This document discusses strategies for building an economy, producing different types of units, and investing settlers to race for victory in a game. It also covers using traders to generate money, using monks to research technologies and convert sectors, and using soldiers to conquer sectors. The document provides details on settlers, the game editor features, fast map creation processes, measuring game behavior, optimizing resource usage, and potential future online multiplayer expansions to the game.

3. • Build up your economy
• Produce monks, traders or soldiers
• Invest your special settlers to race for victory

4. Economy Puzzle
• Establish good chains
• Decide building composition
• Arrange for efficient transport
• Time construction
• Use food boost

5. Traders
• Generate money
– buy instead of produce
Monks – Trade expeditions establish
• Research technologies new trade options
– Production • Buy sectors
– Construction • Questing
– Offense
– Defense
• Convert sectors Soldiers
• Strengthen defense • Conquer and crush
• Questing • Questing

6. Settlers 7
• Free Camera
• Thousands of animated objects
• Highly detailed game world
• Simulation

7. Iteration

8. Lesson: Iteration
• Quality of your game is proportional to the
amount of work you discard
You have to be fast at trying out things and
throwing them away. Once in a while you
actually end up with something that is fun.

9. Game Design and Prototypes
• Game designers write first prototypes
– Enforces stringency by requiring attention to detail
– Shortest possible feedback cycle for game design
– You can go a long way with tools like BlitzBasic
• Tech guys ready engine for production during
prototyping
Once the concept matures you must be ready
to prototype in the engine

12. Turnaround: Build
• Proper coding • Ram disk
• Blob build • Incredibuild

13. Turnaround: Restart
• Dynamic reload
• Preprocessed data
• Low detail mode

14. Creating Playable Maps Fast
• Make a map playable fast
• Collect feedback on map
• Let artist spend time after a map is proven to
be fun

15. Map Sketch

16. Planning
Overlay

20. Map Editor
• Planning overlays
• Full undo support
• Replay support for crash recovery
• Objects can be freely scaled
– Non-uniform with automatic texture adaption
• (Almost) zero user interaction for movement blocking
• Copy and paste support for landscapes
– Copied landscape can be rotated and translated
– Copied landscape can be mirrored
• Template tool: create landscape with a single brush
stroke

22. 0
1
2
3
4
5
7
8
6
VP @ 10mins
VP @ 20mins
VP @ 30mins
VP @ 40mins
Victory points over time
VP @ 50mins
VP @ 60mins
VP @ 70mins
VP @ 80mins
VP @ 90mins
VP @ 100mins
Measure Game Behavior
VP @ 110mins
VP @ 120mins
VP @ win

23. Measure Game Behavior: AI
Fancy Food

24. Lesson: Iteration
• Quality of your game is proportional to the
amount of work you discard
You have to be fast at trying out things and
throwing them away. Once in a while you
actually end up with something that is fun.

25. More is More

26. Lesson: More Is More
• Understand your engine
• Beware of cache
• Stay in control of resource usage
Artistic resource hunger is insatiable.
Technology enables and must enforce limits.

28. Standard Stuff
• Keep object representation small
• Simple and regular scene division
• Visibility culling
• Spatial locality of iterated data
• Stream to stay in memory budget
• LOD wherever you can
• Compact/compress vertex/texture/animation data
• Imposters
• Sort objects by materials to save pipe state changes
• Instancing
• Write efficient shaders
• …

29. Introspection
• The better you understand your engine the
more you can squeeze in.
– Cpu usage
– Memory usage
– Texture and geometry data
– Render targets
– AI goals
– Spatial partitioning structures (quadtree, …)
– …
 Trajectories needed

30. Introspection

31. 2GB Virtual Address Space
• DirectX 9 managed resources add to virtual size
• Differences between XP and Vista
• Address space fragmentation can be critical
– Rule of thumb: leave at least 1/3 unused
• Managed textures: 144 MB • Managed geometry: 150 MB
• Render targets: 121 MB (way too much) • Default: 88 MB
• Default textures: 440 MB • System geometry: 19MB (way too much)
• Animation data
• Streaming buffer
• Quadtree
• …

36. Processor Memory Gap

37. Memory Hierarchy

39. Use the Force
• Where performance matters treat your game
loop as a series of data transformation steps
– Exploit multiple cores
– Exploit SIMD
– Exploit GPU

40. Automated Data Preprocessing
• Support multiple platforms
• Prepare parallelization
• Compact data in order to squeeze more into
the game
• Stay in control of resource usage
• Keep artists happy: they want to work with
native formats only
• Enforce data consistency

41. • fully automated: server monitors jobs for changes
• decentralized: runs on every developer machine
 bad data does not block others
• lives in perforce
 data for any version can be rebuild any time
• fast: parallelized, incremental archive update
• extensible: jobs are just command line tools
 programmers do not need to deal with
framework APIs

42. Resource Handling

43. Dynamic Reload

44. Lesson: More Is More
• Understand your engine
• Beware of cache
• Stay in control of resource usage
Artistic resource hunger is insatiable.
Technology enables and must enforce limits.

45. What’s Next?

46. The Settlers Online
Exploit  Expand  Explore  Exterminate
Act1: Basic Economy Act2: Advanced Economy Act 3: Expert Economy
 Supplies basic needs  Mining  Logistics
 Food  Metals  Advanced troops
 building materials  Basic troops  Advanced defense
 Support chains  Supplies for armies

47. The Settlers Online
Expanding his social network,
a player will become more
powerful at a faster rate
Buff your friends production
Send gifts to your friends
Trade with your friends
Help defending your friends kingdom
Earn hard currency by inviting new friends
into the game by Email, Facebook, or Twitter

48. Q&A