Great news, Ara fans: A brand new Dev Diary episode is now available!
In this week’s super technical episode, we got a peek under the hood at the proprietary engine powering Ara: History Untold. To help explain the technical lingo and show us what Nitrous® is truly capable of, we sat down with the wizard behind the scenes, Dan Baker, Chief Graphics Architect and co-founder of Oxide Games, for a few questions.
Watch this Developer Diary with Audio Descriptions
Dan walked us through the various challenges and triumphs of creating a new game engine from the ground up. From the initial designs to partnering with Microsoft and AMD, the engine has seen its fair share of changes and improvements over the years.
Nitrous® is a next-gen game engine designed to navigate the vast realms of both visual and gameplay complexity. It’s able to handle thousands of units simultaneously, setting the stage for epic battles and scenes on a wide variety of platforms.
Unlike its counterparts, Nitrous distinguishes itself by intelligently distributing its workload across multiple CPUs, paving the way for more detailed worlds and units with seamless movement in between. Dan explains the evolutionary leap facilitated by DirectX 12, that allows Nitrous to harness multiple CPUs for unparalleled performance—a significant departure from older games that relied on a single CPU for their build command buffers.
For a deeper dive into the Nitrous Engine and a glimpse into the future of strategy games, catch the full episode on our YouTube channel. And, of course, hit the subscribe button to stay in the loop with our Dev Diary series!