Realtime Strategy Games

This genre includes such popular titles as StarCraft, Command and Conquer, and Total Annihilation - games that allow the player to command individual parts of an army from an overhead view, with success in battle usually leading to better equipment and soldiers. Because success is usually determined by a player's tactics, these are considered strategy games. Real-time strategy (RTS) games often have a high replay value; they're fun to play again and again.

Real-time strategy games are comparatively easy to program, because, with some exceptions, they do not involve 3D graphics or complicated mathematics;

however, good real-time strategy games are hard to produce, and they tend to be few and far between. RTS games also often involve a certain amount of artificial intelligence (AI) programming for controlling the simulated opponents in single-player games — a fascinating field and an area that we won't touch in this book.

StarCraft is by far the most successful RTS game, combining pleasing graphics, a large selection of well-balanced units, and interesting battlefields in a very well-rounded game and exciting game. Solid game design is by far the most important issue in creating a real-time strategy game, and StarCraft is an excellent example. StarCraft (which will run under Linux with WINE3) is not the first notable game from Blizzard Entertainment, and it will be interesting to see what Blizzard comes up with in the future.

3WINE is an open source implementation of the Win32 API, as well as a layer for loading Windows .EXE files. This allows Linux to run a number of Windows applications out of the box. It is not perfect, but it is improving rapidly.

Continue reading here: The Game Loop

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