Planetary Annihilation

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Wildwill002
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 27 Oct 2012, 12:20

Saturday Morning Forum Roundup! Enjoy, all. We've sent a little over 10k emails out so far, and more are going out regularly. We have reasons for going slow, not just to torture you, we promise! :)

We hope to get through a lot more this weekend.

• We actually are doing a lot of research and development which is form of planning. The features that we are developing now are more the framework around which the rest of the game is built so we don't have to figure out every detail of what each piece of code looks like. Also remember that we've built some of these games before so we can draw on that experience to know where the oddball nooks and crannies are in our problem space. Of course we are making the problem space bigger here as well :)

The actual formulation we are using the terrain, the replication and the sim are all different from previous games but based on our experience. We have plausible fallsbacks for anything that's too wacky. (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 86#p596186)

• Specs: Yeah, basically there is always a server somewhere but it could just be hosted on your machine for single player.

Also everyone needs to keep in mind that we are aiming to make the game scaleable. This means that the minspec needs to take into account how large of a game and what configuration that game takes. What might be acceptable for a 4 player game might not cut it in a 40 player game.

Like I said, I'm not going to go too crazy on the graphics side. At the moment minspec is basically shader model 3 with decent vertex texture fetch (so we can instance stuff). (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 05#p593705)

• Sorian and Planets: I'm still mainly working on planet generation. The weekend was mostly spend getting the planet archttypes and terrain biome stuff setup and working. The next phase is more complex geometry generation using the art Steve is creating. I've already written most of the underlying stuff for that, it's more an issue of layout and generating cool stuff with it (although I still have some tech work do to). I've also done some setup and experimentation with features (trees etc). I can report that I'm happy with the results so far.

WJ continues to work on our UI solution. We think we have this kinda/mostly/sorta dialed in but it's just getting there and we could shift directions on it if something blows up. More on that later but it encapsulates scripting/ui and some other stuff.

William had to put a bunch of work into the build system to see if we could make the UI stuff work cross platform. Seems possible so he's moved back onto sim/replication. I've described the work elsewhere but it's slowly getting more solid as we move forward. One interesting aspect of this work is that the scalability is probably going to happen in a different place than I thought (multiple connection servers, not multiple separate sim servers).

Sorian is starting in 2 weeks. (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 65#p594765)

• Multiple Windows, Redux: The clients workload is going to be quite small compared to the server. It will still be multi-threaded but not as much because it's mainly rendering and dealing with the UI. Since no simulation happens locally it's almost all going to be rendering load. In addition I'm working very hard to move as much rendering work to the GPU as possible.

The server code is where the heavy multithreading work is going to happen. The work is broken down across domains which can be run in parallel. For example units on different planets are completely separate so the first obvious thing is to run each planet on a thread. But we can go a lot further than that. …
SupCom only really took advantage of 2 threads. One for the sim, one for the rendering. In PA the sim lives inside the server and so the client has a lot less to do. The goal here being that you don't get slowdowns based on how slow other players machines are. …
(http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 59#p592759)
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Invunarble
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Invunarble » 27 Oct 2012, 14:12

A Multiplayer system that distributes workload equally onto client and servers? Who heard of such a thing? >.>
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 30 Oct 2012, 14:55

Greetings all, some updates for the news deprived!

First update, we’re a little less than half way through emailing everyone their link to the fulfillment website. We know a lot of you are patiently awaiting the mails, and we appreciate it! We’re going slower than we’d like, but we want to make sure we can handle any issues that come up quickly and be able to communicate directly on each one. We will send out another update when ALL emails have gone out, so until then, if you can’t find it in your inbox or your spam filter, we haven’t sent it yet.

Our LiveStream is tomorrow at 1PM PDT (Wednesday, October 31st - Halloween!). As always, towards the start, we’ll be talking about PA before we get into the developer game of Super MNC. Stop by for the whole thing, or just to catch any new info that will be discussed regarding Planetary Annihilation at the start of the show. You can catch it at: http://www.twitch.tv/uberchannel

Last, but I think you’ll agree in no way least, we are releasing to everyone, backers and just fans alike, our first official wallpaper for the game. This is based on concept work the fabulous Steve Thompson has been working tirelessly on. So, without further ado, we present the metal planet!


The images have been sized for any type of device you can imagine, from iPhone to your giant high resolution computer monitor, and even stretched multi-mon.

In addition to the links below, these will be available to view on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/planetaryannihilation

Desktops:
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 24x768.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 52x864.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 0x1024.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 80x720.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 80x768.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 80x800.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 80x960.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 0x1200.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 00x900.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 0x1050.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 0x1080.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 0x1200.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 0x1600.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 0x1200.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 0x1200.jpg

Smart Phones:
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 0x1136.jpg
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... 40x960.jpg

For all of them at once:
http://planetaryannihilation.com/assets ... PAPERS.zip

Thanks again for your ongoing support of the project, everyone!
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Wildwill002
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 03 Nov 2012, 13:11

Happy Saturday morning PA community! Well, morning for us anyway. We had a great Live Stream this week with some great extended Q&A with Mavor and our special guest, Jan. You can watch that here: http://www.twitch.tv/uberchannel/b/337596251 - The first 30 minutes are more PA focused and some Halloween fun, and then we get into our normally scheduled Super MNC mayhem.

As for the forums:

• Code optimization and other fun: The answer to this question could be a blog post. I'll try and take a quick stab here.

Short answer is yes. You do pay attention to optimization from the beginning. There are multiple levels and types of optimization though.

The first type of optimization is figuring out what problem you are actually trying to solve. I suppose this is a meta-optimization. What's the granularity of your simulation? What are your overall design paramaters? How big/how much and how do the pieces fit together? In our case most of these questions are fairly easy but I can tell you that William and I went back and forth on requirements quite a bit during the initial architecture work. For instance I pushed really hard on the replay system and game scalability in ways that radically changed our thinking. All of this top level design is the form of optimization I'm talking about. We make natural assumptions and tradeoffs during this phase that greatly affect the problem space we end up working within for other optimizations.

Once you've got a basic engine architecture the next phase of optimization is picking smart algorithms. This is where all of the big-O notation stuff comes out. We've been looking at a data structure called a skip list for example to use to store the curve data. In this day and age you also want to pick algorithms that can more naturally be exploited for concurrency.

Then once you've picked a decent algorithm you want the implementation to be fast and bug free. Premature optimization at this phase can make code hard to read and waste time before you even know how the code fits into the whole. I try to write first pass code that's "plausibly shippable" which is my bar for something I don't need to touch again before shipping. This means its "done". However, in many cases I do write simple versions of stuff quickly that does have bad scaling characteristics. This usually goes away quickly.

There are a million ways to optimize a particular piece of code. Data design with cache access in mind is quite important. Rarely do we do something like write asm code though. Things like cache pre-fetching I definitely do in some cases (although it makes less and less of a difference on new processors). I also pay attention to branch misprediction type issues in places where it might matter like inner loops.

We have our own built in profiler and event catcher than we can use to get some quick timings during development. … (See the post for the whole thing, it’s a big one!) (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 71#p605471)
• I think Mavor just promised to play guitar on the next Live Stream. He’s probably gonna slap me for saying that. (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 00#p605500)
• And he’s already mocking us about Alpha: I've already got pa.app on this machine. You guys don't have it yet? :) (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 05#p604405)

I recommend reading through the What’s Up This Week thread, as it’s a good place for much of the detailed discussions.

And while it’s not forum related, we WILL have pre-orders coming soon. We’re not providing more details than that yet, but if you’re excited about the game and missed early backing, there will be some great ways to get involved. We’ll have more information soon, but I wouldn’t want to spoil it! And no, I’m not telling you how long til we announce more details! It will mostly be announced here and through Twitter however, because if you’re following us on Kickstarter, you’re probably already “pre-ordered”.

Have a great weekend, everyone!
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 10 Nov 2012, 12:38

Good morning (afternoon/evening) everyone! Seattle has some frost finally. After a few weeks of rain and wind, it’s chilly and sunny! It’s been a quiet week in the forums, as everyone has been heads down, working. Lots of interesting discussions, as always, however. We’ve added some new folks to our team, and things are moving full speed ahead!

- Advice on learning to program from a guy who was self taught. And some insight into what will be exposed:
“True but learning how to program includes getting some experience with different languages. Still some languages are hard to master even for programmers with experience. C++ for example is a very insane language that requires extreme discipline to use well.”
“This is literally how I learned how to program. I picked something I wanted to build and figured out how to build it a piece at a time. The first thing I ever wrote in C was a paint program. It ran at 640x480 16-color mode. Since I wasn't doing animation I had room for two full pages that I could quickly toggle between. One was the canvas and one was the tools. Paint programs are a great place to start because they are fundamentally simply (sample mouse position and draw a pixel).”
“None of the C++ stuff will be exposed directly because it's hard to do cross platform. I considered embedding LLVM and just using C++ for scripting but chucked that idea after some internal discussions. It's possible that we may end up with more than one scripting language in the game although we currently only have one. For a while we actually considered writing the client and server in different languages (e.g. something like Go for the server). I partially rejected that because I know that I can make it work in C++ and I don't want to take on more technical risk than I already am. C++ is definitely starting to show it's age.”(http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 18#p611518)

- Replays: “The design of the replay system is critical for eSports which is one of the reasons we are putting so much work into making it great.

Fundamentally I'm trying to build a base game and an engine that is flexible and scalable. I expect that the community will help to figure out under which conditions and game modes the game is best played from a competitive aspect. For example the esports version of WC3 is called Dota.” (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 27#p609527)

- Work: “I'm continuing my work on terrain generation. The system is coming along nicely and as I said last week I hope to be able to show something soon.

We now have a larger team! As of last week we added 2 more programmers for a total of 5. Lots of infrastructure work is happening like getting our continuous integration working. Also just generally getting people up to speed with the architecture and current codebase.” (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 13#p607913)
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 17 Nov 2012, 12:48

Hey all! Next week is American Thanksgiving holiday, so you may not see this post for a week. So without further ado, the posts!

- Some details about the editor: So there are two levels to the editor. The procedural generation part which generates a whole bunch of output stuff and then all of the data that actually defines the procedural generation itself. Since the procedural generation phase is separate from the actual final geometry generation the maps can technically be edited offline by modders after they've been initially generated. Of course the intent is to have the front-end be scriptable so people could potentially extend our editor with more functionality as well. In addition people will be able to add their own geometry, textures etc. and definitions for new planet archetypes and terrain biomes as all of this is driven by json text files. (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 41#p618041)
- Flanking your opponents on a sphere: Yep, there are lots of interesting consequences to going to a sphere.

As I've been playing around with the map creator the world I'm mostly messing with has a radius of 600m. So from that we can calculate the surface area which is 4.5M m^2 or about four and a half square kilometers.

If I want a "slightly" larger planet I bump it up to a 1000m radius. That gives a surface area of 12.5M m^2 or 12.5 square kilometers.

As you can see the surface area grows exponentially. We are going to have some fairly large play areas if we want them (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 34#p615634)
- Localization: One of the biggest challenges in localizing games has always been context. While context is kind of slippery in English, in other languages, it often has huge impacts on the grammatical structure and specific word use. Even more so when you get into Asian languages.

I'm doing an ongoing investigation into the best localization techniques, but where I'm leaning is toward first pass localization by professionals. That gets you about 80% of the way there. But even when you spend a lot of time to provide the context for each string, without the translator sitting there, playing the game, there's a good chance they'll get at least a few wrong. The lack of the context of the game running makes it hard, and I've never worked with an outsourced localization team (or even in-sourced much of the time) that can or is willing to run the game while they translate - they do too many products, and too much translation to try and learn a new piece of software every time they want to do a project. …. (More on the forums – long post) (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 74#p617274)
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Invunarble » 17 Nov 2012, 13:49

It'd be nice if they showed a few unit or building models in pictures at this stage. :\
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 17 Nov 2012, 14:41

I'll keep a look out and see what I can find
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 23 Nov 2012, 15:39

Happy Friday all!

For those of you who celebrated it, hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving (Or just an awesome Thursday for the rest of you). Since many of you have asked, here it is. Our pre-orders site is live! If you were an early backer (Kickstarter or PayPal) you don’t need to worry about this, but if you wanted to pre-order, and especially wanted a way to get into the beta or even the alpha, this is the way to go!

In addition to the listed fun stuff for the pre-orders, we’ll be including a new custom commander, the Theta Commander, to all pre-orders and early backers.

https://store.uberent.com/

We’ve also started a FAQ on our forums. It’s still very early, but as we start to get more questions, we’ll add them there. Many of those questions were also asked here, so if you post them in threads or on the wall, we usually notice.

http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 61&t=41493

One final bit of fun. Our own Mavor has had a blog for a while now, but he’s started posting about PA more regularly. If you want to follow his posts, you can find them here:

http://www.mavorsrants.com/2012/11/plan ... ngine.html

No “This week in the forums” today. We’ll be back Saturday after next with a super sized one.

Thanks again, and the war for galactic domination moves ever forward!
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 26 Sep 2013, 14:04

Fun fact! This is the most I've stick with something without procrastinating. Oh and thread bump because the following



It’s been pretty busy around here since our last update. Like, busy-busy. Wicked busy, even. But, now we’re taking a breather because we’ve got some great news to celebrate: beta has been released. Beta! It’s out!

If you’ve pledged to receive the beta, you should be receiving an e-mail soon detailing how to get the game client and what to expect from Planetary Annihilation in its current form. For those of you in the alpha already, you’ll receive the beta just by updating the client.

Enjoy strapping rockets to asteroids and sending them on a crash course into the planets. Enjoy orbital weapons and surveillance. Enjoy launching tanks, bots, and other vehicles onto celestial bodies. Enjoy waging war on an interplanetary scale.

We think this trailer will set the mood well:

(See above)

***

Ah, to be a fly on the wall at Uber Entertainment the last few weeks. We were crunching super hard on delivering beta, bashing out line after line of code and build after build. At one point, we generated over one thousand check-ins since the last alpha update. That’s a lot of check-ins!

And it was a lot in a super short time, too. But, that’s the great thing about Uber: we’ve got a load of incredibly talented, inspired, and dedicated folks eager to rock and roll. Despite the long days everyone has been coming into the office fresh and ready to tackle new features and even a few problems along the way.

This was an awesome experience to have, by the way, because we got to do it for you -- all of our backers and fans. Without you this dream of a game wouldn’t exist. Thanks for all the kind words, the support, the pledges, the questions, and the comments. You guys rule.

***

There are a lot of you who pledged strictly for the beta. We'd like to take a second and welcome you to Planetary Annihilation. Blow up some planets! Have fun!

Also, as we noted in the backer e-mail, do keep in mind that beta is beta; PA is a living, breathing game in development. It’s not “final.” Your experience will improve and change as we push out numerous optimizations, tweaks, and features.

Your input is very important to us, which is why we're rolling out the game in beta. If you have a comment or question or noticed a bug, swing by the PA message boards. We’re good at answering questions in there. Our community is also extremely helpful, too. Folks like SXX, Raevn, Cola Colin, ZaphodX, The Wrong Cat, knight, TheTrophySystem, and many others are great at giving folks a hand when they need it.

If you have a technical-related problem, or if you didn’t get your key, feel free to contact support. The e-mail for it is: support@uberent.com. Also, take a look at our FAQ to see if we’ve got an answer for your specific issues already.

So, what’s next? We’ll continue to make your experience as best as possible. Also, Galactic War, in-game community-related features, better modding support, and a mod marketplace are all on deck. And, actually, if you’re into modding, swing by our modding board right now -- it’s full of great creators.

Anyway, what are you waiting for? Load up the client and get moving, Founding Commanders -- these planets aren't going to annihilate themselves. Have fun!
uber_garat wrote:The build notes are only a tiny subset of the massive changes that have come in over the last month. If you haven't played in a while, now is the time to play! If today is your first chance to play, DEFINITELY PLAY! :)
We have a new payment provider that allows for many more alternatives for non US countries. If you've had problems getting the game in the past, you should have more country specific options available to you, not just Visa, Mastercard and Amex. See more at http://store.uberent.com. The price also has dropped to our beta access price of $60.
SMASH PLANETS. Build on other planets. This is still work in progress, and you will see a great deal of iteration in the coming weeks and months. Go forth, Commanders, take over the solar system, fling asteroids at your enemies, dominate the skies.
Borderless full screen now supported! Alt-Enter (rebindable) to enter the mode. The game will now remember window position and what mode you're in - full screen, windowed, window-maximized, etc.
Significant changes to client performance. If you haven't been able to play much, now is a good time to try again and post in our beta forums with details about your experiences, ESPECIALLY if it's worse for you now.
Major overhaul to metal density and clustering. Still very work in progress. Reduces overall metal. The actual placement still needs more iteration, as the current system results in too many unusable metal spots.
Overhaul of the system editor. Play around with it. Much improved flow, saving, loading and customization of planets and solar systems.
Big changes to landing selection. Still a work in progress. Small games should typically guarantee more reliable metal for all. Larger games can still result in limited immediately available metal. This will continue to be iterated.
Major changes to how we use video memory. In most cases, you should see a significant improvement in your video cards memory usage. This helps visuals, frame rate, etc.
Orbital: In addition to units being fleshed out quite a bit, orbital landers now work. With the lander selected, press L to move it to the ground and "load", select the unit you want to load and right click on the lander to get on board (only some units currently support this - land fabs and the commander), then target another body. Keep in mind, celestial travel isn't fast. Plan accordingly! Also, don't let your commander die while on a lander. Game over man! Game over!
Tons of new art. Orbital units, updated land units, Delta V planet movers, and more.
The community bug tracker can now be opened in game by selecting Ctrl+F10 (Rebindable)
Water shader has more transparency now. Should make it easier to see some of your underwater units.
Torpedos work now. However, they don't submerge yet.
ENERGY MATTERS. If you are running at an energy deficit, you'll notice stuff that requires energy to work won't, or will work much slower. We don't have specific notifications about this currently, so keep a lot of energy storage or simply don't run negative. You'll regret it.
Features are now destructible. Sorry, you can't see them start on fire yet.
Reclaim, wreckage and overkill are now all using a dynamic system, rather than hard coded numbers. The amount it will take to reclaim a live unit, or wreckage, are components of their total build cost, health and wreckage stability. Fabbers reclaim at a lower rate than they build at.
AI now builds air scouts
AI will seek out targets before sending bomber patrols; It will also wait to send a bombing run until it has enough to do an effective run
AI now builds radar
Significant Balance Changes, most not called out.
Tanks currently can't shoot at air. We're testing this change to see how it feels in comparison.
More units now can be built on land and water ; We don't have a visual way to show this yet
Advanced radar satellite is really worth building now
Most orbital units can now move between planets
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Invunarble
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Invunarble » 26 Sep 2013, 14:14

So is the game finally not a ridiculous $90 anymore? If so, do very want...
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 26 Sep 2013, 14:17

To be fair, the $90 was so that the backers that got alpha access didn't feel cheated out. But yes, it's now $60 (?) or £29.99 Which is pretty good since you can now crash things into planets
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Wildwill002
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 29 Sep 2013, 18:16

Decided I'd get the game this week since it's only gonna cost £10 so if anyones bothered I can provide experience and answer questions
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Lord_Mountbatten
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Lord_Mountbatten » 29 Sep 2013, 19:01

Thought you already had it Will?
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Wildwill002
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 30 Sep 2013, 10:44

I backed to get it on release, but I'm going to upgrade to beta access. It only costs me £12 so I might as well.
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Invunarble
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Invunarble » 30 Sep 2013, 14:26

So, I saw a few videos last night of what happens when you deorbit a moon into another planet.

The effects seem kinda underwhelming. I hope that's something they'll improve with future releases.
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Wildwill002
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 30 Sep 2013, 14:42

Well considering they just implemented it this week :P Seriously, beta started at the same time as EVERYTHING off planet

I 100% guarantee it will be improved
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Wildwill002
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 04 Oct 2013, 13:43

Game acquired. Downloading as I type this.
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Invunarble
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Invunarble » 04 Oct 2013, 13:58

My funds still haven't transferred to my paypal account. :(
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Wildwill002
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 04 Oct 2013, 16:50

It's an amazing game, yet difficult, what with many people already ingame so skill level is a bit high. I'm working on getting to the orbital stage by the 8 minute mark which is apparently the fastest you can do that and the communities very friendly

Couple of things, currently firing a moon into a planet wipes out everything on the planet completely instead of just killing half of it or actually destroying the planet. It still leaves a kickass crater though

Oh and to do a vs AI you're gonna have to make a game, publish it to lobby and click ready asap, when the server has loaded you can get ingame against AI instead of humans. The AI itself is quite basic and will focus on land or air and can be quite aggressive. They do not, however, make anything other than economic buildings or factories, so no turrets or space travel for them currently.
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Wildwill002
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 05 Oct 2013, 12:24

So, today the game was patched so you can actually do specific VS AI games. Which is very good as I'm the sort of person that likes to try a lot of tactics to get the best economy before moving onto multiplayer. I've set the goal of destroying 4 AI in 1 match on 1 planet without orbital units or nukes before I properly play the multiplayer. Shouldn't be too hard as the AI is quite predictable and normally just having turrets dotted around your base and air units patrolling, you should be fine.

The System generation is amazing and so is the way units are actually constructed. Current downsides are predictable AI with no ability to change difficulty or utilise anything other than economy or factory, metal deposits sometimes being inaccessible and how easy it is to destroy someone when you make an orbital laser.
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Wildwill002
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 15 Nov 2013, 18:49

You can get the beta for $10 less on the Humble store, with 10% going to charity
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Aenir_bEPU
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Aenir_bEPU » 20 Nov 2013, 10:37

So, they started to send out beta invites to everyone who kickstarted it.

I am coming for you!
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Spyboticsguy
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Spyboticsguy » 05 Mar 2014, 21:46

Gamma's out and I've bought the game to celebrate.
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by vallorn » 09 Mar 2014, 13:21

Nice! What did they add?
Lord_Mountbatten wrote:I didn't quite hear you over the sound of my eyebrow shooting into the sky.
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OI YOU!
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JOIN US AND ADD PEOPLE FOR FUN TIMES!

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Invunarble
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Invunarble » 09 Mar 2014, 14:28

vallorn wrote:Nice! What did they add?
Well, not a ton. There's a new UI that looks far nicer, teleporters were added, and uhh... I think that's all of the big features?

*cue will posting a massive changelog*
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Wildwill002
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Re: Planetary Annihilation

Post by Wildwill002 » 09 Mar 2014, 17:36

Spoiler! :
The upcoming gamma phase of Planetary Annihilation is all about you and your friends. We’ll be rolling out a ton of features over the course of development that’ll make it easier to connect, team up, browse compare, and check out the Commanders you own. Today, we wanted to talk about some of these awesome social and experiential additions that’ll totally take Planetary Annihilation to the next level.

From top to bottom, Planetary Annihilation’s user interface is being reimagined and refocused to make it even simpler to find what you want, when you want it. We’re expanding server browsing options, for instance. In Gamma, you’ll be able to filter potential matches by player count and number of planets. We’ll also make it easier to create a new game.

The new front-end menus, on the other hand, will support dynamic news items. We’re also going to add a video hub that’ll display content from us and you. In the future, we plan to expand this to show new players how to play.

And did we mention how you’ll be welcomed to the game? Our orchestral soundtrack will be rolled out during this phase.

Gamma will also introduce new social functionality such as friends lists and instant messaging. We’ll be expanding our Twitch.TV functionality as well by adding visual cues, controls for audio settings, and the ability for streamers to run commercials (because we’re totally cool with folks monetizing videos of our games).

Also during the gamma phase, you’ll be able to compete against friends on the leaderboards to see who’s really the best and you’ll be able to view a variety of stats after matches. We’re also going to roll out a spectator mode that’ll feature its own chat and provides a real-time display of players’ economies.

A totally new concept that we’re going to introduce during gamma is the Armory. When we add this feature, you’ll be able to see all the Commanders you already own or have been rewarded as a backer of the game. You’ll also see special badges you’ve earned there.

Gamma phase’s social features and rebuilt UI will make interacting and playing a breeze — and the game that much more intense to play as a result. Most of what we’re talking about today will be rolled out over the course of the phase, but you’ll get an awesome taste of what’s to come this Thursday, February 27th, when Gamma releases.

We’ve got some more to share before Gamma releases as a free update. Stay tuned!
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Spoiler! :
Planetary Annihilation has always been about incredible scale and features that let you make entire solar systems your playground. We’re going to push on this idea even harder in the game’s gamma phase with a new suite of features focused on giving you more options, more control, and even more epic experiences.

Two ways we’ll expand on the scale of Planetary Annihilation during the gamma phase is with multi-planet start spots and picture-in-picture. These are two of our most highly requested features — and with good reason. Multi-planet spawns will open up the game, allowing for users to battle interplanetary wars from the time a match starts. We’ll also make some changes to the system editor so it caters to this style of play.

You got your first taste of picture-in-picture mode last week when we debuted it in an update. During the gamma phase, we’ll continue building on picture-in-picture with unit-tracking and a “last notification mode” that instantly snaps your view to where an alert occurred. We expect to keep building on this tech in other ways, too.

Our in-game streaming video tech, Chronocam, has always been incredible. In gamma, we’ll bolster this offering by adding replays that are instantly accessible after matches end. You’ll receive a link that you can use to watch your last matches, even if you leave the client. Down the road, we’d like to add sharing so you can share your matches with everyone.

Also during the gamma phase, we’ll unleash Alliance Mode. Alliances will allow you to ally with several players either (a) before a match starts or (b) during. Allied players will share vision and will be able to share excess resources with each other. We also plan to roll out dynamic alliances. With a dynamic alliance, you’ll be able to break away from your alliance whenever you fancy.

These are all really cool features and just a few of the new options we’ll be giving you during the gamma phase. We can’t wait for you to get your first look at gamma this coming Thusrday, February 27th, when it hits as a free update.
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