Introducing: Hedgine

 

One of the defining traits of Afterconflict is that it's built using a custom engine, and it occurs to us, especially with some of our most recent developments, that we haven't properly introduced it to you.

So, let's get to that which has been a long time coming now, we're proud to introduce you to Hedgine!

First we'll cover some of the features we've been previewing recently that can also serve as an intro to the context to the context of "Why would you spend all of this time and effort to make a custom engine?", and chief among them is scale.

While we've been rather reserved in showing off the map sizes that Hedgine is capable of thusfar, what we will state is that a safe bet for the scale of the maps possible in Afterconflict will be around 300km x 300km, which for reference relatively easily encompasses the size of Switzerland. We use double precision for everything in the world which allows theoretical scale of up to the entire solar system if ever such a need arises.

One of the primary reasons for this is to allow for the fully-fledged accurate simulation of air assets and combat in the cold war era, which, other than the simple visuals, is one of the reasons we've put so much effort into factors such as volumetric clouds that will be fully reactive to things such as wind and humidity maps, volumetric atmospheric rendering that allows a fully accurate simulation of the Earth's atmosphere all the way out to space, and even further beyond that, a fully physically represented model of our Galaxy, including the Milky Way.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves and go back down to Earth to show off something that we've not yet been able to show off (yet still tangibly related to the Moon) is our wave simulations in large bodies of water!

But water isn't the only actively deformable terrain feature as everything from artillery to bulldozers will be able to carve into the Earth to provide cover, build trenchlines, and more.

Additionally, the physics engine driving Hedgine is Jolt Physics, which you may've seen in action in several recent AAA projects, namely for how it allows for robust physics interactions that are also efficient and thus performant via features such as multi-threading. Before we used Bullet physics but found that it doesn't suit out needs in double precision and multithreading.

Generally speaking, Hedgine's focus is on efficiency, of which we've already shown with how Afterconflict's editor isn't a separate SDK, but instead accessible with a simple keybind.
In general Hedgine's C# style scripting language allows for advanced functionalities to be used in an efficient, accessible manner.

Hedgine has been used in Afterconflict as a base, however experiments have already been underway as to the other sorts of applications that Hedgine can be used for, both games and development software.

But the genetics of Afterconflict can be traced all the way down to the renderer, Hedgine uses clustered shading, different to the deferred rendering seen in many other modern engines; among many other niche purposes the use of clustered shading allows for the usage of MSAA anti-aliasing, which is a departure from the dependence of ghosting-heavy TAA in many modern games that make images muddy and difficult to pick details out of, traditional MSAA retains the detail of distant objects, particularly important for a game like Afterconflict.

In terms of future planned features, raytracing is high on the list, which in addition to the more relatively simple additions as improved reflections, also includes additions such as Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion (RTAO) and real time global illumination, but beyond that, expanding the scope of Hedgine's potential scale to entire planets is also on the cards.

To answer a question posed near the beginning of this announcement, the reason that Hedgine has been developed, for Afterconflict and beyond, is to provide a platform that can evolve rapidly, at a pace that suits us, that can change as we see fit, and with the ability to provide accessible mod support to players who want to make something new.

On our Discord server we discuss everything from the game and Cold War history to posting photos of hedgehogs!

In addition to our own server, MicroProse also have their own Discord community, so be sure to check it out!

If you wish to keep up to date with all Afterconflict updates, be sure to follow our X/Twitter feed too.

As Ever: Stay Tuned!