Incorporate the best of the community into PA

Awesome projectiles is mostly team colored. That's why I made it and why I use it.

Only thing that I can think of that isn't team colored in it is the T1 tank shell.

I very much doubt that - I've been fortunate enough to pay a visit to Uber's new office in Bellevue and they certainly have a sizeable portion of that devoted to PA. I suspect rather there has been an internal shift to route the majority of interaction with the community via Jables. There are definitely more than three devs working on PA currently.

I just downloaded PAMM and installed my first mods. Now why was this process so difficult? Why aren't mods available to install direct from the main UI?

I played a map with quite drastic terrain. The only problem I found was that planes don't increase their height quick enough and instead just run through it at first. Not the end of the world, hardly a reason to not introduce these maps into standard.

Even after the layoffs following the HR disaster, and the shift of focus after "release" from PA, to the development of the Playfab infrastructure service during the past year?

Let's just try to list who is still participating in PA:

• sorian
• mkrater
• masterdigital
• forrestthewoods
• jorgenpt
• bgolus
  
• jables

Not all of the above are working full time on PA, some of them are merely providing support when it falls into their expertise.

garat is now working on mobile games again. The whereabouts of scathis are unknown, all we know is that the HR failure has hit him hard. neutrino is still lurking around, but nobody knows what he does, probably he went off to work on the Playfab infrastructure service. metabolical is gone since the layoffs.

There's also a number of nameless artists which are still busy creating custom commanders.

Ok, you're right, it could be worse. And yet, there are not as many left as you would hope for.

Fun fact:

Not every developer will be on the forums, or even active on the forums.

The bolded word you used there is the crux of why I disagreed with you - and @Gorbles is right. Those are the names that you see here on the forums discussing PA stuff - that's not an indicator of everyone that's working on the game.

I know for a fact that a number of the guys at Uber dislike coming onto the forums and prefer to just get on with their work. Again, I also strongly suspect that there has been a conscious effort to route community interaction via Jables which would further discourage them from popping by here.

One other point to consider: a lot of the work that's been done in the last few months has been of a technical nature; I can only imagine the number of hours that have been sunk into the Chronocam enhancements. This is work that ultimately delivers some technically amazing results, but is not perhaps as spectacular or noticeable as gameplay advances of the nature we were used to prior to release. That makes the pace of development appear slower.

Anyway, we've wandered off topic a little (apologies) - I'm still confident that Uber will ensure that mods and community content are brought to the heart of the game.

Uber could just tell us and end all of this speculation. But no, they use the same method I use when dealing with clients, stick my head in the sand, promise nothing, and deliver unspectacular features late

They really should give an update to the maps that are ingame right now. Even pax is not properly balanced atm.

Neutrino and O started working in a spin-off VR based company which has no ties to Uber

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/uber-virtual-reality-envelop-vr.68457/

Do I remember things wrong, or didn't we originally had:

• Sound files in .ogg formate, no fmod DRM crap
• Textures in .png format, not hidden away in .papa files

So why was this actually ever changed? I mean, originally we DID had the option to mod that stuff as we like.

Don't give me "file size" as a reason. These .fsb files account for a full 620MB on disk, and most of the .papa files are even BIGGER than the sources.

I could assume that hey tried to safe a little on load times, as they could now cut on implicit type conversions while loading the resources. But at what cost?

Even on an old 1,3Ghz Core2Duo, load times were still acceptable during Alpha, and they never reduced much. (Except for actual planet generation, but that one was improved in general.)

And a resource cache would have done the same job as well. Twice the consumption of disk space, but none of the drawbacks we are facing ever since.

EDIT: Sorry, wrong thread...

Well I am sure we had sound files in another format before, as people talked about how there was a much better laser sound in the files which was unused.

You can extract food files to get their contents and then make a new food file, can't you? That's what I was planning on doing a while back for a mod.

Also you can make .papa images (for our textures on units and stuff) with papatran. Not sure how to get the images from the .papa's though- the dump thing doesn't actually extract them iirc.

With fmod studio you can find sound files within fmod files, that's what I did To find the hidden lasers.

Papa texture editor.

A little box on the main menu describing pamm and linking to an installer for pamm would be ideal imo. Failing that, someone could do a proper video advertising pamm and add it to the video tab. I can do a video at some point if no one else does, but it won't have all the fanciness it probably should have like editing and fanciness.

This is a good quote

We do not share employee information, but as we've said multiple times, PA is not abandoned, The vast majority of the company is still working on it, the next PTE is coming as soon as we get the build made (so a day or two depending on QA).

You don't need QA for a PTE, silly.

You need QA before sending anything out the door

Bah, excuses, excuses!

I cannot remember ever seeing anything not fmod in the game files for the sound stuff.
Isn't fmod some form of bigger library for sound effects that does something sound-like as well. I would have thought that using the fmod sound format stuff is the normal way of using fmod for whatever it does.
For the textures I do remember that in some areas they used png before. Who knows why that changed. Probably organizational reasons. papa isnt a drm format though, so I think it is manageable for modders by now.