Map Scale

the unit count has not much to do with that, you can have too many units on smaller planets as well

If you load a big planet now some people are loading forever. Heck i cant even start because of other people. And i really dont need larger planets they are fine now.

I´d definitly would like to have 2000+ Planets, but I don´t think we should go for this right now.
It´ll be a good step you could do at the same time as 40 Player-Support is included! (and previous to that part the lobby has to become really good!)

Well, you can also spam a minimum sized moon with 10.000+ Doxes right now, so no, this really isn´t the point! In fact, one giant 10 Player-Planet leads to less unit spam than a galaxy with ten medium planets with one player on each planet!
(as their are MANY units dying on that giant planet...)

bleep blop bloop blap

bim! bam! boom!

zappadady-wazooo!

done!

uh yeah no. it can't be done.

I really want large maps with interesting features like giant mountains and winding cannons. Rivers and marshes. Pretty boring in their current state. Planets are definitely too small for how large of a scale this game is.

you can thank the 1300 radius cap for that

If you care so much about it just get the mods on PAMM to set it up.

I noticed that PA uses more resources (RAM, CPU) to load larger planets. Yeah play styles can definitely be an issue, but with larger planets there is obviously more room to build up large amounts of units.

It's my dream and
I can dream what I want to.
Dream what I want to.
Dream what I want to.
You'd dream this too
if it happened to youuuuuu ♪♪♪

I'm as serious as a pumpkin in July.

Since nobody asked... What are the ratios anyway? E.g. For tanks, factories and planes.

I don't see the point of these particular ones?
but here you go :


Here's some extra scale fun with human model.



google failed me what's that song?

I meant the ratio between a PA unit's size and the SupCom equivalent. I.e. Bolo:20/Striker:75. For aircraft, speed is probably more useful than size. (I.e. Are supcom's air units significantly faster than PA units.)

Though those images are quite impressive, especially the latter. SupCom's just so big.

"It's my party"

do you realize how abstract that is?

you have to give me more elements then that.

give me a metter stick, the commander? a tree? a mountain? what?

everything is different.

3D Models don't have a "size" they can be bigger than the earth or smaller than an atom depending what you put them next to. Informatics is funny that way.

so tell me more constraints or I won't be able to give an (estimated, it'll never be exact) answer.
here a fun little pic for extra size understanding. it features meters for measurement:

EDIT: that song is damn catchy

Models don't, but both games use meters/units directly convertable to meters as bounding box sizes, so it's easy to tell what a models' "size" is in-game.

The infographic you posted is incorrect; from the game files we can see that an ACU is not 90m (less than half that, actually). Sup Com uses the "square" measurement in the game files, where 1 square is 19.53125 meters (A 5km map is 256 x 256 squares).

PA directly measures things in meters.

The Sup Com Cybran ACU has SizeY = 2.2, or 42.96875 meters.
The alpha PA Commander has a bounding box height value of 13.6 meters.

From that, we can conclude that PA units are approximately 1/3 the size, making the apparent map size three times larger relative to the units (so 1000m in PA would appear like 3000m in Sup Com).

What is the data on movement speeds?

Map size is an area measure, so it is nine times larger (e.g. you can put nine time more units in an area).

Sup Com Cybran ACU: 33.203125 m/s (MaxSpeed = 1.7)
PA Commanders: 6 m/s

Hmm, so that means:

The surface area of a 81*81 map is 6561km^2
Since PA has unit sizes and speeds at a factor of 1/3 to SupCom for PA we get:
(81/3) * (81/3) = 27*27 = 729km^2 to be equal to 81*81 in supcom.

let's have js do some work for me, working km as unit:

var rFun = function(scarea) {return (1/2 * Math.sqrt((scarea/9)/Math.PI))}
for (var i = 5; i < 85; i+=5) {console.log(i+"*"+i+": " + rFun(i*i))}

5*5: 0.47015798628979694
10*10: 0.9403159725795939
15*15: 1.4104739588693906
20*20: 1.8806319451591877
25*25: 2.3507899314489844
30*30: 2.8209479177387813
35*35: 3.2911059040285786
40*40: 3.7612638903183755
45*45: 4.231421876608172
50*50: 4.701579862897969
55*55: 5.171737849187766
60*60: 5.641895835477563
65*65: 6.11205382176736
70*70: 6.582211808057157
75*75: 7.052369794346954
80*80: 7.522527780636751

So current ranked maps are indeed not even 10*10 if you compare them to SupCom and the biggest we can play is 4*PI*(1/3^2) * 9 = 191.16km^2, so 13,82*13,82
That's tiny.
Did I do some mistake? From my feeling it isn't that far of though. I think I'll play around a bit with how big of a planet my computer allows...

I guess it would be really cool if we could get 2000m radius planets at minimum at the future. That is a little more than 20*20. 20*20 is a nice map size for larger games.

I get the same:

• 81k m Sup Com map = 7,618 m radius planet (or 16 x 1905 m radius planets )
• 40k m Sup Com map = 3762 m radius planet (16 x 940 m radius planets)
• 20k m Sup Com map = 1881 m radius planet
• 10k m Sup Com map = 941 m radius planet
• 5k m Sup Com map = 470 m radius planet

and

• 13.82 km Sup Com map = 1300 m radius planet.
• A full compliment of 1300 m radius planets is equivalent to a 55km Sup Com map.

EDIT: updated with better speed compare factor of 3.9 instead of 3

Actually there is one more thing to consider that makes planets smaller than squares: The distance between starting bases.
Given a square map in SupCom units with a size of r*r if you start on opposite corners your distance is equal to Math.sqrt(r*r+r*r) or Math.sqrt(2) * r, to convert into PA units it needs to be Math.sqrt(2) * r/3.9

3.9 because I am gonna use the speed factor of t1 lab to dox which is:
lab: 78 m/s
dox: 20 m/s
so ~3.9

The distance between the bases on the poles of a PA map with radius r is half the circumferences, so PI*r.

Letting js work some more we get these size comparisons that aim to provide PA maps that have equal base distances assuming you start on opposite corners in SupCom or on the poles in PA, so this is kinda like the "worst case scenario" for PA:

var fun = function(r) {return (Math.sqrt(2) * (r/3.9))/Math.PI}
for (var i = 5; i < 85; i+=5) { console.log(i+"*"+i+": " + (fun(i) * 1000).toFixed(0) + " meters")}

5*5: 577 meters
10*10: 1154 meters
15*15: 1731 meters
20*20: 2309 meters
25*25: 2886 meters
30*30: 3463 meters
35*35: 4040 meters
40*40: 4617 meters
45*45: 5194 meters
50*50: 5771 meters
55*55: 6348 meters
60*60: 6926 meters
65*65: 7503 meters
70*70: 8080 meters
75*75: 8657 meters
80*80: 9234 meters

Obviously not on all maps players would start on opposite corners, but it's something to consider when comparing as well, especially for small maps.

EDIT: actually I think the dox is just a crazy fast unit, let's compare the tanks instead:
mantis in FA: ~72 m/s
bolo in PA: 10 m/s
so a factor of ~7.2
That means:

5*5: 313 meters
10*10: 625 meters
15*15: 938 meters
20*20: 1250 meters
25*25: 1563 meters
30*30: 1876 meters
35*35: 2188 meters
40*40: 2501 meters
45*45: 2813 meters
50*50: 3126 meters
55*55: 3439 meters
60*60: 3751 meters
65*65: 4064 meters
70*70: 4377 meters
75*75: 4689 meters
80*80: 5002 meters

So comparing the possible max distance between spawns and considering the speed of a tank actually makes it better for PA, due to the fact that tanks in PA are waay slower compared to tanks in SupCom.

Starting a game on a 2k planet (desert biome) locally:
- took a few minutes to load on my i5 3550
- uses a lot of ram, my 16GB barely manage it:


- my Radeon HD 7850/2G together with the i5 yield me ~30 fps after spawning my commander. Feels playable.
- I guess I do not have enough RAM for a large game, as I know from previous experiements on amazon servers that the server eats more and more ram over the course of the game. If I were to use a cloud server with 16GB for the server alone I would be able to play.

So requirements for a single 2k planet are in the ballpark of:
- You need a server with 8, probably better 16GB ram
- All clients need 16GB of ram
- A faster CPU than an i5 probably would reduce the rather long load time

I think that isn't that unreasonable in the next few years at least.