Offline Play step 1 (LAN play) update is live!

Linking over to the support thread for it. It calls out build notes including things that have made it in since my last posts. Enjoy

Offline play step 1 is live!

Added Hotfix 73823 provides a number of fixes for stability, Mac player local server issues, Area Attack Move order issues, and a number of other issues uncovered in the last day.

Hotfix 73939: Server crash uploading is fixed (This helps us fix server crashes!), lots of new localization, AI can fully commit to a fight now if retreat is not the better option, and miscellaneous client and server crash fixes.

Yay!

Thanks, already using PTE, I'll get the official version when I have internet again.

Congrats on the offline build jables can you tell me if there is some server optimization in the works, so it can be spread out on multiple cores?

Congrats on getting this out as a stable version!---hope it will positivly affect the KS-Campaign for HumanResources as well! The build (was playing PTE) is simply a huge step forward!

If I take a look at you sig I know why you´re asking...

I can speak to this. The server currently operates on two threads. A server thread and a sim thread. It is not a simple task, nor a "sure thing" task to add additional multithreading to the server.

That said, there are probably wins we can get in by adding some additional threads to the server, but those types of additions or changes have to be carefully considered, and usually involve large amounts of work, and a high amount of risk. Multithreading is an inherently destabilizing re-factor. So it has to be weighed against other available optimizations so we can focus on the biggest wins for the lowest risk.

There are lots of ways we will continue to optimize the server for performance and memory usage, and additional threading is one of the options on the table.

Very informative, thanks garat. I love the recent rise in communication of you guys!

Edit: Used term "server" when talking about threads in a case where I meant sim.

In the spirit of supporting big servers and future machines with lots of cores it should be a high priority task.
If you can at least scale with one set of threads (I can imagine that pathfinding, simulation and maybe some other things could potentially work in parallel, though that's me guessing hard?) per planet it'll already be a pretty big help to make the game scale much better with the huge servers it is supposed to run on. Since planets are inherently separated most of the time it should be "easy" (yeah all those annoying exceptions like teleporters, planet crashes, etc...) to use one thread for each of them.
I know it's a complex task, but it's what decides if a big server is helpful or not. Right now PA basically needs super powerful 1-2 cores for the server. That's not really something available from cloud hosting.

That said if you have other things you can do to improve the performance considerably with far less work, obviously first fix those

Amusing to see some people trying to give programming advice to the devs.

@jables
I would love to see an option within the game to rent out a dedicated server on AWS through Playfab. You already have the playfab infrastructure and the micro-transaction system, so you are already half-way there to getting this to work. You could mark up the server cost by a small amount to make a profit because this would be convenient enough that we would still probably use it.

Yeah, hopefully someday the game will be able to handle many thousands of units. (I want to see crowd simulation of ants on a planet ) Actually, I am quite amazed at the speed that all the current calculations occur. Far far beyond my programming skill.

That is one thing that really drew me to this project. (The server-side networking and computation. )

What a good way for Uber to make some $$$. Renting dedicated servers for private games or large matches.

question: when i choose to play single-player(VS AI ,Galactic War) does it use the local server by default?

I'm not sure how you can tell, but by default it is set to Auto in settings. If you want to force it you can choose Local or Remote.

If you fit the system requirements, I am fairly sure it should attempt offline first if set to Auto.

i do fit the system requirement(8 GB ram, i5 quad core, GTX 750 ti), i added a new ram for purpose of playing PA.

and i was just asking if when you click VS AI and Galactic war buttons, does it create a an offline local server session?

Just to add a note here. We will have an update out later today fixing some of the bugs introduced in this update. Will update original post when it goes live.

And hotfix is live. Additional info added to OP.

I made a thread about that a while ago: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/could-uber-please-start-renting-us-servers-directly.63445/

People were not very positive about it. I still love the idea though.

I agree sooo much. Lack of real multithreading is one of the biggest issues you can have with non-limited RTS, and completely misses the reality of PC's relying on more and more cores.
The otherwise wonderful SupCom was already nothing short of crippled by it's bad performance. Even todays machines hardly improve the game because of the lacking multithreading (although PA ofc already runs a lot better than that game ever did). A future-proof game just needs it, otherwise we'll never even get close to those 1mil unit games.