Developer and Publisher Stardock is currently working toward their new game to their Galactic Civilizations series, Galactic Civilizations 3, and they have announced today that Blizzard Engineer for 17 years, Adrian Luff is now the new director of platform architecture for Stardock. Luff will be helping out with the next-gen connected gaming/cloud service called, “Tachyon.”
“Stardock has a long legacy of innovating from the ground up and this is a fantastic opportunity to continue that tradition,” said Luff. “Cloud-based computing lets us do things that used to only be possible for the biggest-budget games – now we don’t have to fly around the world and spend millions of dollars setting up hardware like I’ve done in the past.”
Some of you may think, ‘oh great, yet another gaming service that will be involved,’ but in reality the plan is to avoid having it running the background. Instead, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell mentions that they want to tie everything together in the platform that everyone is already running anyways, which is Steam. With Project Tachyon, if players suddenly can’t talk/connect with Tachyon, players will not be forced out of the game or will not need to be online in order for you to continue playing your game, and you won’t be kicked off if you lose connection or won’t fail to load, instead you will continue to play through.
While Luff is responsible for Project Tachyon, he will manage the online framework to give the meta-game experience for Stardock games. With Project Tachyon being a cloud based service, this will give Stardock testing grounds for the capabilities the cloud can take for the demand in real time. As mentioned above, PC gamers will be experiencing the Valve’s Steamworks on Tachyon.
“With Tachyon, we don’t want to create yet another social network that gamers have to sign into,” said Stardock CEO Brad Wardell. “On each platform Tachyon resides on, it’ll use that platform’s inherent features. For example, on the PC, that means Steamworks. Tachyon is about giving players new ways to enjoy Stardock games, such as integrated ladders, seamless matchmaking, or even data mining shared ship designs for game AI to make use of.”
Whether it be the current work in development game, Galactic Civilizations III, or Mohawk Games’ Offworld Trading Company or the unannounced title game for Oxide Games, players will get to use the cloud service Project Tachyon in “some capacity.”
You won’t see the first public rollout of Project Tachyon until Early 2015.
You can found out more information about Stardock at their official site.