Latest Weekly Update from Uber – 40 Person Battles, Ladders, and Q&A

Since Uber isn't posting it, I will.

Source: http://www.uberent.com/pa/2014/07/28/uber-weekly-update-728/

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Consider your latest skirmish in Planetary Annihilation an appetizer. The feverish, mind meltingly huge battle was just a sample, a tease of what’s to come. The latest build, as we promised, ushered in a new lobby, new menus, and new explosive effects. You saw quite a few performance breakthroughs, too, as you wildly battled across the stars.

The gains over the last build were incredible, and we’ll keep building on that momentum well into the future. Every day, there’s a new discovery, a new feature or mechanic that we can make better or more powerful and cost less.

The target is clear: deliver on the vision that you helped make a reality. There’s a lot more work to do, but we’re up to the task.

40-Person Battles


Fans who fight commonly in epic free-for-alls and team games often ask when they’ll get to experience 40-person battles. Planetary Annihilation has always had big fights, even early on. Yet, we’ve always wanted to up the ante.

You might be surprised to know that we can support these matches now. Unlocking them for you, however, is a matter of making absolutely, totally sure that the experience will be as fun and as smooth as possible.

In order to get there, we’ll need to add in layers of UI to handle the increased amount of players. Also, we’ll have to tune servers to handle all the carnage. And, of course, bigger fights are going to require some additional background polish work to make sure they run smoothly, efficiently, and offer as much interesting content as possible.

The game you’re playing right now has an excellent example of how we’re paving the way to raising the player cap. Currently, whenever you play in big systems, you aren’t hit with data about planets that aren’t immediately relevant to your interests. This keeps the game’s footprint smaller than it would be if planets were constantly phoning home, and as a result the game runs faster.

Don’t be surprised to see the player cap jump up over time. It’s how we plan to scale the game.

Ladders in 1.0


You asked and we’re listening.

Last week, Jon revealed on our forums that we’re going to re-evaluate our stance on saving ladders for competitive update down the road. We learned a lot about what you think ladders add to a game during our various discussions, so we’re looking at ways that we can accomplish what you want.

We’re with you: we want to make sure new players can battle it out against other new players and veterans can battle it out against veterans. Thanks for your input! It’s been a big help. We’ll have more on this in the future, no doubt.

And Now For Some Questions:


Have everyone who want to grow a beard, after a month or two, have a community vote on the best beard. MAKE IT SO!

That’s not a question, but we like where your head is at. Ryan and Brad are trying to grow out their hair again. Does that count?

Will we be getting an annihilation victory condition where we must kill commander, factories, and fabricators?

That’s a great question. Different victory conditions (and new modes, even) are on the agenda. One of the wonderful things about our short-term goals for modding, however, is that want to give you the power to make cool victory conditions and modes.

I haven’t heard anything about the Gas Giants since launch. Are gas giant planets still planned?

Yes, yes they are. In fact, we plan to talk about them in detail very soon.

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That’s it for this week, but we did want to mention: did you see this thread about Super Monday Night Combat on reddit? Interesting stuff, for sure.

Please remember in your discussions what was said last week about the audience for that type of communication, boys and girls.

Hehe 40 player battles

Now here is what i picture, one big planet 40 player, who will be last man standing!.

Interesting stuff D: Can't wait for some gas giant info, though I still wonder if Uber is working on something regarding the metal planets? They were one of the things I was most excited about from the beginning. But a good update indeed, keep up the good work Uber

I didn't get that memo.

Consider yourself caught up

Gas Giants!

DO WANT

@Com0676, Welcome to the forum.

I believe I got halfway down the first page and said not one of these threads again.

In other news gas giants been waiting for those for ever and a day.

OMG LADDERS IN 1.0.

You listened Uber

Gas giants and ladder/matchmaking seem to be the "big rock" features for 1.0, and if so I think they will more than suffice.

It's really nice they listened to the community nothing but kudo's there!

Altho 40 man cap, is never going to happen, the performance is pretty good, but as soon as i play a 10 player game against the AI on a 1000 scale planet (just 1 planet) the performance litterely sucks after 30 minutes! (and i got a BEAST of a PC) Now since a 10 player match does not run smoothly thoughout the hole match, i don't see why they want to up the player count. I can not believe they found a way to improve performance 450% better from what it is now, unless the servers suck so badly that if they up that all works fine!

Right now. Give them enough time and throw enough hardware resources at the server it will work.

The servers are 8 games on one machine. So, they can multiply performance x8 technically, just have each machine run all power on a single game.

The game can at least double in performance with optimizations in motion.

The game running 9 seperate AI is very resource intensive, the AI is just that good. The game runs at least twice as fast if all the players are human controlled.

So yes, 40 player games are easily plausible. If they are sluggish, there is no reason they should have a cap of any kind once clientside server comes out anyway. Not because of performance, but because of the open ended of the game. Call the official cap 10 or 20 or 40 or whatever. But leave it to where you can attempt a game with more, crashing the game possibly, its not officially supported so you get what you get if you attempt 80-100-200 man matches.

We already did have games that big several months ago and it wasn't entirely terrible. I would imagine it works a lot better now and they're still holding back on it until they are sure.

Actually that's because you're playing with an ai, ai rat up resources. Play a 10 player ffa, very different.

Nice write up from uber on what's going on with out getting too caught up in too much details.

Very nice... As for 40 player games, 40 player com boxing sounds like a fun place to start with! Haha

I am afraid that is not how AI works. Personally, I am most interested in netcode performance. That thing seems to me to be the hardest to optimise - there is only so much compression of information possible.

Meanwhile back in Beta...

Those games were so awesome...

Can't wait to have 'em back!