Hi, I've just recently got my beta keys, so I'm a pretty newbie in this game, but I list my problems: first I've tried the game with an old videocard : PA started, wrote lot's of messages to the console, and a black window appeared, but nothing else. -> It would be nice, if the video card is not supported, a simple dialog would pop up, to report it. after a videocard upgrade, I've tried again: PA started, less error messages, but still just a black window : it turned out, that it's needs libudev.so.0, but I only have libudev.so.1 (fortunately a soft link solved it). after finally the app started, but I found the following: in the settings screen, all of the dropdown fields has drawing issue - only when I select something, only then it is displayed, it is impossible to read the other possibilities I can't change to full screen mode Quick Match doesn't work - only a waiting screen, and the back button doesn't work, so I have to stop the game Watch Replay goes to Ubernet games Starting up a lobby game is really slow, once, I had to wait 10 minutes to see the planet - and that time, the game is already started, 2 people already annihilated, and after a couple minutes, the game froze my machine, so I had to restart. Accidentally, during the game, I've pressed the 'Main menu' button, on the left side, after, I can't return to the game I can't find a way to start a local, AI-only game. I know, AI is very limited, but I just want to try out the game, without lag, and connectivity issues I know, it's still beta, but I'm a bit frustrated with the current state of the game Do any one else experience the same? What can I do to resolve it?
I run on linux and it plays great, though with a mid-game battle, expect to drop to 12 fps, and also if you reconnect, some units won't render and won't be accessible.
At the moment, all games are hosted on uber's servers, even the ones that are just you vs ai. Until they decide to release a local server, the online games have a bandwidth requirement as well as whatever the hardware requirements end up being. It might be useful to have people post an internet speed test as well as their other hardware specs when trying to trouble shoot issues.
Sorry, my machine is AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ with Radeon HD 7750 2048MB on Kubuntu 13.04, without Steam. Is it simpler to troubleshoot using the steam client?
What version of proprietary drivers are you using? Nope, currently PA broken for Steam runtime so it's just won't run directly from Steam on any Linux distro. Steam also add some overhead by it's overlay and in future (when Steamworks SDK integrated) it's also might cause problem like currently Windows users have with FPS drops and extremely long loading times. Obviously it's much easy to check for possible problems by running PA though console with strace/gdb/etc.
coherent ui for linux is garbage. i haven't seen a more half-*** professional software product in decades. code drops with broken ld loader links is inexcusable.
the distro, GPU, and drivers I'm using are nothing that wouldn't work better with a statically linked binary.
google doesn't have a problem supporting working builds of chromium. nope, it's not thier fault. if an update from uber says they are updating coherent, and all of a sudden the linker fails, without any other changes to the environment, whose fault is that?
Are you ever used build of Chromium from Google and not your distro maintainers? Just for example Chrome and Coherent deps: My point is this: codebase of Chromium is just too big, devs of Coherent can't really change anything important in it.
Those are all issues that have nothing to do with you playing on linux btw. The general answer to them is: Feature not complete (replays/local games/quick match) or feature buggy
chrome is a fine browser. i wouldn't hold it or V8 up as a gaming platform, so as transitive properties go, i wouldn't say coherent really is the platform to host the rendering layer of an RTS. that said, use sort|diff and it would go a long way toward proving whatever you seem to be trying to prove here. im not convinced PA is onto something that a $2.5 million round of funding couldn't write better in native platform code.
PA is designed to be mod friendly and there is no better way to keep UI modable then using middleware based on browser. Only available alternative is Scaleform which is mean all UI will be made in Flash and you can't even modify it on Linux. Choice is very limited here: Hardcoded UI, very limited modding UI based on crappy Adobe Flash and some support of modding though dirty hacks with tons limitations UI based on HTML with tons of modding features I totally sure developers made right choice.
While I enjoy PA for what it's done so far, I'm interested in a solid game that's not js or lua centric, something that's not outclassed by my 3dfx card on a pentium 2 from 1996. I'm beginning to rank my purchase among the least rewarding investments of 2013. I'm sorry but if you want performance, you need c++ or llvm, and type safe language, not garbage collected object pools. while it's regrettable that linux suffers from driver envy in every way from wintel, i bought supcom in 2006 and would still rather remember mavor's contribution and namesake for that accomplishment than hearing "we wanted to take advantage of web UI and technologies" for a game about scaling planets and every nuance therein. on a $500k investment backing, sure, write a facebook app. but not at $70 a pop with $2.5m in the bank, that's just bunting for a walk, no homerun there.
User interface is completely separate from the graphics. In fact there both running in isolated processes. here's a quote fom Mavor's blog. Jon Mavor. (2012, Nov 22). Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update [Online]. Available: http://www.mavorsrants.com/2012/11/planetary-annihilation-engine.html If memory serves me it is also on a livestream. I just don't know which one it is.
galactic metagame: yay, go webkit. selecting 400 units of 5000 on the side of a planet bigger than a football field? fail. supcom got it right with concurrent p2p simulation. now that moore's law caught up, and there are cpu/gpu libraries taking shape, let's do the obvious, and constrain large scale simulations to a single threaded UI runtime and a 150 ms ping latency. derp.
