Build The Battlefield!
Strategy Maxed Out
Giant Space Battles
NEWS 
100k units in multiplayer. Custom DX12 rendering pipeline in UE4, custom netcode, pathfinding, movement. 1500 bytes/sec (1.5KB) of bandwidth. Deterministic lockstep P2P of the floating-point variety. Animation handled via compute shaders, pathfinding and movement are on the CPU.
Feels nice to be able to control 100k units in an RTS with way beyond 60 FPS! This update also adds collision.
Unoptimized and unpolished, custom tech to enable real-time continuous pathfinding for up to 1 million units. Continuous means that the queries are running every frame.
Deterministic RTS collision for a million units, at 0:25 half a million units start moving and colliding with the other half.
Wrote an instanced skeletal mesh renderer that can render up to a million units in UE4. Fully custom DirectX 12 rendering tech built in the engine, all GPU-based including animations, bone transforms and skinning.
For the past 3 months I’ve been busy full time with making a giant army renderer from the ground up in UE4 and it’s finally finished. It can render up to a million units 3x faster than stock Unreal Engine and is hopefully using many of the latest & greatest DirectX 12 tricks: single draw […]
Computes everything in compute shaders on the GPU, including LODs and frustum culling. No GPU-CPU stalls anymore, it’s faster than HISM or ISM. Since around 4.22 Epic has exposed indirect rendering via the RHI mostly because of Niagara, but this is a custom rendering component so there’s no overhead and is therefore faster where it […]
Implemented merge instancing in UE4 to render different meshes in a single draw call. Large meshes are multiple instances. Can render an entire level in a single draw call. Based on an older SIGGRAPH paper by Emil Persson of Epic Games. All the colored parts in the video below are one single draw call!
Fully deterministic unit movement integrated with custom P2P netcode. Features steering, unit clustering, 2D collision resolution, movement lanes, group splitting, regrouping on arrival and navmesh pathfinding. Animations are 100% done on the GPU to free up CPU capacity. Performance is 1.5ms per frame for 500 units moving concurrently, measured on an Intel i7-4770k in a […]
Implemented 2D blend spaces on the GPU so I can have giant armies with minimal impact on the CPU so I can use it for stuff that matters e.g. AI and navigation.
Starting to look like a game! Custom movement and collision system, swarm AI, first draft.
2 months of writing netcode finally paid off as I now have deterministic lockstep P2P multiplayer in UE4. This is a great step for the game and with it, the biggest technical challenge has been overcome.
Lower and upper body are decoupled so it can walk and shoot in different directions. Also quaternions.
Armored turret that can be found defending raidable spaceships and space stations.
SCREENSHOTS
