Unit Design and Why Voxels?

Westwood Online has been one of the greatest on-line success stories. Did you expect it to take off so well (if relatively slowly) or has it come as a surprise to the company?

We always felt that building a community for people to come together to play our games would be fun and worthwhile, but we had no idea that people would STILL be playing games of C&C and Red Alert several years later! There are hundreds of thousands of C&C games played each week on Westwood Online. That number doesn't include games being played on Mplayer, TEN, Kali, etc. There was no way to anticipate that level of excitement, but we couldn't be happier. People continue to use it, love it and it continues to deliver consistent quality game play. The best part about the success of Westwood Online is the fact that we can offer this service for free. (Trust me, it's expensive for us.)

On the ground

Liftoff!

What's your philosophy about unit design?

For every C&C game we like to introduce several new strategies and units never seen in previous C&C games. We will not add every unit from our previous games into the new ones because it would work against our story as well as the clarity of each side. Where is the clarity if we plug in 50 or 75 or 100 units into the game? How long will it take to learn those units effectively so you will not feel cheated when an opposing player beats you through deeper study and memorization skills instead a fair fight where all the rules and units a easily knowable and memorable to everyone? Once you introduce large numbers of units and game elements, the means of differentiating them becomes harder and harder and the differences between them become too subtle. I believe there is a fine line and art to all of this and if you are not careful with your design, the very essence of what makes a great strategy game exciting and addictive starts to leak away. Our aim is to create a completely different mindset and philosophy behind each side. This is what makes a C&C game truly dynamic and full of strategies and counter-strategies. There is also our story, the setting, and back story which determines how Nod and GDI have evolved and the tactics (and hence units) they believe will help them win.

Ion Cannon supports the GDI assault

The most ubiquitous CnC2 shot ever

You're using voxels instead of polygons to create 3D units. Why?

Two main reasons. Gameplay and aesthetics.

In a game like TS where it's possible (and very common) for lots of units to be on the map at once, speed and responsiveness are important. Once one of our voxel objects is rendered into RAM it's really no worse than blitting a bitmap/sprite to the screen from a performance standpoint. Polygons must be constantly recalculated anytime they move. That's a lot of CPU usage and given all the atmosphere, kinetics, lighting, and shrapnel we want to have flying around during intense battles, we had to create a more advanced visual system that also didn't require everyone to have the latest and fastest CPU and/or 3D render card.

As for the aesthetic, it helps that our voxels don't really care what shape they take. We can make very ornate and smooth units with slopping curves and lots of detail. Given the fact we want you to see a good portion of the map through the viewport, polygon units wouldn't be large enough to reveal all the visual fidelity and most importantly, reactivity we wanted. There are no true 3D polygon RTS games like C&C out there yet, but I am sure one or two are in the works and it will be interesting to see which trade-offs they choose-and how playable they will be on say, a P5 133 with a standard 3D graphics card.

Keeping the ramp shut

Small skirmish