Let 'er Rip

Ice Storm Fighters is based on a multi-threaded game engine, and its performance scales with the number of processor cores as well as other PC platform components. Using a technique called "n-number threading," the Ice Storm Fighters game engine will generate as many threads as there are CPU cores present on the system.

Ice Storm Fighters is intended to be a forward-looking game engine technology demo for Intel platforms. Here are the system requirements:

CPU: Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme QX6700 or Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Q6600 processorQuad-Core CPU for “Demo-high” mode features & capabilities, dual-core Intel CPU for “Demo-low” mode features & capabilities

Graphics Card: Support DirectX* 9.0 Shader Model 3 required. nVidia* geForce* 6 series (minimum), 7 series (recommended), ATI* Radeon* 1650 or higher

Memory: 1GB or higher

You can launch either the demo to just watch the mayhem unfold, or you can play the game and jump right into the fray. If you're running the demo, after you launch Ice Storm Fighters, you can:

• Choose "Demo-High" if the system has a quad core CPU
• Choose "Demo-Low" if the system has a dual core CPU

• Choose "Game-High" if the system has a quad core CPU
• Choose "Game-Low" if the system has a dual core CPU

Notice at the outset of the demo that the snow surface looks fresh. It won't stay this way for long.

You can interactively control the number of threads in flight. The 1, 2, 3, and 4 keys will enable/disable CPU cores if you're running a quad-core system. You'll notice that the frame rate slows down noticeably when you run Demo-High on only two cores.

The workload can also be controlled by increasing or decreasing the number of hovercraft. Additional hovercraft means leads to increased AI (determining their direction of movement) and physics (torque, acceleration) processing. Increasing the number of hovercraft increases the computational load and decreases FPS and vice-versa. The "F3" key increases the number of hovercraft units, and the "F4" key decreases the number of hovercraft units

Here's a summary of the available key commands:

Key Map

Observe the fired missiles. the motion of the missiles includes detailed physics calculations and includes factors such as gravity, speed, direction, angle etc.. The condensation trails (i.e. emitted smoke) are also modeled with in-depth physics calculations.

Ice Storm Fighters also maintains an extended list of decals, which include the marks left by missiles and lasers as well as the footprints created by the movement of the mechs. In a typical game, as new marks occur the decal buffers are overwritten. Ice Storm Fighters maintains an extended decal list.

Demo-Low has fewer hovercraft, which decreases the AI and Physics workloads. In addition, it has simpler smoke and particle effects for the missiles, and maintains fewer decals. These changes lower the computational workload to enable Ice Storm Fighters to run smoothly on a dual core system.