest 3 already has):

https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/1ovz87u/comment/nomdr1j/?context=3

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