will the Unit Cannon be added in Gamma?

Of course it means they're trying to focus on other areas of the game, that's kinda the whole point/reason that unit cannons fell in priority.

But you haven't answered my question, the devs say it'll take a lot of work and you say it won't, why should I believe you over the devs? What do you have that trump's the devs game design experience and hands on time with creating the game and systems in question?

Mike

In any case, even if i agree that kickstarter game trailer was not reflecting 100% of what the final game was going to, the Unit canon (as far as i am concerned) provided some kind of epicness to the trailer and the action. This is why i'm a bit disapointed we do not get it.

We do get it. We simply don't get it when the game is released but since we are already playing the game anyways, this doesn't matter in a direct way. It only matters if the lack of the unit cannon (and other features) results in bad reviews and hinders the success of the game.

Please don't mistake the "final game" with the released game.

Where did the Devs say that it would require a lot of work? I remember only few of them saying that at some point it was not a priority, then saying that we have already what we need in game, and then saying that they really do not understand the need for a Unit Cannon. Which led few people to worry that the Unit Cannon has in fact never been in the plans.

I've never read them saying that it is hard to code.

Neutrino has said it's difficult, it was either on the forums or livestream.

Could you find the message? Because I suspect you are referring to the post of Neutrino about the Multi Unit Transport. Which may have very little to do with the Unit Cannon, for what we know.

I'm not.

Good. Can you actually prove the Devs said that?

I do understand they find other things more important but they are not playing the game as much as most people do on the forum. We need more (fun) ways than just nukes to crack a planet and we all think the unit cannon is the right weapon to do so. Besides it's function I also think its a lot of fun!

If you look at all the commotion about the Unit cannon you would think the DEVs could reconsider the priority of the unit cannon. I hope they do, I think the game sells a lot better with the unit cannon. It will also get better reviews.

I'm pretty sure this is what you're looking for.

Mike

Oh snap!

Exactly! Thanks, that makes my point.

You see, Brad is not a Dev. He's a PR.

If I have to believe to Brad, I feel fooled because the core of the game should be able to render the Unit Cannon at ease. C'mon, seriously? After two years of development the game is still incapable to render one of the most fundamental asset of the game? It has been shown on Kickstarter in the gameplay trailer, it should have been implemented on the first pass. Or at least, planned along with the development of the fundamental capabilities of the core.

You still have to prove to me that a Dev said that it is hard to implement. Not that a PR inadvertently told us how the core is way behind the expectation. If you build a car without wheels you can't tell me later that the car is hard to move it. Your design sucks, that's it, but it's not rocket science the reason why it does. A decent designer will simply put wheels.

I am afraid that it is quite evident how the Unit Cannon has not been in the plan since the beginning. It has been left behind. And there should be other reasons why than the difficulty to code it. I feel pretty puzzled about this topic, and I would like to understand it better.

You see, the point is that it might be that the Unit Cannon is not hard to code at all. But sadly not wanted.

lolwut?

Carlo, Are you trying to say that Brad exists completely outside of the Developer Side of PA? That'd make his PR job pretty hard to do seeing as this isn't a "regular" PR job where you're working mainly with Marketing material,in this case aside from a few bits here and there there is no "Marketing Material", there is only the game itself.

Sure it might not have been Brad himself who discovered how hard the Unit Cannon would be to implement, but I can only imagine that he collaborates with the PA Team to ensure that when he posts something like this he is as accurate as he can be. I bet he sits in on meetings as often as possible to make sure he has as much insight as possible because that makes his job easier. Even if he doesn't have some key piece of info on hand I doubt it's that hard to track down someone to ask about it.

Brad might not be a Developer, but he's not an idiot either.

Mike

We don't really know why Uber thinks the Unit Cannon is hard to implement because they haven't been very technical about it with us on the forums. I wish they would be, just out of curiosity. But I suspect it is a transport issue in the larger sense - both SupCom and TA had some rather major transport problems. PA seems to have similar issues. And I'm not really sure why transport in general with this type of game is such a stumbling block. It does seem to be a problem for some reason. Maybe the Vanguards could bitch about this a little bit and get something more technical from Uber next time they chat?

Well, sorry if I sound like a j*rk sometime. Brad looks really like a good big guy, with great passion for his work, and I do not blame him for saying more than what he might actually know. Coding a game at this level may be difficult to explain to not programmers. So, when Brad said that implementing the Unit Cannon would require a month of work from their engineers, I finally decided to ignore that information because none of us here on the Forum can really understand what it means, and perhaps not even Brad himself.

I like pretty much the comment above from GoodOak. Clearly we have still no idea of what prevents the Devs in adding the Unit Cannon in game at today. Perhaps they could give us a some more information about this, so that we could stop speculating and getting to conclusions or assumptions that can be far from the truth?

Would you like them to copy/paste the exact lines of code they're having problems with? I'm not sure what you're expecting to happen if they explain the problem with the unit cannon in great detail. Do you think some miracle will occur and somebody will post a magic answer leading to a vast reduction in work required to make the unit cannon?

It takes time to code things. Period. No amount of speculating about the problem or theorycrafting with 0.1% of the information about the problem will make the unit cannon come faster. Some poor dev has to sit down at a computer and write out a bunch of code to make it work. We don't need to know the exact details of why it will take awhile, it just will. It's a complicated program. Uber would have to explain how half their program works to get to the nitty gritty of why the unit cannon is a complex beast.

This reminds me of the time in one of my programming classes, a student told the professor he wanted to know every line of code that ran while a computer was booting up. A seemingly simple question right? How much stuff could the BIOS and OS really be doing in the ~30 seconds it takes to boot up? The professor laughed in his face, stating that people spend their entire careers on stuff like that.

I'm sorry, even if I understand and respect your point of view on the issue, I do not entirely agree.

I understand that the community on this forum is extremely Pro-Uber, and on average you folks have a hard time to question things related to PA. Just go on some other forum or community, and you see PA shattered in small pieces (which I agree might not be very fair).

Nevertheless, we are not stupid at all in here. Some of us work in fields that allow them to understand coding at higher level, or have the competence to appreciate more than just bare excuses. Because, let us be frank. We are speaking about excuses: no valid reasons has been given so far to justify the absence of the Unit Cannon.

We are speaking about an asset that is a pillar of the gameplay trailer, and that should have been prepared from day zero, as well as spherical maps, orbitals, and planet smashing. At this point of development it should be a breeze to implement it. If it is not, something is not quite right in the progress of the development of the game. So, since I trust people at Uber to be quite smart, it simply means that they did not plan for it.

It is really not enough for a Kickstarter project like PA is, being told that "it will take a month to our engineers", therefore forget about before release. Because that's also mean "forget after release as well".

This it's where I start worrying that they might be unable to fulfill one of the key selling points of the game, as it has been proposed on Kickstarter. And one of the reasons I, as many others, bought the game.

For the record, it is now literally 29 years that I code. So I am pretty sure that I can handle a bit more than the 0.1% of information about how things works in a video game

Until I will be proved wrong by facts, I assume that this entire topic has been nothing more than a farce.

Frankly an insult to everyone who believed in it.

Good luck going public with the Unit Cannon Scathis' style. Looking forward to read the reviews.

I guess the Unit Cannon has simply become Scathis' unit of measurement by now. Every other unit is simply evaluated against the Unit Cannon - or all weapons, at least. Still leaves us with the question if the Unit Cannon is part of the unit canon, though.