What happened?

I was just wondering.
Started to play a few rounds with some friends again, when i noticed a few things.

PA feels like it is empty.
Barely 5 games open whenever i take a look
What happened? Is it just the Custom Games that are empty?

Also what about the bugs?
Its bad, most of the times it takes us around 10min just to set up a game.
One player (host) cant spawn, gets a weird blur effect across the whole screen, enters a "limbo" where he cant see anything after he tries to reconnect, wont get the UI...
It wasnt that bad when i played the last time...but now it feels like a mess.
A random chance to get an error that breaks the whole multiplayer game.

Not to mention that all my unlocks from Galactic War vanished...
Also i couldnt see the Unit Cannon there...is GW unfinished?

Planetary Annihilation might just simply be to big for the small development team, it took them half a year to get a load/save feature in after launch

Things would probably be going considerably better now if a less... ambitious... game had made it to launch.

I don't play that much anymore but I have expirienced the game getting stuck with no landing zone selection/chat after the lobby launches the game twice.

The crashing issues sound like a problem on your friends machine. Also some of the problems you describe sound like mod related issues... did you have any old mods installed? Try disabling any mods, also make sure you graphics drivers are the latest available and double check the files.

I've not run into any stability problems recently...

How do guys like you continue to get off trying to blame people's individual PCs for the constant issues people encounter with this game? It completely boggles my mind.

Because it usually is their PC.

would be weird, because all of us have the same problems.
Random Crashes/Freezes when you click out of the window (PA wont bind the cursor to the screen)
No landing zone selection - after that we have to relog and then we have a chance that it either removes the player from the game and the commander idles, the commander gets replaced by ai, or the player can play normally.

i had mods enabled a while ago,
the Teamcolor commander explosion
SupCom symbols
and fancy projectiles
nothing that should affect the multiplayer game at all, it wasnt even recognized as "mod" back then, since it is all clientside.
i could still play without problems. - then i took a long break (that was before the unit cannon), came back and suddenly there are so many weird problems.

Pa is very (arguably unreasonably so) sensitive to things like drivers. A large part of that is down to the ui they went with (very customisable, powerful and cross platform, but also very new and untested).

That said, when you get your settings correct the game runs fine. It isn't fundamentally broken like some would like to make out. People aren't used to having to tweak anything these days. I started out gaming on a 286 in dos and had to reconfigure the machine for each game. Whilst that's not reasonable, I don't see why updating a driver or two is such a big deal, updated drivers usually improve performance for all games.

At the end of the day, it's worth ruling out the simple things, rather than getting angry at uber. If we find there is a reproducible problem once mod and drivers are accounted for, then we have something useful to feed back to uber, and they do fix these issues. I don't see why that's such a bad idea?!

L

There's a known issue of the commander and units not being visible on reconnect, that is fixed in the current pte build (if your in steam enable the beta build option).

As for old mods, the client side mods change stuff related to the ui and so on. Uber have updated a load of things that totally breaks old mods so they could very well be causing your problems (which are client side ui related from the sounds of it).

Do you have PAMM installed? If so try updating all the mods to latest versions, or try running game with them turned off (safe mode in pamm). its worth ruling these out.

Also random freezes can be caused by a few programs that are installed on some machines (msi afterburner for example).

@DeathByDenim Can probably help more with that.

Edit: ill experiment re the cursor as I run dual screens. I've never noticed any issues of clicking out so I think pa does bind the cursor for me but not 100% on that. Either way it doesn't cause crashing. Are you not running full screen? Also what Os are you on?

yeah, but i installed those mods again AFTER i had these problems.
I completely removed them a while ago when i tried some pte builds and downloaded the most recent versions after our matches yesterday.
I for myself had no problem since i was not hosting. only our host had those issues where he could not spawn. And even if i had old mods installed and havnt noticed them, it was pretty much functional for me...just not for our host, whoever it was.

The freezes are pretty normal for...well...any game that has no borderless fullscreen support on dualscreen setups. Or maybe the "fullscreen" setting is allready "borderless fullscreen"...i dunno, its not a big problem, i just cant tab out during loading screens^^

With the fullscreen setting i had another issue. When i switch to "windowed", i cant switch back to fullscreen without reseting that tab. The fullscreen option simply vanishes from the dropdown menu.

The main problem we had was the commander thingy, and since it is fixed in the pte, i dont think it was on my end^^
It was just frustrating that we had to restart a match sometimes 5x in a row until everyone could enter and control a commander.

(also could someone tell me if the galactic conflict is up to date? Unit Cannon, Submarines etc? the last time i checked in pte, the UC was not there and metal planets had no deathstar function)

Use alt+enter in game to switch between full screen and boardered.

If you are having serious problems every time you play it is most likely an error your side. Check the mod folder in c:/local/users/your name/appdata/uberentertainment and delete all the stuff in there. I'd be pretty sure your issue lies there.

Ah ok, yeah invisible units was a bug that came with save / load so at least that one is fixed. As for fullscreen, dunno about button but the keyboard shortcut usually works (alt enter).

As I said I was just ruling out possible obvious things.

Edit, as for galactic war, I don't really play it. I must admit I thought a recent build added the new stuff but I could be wrong. I gather the new units are working ok in skirmish and multilayer for you?

doesnt alt+enter switch from window to fullscreen? atleast thats how i remember it in other games.
think i give it a try later, maybe it works. overall it was not a big issue, it crashed just when i was loading a map and is annoying when i scroll with the mouse...what i rarely do.

no problem, i just wanted to say it^^
would be weird if it had anything to do with a mod, since only the host had them...and it would be pretty weird if my clientside mods would affect his game xD
If i would have had those issues, then it might have been an outdated mod^^
But since we have now ruled that out, we know where it comes from and we know that its fixed in the pte build, its fine

Think i will try GW later then, never finished a game and i want my bot commander back. i love my bots.
for some reason i kept only the BACON commander...
(still waiting for unit-mods...need AA Bots)

EDIT: to your edit: yeah, the units work fine so far, atleast i tried the unit cannon (sadly it cant build the artillery bot, would have been usefull as anti-orbital strike), also submarines work. havnt noticed anything else that would be new to me.

Because we don't get these issues ourselves? -w-

If exactly that issue is fixed in the PTE builds, then someone else had them, right?

Quiet you!

We sure get some issues as well. (For the no vision on reconnect issue there is a hotfix mod on pamm), but issues like "crashes all the time completely and I cant play most of the time" are far beyond what I get usually. Sometimes they introduce a bad bug (like the vision thing) with a patch and fix it one patch later, but in general the game works fine for me.
Afaik the last info that jables posted on their current plans is to do an extensive "bugfix" run after save+load is complete. They know that PA currently is too "picky" about your systems config.

While modding PA I often juggle 2 instances of PA at the same time and it mostly runs fine like that for me.
For the mousebinding and fullscreen stuff:
PAs has no native fullscreen mode, the fullscreen mode is a borderless fullscreen.
Setting> Camera > Edge scroll options might be interesting for you if you want the mouse cursor to be locked inside the games windows. With that PA does lock my cursor inside the PA window even in windowed mode.