Recently formed developer Oxide Games came up in AMD’s APU event to explain their work helping develop the Mantle API. In the process of doing so, they use a game demo that looks so much like Homeworld.
Although Oxide Games is a new studio, it is comprised of many industry veterans, helmed by no less than Stardock founder Brad Wardell. Oxide is busy developing a multicore 64-bit engine for 8th generation gaming called Nitrous. Nitrous renders calls automatically from whichever CPU is available, making it possible to render large numbers of units and light sources on screen.
Of course, with Nitrous, Oxide has an interest in seeing the game engine perform consistently across Playstation 4, Xbox One, and 8th gen specced PCs and higher, giving them incentive to work with AMD on Mantle.
The demo comes up in the video in 26 minutes. As Oxide Games makes it clear, although they share a lot of Homeworld love with said demo, this is purely a demo and they have no plans to make a game in the same style at the moment. The demo shows a spaceship able to seek out and fight enemy spaceships, while moving around meteor fragments, suns and planets. The demo allows them to move the camera around as if it were on a floating ball. As a result, you can see the beauty of the lighting effects and graphics rendered under Mantle. Oxide’s presenters also explain each one of the innumerable ships on screen have their own AI and generated dynamically. In total, they have 25,000 discrete object in said demo. Watch the whole presentation, or skip to the demo, below.