Beta is atrocious - going backwards

a little bit over exagerated, isn't it
Pa pathfinding fundations are here. It's just a matter of time and will definitly beat Supcom/FA pathfinding.
Again, it's beta, and Pathfinding programmer is not full time dedicated to pathfinding. As sorian is not fully dedicated to AI coding.

The way Alpha was conducted explains why many features have not progressed over Alpha.

Last but not least, Supcom/Fa are just poor at moving tons of units properly without avoiding multiple collisions.

Sadly, no.

On a metal planet, I've tried 10 times to move a platoon, they've moved like 5 meters then were humping the walls. I had to make 20 little waypoints in order to make them able to stop making babies to them.
Repeat that to every unit, I've justed stopped trying to attack, it was impossible.

They are also moving in a straight line, something that FA doesn't do either.
It's easier to avoid collisions (even they don't right now) doing that

FA pathfinding is crappy at moving a single or several units through many other units. It works great at moving platoons.

I don't know if the foundations are there or not, but for now, it's the worst pathfinding I've saw for years. Would have been better to have a playable game in beta, even if it was a month later. Just saying.

Its not that bad but its true that pathfinding got way worse in transition to beta. Units stuck to features all the time now while they didn't that anymore some time ago.

Quoted and liked for showing the Destiny .

@OP: bear in mind that the Beta build was HUGE and thus caused quite a few bugs. I do not have a single doubt that the next few builds will address many problems to bring it back to -at least for you- alpha levels of stability (sounds like a weird thing to say..).

Most pathfinding bugs are related to "weird" planet features like crevices. I played on a planet with a ton of such features and pathfinding was hell. On a much smoother planet (read: plenty of mountains, just no big holes in the ground) it went perfectly.

My advice: play on regular planets if it bugs you that much. Yes it's a workaround but hey, better than no PA.

I don't choose the planets the automatch is creating.

um... this game just got out of alpha. They added a bunch of new features. What do you expect?

I've expected them to release the beta in a playable state.
Because it's a beta, not an alpha stage.
They put a date themselves, nobody asked for a beta in september.

1: it's playable. Just don't build huge, or complex systems. If your performance is THAT bad, you might want to consider sticking to 1 planet for now.
2: they have an obligation to the Kickstarter people for getting this out. Also, the Beta build was a big build with a proportional amount of bugs. And, they made the Simulation an order of magnitude better and added an order of magnitude more things to it. So, it balances out.

Actually, the plan was for beta to be broken upon release. With a stable release of alpha a majority of the core features were in place and were relatively stable; rendering, basic orbits, planet generation, units, pathfinding, combat, UI etc. All came together. In beta theh could add many features that would break these mechanics because they had a much larger tester base to comb through it and report it. Generally speaking it was planned because they had more resources to go out and find bugs.

The other thing you are assuming is that beta means more polished. My brother works in the industry and I often get to check out projects he's worked on and most times the betas are as broken or bugged as alpha, the big difference on those projects is the core team is no longer just testing handing builds off to a QA team and the game has most of the featurea now in place. What marketing teams have done to the term beta especially when 'testing' major titles, is give players a glorified demo. The 'betas' already have a polished games (with considerably higher budgets) and only are used for minor gameplay bugs and to collect mass data for minor balancing. PA is a normal beta in the game industry. And the constant has and always will be, the more features you add, the more code conflicts and is broken.

But we are here to make sure they keep ironing out the bugs, or the beta is not doing its job. But don't just complain saying one feature is broken therefore the game can never work. Make a thread where you detail all the problems you encounter and how they can be fixed. Its how we can help them make a stronger game. All that your fellow forum goers and testers ask is that you change your tone.

But I do hope you eventually have fun with the game. And this is the most fun I've had testing a game. Most times. Its just jump over the same gap 40 times to see how often you miss because other players say they have experienced it and the devs need a confirmation. This beta is alot more fun and verplayable for what it is.

Beta is perfectly playable for me and many others. The reason it doesn't work for you is because of instability which will be fixed over time.

Garat, what i have noticed since exactly the beginning of beta is the following :
I click on "Ubernet games"
I click on "create new game"
I keep the 2 default players and i do not generate a new system
I clik on "publish game"
I click on "join"
I click on "Ready" (Thus will to play again AI) => "Game will start when all players are ready" => I will take 10second at least to have the game starting to load while it used to be almost instantaneous in alpha.
While the game is loading, PA.exe will hang 3 times (equivalent to "PA" is not responding). This used to happen only once in Alpha. And thus it takes up to 1min for the game to load.

This is basically the most common "issue" i'm having since beginning of beta. I'm not saying 1min is exagerated, but having main program hanging 3 times when the game is loading is quite unusual for any player, and i guess that on slower configurations than mine, it can take more than 1min for the game to load, and PA.exe migh be unresponsive much more time. I think this might explain why at some point people wonder if connecting to a game is working correctly.

Stop me if I'm wrong, but isn't pathfinding super duper terrible right now? It's usually one of the first things you get solid when developing an RTS but this is like amateur hour action with the pathfinding. The game works fine on big open maps where there's not very many obstacles but on the metal worlds and water w/ ships its barely working. I do realize the game's in beta and I totally, 100% appreciate that, but this is a little late in the game for huge fleets of ships to get stuck on a little bay as they are headed out.

Again I know the game is under heavy development, and I only really mention this because everything else is so good by comparison.

Keep up the great work guys, I am really proud to be in the beta.

Pathfinding, especially on procedurally generated planets, is one of the more complex systems, that also happens to be prone to breaking when anything anywhere else in the game changes. There have been times where it's been rock solid, but when we have a period of lots of new changes coming in, it tends to break.

This isn't your granddad's a* pathing going on here.

Every time Uber makes an addition to the code (unit size, new terrain details, etc.), it has a good chance of screwing up the pathfinding. That's just development. Pathfinding is, to put it nicely, FREAKING HARD. Pathfinding a single object across set paths (a la Google maps) takes years to optimize, and is still being tweaked. I mean, Apple maps has an impressive pathfinding algorithm, and we can see that for all the developers in one of the most prestigious software companies in the world, it screws up often. Now imagine that you don't have set roads and streets -- you've simply got a surface with obstacles. You have to tell a million tanks, every frame, at least 30 times a second, on a spherical surface, which direction they need to be going, at what speed, while keeping in mind that the units themselves have to also maneuver around each other. As a CS major, I cannot even conceive of how that's possible. And yet apparantly it is...

As you see, most rts's use A*, which screws things up when you have tons of units moving around each other. It's relatively simple to code, though. Supreme commander 2 (and Planetary Annihilation) use Flow-field, which is incredibly awesome and also really complicated and difficult to implement. Especially if you want to conserve FPS, which flow-field can have a tendency to do if you screw up just a single line of code.

And don't get me started on the flocking algorithm, which on top of using the flow-field pathing, seems to adjust the individual units' path in relation to each other such that the units form a cohesive army that doesn't stream into enemy bases one by one in a long thin line to get taken out by a single basic laser turret (like they tended to do in alpha a lot).

Pathfinding is HARD. And PA has a crazy awesome pathfinding system that happens to be really hard to keep stable when you re-write half the code to add int 50 features for beta.



edit: did I just get freaking ninja'd by garat? I think I did. And he literally made the exact same points I did...I'm going to go sit somewhere and sulk...

Believe me, I know, I have programmed a 3D game that uses pathfinding. As a matter of fact, from a gamecode perspective, pathfinding IS 90% of the gameplay of an RTS (unless you have wheeled limited turn radius AI vehicles, then its like 35%). And I get that its hard to do it with procedurally generated surfaces, especially spherical 3D ones- I am not even sure any game has done that before, maybe eskil steemberg's LOVE but thats a game never to use in an example anywhere as far as technology is concerned

My bitchy concern is completely satisfied by Garat's answer. Thanks

The more close to feature complete the game becomes, the more it will get broken and patched back up. A few livestreams back, I think Garat said "We are getting really good at breaking builds". This is really a sign of progress. The initial Alpha had one direction, to get on-planet combat (the games core) working. Once we throw in the other features, they will start as gimicky, unbalanced functions with little depth. Then all of these things need to be molded in to place. Beta was a leap to adding a ton of feature to a semi-stable, semi-balanced build. The scales are once again tossed around and another cleanup needs to be done. This is expected. These are agressive updates that we are receiving, rather than panicky "oops sorry guys, dont yell at us" patches to appease the masses. Some patches give you that "oof! that was a big update", and it will feel different again until it all balances out.