Beta is atrocious - going backwards

I have to say I see the change to beta as being atrocious. All aspects of using the game are going in the wrong direction. Maybe I had to high of hopes for all the changes they were hinting at but it seams worse than a month ago. You can only join a game about 10% of time, all the rest are server errors/failures. I you can join a game only 25% of those will not let more than one player connect. Multi planet systems do not load you can wait 5 to 10 minutes (yes i have done it) and nothing happens. Path finding is the worst I have ever seen it. Units simply can not move around terrain or buildings, the just stop it huge bunches. If you give units move orders they will do something totally random. The best example of this is giving fabbers an order to build three metals in a strait line. Instead of going strait to the spot they wanted to go around the planet. I had to micro them to the stop so they would start. After finishing the first they decided to travel half way around the planet then back to start the second. The amount of micro required in the beta is absolutely stupid. You have to manually move every unit to every spot you want.

The decision to add more flash and hoopla instead of focusing on improving the basic game mechanics has killed this game. They need to get together a good stable game then improving it by adding features. Just throwing stuff into the game to generate buzz, and sales, is going to end up turning what could be great into a lack luster disappointment.

Sounds like a problem with YOUR PA.

For me its way more stable then before, i have no problems connecting to games, i sometimes get simulations terminated errors but i have gotten those since alpha and the pathing seems to work better then before (Less likely to get stuck inside buildings and at the bottom of cliffs).

Eehmm.. you begin to say the game is bad.. then give all kinds of examples typical for a beta.. then you say that those problems has killed the game..

So.. is your complaint the game isn't stable enough? Or is your compaint that the game isn't good enough?

No, he is saying that for example path finding is worse than in the alpha phase one month ago. And sometimes I have the feeling that this is true, means my units get stuck in situations where they earlier didn't.

But since this is beta there is no reason to complain about that, just mention it and wait till the devs fix it.

For me the latest build solved several problems:
- long wait time during screen "Starting game"
- connection lost / failed during game selection
- black textures on the planet while playing

I just played the longest (more than 1 hour long) BETA game and it was fun. Like crazy fun. I've lost the game but they had to chase me through the whole solar system (2 planets and 2 moons).

Here we go -

The game is expected to be wholly unstable up until release. As an Alpha or Beta tester you should entirely expect, be ready for, and understand how to report bugs, crashes, and downright game-breaking builds. This is how all games are; you should see how often a game just completely and entirely quits due to an exception or a typo somewhere in the code. Even experienced code monkeys make a LOT of typos.

I am actually happy that Uber decided to eschew stability in trade for some new mechanics being hacked into the game. I am not entirely happy with the game as of the moment, and I've kinda sidelined myself as the game has a tendency to cause RAEG and ALT+F4 for me, primarily because I am a very competitive person that hates loosing. This is a major fallacy, I know, but everyone has their flaws. Back to my explanation, you don't have to play the game yet. You aren't even supposed to play the game yet, it isn't really a game yet. Most "Betas" you see nowadays are more or less the developers telling you "Well, we've finished the game, but we're going to add a lot more stuff because I think you want to give us more money." A good example would be End of Nations, Mechwarrior Online, CoD Closed Betas... Actually, 95% of Betas tend to be just early access retail games, not really betas.

I define Beta as "Work in progress," the same way that



would be work in progress, or



(I googled Work in Progress, so kill me)

Point being - Have fun with the beta, be productive, post bugs, make friends. If you can't do any 4 of these things, you should probably set the game down for a while and play something else. You spent $40-$90 on the game at this point, and yes, while that is a large amount of money to pay up-front, most people make that kind if "free money" (not used to pay bills or food or gas) back in under a week, some in under a day.

I am playing on 2 HWs. With latest graphics drivers here are my subjective observations:

1. core i7 3820, asus p9x79, 32 gb ddr3, asus gtx 670, ssd, sb Zx, 2 displays, win 7 x64
- Beta is little less stable for me, with more bugs

2. core 2 duo E8400, an asus board, 4 gb ddr, ati radeon 4850, win 7 x64
- Beta is much more unstable, got 2 crashes in 5 minutes, Therefore I stopped playing here. Just browsing forum.
- For Alpha 4 GB of ram was insufficient even for size 3 planet, it used additional paging file.

If anybody says it is unplayable and the other it's better, both are right. My point is about graphics which is kind of not up-to-date. I will look for any thread about graphics...
edit: point 1, little less stable

The game joining is definately NOT a problem of "his PA". Its wrong, very much so. I can join one out of 15 to 20 while I had a success rate of 75% or better in alpha. I even made a video after trying to join a game for about 5 minutes. The video is roughly 4 to 5 mins long, so to find one game that wasnt empty (shown half full in browser) or failed to start it took me a bit more than 10 minutes.

Pathfinding in alpha was of questionable quality but now, sometimes its just really bad. Units rubbing against each other in open terrain instead of moving, others having a good chance of getting stuck on everything there is, buildings, terrain features,.... Much fun on metal planets.
On open terrain though, it works ok. Its not always bad, just when it has to go through or around a bit of stuff.
I mean, its in heavy development, its ok for it to be buggy in this stage of the game. Sometimes there are even steps backwards, nothing wrong since this isnt release .

His complaint is, I think, that there was no improvement but, on some points, the opposite. Sadly I cant deny that.
Its not that the whole game is bad, no its a grand concept with great potential. But some, including me, might argue that getting the very core functions of the game up and running smoothly is more important then some features.
But Uber chose a different path for development, Im very sure they have a solid plan of how to do things and that it includes delivering a bug free and feature complete version for release .
On the other hand, based on personal experience, this whole development and discussion around it takes a frightingly close way to some of the bigger titles that arrived neither reasonably free of bugs nor complete in features.

That betas/WIPs look already better than anything in PA. Now or at release.

Not being able to join a game actually started when beta started, but it does not mean it's because of Beta itself. My guess (and because of my own experience with early interim beta build which was available to alpha backers like me) is that the current backend provided by Uber might be running out of resources just because the number of simultaneous games has dramatically increased [as far as i can see, 4 times more games than before alpha]. Not to mention multiplanetary, which, as far as i understood uses 1 thread for each planet. Thus, there's a good chance the backend does not meat the requirements (in terms of cpu and network bandwidth available).

Regarding pathfinding, as far as i could see and test, there are not obvious improvements in the current beta compared to alpha. There's still this minor/(major?) issue where units will stop to assist / move / build their building assignments just because they do not find a (supposed) viable path. In previous alpha you could see the units keeping trying to move. In the current release, they just stop. My assumption (maybe wrong) is that there's a default behaviour which makes the unit giving up instead of spinning on the algorithm used to make it find the best possible path.

Generally speaking i'm quite happy with the current pathfinding. One should play again vanilla supcom or FA and compare current beta pathfinding to Supcom/FA. You would be surprised how big the difference is. It's true that since we've seen Supcom 2 pathfinding in action, we're all expecting for such nice stuff without any failure. The thing is it's probably much more difficult to build a pathfinding engine on such dynamically built spheres.

I'm sometimes suprised how people forget the number of additional technical challenges there are in PA than in Supcom/FA. This game might not be the perfect game when being released, but Uber has clearly stated that they are going to support it and make it improving over time after release. Be patient, reaching such a beta state within a single year, with that amount of technical challenging, is , as far as i can remember, never seen before.

Keep faith, Uber is on the good way.

As of right now saying that alpha was more stable than current beta is true and uber had acknowledged this in both threads and the newest video stream (Sep 27th livestream) on theor youtube channel. The reason for thr change in stability is when they developed beta they added a host of new features (orbital and planet smashing being the biggest) and alot of background work to make that possible. Our job is to tell them exactly where we encounter these issues so they can fix them.

The reason late alpha worked so well is that the features that were there were already ironed for performance,
not totally, but were getting there. Then the new features added new problems and bottlenecks. If you were here when alpha released you would remeber it was bad then as well and there weren't even as many assets in play. It wi) get better as we and the devs identify and iron out these issues as they come up. But theynare balancing fixing/improving the performance of the game as they add features and they often come into conflict.

But to say the gams worse for these expected performance drops is a bit ridiculous, if theh continue for a while and are not adressed then it would be true, but the features came out yesterday. Game development is a long process,
as long as you contribute, all will be fixed in time.

It's pretty clear there is either a lobby problem or a lack of clarity on how to get into game. We'll be talking about this on Monday and figure out some ways to ease up getting people into games together. I think there are currently too many menu options, and it's not clear what will do what. We'll fix this quickly. There may be even some bugs joining games, but I don't think so. I think it's mostly lack of clarity.

We're fixing a lot of client and server crashes. We made such huge changes to the underlying architecture of the game in the last month, we expected a week or two of having to do a lot of bug hunt and fix. We'll get there quickly, please try and bear with us and tell us about problems. Crashes we mostly know about, as we auto upload all client crashes so we can get them fixed ASAP.

Methlodis, I'm a little bit worried about the fixing etc. Now the game is going to finish. Long time it was up to now. They have about 3 months to final release so it's not so much time. I hope they finish it in time, but if not, it would be better to wait a little longer to implement the stuff, fixes, maybe open beta for all pre-orders than to push it to market partially-done. They promised lot of things and have a lot on the plate now. I pray I am wrong.
edit: spelling

You gotta break the game to fix it. Every new feature breaks something else. Just so it happens the game got about 50 more features a few days ago. **** breaks man

Flash? Hoopla!? What do you mean? This version has added in most of the remaining basic features of the game - interplanetary travel, planet smashing, orbital stuff, etc. That's not just cool effects - it's the core of the game itself. One thing I was thinking when playing beta, is that it definitely needs a LOT more flash. Engines strapped to a moon doesn't look nearly cool enough yet.

And hoopla too. Uber, please increase hoopla by 300%. Thanks.

Yeah I hear you, its actually something that has been on my mind as well. I beleive the original goal was to complete by december based on budget with the kickstarter (with a little left over incase of a serious need for a delay). But with what seems like a new budget (from all the post kickstarter orders), and the devs considering new features (like space fleet talk in the newest stream), I'm pretty sure there will be a delay to implement new features.

But at the same time the devs almost completed the core mechanics of such a complex game in a year, which for most developers is unheard of, so they make a very skilled and hard working team. No worries there for making a solid game. We also have been promised for future content using the money from sales to go back into the game which is great news. Even more will be ironed out post release but its going to be a solid game on release.

@goodak: the effects are a first iteration, they said they will be redoing all of them once they have the tech they want to make them really flashy/polished.

Thank you man You calmed me down.

Yeah, it's so much better in FA. Units can go in a straight line without stopping.

You really can't be serious about the pathfinding working great in PA. It's a miracle when units are able to move.

On a metal planet, they can't even get out of the factory correctly.

Again, pathfinding was actually good in alpha I've had no problems. Just the changes in beta builds broke it and have to be fixed.

On the other hand the flow-fields tech they use to move units is AMAZING and have been toying with similar code in other units. It works wonder with performance, unit counts and overall navigation. It makes everything seem organic (when it works properly and no clipping). FA worked better because it was polished. They didn't how ever use flow-fields which was only developed in the last 4-5 years and is far superior to previous rts unit navigation. They will get there and I garuntee you it will be much better.

The game has lots of positives, but I just can't understand anyone saying the path finding is good. I liked the flow field idea, but if it can't be made a lot more reliable than it is now then the algorithms should be changed to a* or a more recent version.

It can be much more reliable, its just the first two days of new beta builds and dozens of new features. Give it a week and it will change. A* is good, but not as good as flow-fields for this many units.