With Civilization V done, they were looking to do something incredibly ambitious. They wanted to create a new type of game engine that would allow for strategy games of nearly unlimited design sophistication and with the literal fidelity of CGI in movies. Their dream was my dream.But could they actually deliver such an engine?What they wanted to create wasn't just a 4th generation engine, but one that promised to deliver visual fidelity beyond anything we had previously considered.To be clear: their engine was going to use object space lighting like you'd see in a CGI movie, except in realtime.While I was familiar with deferred rendering, forward rendering, and forward+ rendering, what they proposed was something beyond my development experience.Whenever someone suggests they do something like do movie like CGI rendering in realtime the obvious question is: If this were possible, Runescape Gold why hasn't someone done it yet? That was why I was so skeptical of their proposal.However, their credentials gave me confidence that they could actually pull it off.First, they had just finished developing the most successful strategy game of all time, Civilization V even as I write this, it has over 50,000 people playing it simultaneously .Secondly, each of them had a long trackrecord of technical success. RS Gold Dan was one of the developers of DirectX, Brian had been the lead developer and/or AI programmer on countless well known and beloved PC games, Marc had developed the UI system that helped make Civilization V such a success, and Tim was the guy who built a threaded animation system for the Xbox 360 and helped build the engine for Battle of Middle Earth II.Their proposal: fund their startup and they'll build the engine that would solve all or problems.I did. And so did they.Ashes of the Singularity is bornNow that Ashes is out and is a success, there is always the temptation to look back and think if only we had spent more, we could have launched with so much stuff.But in 2012, the project seemed very risky.Stardock'sAshes of the SingularityLet's recap on their proposal understanding that this is 2012 for their new engine:It would be a coreneutral engine. That means, there is no main thread'rdquo. There is no graphics thread'rdquo. The more cores you add, the better the engine will perform. As a reminder:In 2012, most people only had single core CPUs. CoreDuos were relatively new and only crazy people had more than 2 CPU cores. <a href="http://www.rssong.com/">RS Gold</a> The engine would be 64bit only. You wouldn't be able to even use it unless you had a 64bit machine.Every CPU core would talk to the graphics API DirectX something that, at the time, no one to my knowledge was doing. Moreover, RS 3 Gold DirectX at the time serialized its output to the GPU so this very expensive engineering endeavor would have limited benefit.The graphics engine would render using object space rendering OSR as opposed to deferred rendering, forward rendering, or forward+ rendering. OSR is basically how CGI in movies is done think Pixar's Bug's Life'rdquo level rendering but in realtime and use OSL Object Space Lighting .