We will have hopefully one final PTE build in a few hours that adds a few more things and resolves the wreckage issues, as well as some config write issues.
Just played a quick GW game and found a couple of minor issues: 1: Boom bots didn't really want to explode on their target- I used them to take down the comm and with a large group of them only 1 hit the commander whilst the others just stood next to it? Very sorry but I didn't take a note of the game ID (oops!) 2: Path-finding is still causing issues (on a desert biome). Lots of bots getting stuck finding their way to rally points and such. I'm sure it's just a case of a bit more fine tuning- nothing was *totally* stuck, I was able to get them moving again with a movement command in a different direction. 3: Once I defeated the enemy commander I didn't get a game end screen. I was however able to manually end the game by brining up the menu and the GW correctly recognised the game as a victory. This is on Windows 7 (64 bit) with PA Stats and System sharing installed but disabled via PAMM.
Now I can tell you what did kill it was when I had 15 bot factories all rallying to a teleporter and then had the other end of the teleporter on planet area patrol. That started slowing things down. 300-400 boom bots.
Doing world wide area patrol with land units - especially if they have weapons - will kill the sim. Currently, this is known, and expected. You need to keep in mind - every single one of those units is constantly creating, and validating, its own path * however man units with some kind of ^ of radius of the planet. It gets bad FAST. Air units don't have as much problem, or perf hit, due to they don't ahve the same collision pathing worries as ground units. We have some things we'll try and do to improve this, but area patrol on a world wide basis is primarily intended for early scouting.
Just use with caution. Area patrol a base, or send out some land scouts around the world.. but you may want to avoid having 500 tanks try and area patrol an entire 600 meter radius planet. A hundred or so bots on an asteroid? Probably won't even hurt perf that much.
In the menu or when starting a match? Both seems to be working for me, although I have only played a minute or two with this build. CPU utilization is quite high in the menu, PA uses around 50-80% and one of the Coherent UI processes uses around 80% (of one core). When switching to another process the animation of the menu stops after a few seconds and the CPU utilization of both processes drops to a few percent. Using --software-ui/mouse cursor fix/primusrun.
On startup on Intel HD4600, but it's looks like some kernel or driver bug. AMD HD6950 working fine, but R600g still have some GPU lockups in system editor and on reconnect.
Just tried it without primusrun on my internal HD4400 and it's still working. Using kernel 3.16 rc6 and latest mesa/intel driver from xorg-edgers. Haven't been at my desktop for the last two weeks, but the latest stable has been working fine with fglrx and my R9 290. Still need to upgrade the CPU though as my Phenom II 955 can't keep up in big matches.
I guess I should lave the development to the developers, but what if the game generates valid paths that maximize coverage and each tank then picks a spot on the path and they play follow the leader. Maybe the game can generate a new valid path every 30 seconds or so? For my actual post... If we're going to talk about polish, I have 4 issues: 1) Game lost it's alt-tab friendliness. Before I used to be able to alt tab with no delays, no flashes, I could move the mouse off screen to my second monitor and click something. Now it will flash my screen black or white and feel like there's a 150ms delay. 2) Visual glitch at game start. As the game transitions from the lobby to the sim, as you go from the colored panels with commanders on the, the vs screen, to the display of spawn locations, the game will freeze up, a black planet will render, slowly the black will go away and the game will transition into a smooth sim. Suggest if all of this is hidden with a black screen, or extending the vs screen duration, maybe even a landing cut scene like in the kickstarter. 3) Menus feel sluggish. For some reason, maybe it's just me, or my computer, but menus in other games seem crystal clear and snappy, very responsive. I feel like the sluggishness is especially evident with drop down menus. 4) Engineers no longer guard/assist factories that are not completed, but instead only repair them. The behavior that was in place before was the default in TA and FA. Maybe I shouldn't waste developer time and instead utilize free fan labor, have them make a mod. Where one right click will repair the building to completion, a double right click will set the engies to guard the building and assist is after it's finished. Thanks for reading. TA was my childhood, and knowing that I'm interacting with that people that "babysat" me, is great. Knowing that Mavor corresponded with me, man, thanks guys.
