Westwood on the Forum

[Gobalopper]

Wow big day for both Delphi and Meatball on the official forums today. Here is a recap:

On release dates Delphi had this to say:

Look for it to hit stores shelves this Spring or Summer... No actual date yet. =(

Dune 2000 was delayed about 3 months from the initial release date so if Emperor is anything like that expect the game in June or July.

Delphi gave us the platforms that Emperor will support:

Emperor will run under Win 9x, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Win NT.

On the ever expanding topic of camera angles Delphi has weighed in with his own opinion:

I knew this would pop up. Don't think of Emperor like other 3D RTS games. Those guys had no clue how to use the camera. Personally I think the only reason certain developers made 3D RTS because 3D was a selling point.

Emperor will start off in a traditional god like mode (normally what I use). Players will have the option to rotate the camera and use the mouse wheel to adjust the vertical. We wanted to make sure these features were easy for everyone to use and were not obstructive to gameplay.

Emperor is not one of those look at us we have 3D so it will good type of games. Westwood held off on producing a 3D RTS because we wanted to make sure we could optimize the control so that everyone could use them.

Meatball is a big camera angle freak and uses it all the time, I'm old school RA2, and let's just say Meatball and our games have been evenly matched.

Last up is a question on what sort of environmental effects will be in the game, in this case trees burning on Caladan. Delphi's response is first:

It's possible, it will be up to the designers to decide. What it comes down to is "how will it affect game play?" Sure it may look pretty, but it also takes up CPU power. This is something that will go into the final polishing phase, if the team feels that in can be implemented without to much trouble.

Meatball fills in a little more detail:

There are trees on Caladan. I like how they sway a little in the breeze.

That's it for now, if you're interested Daily Radar has an article on the future of RTS, Emperor being one of the games mentioned, check out Where does the RTS genre go from here?