A few days ago, Stardock announced it was working on Galactic Civilizations III for the PC, and that the game will be made to run exclusively on 64-bit operating systems. Today, a new game development company has been revealed and announced it is working on its own 64-bit game engine. Furthermore, it has Stardock CEO Brad Wardell as one of its founders.
The company is called Oxide Games and besides Wardell it has a number of experienced game developers on board, many of which worked at Firaxis Games on Civilization V. Stardock provided the Maryland-based company with seed funding from the Stardock Strategic Investment Fund. In its press release, Oxide Games offers some information on its in-house created Nitrous Engine, made for 64-bit PCs along with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles.
The engine was created with strategy games in mind, and the press release adds:
What makes Nitrous unique is its support for Simultaneous Work and Rendering Model (SWARM). Specifically, the engine renders calls automatically from whatever CPU core is most available. This allows for a vastly larger number of high-fidelity 3D objects to be rendered to the screen at the same time ... By natively supporting 64-bit computing, Nitrous is able to support very high resolution texture models while its multicore capability enables vast numbers of light sources on screen simultaneously.
The Nitrous Engine can allow gamers to control as many as 10,000 units on screen in a strategy game at one time. Oxide Games has worked for months with Intel, NVIDIA and AMD to make sure Nitrous works well with hardware from those companies. The press release says that a number of unnamed game developers are already working on projects that use the Nitrous Engine. So far, none of those games, nor any screenshots or videos showing off the Nitrous Engine, have been released.
Source: Oxide Games | Image via Oxide Games
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