Gameplay downgraded?

This is going to be extremely brief..

Why for the love of god have uber used time dilation in a game of this size???

Because i don't want to spend a total of 8 hours to play a 4 hour match just because people want a smooth fps experience.. I think uber should have a option to turn time dilation completely off so i can play at normal speed with choppiness etc as i don't have time to wait around and watch everything in super slow motion. Because that was the biggest issue of the supreme commander games.. Sim speed being severely throttled and ruining gameplay

And the stable/pte build is still full of bugs that i have reported months ago and had nothing done about as usual.. Just thought id mention that before people moan about bug reporting.

While it is great they have offloaded some of the server load to the client i still think they have gone about it the wrong way and just have the option to play it at the same pace with lag..

I suppose you comment on fact that in PTE client show slow-down of unit movements instead of choppy animation, but I personally doubt it's caused any changes in simulation at all.

My guess it's fully client-side change that made to make game looks better even when slowdown happen.

I can confirm that the sim does really suffer in the PTE, compared to the Live build

Played this game earlyer, was unplayble.

I hate choppyness and much prefer the slow down.

Its a good change. Now that we have all the features we are pretty much in bug crush and performance and stability mode. We are working hard on finding and letting them know about the bugs. You should re list the bugs here if they haven't already been mentioned: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/list-of-bugs-in-build-71378.63273/

They are going through that list and resolving them. They have a team at pax but they have another team at the office just working on this stuff.

To some point yes, but if one sec is 3 or 4 ingame, its to much.

Can't say I've noticed any downgrade myself. The game seems to run MUCH better than before.

This isn't about slowing down the game for low performing clients; time dilation is only in effect if the *Sim*(ie. server) performance requires it. At that point, it's either time dilation or everyone has a choppy (and just as slow) experience. The clients can only run as fast as the server/sim can process.

I've noticed a large increase in performance... obviously someone was mass patrolling in that game.

Where as sup com had time dilation based on client performance, if one player (normally me) couldn't keep up with all the unit spam (the computer couldn't anyway) then the game would slow down for everyone.

Now in PA we have a slow down for everyone when everyone would be normally effected, theres nothing wrong with that.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO the thing i most hate of supcom has return in PA, you lost me in big systems u.u

Nope it hasn't. The game is still exclusively calculated on the server. You will only see slowdowns if your PC or the server can't keep up. The only change is that the game will look smoother now if the server can't keep up.

It's always been like this hasn't it, nothing new? It's very much preferable to being choppy and the simulated projectiles being more glitchy, which as far as I'm aware is the other option. It may not even be possible for the engine to use variable-time-step as opposed to fixed-time-step at this point, that seems like quite a major change that heaps of other code may have assumed to work one way only.

noone who has played FA extensively can say such heresy

surely you realise the issue here isn't an aesthetic one but what's going on at an engine level.


what am I saying of course you don't, otherwise you wouldn't be saying something like this.

Time dilatation is a cover-up solution for lack of servers. And a very cheap one at that.

If time dilatation is allowed into PA then one of the two reasons why I saw PA as the true heir to FA is gone:

those two reasons are :

• client-server (FA does not have, it is peer-to-peer)
• constant +1 game speed due to the slient-server achitecture (if you can't keep up, you don't drag everyone else down with you)

As it turns out, it's the servers that can't keep up.

I've been making posts for nearly a year now about Uber needing to up their amazon plan as new pleayers steadily streamed in and bogged the servers down more and more and more.

And instead what do we get ? The bane of Supreme Commander : Slowdowns added to the PA code

Merry christmas everyone

This is too much reaction for me.

I've played with this and it doesn't happen that often unless someone has done something crazy like area patrol with dox or tell 500+ to move some where etc. Most of the time you don't see this kind of thing.

Of course they will increase performance and this will happen less. It is a good solution and I'm glad they added in it. I much prefer it to a complete pause or a stutter step.

I much prefer to see whats going on, even if the game is slowed, rather then getting one or two frames of full speed gameplay.

Even in FA.

The bane of supcom (for others) was being slowed down by another user.

Which is why I never grew up liking or playing MP.

The game has been slowing down since the beginning right? I remember games that ran for 2 hours and only had like 1 hour on the ingame clock. If the sim slows down the game slows down, only now the client also slows down so it looks more smooth.

OMG Read! "seeing" isn't the issue here!

the issue is that all of this could be avoided and that this bit of code is a plague! noone wants to play a slowed down game and we don't have to ......and here's the part where you didn't read... be it choppy version, or time dilatation version.

If server-side was released @brianpurkiss and I and others could host our own servers like we've been planning to on our own beast of machines (allthewhile filtering the entry to below what our servers can handle to provide a guarantee of +1 gamespeed)

the addition of this bit of code is terrible news as henceforth as UBER pile on code it will become more and more of an impossibility to remove it.

You'd think with the 7-8 years and countless hours of dev time FAF has had we'd have been able to add server-client to Forged Alliance, to remove the bullshite of having to deal with a celeron CPU in your game, and play the game on your 4GH i7 PC like you're on a fuc*king celeron!

well no. Down to brass tax... you need to decompile the whole game and remake it from scratch.


The idea of what I'm saying (if you don't get it by now) is that none of you here have fully ventured the depths this type of code can sink to.

I've had to deal with it for 7 years now. I wouldn't trying to find a successor to the perfect game if the solution was simply to fix it.