Nice article this. It really is a great game and its good to hear it went smooth and well for both Stardock and Ironclad. Hopefully this would mean potential Sins 2 to show up sooner rather than later. 

As a young amateur game programmer myself, I found this article to be extremely fascinating. The account of the development process was quite enlightening. Finding those desync bugs sounded invigoratingly difficult. I have thought about the difficulties of deterministic multiplayer, setting the floating point control word and all that delightful complexity, so I can get a dim picture of the task you guys faced. I was surprised that so few people worked on the development team. I guess it is possible to produce a AAA title without a $100 million budget and a 50-80 member development team.

Also, I agree that digital distribution is the way to go for the initial release. Later on, when the game has stabilized, you can release a phisical version for those who want it, like you have done with the collector's edition.

I am also happy, like Timmaigh above, that Rebellion has done so well, as this means plenty of money for the eventual development of Sins II, in a few year perhaps.

Nice job!

P.S. If you are free to reveal it, did you use a shadow mapping method for the shadows? Cascaded? Or perhaps a more optimized solution, because you only see shadows that fall on ships, so a naive shadow map would waste a ton of memory on empty space...hm...

I can't tell you how they programed it, but as a modder I can tell you there is no specific shadow map texture, just a normal map. And from close inspection of models, you'll see the shadow "pixels" are bigger than the individual pixels of the texture, leading to a checker board of similar shaded squares, probably done so the shadow wouldn't have to be determined for every single pixel.

It sounds like you are implying that the shadow map is stored somewhere, or associated with models like textures and mesh data. The shadow map is created and updated at runtime. I don't have Rebellion (but I plan on getting it!), but from what you say, it sounds like they did use a shadow mapping technique. I am pretty sure that adding shadow maps only impacted (to a significant degree) the GPU's workload and VRAM usage. That's a pretty good deal when you are up against a 2GB main memory limit.

Edit: As far as I know, shadow mapping is the most popular shadowing technique. Shadow volumes and other exotic methods are pretty rare.

Sins team is very small compared to others games rolling out and i really don't think they are fully utilising there building and equiptment. I really em not impressed with this single core engine after 5 years down the road. How do they expect to be competitive in the future and why do they continue to think they are an indie developer after rebellions sucess?

I really hope that the huge profits from the original Sins, its expansions, and Rebellion will go toward a massive and awesome Sins 2 with multicore support, 64 bit, and generally better everything.

I think we have to be very specific about multi-core because starcraft 2 performs badly on low end machines but games with frostbite 2 or gas powered games own engine for supreme commander 2 perform very well because there Quad based. Running a game on 2 cores is outdate, out of fashion and if they are going to be going multicore then they better well unleash the incredible bandwidth with a Quad core engine. I can't stand having a quad machine thats limited by its clock speed and have sins convince me it sucks and makes me want a new machine while in fact its a damn well powerful machine. 

Edit:

Generals 2 looks like the more cost effective investment for me. i won't buy a sins game and have to go through this disgusting feeling that my comp is not good enough. Word is the frostbite engine can support up to 16 threads-thats just awesome so that game will scale with every cpu upgrade and PC i assemble. Amazing.