Updated: Oxide Games’ new Star Swarm engine demo looks pretty amazing

Not a game in itself, Star Swarm is a realtime demo cooked up by the folks at Oxide Games to show off their new RTS leaning game engine- and it’s nothing short of amazing. Update: Now with even more amazing!

Update: Oxide Games has passed along a link to a description for a brand new update for the Star Swarm demo. That Nitrous Engine that we went nuts over here in this post? Yeah, it’s even better now.

I haven’t played a good RTS in a while. And that’s mainly because I’ve felt that the genre really hasn’t done much different or interesting in a long time. That said, what Stardock Software and developer Oxide Games have going here actually looks like an honest-to-goodness evolution of the genre.

In case you missed it in the video, Star Swarm (which was first shown off at CES last week) is making use of the all-new Nitrous Engine, which is capable of rendering thousands of units at once. More than just rendering too, Nitrous can actually display AI, dynamic lighting effects and separate physics for each of them; individually and in real-time. That’s pretty darned impressive.

None of the reported three games in development using the engine have been revealed as of yet, but it certainly looks like whoever is doing the honors has quite the engine to work with. Here’s to hopping one of them is something like Star Swarm- with lots and lots of little ships blasting away at each other.