Remember those mods that added all those crazy units? Like the buzzsaw which was a giant wheel with dozens of artillery cannons as spokes. Like a minigun, once it spooled up it would fire hundreds of shells halfway across the map, shredding any incoming tanks. It was a carpet bomber in a building.
Actually, as crazy as it was the buzzsaw wasn't a mod, that was in the official expansion pack (Core Contingency). Arm had a similar one, which was called the Vulcan Bertha cannon.
I remember back when playing the original the Bertha cannon was a big deal, and you'd want to have a lot of excess evenrgy because it took something like 1000 or 10,000 per shot. So when it fired you'd see your energy reserves bar suddenly collapse as if it was taking all this power and blasting it across the map in one HUGE shot. Was so awesome. 8->
Then came Core Contingency with the Vulcan Bertha and Buzzsaw, which were freaking ridiculous. As soon as it got 5-10 kills the thing was basically 100% accurate. Assuming you had a spare row of fusion power planets, those things blasted out an unceasing rain of pinpoint accurate artillery shells. Enemy vehicles would come around pillars and hills and get obliterated a few seconds later as the shells hit home. Light vehicles didn't even leave wreckage behind, they were just smashed to shrapnel there and then.
Uberhack was the best mod, made the Vulcan and Buzzsaw real game-enders and did a TON of mostly good rebalancing.
I actually made my own mod inspired by FA that removed the, IMO, overly stultifying wreckage mechanic. All I did was remove the collision on wreckage (it would still block shots) and the game was suddenly WAY less turtle-friendly and more zippy and fun.
Apparently they're still going to be sticking with separate factories for Bots and Vehicles. I wonder how that's going to pan out. For that matter, I'm also wondering about the 2 tech levels
The problem in TA was one of units being a bit too homogenous, either between factions or even between tech levels. Or in the above case, between two different ground factories. There was no real big differentiator between K-Bots and Vehicles in TA, other than base stats (pricing, time to build, speed, armour) there were a lot of units that basically matched roles with very little to differentiate between them.
I'm hoping they have some way to make bots a more destinctive choice compared to vehicles this time around.
I also hope that there's more difference between units Tech 1 and Tech 2 aside from simply bigger and more expensive. One thing that I felt SupCom 2 got right with the research system was that it basically removed that kind of redundancy, and made it so that all units were viable throughout the game as long as you invested in them. In TA, once you hit T2 units it was never really valuable to continue building T1 units except if you had spare mass to sink and not enough T2 factories (in which case, you should probably just build more T2 factories with that mass instead first).
I could appreciate if T1 units were lighter and cheaper, but if they also maintained some kind of role even in the later stages. Because another annoying thing was simply sacrificing large numbers of those units sometimes just to get back under the unit cap so that you could build more T2 stuff.
Well, sort of. In Supcom 2, normal units without a movement upgrade and probably shields are completely worthless against minor experimentals, as they can just be kited to infinity.
In TA / SupCom your T1 a lot of (though not all) units were basically cannon fodder come T2 or T3. Even sending an army of T1 units against T2 point defences was typically going to result in a massive pileup of wreckage.
Well Flashes were mass-efficient against Goliaths at certain numbers, and Mantises could beat Percivals cost for cost because of overkill, but the main point still stands.
Whilst appearances may be to the contrary, I haven't abandoned this thread. I've actually been looking out for any info I can find on the game, but as I said in earlier on, since the game's only just starting into development, there's probably going long stretches with not much happening, at least until the game gets closer to development. I still intend to update on things whenever we get some new info.
That out of the way, infodump time (apologies for the messy post, I'm in a bit of a rush):
First up, always useful to link to the main Planetary Annihilation web page:
From here you can place pre-orders in case you missed out on the kickstarter. If you're already a backer, you should have gotten a link in your e-mail allowing you to, if you desire, upgrade your purchase with things like additional game keys. I think that's still running, but I haven't checked recently
Uber have been releasing the occasional video update regarding Planetary Annihilation, and one recently came out. You can find them over at their Twitch.tv channel.
Bear in mind that any videos you see at this stage aren't even Alpha footage, and what little that isn't concept art is concept design.
A QA session touching on various topics (starts 10 minutes in). IIRC they talk about the Metal planets at one point as well. Interesting thing: they're apparently going to be more like large battle fortresses. Goodness knows how that's going to work, but apparently going pretty powerful. Concept art on this page:
Most recent video (starts 5:30 in). This is an overview of how the planetary / system generation is going to work. Naturally this is all pre-alpha footage and largely concept, but it should give you an idea of what they're aiming for. What's cool is the amount of control they're allowing, to the extent of being able to set size of planets and systems, different styles of planet, temperature ranges on those planets, orbits and other stuff.
They also talk a fair amount about the fact that the actual in-game UI is going to be re-workable in Javascript. Which means that basically anyone can tweak it to their hearts content. Moddability right down to the interface, which is pretty groovy (yes I know, some people are going to object to Javascript).
The other thing of interest to me is that they've got the dude on-board who did the flowfield pathfinding for SupCom 2, and he's looking to make an improved version of it. For those that don't know what that's about, GPG did a short video on it years back:
...
JD : Designing the audio for a gun going “bang” is one thing, is coming up with an accurate sound for a planet exploding a completely different challenge? What challenges do you face in this game that is going to test your skills?
HM: The sound of planets exploding will probably be one of the most important sounds of the game. It will be especially challenging considering there are so many different factors such as size of planets, different types/elements, weapons, magnitude etc.. What I do know is that there will be a lot of bass so make sure you have a good subwoofer.
I'm about a week late posting this. Apologies, unfortunately at the moment I've got very limited access to the internet where I am.
In any case, it's the usual QA session, starts around 8:50 and runs for the rest of the video. Amongst the things discussed:
- Terrain Biomes / meshing, and keeping the polygon count low (including concept arts)
- AI: Interview with Sorian
- General QA
- Area commands
- Neural Networks
- Cheating and non-cheating AI
- E-sports / Replay functionality (lots). The way they're setting up, a replay is basically a save game (and vice-versa).
- Terraforming, probably possible, but not really to any major degree as a focus of the game, at least not yet.
- Some stuff regarding optional per-server lobby systems.
Regarding area commands, this is something I've been itching for since the original TA, so I'm glad they seem to be emphasising that quite a bit. Basically whenever you sent your bombers (or whatever) to attack an oncoming army, you'd tell them to attack a single unit (or even a selection of units, but one at a time), with the end result being that they'd massively overkill it and end up wasting attack runs in the process. With area commands you can expect to designate entire groups of units to attack, and the attacking units will be expected to coordinate with each other and attack different units in the group in order to maximise their efficiency.
The stuff about neural nets is also pretty interesting.
Oh boy, I knew he was working on area commands but couldn't quite get them to work in time for Supcom 2 to ship. This is particularly interesting because it should smooth out some of the micro difficulties my longtime TA-playing friends have (as in, they hate it and are bad at it).
First up, I've tried the Backer forums, they're working. Just log into Uber Entertainment's forums with the login you used to verify your order (see your e-mails for details if you don't know what that means). If you hit them up you'll see postings by the devs that show concept art of the Desert Biome (which we saw in the video) and some scale mock-ups. Please note that the devs have asked that stuff in these forums NOT be posted everywhere on the internet, so I'm just telling you about them. They're easy enough to find (look for posts made by people with red names, those are the devs).
Nothing we haven't already been told. Initially it's less about the game, more about the background and process of doing the Kickstarter for this project, and RTS games in general. Later in the interview they talk about the scope they're aiming for.
RPS: Can you compare this to Supreme Commander? I mean, on the biggest maps with multiple players that’s hours and hours of play. Does PA go up that far? Can you make a comparison?
Mavor: I want to have a lot more capability than that. Hopefully you’ve heard me talk about 40-player games that take place over tens of hours. The client-server technology that we are developing means that it is possible to have a game that is persistently there, and have teams come in and join a game in shifts. We could start up a game with four different armies and twenty players, and you might leave go have dinner, have someone else control your forces, then come back, and the game is ongoing. It could potentially persist. We are trying to push the engine way beyond what you would have seen in the past. This cuts both ways of course, because for a game like that you will need a beefy server. But hey we have this thing called The Cloud now, and there are beefy servers for rent right now. To play on the biggest game your server might have to be in a data-centre with an ultimate machine. Conversely, if you want a small game you can run it on anything. The level of scalability is going to be unparalleled. The number I throw around is a million units in a game. Whether we reach that… I dunno. But that’s a goal.
RPS: It sounds like an amazing goal. So I could run my own server like that?
Mavor: I fully expect players to run their own servers, especially for mods, custom setups and stuff like that. I feel confident that we could run enough servers for the community if we had to do that, or wanted to do that, but I don’t think we need to do that. People are going to want to run servers. People want LAN games, too! Get yourself a beefy server on a gigabit LAN and see how crazy we can make it.
RPS: LAN is a dying technology as far as games go.
Mavor: Well everyone is locking things down for micro-transactions. We do with Monday Night Combat. It’s a free to play game, that’s how it has to work. And, well, as soon as people can run their own servers, piracy becomes rampant. We have just accepted that will happen. We just want to incentivise people to log in to our network, so you can track stats and so on. I’m completely against the kind of DRM that makes it more difficult for legitimate players to play the game. The other thing is that we are going to be updating this game for a while, like probably a weekly basis for a significant period of time. If you want those updates you’ll need to log in. Look at League Of Legends – they add content on a regular basis. Minecraft does the same, it sold nine million copies and did that not with micro-transactions, but just by making the game better on a regular basis.
Finally, someone in the formers did a cool little Unity web app mock-up of their own to show how strategic zoom might work in this game. Pretty classy of the guy if you ask me. Again, it's the Backer forums, so whilst I think it's extremely cool and it's not showing anything we haven't seen before, I'm not sure whether I should be directly posting it (especially since it is in NO way official but it looks good enough that it might be an early concept mock up). So I'll just say to look in the thread labelled "mini PA engine for fans". He's a professional dev by trade (and apparently worked on a facsimile of SupCom for smartphones a long time ago).
Can I just pop in as an SMNC player and chime how glad I am that this project got off the ground.
Uber do good work, they deserve to keep bringing us awesome, awesome that's a planetary warfare RTS is even better.
Though I'm still holding hope they add the oppurtunity to replace the in game alert VA that every RTS has with the SMNC announcers. That'd be great.
They might be amenable to the suggestion if you make it on their forums, they're usually good about listening to fan feedback. Never played SMNC myself so I couldn't comment.
So some information on Commanders, from the Backer forums (and of course, always subject to change):
There are going to be several Commanders, and they are going to have or be upgradeable with (not sure which) abilities, as in Supreme Commander. Each Commander is going to have their own unique selection of abilities. So while each side will have access to all the same units (barring what sounds like it's going to be one or two different units between "factions"), I could see the Commander selection before each match being an important part of your playstyle.
No details on actual abilities have been stated yet, but you can see concept art for some of them right now. At the moment pre-order backers get the "Progenitor" and "Theta" Commanders. Those that backed at $90 get the "Alpha" Commander. And for those (crazy) people who backed the game to the tune of $1,000, they get their own unique Commanders for which they work with Uber to design and select the specific ability sets. Given that, there are going to be something like 100 "unique" Commanders running around (roughly how many 1K + Backers there were). So don't be surprised if you run into one you've never seen before and that isn't available to you, that's probably one of the dudes who spent a lot of money backing the game :P .
To quote:
There are going to be a bunch of commanders in the game. Custom commanders as well as commanders representing the different factions.
...
The palette of abilities that is available will be the same for all commanders and will be fully represented in the commanders available to all players. There is no possibility of getting a gameplay advantage by having a custom commander. You don't pick your abilities in the lobby, you simply select which commander you want and he comes with specific abilities.
In the backer forums they've also shown off a polygon model of the newly announced "Delta" Commander, which I'm guessing is going to be available to everyone. As ever, I can't directly link to this stuff since they don't want the pictures being posted all over the internet for what's effectively still concept work, but it's easy enough to find if you hit up the backer forums.
And finally, from those forums:
Also dont forget you should call the d cannon the Uber-Cannon
Will there be the ability to select commander ability sets in game? Because while I think it's totally nifty giving high backers their own personal character it would suck if it was a unique ability set no one else could get.
Will there be the ability to select commander ability sets in game? Because while I think it's totally nifty giving high backers their own personal character it would suck if it was a unique ability set no one else could get.
No, each Commander will have their own pre-set selection of abilities. However they've made it clear that even the custom commanders won't have "unique" abilities, just a unique selection of abilities from the same pool as all the other commanders.
So whilst a custom commander might have a collection of abilities you haven't seen all in one place before, each of those abilities is something you could get elsewhere.
At the moment we can only really speculate as to how this all pans out, we don't know anything about the abilities, how powerful they are, or how many there'll be. I'm just imagining something along the lines of how SupCom dealt with Commanders. Personally I can imagine things like a dedicated Anti-Air commander, or a dedicated Stealth commander, and variants thereof.
Of course, all this is still open for change as time goes on.
i love how they're pretty much recreating the K-bots, always iconic for me. I wonder if there are any other throw backs like Can's.
Philippe about the tactical deployment of german Kradschützen during the battle of Kursk:
"I think I can comment on this because I used to live above the Baby Doll Lounge, a topless bar that was once frequented by bikers in lower Manhattan."
They were pretty much useless in TA owing to the stun laser, but the idea itself was always cool, bots that can traverse any terrain. When I asked about it during the Kickstarter, they did say they wanted to include some kind of spider-bots in the game.
They also said that bots will be their own separate factory to vehicles, like in TA, but who knows whether that'll remain the case as production kicks off. If they're going to be separating out bots from vehicles again, then they need to give them a more unique gameplay differentiator than "has legs".
And Cans were my favourite Core K-bots. Literally just waddling blocks of armour with a heavy laser on top. Were really good if the enemy tried to swarm you with Flashes.
Well that's the concern, there was no point building Peewee's as flashes were better in spite of the Peewees being more manoeuvrable with better acceleration and lower top speed. So what was the point of a emg kbot. Although with the one side diffrent commanders style of blanacing maybe they'll have better lock as they only have to balance one side as opposed to Peewee/Flash/AK/Instigator
Philippe about the tactical deployment of german Kradschützen during the battle of Kursk:
"I think I can comment on this because I used to live above the Baby Doll Lounge, a topless bar that was once frequented by bikers in lower Manhattan."
I have zero complaints about there being only one "side", they've already said there's going to be a large variety of units, and the Commanders (and whatever unique things "factions" turns out to be) will add a little variety to your choices.
Getting into more generic RTS discussion here, I've always felt that the idea of "perfect balance" in Asymmetric RTS's is nonexistent. It's constantly mooted, especially when it comes to games like Starcraft, but it's simply impossible to achieve (and games like SC are always being patched in light of one new strategy or another). I've always felt that trying to balance asymmetric sides against each other is just trying to draw valid comparisons between the sun and the wind: They are both different things and act differently. You can try to achieve results via usage of them, and vaguely quantify the difficulty of harnessing them to those ends, but you can't reach a point where you can say "these two are equal".
It also leads to things like "Axis Lategame" (Company of Heroes), where one faction is defined as weaker at time X of the game, but if you allow them to get to a later stage then they become the stronger faction. That's not balance either, that's just different sides having advantages over each other at different times.
I bring this up because I've always felt the idea of absolute balance is a bit of a toxic one when it comes to RTS's. Asymmetric RTS's are fine, but balancing them is always going to be a constant process and should be accepted as such. The idea that you can fine-tune work the cost, time, durability, damage and abilities of all the units on both sides of an asymmetric divide so that overall the sides are "equal" is a myth.
Getting back to Planetary Annihilation, the key goal then isn't going to be ensuring so much that each unit is balanced to counter the opposition, since you effectively ARE the opposition. It'll be designing them so that they each have a valuable and viable strategic role to deploy them for, and then tweaking them so that they're practical to use in that role. Which I would argue is a simpler proposition.
I'm really excited about every aspect of this. And I like that the end game 'bombs' (asteroids etc) are more immediate and will likely actually be very expensive. As much as I love Supcom, you could easily get into a massive slog if you're playing against someone who has a concentrated defense. This is especially true as the UEF, where you don't really have a counter against defensively used air experimentals. Nukes were so expensive and so easy to counter that they weren't really worth it. When not playing UEF I ended pretty much every game by building 50 strat bombers/gunships.
But then I was turned into a hugely conservative player by the campaign and it's only now that I'm getting a bomber rush down
I actually really like nigh-identical sides. I know it's not standard practice in RTSes, but I prefer it. Different appearances and maybe some minor variations, but if each side has basically the same set of units for the most part? I'm cool with that. Maybe unique experimentals for each side, but I don't mind the naval units (for example) being Submarine-Destroyer-Battleship-Carrier for everyone.
Professor Phobos on
0
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
It will be interesting to see the strategies that develop from that.
-Spend the first half talking about the commanders, mainly the stuff that I posted about earlier from the Backer forums. Including footage of the aforementioned Delta commander and basically how they used it as a prototype for figuring out what their design process is going to be for the commanders.
- Minor talk on the necessity of readability in designs. Also, construction stripes, responding to community feedback, anime and big shoulders.
- They mention 4 'skeleton types' for Commanders at the moment. To me that implies more than just bi-pedal commanders.
- "Factions" are linked to Commanders. No explicit details yet. The only thing we know at the moment is that each faction will have most of the same units as everyone else. Whether that means a few faction specific units, or each faction draws all their units from a (slightly) larger overall pool remains to be seen.
- Mavor mentions "Macross style" when missiles are mentioned. About the exact same time that I was thinking it. This mention may make me squee a little if the "Macross Missile Massacre" is in there somewhere (although mention of that was quickly shot down. Still hoping).
For those that aren't anime fans, a Macross Missile Massacre is basically shorthand for MISSILES! EVERYWHERE! Made famous by (who would have guessed) the Macross series of anime.
Also sometimes called "Itano Circus" on youtube if you want to look it up. Like I said, something like that likely won't be included, but man I would love it if they did.
- They move on to graphics and texturing for the second half. There's some talk of procedural generation, and using a system similar to id's Megatexture system.
-An aspect that ties into the virtual texturing is that they're planning on having things like permanent scorch marks and general effects, so over the course of a match a planet generally gets more and more ruined.
-They're aiming to have wreckage stay on the battlefield. How much or for how long is a performance issue that they just don't know yet.
- Current concept for start of game (subject to change): The Commander comes in on a Lander (like in the video), what they call a configurable "egg" that can deploy into a "mini base" to get you started. Mainly a means of speeding up the early game, as opposed to rote structure building at the start.
One thing I think Supcom 2 gets right is that the building choice in the first 20 seconds is fantastically important. Not like Starcraft where the first 2 minutes are basically always the same at all.
That is to say, I hope the custom base thing doesn't take away from that.
One thing I think Supcom 2 gets right is that the building choice in the first 20 seconds is fantastically important. Not like Starcraft where the first 2 minutes are basically always the same at all.
Agree with the first part.
Ho-ho-hooooooo boy do not go into the Starcraft thread and say the second one.
Well obviously there are things that happen in the first 2 minutes, but the openings in Starcraft don't dictate your strategy quite so much as in Supcom 2.
I'm not too familiar with SC2's online play beyond the basics, so I'll just agree with you on that one.avoid it altogether.
I'll be happy enough for the ability to queue up production without it instantly take up resources, and the whole host of gameplay design decisions that go along with it.
As part of this they're aiming to do at least one update a week, so be sure to check it out regularly.
As part of the update to the site, they've posted the scale renders and concept work they've been showing in the backer forums so far. Be aware, these are CONCEPTS, designed to illustrate scale, and give a rough idea of some of the directions the art style and "readability" of units will be going. So that out of the way:
And finally, they will be having a new Livestream up on their twitch.tv account this Friday at 1PM (1300) Pacific Standard Time (UTC – 8). They usually take questions during this session, so if you've got anything you'd like to know and don't want to post it in the forums, this is the place to do it.
There's a new livestream with interesting technical info on the planet generation (it helps if you've read Mavor's rant about that beforehand) and on the AI pathing system they're developing based on flow fields, which is apparently state of the art. Have a look-see!
Flowfield pathfinding was also what they used in SupCom 2, and it really does make a significant improvement to how dozens and hundreds of units can navigate around each other.
Really liked the planet visualisation when they exported it, even if it is Alpha footage. Huge craters carved out of planets. The idea (not shown) that you can hit a planet with a rock big enough that it'll expose the mantle sounds awesome. Of course, I imagine it would take a LOT of resources to push an asteroid that big. No current plans for manual editing of planets (just generating them), but there's nothing preventing it either. So someone could just build an editor / interface to do it.
They also talk a bit about day-night cycles. Current idea is that units will have things like headlights and other lights on them that activate as they cross into the dark regions. Modeled using deferred lighting.
Reason I didn't post about the previous video (the one a week previous to the one posted by Kashaar) is simply because they spent it talking almost exclusively about their new iOS game. Hopefully they'll be able to focus on PA from now.
EDIT: Also a minor aside from the forums. I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but at current, they're not planning on implementing experimentals (basically, mega-huge units) into the game. At least not for the first release. They're very difficult to balance right against each other and standard armies, and it usually results in them either being too much of a game ender or simply not worth the cost in resources. Or even just not as "epic" as they should be in order to maintain some semblance of balance.
War / Fall of Cybertron are two games currently buzzing in my head. I wish they could have planets with transforming bits like that, but I suspect it's not going to happen. :P
Posts
Ah, good times.
I remember back when playing the original the Bertha cannon was a big deal, and you'd want to have a lot of excess evenrgy because it took something like 1000 or 10,000 per shot. So when it fired you'd see your energy reserves bar suddenly collapse as if it was taking all this power and blasting it across the map in one HUGE shot. Was so awesome. 8->
Then came Core Contingency with the Vulcan Bertha and Buzzsaw, which were freaking ridiculous. As soon as it got 5-10 kills the thing was basically 100% accurate. Assuming you had a spare row of fusion power planets, those things blasted out an unceasing rain of pinpoint accurate artillery shells. Enemy vehicles would come around pillars and hills and get obliterated a few seconds later as the shells hit home. Light vehicles didn't even leave wreckage behind, they were just smashed to shrapnel there and then.
I actually made my own mod inspired by FA that removed the, IMO, overly stultifying wreckage mechanic. All I did was remove the collision on wreckage (it would still block shots) and the game was suddenly WAY less turtle-friendly and more zippy and fun.
The problem in TA was one of units being a bit too homogenous, either between factions or even between tech levels. Or in the above case, between two different ground factories. There was no real big differentiator between K-Bots and Vehicles in TA, other than base stats (pricing, time to build, speed, armour) there were a lot of units that basically matched roles with very little to differentiate between them.
I'm hoping they have some way to make bots a more destinctive choice compared to vehicles this time around.
I also hope that there's more difference between units Tech 1 and Tech 2 aside from simply bigger and more expensive. One thing that I felt SupCom 2 got right with the research system was that it basically removed that kind of redundancy, and made it so that all units were viable throughout the game as long as you invested in them. In TA, once you hit T2 units it was never really valuable to continue building T1 units except if you had spare mass to sink and not enough T2 factories (in which case, you should probably just build more T2 factories with that mass instead first).
I could appreciate if T1 units were lighter and cheaper, but if they also maintained some kind of role even in the later stages. Because another annoying thing was simply sacrificing large numbers of those units sometimes just to get back under the unit cap so that you could build more T2 stuff.
In TA / SupCom your T1 a lot of (though not all) units were basically cannon fodder come T2 or T3. Even sending an army of T1 units against T2 point defences was typically going to result in a massive pileup of wreckage.
"Who left this thread just lying here?"
*BZZZZZZZZZT*
"There, good as new".
Whilst appearances may be to the contrary, I haven't abandoned this thread. I've actually been looking out for any info I can find on the game, but as I said in earlier on, since the game's only just starting into development, there's probably going long stretches with not much happening, at least until the game gets closer to development. I still intend to update on things whenever we get some new info.
That out of the way, infodump time (apologies for the messy post, I'm in a bit of a rush):
First up, always useful to link to the main Planetary Annihilation web page:
http://planetaryannihilation.com/
From here you can place pre-orders in case you missed out on the kickstarter. If you're already a backer, you should have gotten a link in your e-mail allowing you to, if you desire, upgrade your purchase with things like additional game keys. I think that's still running, but I haven't checked recently
Uber have been releasing the occasional video update regarding Planetary Annihilation, and one recently came out. You can find them over at their Twitch.tv channel.
Bear in mind that any videos you see at this stage aren't even Alpha footage, and what little that isn't concept art is concept design.
http://www.twitch.tv/uberchannel/b/337596251
A QA session touching on various topics (starts 10 minutes in). IIRC they talk about the Metal planets at one point as well. Interesting thing: they're apparently going to be more like large battle fortresses. Goodness knows how that's going to work, but apparently going pretty powerful. Concept art on this page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts/posts/338889
http://www.twitch.tv/uberchannel/b/334446805
This is a short overview of the kind of terrain types and things they're prototyping for, and the kind of art style they're looking towards.
http://www.twitch.tv/uberchannel/b/344229715
Most recent video (starts 5:30 in). This is an overview of how the planetary / system generation is going to work. Naturally this is all pre-alpha footage and largely concept, but it should give you an idea of what they're aiming for. What's cool is the amount of control they're allowing, to the extent of being able to set size of planets and systems, different styles of planet, temperature ranges on those planets, orbits and other stuff.
They also talk a fair amount about the fact that the actual in-game UI is going to be re-workable in Javascript. Which means that basically anyone can tweak it to their hearts content. Moddability right down to the interface, which is pretty groovy (yes I know, some people are going to object to Javascript).
The other thing of interest to me is that they've got the dude on-board who did the flowfield pathfinding for SupCom 2, and he's looking to make an improved version of it. For those that don't know what that's about, GPG did a short video on it years back:
Having come to Starcraft 2 after SupCom 2, I have to say, I was sorely missing the pathfinding.
Aaaand a final useful link, Mavor's (lead dev) blog, where he occasionally rants about things.
http://www.mavorsrants.com/
Want to know exactly why they went with Javascript? It's a simple explanation, and you can find it here.
http://blogcentral.plantronics.com/game-over/2012/12/06/interview-with-howard-mostrom-audio-director-and-composer-for-uber-entertainment-creator-of-the-upcoming-pc-title-planetary-annihilation/
New video up on Uber Entertainment's Titch.tv channel. As usual, well worth a look for all the stuff they go into.
http://www.twitch.tv/uberchannel/b/355803747
I'm about a week late posting this. Apologies, unfortunately at the moment I've got very limited access to the internet where I am.
In any case, it's the usual QA session, starts around 8:50 and runs for the rest of the video. Amongst the things discussed:
- Terrain Biomes / meshing, and keeping the polygon count low (including concept arts)
- AI: Interview with Sorian
- General QA
- Area commands
- Neural Networks
- Cheating and non-cheating AI
- E-sports / Replay functionality (lots). The way they're setting up, a replay is basically a save game (and vice-versa).
- Terraforming, probably possible, but not really to any major degree as a focus of the game, at least not yet.
- Some stuff regarding optional per-server lobby systems.
Regarding area commands, this is something I've been itching for since the original TA, so I'm glad they seem to be emphasising that quite a bit. Basically whenever you sent your bombers (or whatever) to attack an oncoming army, you'd tell them to attack a single unit (or even a selection of units, but one at a time), with the end result being that they'd massively overkill it and end up wasting attack runs in the process. With area commands you can expect to designate entire groups of units to attack, and the attacking units will be expected to coordinate with each other and attack different units in the group in order to maximise their efficiency.
The stuff about neural nets is also pretty interesting.
First up, I've tried the Backer forums, they're working. Just log into Uber Entertainment's forums with the login you used to verify your order (see your e-mails for details if you don't know what that means). If you hit them up you'll see postings by the devs that show concept art of the Desert Biome (which we saw in the video) and some scale mock-ups. Please note that the devs have asked that stuff in these forums NOT be posted everywhere on the internet, so I'm just telling you about them. They're easy enough to find (look for posts made by people with red names, those are the devs).
Next up, interview with Mavor over at RPS.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/25/ubers-jon-mavor-explains-planetary-annihilation/
Nothing we haven't already been told. Initially it's less about the game, more about the background and process of doing the Kickstarter for this project, and RTS games in general. Later in the interview they talk about the scope they're aiming for.
Finally, someone in the formers did a cool little Unity web app mock-up of their own to show how strategic zoom might work in this game. Pretty classy of the guy if you ask me. Again, it's the Backer forums, so whilst I think it's extremely cool and it's not showing anything we haven't seen before, I'm not sure whether I should be directly posting it (especially since it is in NO way official but it looks good enough that it might be an early concept mock up). So I'll just say to look in the thread labelled "mini PA engine for fans". He's a professional dev by trade (and apparently worked on a facsimile of SupCom for smartphones a long time ago).
Uber do good work, they deserve to keep bringing us awesome, awesome that's a planetary warfare RTS is even better.
Though I'm still holding hope they add the oppurtunity to replace the in game alert VA that every RTS has with the SMNC announcers. That'd be great.
They might be amenable to the suggestion if you make it on their forums, they're usually good about listening to fan feedback. Never played SMNC myself so I couldn't comment.
There are going to be several Commanders, and they are going to have or be upgradeable with (not sure which) abilities, as in Supreme Commander. Each Commander is going to have their own unique selection of abilities. So while each side will have access to all the same units (barring what sounds like it's going to be one or two different units between "factions"), I could see the Commander selection before each match being an important part of your playstyle.
No details on actual abilities have been stated yet, but you can see concept art for some of them right now. At the moment pre-order backers get the "Progenitor" and "Theta" Commanders. Those that backed at $90 get the "Alpha" Commander. And for those (crazy) people who backed the game to the tune of $1,000, they get their own unique Commanders for which they work with Uber to design and select the specific ability sets. Given that, there are going to be something like 100 "unique" Commanders running around (roughly how many 1K + Backers there were). So don't be surprised if you run into one you've never seen before and that isn't available to you, that's probably one of the dudes who spent a lot of money backing the game :P .
To quote:
In the backer forums they've also shown off a polygon model of the newly announced "Delta" Commander, which I'm guessing is going to be available to everyone. As ever, I can't directly link to this stuff since they don't want the pictures being posted all over the internet for what's effectively still concept work, but it's easy enough to find if you hit up the backer forums.
And finally, from those forums:
Basic Commanders:
Commander A (skillset 1)
Commander B (skillset 2)
Commander C (skillset 3)
Preorder Commanders:
Commander D (skillset 1)
Commander E (skillset 2)
Commander F (skillset 3)
No, each Commander will have their own pre-set selection of abilities. However they've made it clear that even the custom commanders won't have "unique" abilities, just a unique selection of abilities from the same pool as all the other commanders.
So whilst a custom commander might have a collection of abilities you haven't seen all in one place before, each of those abilities is something you could get elsewhere.
At the moment we can only really speculate as to how this all pans out, we don't know anything about the abilities, how powerful they are, or how many there'll be. I'm just imagining something along the lines of how SupCom dealt with Commanders. Personally I can imagine things like a dedicated Anti-Air commander, or a dedicated Stealth commander, and variants thereof.
Of course, all this is still open for change as time goes on.
"I think I can comment on this because I used to live above the Baby Doll Lounge, a topless bar that was once frequented by bikers in lower Manhattan."
They were pretty much useless in TA owing to the stun laser, but the idea itself was always cool, bots that can traverse any terrain. When I asked about it during the Kickstarter, they did say they wanted to include some kind of spider-bots in the game.
They also said that bots will be their own separate factory to vehicles, like in TA, but who knows whether that'll remain the case as production kicks off. If they're going to be separating out bots from vehicles again, then they need to give them a more unique gameplay differentiator than "has legs".
And Cans were my favourite Core K-bots. Literally just waddling blocks of armour with a heavy laser on top. Were really good if the enemy tried to swarm you with Flashes.
"I think I can comment on this because I used to live above the Baby Doll Lounge, a topless bar that was once frequented by bikers in lower Manhattan."
I have zero complaints about there being only one "side", they've already said there's going to be a large variety of units, and the Commanders (and whatever unique things "factions" turns out to be) will add a little variety to your choices.
Getting into more generic RTS discussion here, I've always felt that the idea of "perfect balance" in Asymmetric RTS's is nonexistent. It's constantly mooted, especially when it comes to games like Starcraft, but it's simply impossible to achieve (and games like SC are always being patched in light of one new strategy or another). I've always felt that trying to balance asymmetric sides against each other is just trying to draw valid comparisons between the sun and the wind: They are both different things and act differently. You can try to achieve results via usage of them, and vaguely quantify the difficulty of harnessing them to those ends, but you can't reach a point where you can say "these two are equal".
It also leads to things like "Axis Lategame" (Company of Heroes), where one faction is defined as weaker at time X of the game, but if you allow them to get to a later stage then they become the stronger faction. That's not balance either, that's just different sides having advantages over each other at different times.
I bring this up because I've always felt the idea of absolute balance is a bit of a toxic one when it comes to RTS's. Asymmetric RTS's are fine, but balancing them is always going to be a constant process and should be accepted as such. The idea that you can fine-tune work the cost, time, durability, damage and abilities of all the units on both sides of an asymmetric divide so that overall the sides are "equal" is a myth.
Getting back to Planetary Annihilation, the key goal then isn't going to be ensuring so much that each unit is balanced to counter the opposition, since you effectively ARE the opposition. It'll be designing them so that they each have a valuable and viable strategic role to deploy them for, and then tweaking them so that they're practical to use in that role. Which I would argue is a simpler proposition.
But then I was turned into a hugely conservative player by the campaign and it's only now that I'm getting a bomber rush down
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Also, Mavor's done a blog update with more fairly in-depth engine talk. Also worth reading if you're into this kind of thing:
http://www.mavorsrants.com/2013/02/planetary-annihilation-engine.html
The short notes on the video:
-Spend the first half talking about the commanders, mainly the stuff that I posted about earlier from the Backer forums. Including footage of the aforementioned Delta commander and basically how they used it as a prototype for figuring out what their design process is going to be for the commanders.
- Minor talk on the necessity of readability in designs. Also, construction stripes, responding to community feedback, anime and big shoulders.
- They mention 4 'skeleton types' for Commanders at the moment. To me that implies more than just bi-pedal commanders.
- "Factions" are linked to Commanders. No explicit details yet. The only thing we know at the moment is that each faction will have most of the same units as everyone else. Whether that means a few faction specific units, or each faction draws all their units from a (slightly) larger overall pool remains to be seen.
- Mavor mentions "Macross style" when missiles are mentioned. About the exact same time that I was thinking it. This mention may make me squee a little if the "Macross Missile Massacre" is in there somewhere (although mention of that was quickly shot down. Still hoping).
For those that aren't anime fans, a Macross Missile Massacre is basically shorthand for MISSILES! EVERYWHERE! Made famous by (who would have guessed) the Macross series of anime.
Also sometimes called "Itano Circus" on youtube if you want to look it up. Like I said, something like that likely won't be included, but man I would love it if they did.
- They move on to graphics and texturing for the second half. There's some talk of procedural generation, and using a system similar to id's Megatexture system.
-An aspect that ties into the virtual texturing is that they're planning on having things like permanent scorch marks and general effects, so over the course of a match a planet generally gets more and more ruined.
-They're aiming to have wreckage stay on the battlefield. How much or for how long is a performance issue that they just don't know yet.
- Current concept for start of game (subject to change): The Commander comes in on a Lander (like in the video), what they call a configurable "egg" that can deploy into a "mini base" to get you started. Mainly a means of speeding up the early game, as opposed to rote structure building at the start.
That is to say, I hope the custom base thing doesn't take away from that.
Agree with the first part.
Ho-ho-hooooooo boy do not go into the Starcraft thread and say the second one.
I'll be happy enough for the ability to queue up production without it instantly take up resources, and the whole host of gameplay design decisions that go along with it.
The main site's been updated and is in the prototypical stages of becoming a proper news and information hub.
http://www.uberent.com/pa/2013/03/06/planetary-annihilation-blog-edition/
As part of this they're aiming to do at least one update a week, so be sure to check it out regularly.
As part of the update to the site, they've posted the scale renders and concept work they've been showing in the backer forums so far. Be aware, these are CONCEPTS, designed to illustrate scale, and give a rough idea of some of the directions the art style and "readability" of units will be going. So that out of the way:
http://www.uberent.com/pa/category/media/conceptart/
And finally, they will be having a new Livestream up on their twitch.tv account this Friday at 1PM (1300) Pacific Standard Time (UTC – 8). They usually take questions during this session, so if you've got anything you'd like to know and don't want to post it in the forums, this is the place to do it.
As usual, you can catch the show again on that channel even if you miss the livestream, and it should be up shortly afterwards on their Youtube channel here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/UberEntChannel/videos?view=0
Will post an update later when the stream's gone out.
Damn, I can't wait for the beta.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Really liked the planet visualisation when they exported it, even if it is Alpha footage. Huge craters carved out of planets. The idea (not shown) that you can hit a planet with a rock big enough that it'll expose the mantle sounds awesome. Of course, I imagine it would take a LOT of resources to push an asteroid that big. No current plans for manual editing of planets (just generating them), but there's nothing preventing it either. So someone could just build an editor / interface to do it.
They also talk a bit about day-night cycles. Current idea is that units will have things like headlights and other lights on them that activate as they cross into the dark regions. Modeled using deferred lighting.
Reason I didn't post about the previous video (the one a week previous to the one posted by Kashaar) is simply because they spent it talking almost exclusively about their new iOS game. Hopefully they'll be able to focus on PA from now.
EDIT: Also a minor aside from the forums. I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but at current, they're not planning on implementing experimentals (basically, mega-huge units) into the game. At least not for the first release. They're very difficult to balance right against each other and standard armies, and it usually results in them either being too much of a game ender or simply not worth the cost in resources. Or even just not as "epic" as they should be in order to maintain some semblance of balance.
http://www.uberent.com/pa/2013/04/05/planetary-biome-concepts/
http://www.uberent.com/pa/2013/04/05/planetary-biome-concepts-updates/
Liking the style of the metal planet. I always thought metal planets in TA didn't really look so great.
Also, I suspect the last image is probably a gas giant.