How many times can Uber make the same mistake?

From the HR kickstarter page - comment posted by Uber employee John [1]:

Offline Server:
- HR will be huge game. There are amazing features and numbers of units not found in other RTS games. (Other games support ~100 units at a time? PA supports 20,000+) This kind of thing takes a ton of PC horsepower. Releasing offline server can make for a very poor playing experience. There's many computers out there right now chugging along in PA with 10 planets and 20,000 units and if you listen closely, you'll hear the CPU saying "mercy!"

And further on:

"We did release a game that you can smash asteroids into planets, fire giant lasers, commander armies of 20,000 tanks, and play on massive play fields across a solar system. That is what we're proud of."

"PA supports 20,000+"
"supports 20,000+"
20,000+



Dear John - please see [2] for reality check. Thanks!

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/project...n-apocalyptic-rts-game/posts/1022176#comments

[2] https://forums.uberent.com/threads/please-continue-to-optimize-pa.65327/

For clarity, is that 20,000 per player, or 20,000 overall?

and are they all dox in a area patrol?


Although as funny as it might be, even supcom 2 can handle 1000 units per player, and that game is single threaded as far as I understand.

How many units did Gandalf get in one setting? Also, what kind of computer are we talking about, because theoretically I am pretty sure any number of units work if enough ram and cpu are present.

P.S. What soap opera is that GIF from? General Hospital or All My Children? Seriously, good taste in tv /s

I would not be sad if Uber started banning the trolls on this forum.

Who knows how capable will be computers in two years from now?

There are very much computers that can handle it. "Support For" means the engine is designed with it in mind, not that every computer can run it. Compared with Supreme Commander, for example, which would crash due to memory limitations on even the most powerful of machines if it got anywhere near that amount (and would probably never be playable otherwise in any case, as it was not designed to be that scaleable).

"PA Supports 20,000+" - absolutely, as a fact.

tl;dr: You're misinterpreting what is being said.

This thread is pretty pointless. There are several threads pretty much concerning more or less the same thing (Performance) with a more objectiv op. I also don't see how the link to your other thread is going to proof anything to John since it contains no information about how many units there were in the game, how big the planets were, etc.

Gordon E. Moore.

You'd think the forum would be used to hyperbole by now.

Anyway, I believe he means from an engine standpoint.

I play PA on an acer tablet with an i5 3317u Ultra Low Voltage 1.7ghz with 2.5ghz turboboost dual core cpu with only 4gb of ram using the embedded intel hd 4000 GPU @ 1366x768 resolution,
I play offline only and my game runs fine..
30-50FPS when using the settings posted in my how to improve FPS thread.
I can build 20k ūnits easily, only time game slows down is when i give all 20k+ units an area command, sim speed drops from it's normal 10fps to about 3-5 fps my ingame fps sits around 15fps....

That's fair amazing considering it's playing offline on a dual core acer tablet with almost identical hardware to a surface pro.

It's from a comedy centrals series: Parks and recreation, quite a funny comedy.

I don't really see what you are getting on about what John has posted. I find it hard to interpret that comment, but it seems you're falling over the 20.000 units. We all know that online the servers are mostly the cause of bad performance and the dropping sim speed. But more and more refinements and performance is being worked on so it should get better, but even what john said 10 planets systems and allot of units is painful for any computer.

altho i'm wondering tho, Uber talked about getting better servers, or adjusting servers so more people could play in 1 multiplayer sessions and would increase performance and less drop in sim speed. I wonder if that ever happend?

20k tanks is a little over the top. I've been trying to find a server that can handle that at a "fun" sim speed. I did not found one yet.
Maybe 20k is what they hope to achieve once more optimization is done?! The way he writes it really reads like "You as a single player may build 20k tanks". Well yeah I can do so. But the game won't really end after that, as it will drop to below 5% speed.

Yes PA is build in a way that it won't blow up due to hard engine limitations and that's really good and with more optimization and better cpus in the future PA will support that many units, but making statements like that right now definitely is pretty much over the top and ignores the sim-speed reality of big games.

Not to mention that that I really dislike this thinking. "No offline server, your computer is too bad for that." while in reality my computer is just as good or better at handling a ton of units compared to the official uber servers already. The reason why we can at least try to play gigantic games right now is because we have the offline server.
If we ever can play 20k units per player with a high sim speed I would guess that it won't be on servers hosted by Uber.

Also wtf, HR only talks of "hundreds of units" and "8 players". I though that game was aiming for a little smaller scale. Hundreds of units on the PA engine are easy for any average computer right now.

Better to over score then underscore maybe?

Personally I define modesty as a virtue.

Its not really fun to make nothing but factorys and units without attacking, playing simcity untill you eventually see you got over 20k units. Players who do those strats should be playing heroes of might and magic or something.

Usually I see it as a kind of coldwar scenario, where other then minor skirmishes neither side wants to lose a significant fight for a long time, thus making time for a build up.

20k units would only really be possible on planets as large as supcoms 81K maps, or larger, most likely larger still.

As the current planets can only have enough front line space for a thousand or so units before you have trench warfare.

The current maps just don't have the space to effectively have that many units without holding back a considerable amount.

Technically every wall is unit in PA and even projectile it's kind a unit that need pathfinding too. So 20K units it's totally possible and might be even 30k. Game can handle it pretty well except you want 3000 dox to patrol so I suppose this statement is totally correct.

Though I don't like official Uber statement on offline gameplay because it's don't even looks valid. Would be a lot better if they just say "Sorry guys, we don't want our game pirated so there is DRM on it".

I believe they posted it before PA had offline right?

I think it might have been a insurance line just in case PA's off-line was seriously delayed.

Unfortunately it's was posted 8 hours ago in comments:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/human-resources-an-apocalyptic-rts-game/comments

Walls do not move on the map, therefore once their positioning has been passed to clients, they impact on the data only when finally destroyed.

But I do agree that saying offline mode would slow down the game is a lame excuse, mainly cos it's exactly the opposite. Specially since CPUs improve way faster than internet connections and data transfers across servers (and clients) on the web.

In two years from now the web is gonna be basically the same. While CPUs will be immensely better.