Reviews/3D RTS Engine

In the spotlight for this issue, we have an excellent engine that is still in the works, probably missing a lot from its final stage, but still, I would consider it a legend a work of art. I present to you the 3D RTS Engine.

Now before I start telling you how wonderful this engine is, I must confess, I have no idea why the guy picked this name; I mean – come on!

There is no need to waste your time gazing at this picture trying to remember from which commercial game it was taken from, because it wasn’t! It is actually no more than a simple screenshot of the 3D RTS Engine! The features of this engine are very important in the Real Time Strategy gaming market, such as unit arrangement (here it exists as line, cone, and rectangle), path finding, and cool 3D graphics!

Now, let’s start talking about the pros and cons of this RTS engine.

Pros
The think that I have noticed in the instant I started trying this engine out was the cool and excellent graphics, its smooth and excellent multi-leveled terrain, the options it included for advanced unit formation that could be either line, rectangle, or cone formation, showing future unit position in unit formation, listing selected units, easy unit selection, and great walking. The pros of the engine could be summarized in the points below:


 * Unit formation (with cone, line, and rectangle)
 * Smooth terrain with multiple heights
 * Selected units are listed
 * Great 3D Graphics
 * Excellent textures
 * Controlling Groups
 * Smooth walking
 * 2 Dimensional Unit Selecting
 * 3D outline for observing position on the map

Cons
The problem with the engine is that even before I started noticing the pros, I noticed some many serious cons. Entering the executable of the engine required lots of time; I even thought it stopped responding for a while, but apparently, it was still loading! I’ve also noticed the huge amounts of memory it ate up while it was running, they were much larger than many gigabytes-large commercial games - THAT is clearly unacceptable! I have also noticed it took lots processing power, and, additionally, still ran extremely slow. This slow running made the mouse to move annoyingly slow, and for the units to take a while to respond. The cons of the engine could be summarized in the points below:


 * Extremely slow to load
 * Takes a lot of time for units to respond
 * Takes unbelievably large amounts of memory when run
 * Takes a huge percentage of the processing (depending on PC)
 * Slow running in general

In general, it is a very good engine; cleaning its coding and fixing it up a little bit should hopefully remove those enormous speed issues. It also needs some polishing to add other features like buildings, etc to emphasize and even increase its pros. Anyway, it is a great piece of work and you can take a look at it in its GMC topic located here:

Reviewed Version: http://forums.gamemaker.nl/index.php?showtopic=210170 Newer Version: http://gmc.yoyogames.com/?showtopic=239313