An Update: Beta, October 29th, 2013

Thanks for the update! I can't wait for that new patch!

KNight please do this, your threads are the best. They look good and are well organized. Furthermore you are a creative and active member of the community and you bring a lot of structure and order into the community/forum.

Going through and answering questions as I can:

- Optimizations: there's still a lot more to go. We have some in the works that should hopefully have a big impact on most people's performance in a good way, but we won't know for sure til we test it. And there are no lack of optimizations to work on, but they're often being done by the same people iterating on features.
- Alliance / Team armies: That is up near the top of our backlog on the "do this soon". It's got a number of dependencies, but we all want to see support for alliances (unbreakable AND breakable) come in as soon as possible.

Apologies if I am slow (or forget) to respond to PMs. We encourage asking questions in the forums, as most have been asked before and and much of the community knows as well as we do the answers. We try and account for a lot of things up on our support knowledgebase and our FAQ, but.. Yes, we will have a way to make sure people can finalize their credits, planet names, etc.

Re: Terrain / heights / etc: We have a lot of desire to get a lot more verticality integrated into our planets. However, that is something that will be a moving target not only til launch, but proably well beyond it. Doing pathing on a fairly complex map (round and procedural generated) presents some challenges that normally don't exist. As we get each iteration better and better, we'll start to expand the type of terrain surfaces you see, limited by the time it takes to make new biome types, which is a very involved process.

I would like 1 question answered is any or all current buildings, factory's or units still place holder or are we looking at a close finish look to them.

.

One quick question: How did the quad-commander get released without an official announcement? I really enjoy it and it's my favorite commander so far, but did it slip out by accident or what? Anyway, I'm just curious.

It means when we have a build ready for people, and not before. And it's a goal, not a promise. ;-) We actually just changed our entire checkin process internally so we can always have more stable builds that can be pushed out incrementally.

Sorry, but we've gone over this before, so I don't mean to sound harsh. We're always very aware when a build has been in the wild for a while, and has a large number of known issues, but software development takes time, especially for a game this size, and it's not always as simple as pushing just a few lines of code to fix a few issues.

You mean to say that you guys dont just yell the code into submission? I have been wrong all my life..

I was wandering too if the buildings and model textures are all final or still placeholder? Thanks.

My position on expectations we should have;
Early access shouldn't mean 'finished game' or new features every x days. In a sense we paid to be beta testers and get to play a game as it is getting built. There were of course perks for different backers but beyond that people shouldn't be expecting much more.

Engaging with us takes time. Programming isn't simple that's why there a whole set of jokes about programming and bugs. I've tried it noteworthy even though I'm not competent like some people here I do understand how it works. Although C and compiler languages maybe aren't good places to start if you try to learn!

The developers also have lives outside of work and I expect nothing more than a quality game on release. Anything before should be taken 'as is' although for obvious reasons builds should be stable and we should give feedback on current bugs.

Since its an iterative process asking whether anything is final is an oxymoron I think?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_and_incremental_development

If it isn't too late, I would actually like to know if there is a stance on large maps v. small maps.

While there is currently a cap on planet size, my general feeling of PA is that the planet size cap should be smaller. This isn't for hardware reasons but for balance reasons and to prevent a "gigantism" player community shtick from making an entry barrier to new players. Emphasis on balance reasons...

a couple of questions:
1. is there going to be an ETA time on when things will be finished constructing?

2. with the shift-click thing for construction units (commanders, fabbers), are you guys working on being able to delete/move constructions that are in the queue?

3. any plans for de-fordable terrain for nukes and other explosives, like how the planet smashing works (leaving a huge crater in the ground)? i know this question was asked on a livestream before, but they didn't exactly answer it, they just said "planet smashing has this".

Sooo... can anybody tell me how long it is (roughly) supposed to be taking for me to crash a small moon with 3-5 rockets into a planet? Once I have engaged them it seems like it is taking waaaaaay too long, i ended up just finishing things off via other means.
Couple questions: Is it possible that if you are still building rockets it can cause a glitch? Also, is it possible to accidentally click on the sun and send the rocket-laden moon there by accident?

Depends on the system I guess, but in the systems I've made (Usually no planets over scale 3 cause otherwise my computer chunks too much) it takes a few minutes. Seems to go pretty quick once it has broken the orbit of its parent planet and started heading round the sun, like it only takes about a minute usually for me.

I have once had it not seem to work though (I think it was a system where there were 3 moons orbiting the one planet though and maybe that's why it wouldn't go?). Dunno about the still building thing, but I'm also not sure why you would build more than the number you need? At least currently any extra thrusters are just wasted anyway.

This may not be that helpful but here's a GIF of my last planet smashing. It's probably about 5 times as fast as it actually happened, it took about a minute in its initial orbit before it broke off (I had to command some dudes that's why the GIF jumps), and it was a bit glitchy

Thanks for the update.

Large maps / small maps - there are going to be more controls for making the games you want to play, and finding the types of games you want. We expect a number of things to be included such as max planets, max planet size, etc, as it does have a lot of impact on length and the way the game is played.

ETA's : Anything UI related is still work in progress. That is something we could consider, but it is also pretty easy for mod support to provide as well, so it's lower priority for us right now.

Shift-Click, etc: We want to get more order and queue management support it, but it is a longer term goal.

At this time, we don't expect to hook terrain deformation up to any other explosions. That doesn't mean it can't happen in the future. There are a ton issues related around terrain deformation that need to be investigated before opening it up to other units.

More celestial view information is very high on our list to provide as soon as possible. Things like full paths, rough estimates til impact / orbit changes, etc.

Aw I really want larger explosions to cause deformation. It would add a more dynamic nature to the battlefield(And force it to somewhat 'evolve' as the fight goes on) as nukes, large vehicle explosions, building explosions etc cause the ground to deform.

However I don't think it should be progressive, but happen at the moment of 'impact'. If a sufficiently large vehicle or bomb explosion happens, the ground deforms, but a bunch of little explosions will never cause it.

Just an idea for the future maybe!

Well, I hate to be "that" guy.
But I need to ask as to how high in your priority list the unit-cannon is atm?

The problem is that playing with more than one planet doesn't really increase the fun as it is now.
So imo it would be a big step foreward in regards to actual gameplay.
Though I can imagine the trouble in trying to program that thing, with moving and rotating planets and all that.