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Upcoming Stormgate RTS (opens in a new tab) will use an engine that incorporates netcode rollback, technology that has become standard in competitive fighting games over the past few years. In a new video talking about technology and revealing new concepts, Frost Giant Studios talks about its RTS SnowPlay engine and how it integrates modern technologies such as restoration to make the game more responsive.
“Rollback allows us to reduce the lag a player experiences while playing the game over the internet,” says Frost Giant Chief Architect James Anhalt, “Rollback works by allowing us to simulate gameplay, even in “lack of player input. And if we receive input later, we can go back to when the input happened and then fake forward very quickly to catch up.”
“This will be the most responsive RTS game I’ve ever worked on and I’ve worked on some great ones,” Anhalt says. Anhalt is a seasoned developer and worked on network programming for Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, and World of Warcraft before becoming first a programmer, then lead engineer, on Starcraft 2 and several of its expansions.
Backtracking has become a major feature of fighting games, turning a genre where online gaming was unappreciated into one where it can be viewed as fun rather than frustrating. It’s so popular that developers are greeted with cheers (opens in a new tab) announcing it for games that are several years old, or delaying (opens in a new tab) games entirely to implement it.
Stormgate was announced earlier this year at the PC Gaming Show, a game set in a future where a technological human resistance battles the demonic alien hellish host to save Earth. It is a cooperative and competitive RTS (opens in a new tab) which wants to rekindle enthusiasm for multiplayer and single-player in what many see as an increasingly niche genre that has stumbled to hold its own in recent years. Frost Giant, the studio behind Stormgate, is made up mostly of ex-Blizzard developers who have worked on RTS projects before.
Earlier this year, our Fraser Brown quoted Stormgate (opens in a new tab) as one of the reasons RTS is back on the brink of death.
Rollback Netcode looks weird, but it’s generally accepted to be much better than its high-latency, input-based predecessors. Rather than waiting for both players’ input before proceeding, your input is displayed immediately while the other players’ input is predicted. If there is a discrepancy between the predicted state and the actual game state, it reverts the game state to an earlier point in time. This allows for faster and smoother gameplay, even over long distances or with high latency.
If that’s too much to parse, trust me: the fact that fiercely competitive fans of finicky, precise timing-based fighting games have embraced the restoration netcode means it’s going to be great elsewhere, too.
The Frost Giant video ends by showing some intriguing concept art meant to flesh out the mood of the Human Resistance and Infernal Host factions.
