What happened to PA?

This I can agree with, I really hope it gets some more light put on it.

Support of mods != Promotion. For example, I'm sure there were many engineering decisions made to allow mods to happen, when it would have been easier to simply hard-code or only code the bare minimum to get the core game content to work. For example, shadowing and UI modding hooks exists solely for modding, and serve no other purpose. Same with the inclusion of the coherent debugger, papatran a papadump.

As for not promoting PAMM (or other specific user content), that's a grey area for a company to do. It can have implications of actual support/approval. But there was a stream an Uber staff member did that was specifically to look at a number of different mods.

Edit: to add to @cola_colin's list, from the top of my head:

• Changing of the symmetrical arms on commanders to assymetric
• At least two bits of code directly from mods are/were included in the PA source (one is no longer used). If you don't believe me, search for "raevn" in the ui/main folder
• Changes inspired/probably by mods: economy %, in-game bug tracker, probably many more if I look in the mod forum for older mods.
• Faction names

Technically they were intended to be assymetric from the beginning according to the concepts, it was the Delta that bucked the trend because it was thought of to be more "combat focused" at the time. I don't think it was ever intended as the new standard. This was still back when having differences between commanders was still on the table after all.

Mike

I agree, Uber has gone crazy over the top in the 'listening to the community' category.

If you completely remove balance from the equation. With the exception of things that were blatantly OP (the balance mood swings from beta to gamma to release), Uber has literally ignored any requests to completely alter their flawed impression on how the balance should work.

I know I just made a few people very, very angry. Sorry. Let me put it this way: In RCBM, I always have fun losing horribly. In vanilla, I feel crushed upon a loss. I feel like I've put in a ton of effort into this one endeavor - to win - when the objective is, in actuality, to have fun playing the game. I can't comment on Statera because I've never given that balance a fair shake.

It's why I've decided to back off from PA for a while - I just put too much emotion into it because it plays fast and hard. This doesn't accurately describe the situation - I'm not sure I can put it into words - but it's close.

RCBM? I can see myself casually playing a FFA4 or FFA8 and having tons of fun attacking, countering, and developing for the end game, because attacks aren't completely devastating early game. Vanilla PA? I play FFAs quite often, and most of the time it's just a bunch of people having a stand-off, until some noob tries to take on someone else, and all hell breaks loose. Sure, it can be fun, but it's not interesting.

Anyway.

Good job to you guys Uber. Ya'll still hold my number One spot for community interaction. It's amazing, quite frankly.

• When first showcasing the first commander model, someone mentioned how much more prominent the gun would look, if they were seperated to a nanolathe arm and a cannon arm. They immediately made that change to the showcase, the commander having a cannon arm and a nanolathe arm, because he is unique enough to warrant breaking symmetry. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/for-backers-only-introducing-the-delta-commander.43377/

Is this game dead already? I hardly see many games whenever I log on. It just feels like something huge is missing. Back in supcom/ta strategy was so important & there was serious depth to it. You were constantly on your toes about what the enemy is doing, what forces he is sending, what strategy to come up with next, using stealth, tac missles, different units to dent his forward base, constantly a see saw back and forth battles taking place. In this game there is no strategy, no big battles taking place ever besides amassing a orbital (which i hate) & taking over planet after planet.. Whoever gets a planet first usually wins bc they own so much resources. There is no actual war/battle like in supcom. Every game I play its just orbital crap & 45 mins of building junk with no battles. Im sick of it. Is there anyway this game can be modded to actually have strategic depth & be fun....?

Is there an example of someone successfully putting a multi weapon model in the game and having it work correctly? No. Ok. So the support for bringing in and making models is NOT good.

If you show me an example of a working superbot, ingame, showing correct animations with multiple weapons and custom sounds then yes, I will say, GOOD JOB Uber on your mod support.

Wait, all we have right now is a bunch of models with broken guns that are basically copies of existing units? Ok, sorry but that does not equal good mod support.

Seeing people running around in the mod forums doing blind testing on things because of a lack of simple documentation says to me that, in fact, no one in uber really gives two shits about the modding community. Compound that with defaulting the lobby to NOT show mods (wtf?) and/or promote PAMM, a great tool that the DEVS should have created with the game (wtf why do modders have to hack together a basic mod installation tool when your dev team says "we're going to support modders"), and you wind up with the conclusion that modding is NOT a priority.

Heck, a fun well balanced game isn't a priority. And look at the Galactic war and AI... wtf is a single player only player supposed to do in this game without throwing his hands up and cursing at uber?

"Delivered" indeed.

You know this isn't true. That's just one example. Both RCBM and stratera have custom units also.

Please point me to the non-community made documentation for Supreme Commander? I modded heavily for that game too, and there was just as much trial and error/blind testing. Total Annihilation, too, was entirely reliant on 3rd party tools.

If modding wasn't a priority, it wouldn't exist. Modding is built upon code that was written specifically for modding and for no other purpose. There are a lot of areas where it would have been simpler for them to not worry about modding and do things the easy way to just support what they wanted, rather than mods. Yet they didn't do this.

Have you tried to organise a multiplayer game of Sup Com using sim mods? Have fun making sure everyone has the mod(s) installed, with the right version etc., and then have the game die 15 minutes in due to a desync because someone was 1 version behind. And since you don't believe community tools are allowed, launching a mod game via FAF doesn't count. Now to PA - just turn the mod on and host a game, and all the players who join get the mod automatically.

Is modding support perfect? Of course not. But there's higher priority things to do than improving the already significant mod support. And despite all these issues modding in PA has been vastly more popular than modding Supreme Commander. The game is fresh out the gates, and it already has more mods available than Sup Com has to this day.

Because their plan was to make a marketplace for mods. And monetize on it.

And I am sure 99% of all modders can't wait for that to happen.

Really? Because they opened up a server side pull for mods that they didn't have to do considering they didn't release server side anyway, they went out of their way to make server modding possible even though lack of serverside.

This is old documentation included in the game files for modding. It is long since obsolete, but it means they intentionally built the game with mod hooks.

If they didn't like modding, they wouldn't have made the effort. Every single thing you say is a lie. The game supports units with 12 weapons, the leviathan. The game supports porting models, Statera and RCBM. The game does all this stuff.

But if "it did all this stuff", you wouldn't have a very good arguement, and you need that arguement to make people believe in what you want, what serves your own personal goal and agenda. And as long as people follow your arguement and do what you want, games you don't like will fail and games you do like will succeed. Pity it was all too obvious though.

Sorry but it only takes the devs a few minutes to make a post on the mod forums, yet I see barely any posts at all - especially related to the future of modding. If the modding community was so important to them, they would give us a constant stream of information about what is going on now and in the future to bring us to a time when the modding system is pretty much at a "gold" release standard.

Instead, what we have now is modding v0.6 with no idea about what they are doing now and where they are headed in the future in terms of PA modding.

Stop defending a team of devs that abandons their community like this.

Stop telling lies to make Uber out as malicious and of mal intent.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/discussion-ubers-plans-for-modding-1-0-and-beyond.62147/page-2

Seriously, it is easy to defend the dev's right to try and do honest dev type work, it isn't like they abandon their community, they will continue work on PA and they never just let SMNC shut down either.

What if no one is buying PA, the reason they halted work on SMNC was because it wasn't pulling any money, what if the same happens to PA? They've already had to do a 50% off sale and the game barely got into the top 10 sellers on steam?

What makes you think Uber will continue working on PA?

Indeed, I am not against the idea, either against Uber taking a cut, when they clearly have to manage servers and the marketplace. And we all would benefit, modders and players.

But, is it still happening?

Features that had to be in at release have been postponed and as usual with Uber there is no deadline, and no public roadmap. And stuffs that were supposely to be added after release, all the goodness Uber promised as continuous development for PA might very well never happen at all.

That's disheartening.

No offense, but when it stops being sustainable, they will figure out how to sustain it, or will stop it. That is the truth, they don't hide that, as long as PA is sustainable they will continue great focus on it. Their own words are, they will always support PA as long as there is a backing for it.

The worse part in that regard, is people who think the best thing to do is put the hurt on it, like negativity actually benefits. Pressure the devs, heck I don't mind that, I have to PM them all the time tbh. Call every part of their existance into question, that calls all of our existance into question. Why aren't I just playing titanfall right now? Why do I play videogames at all at that rate?

The difference is, SMNC was never sustainable. PA barely made it into the top 10 steam sellers? Wow, that is almost not a whole ****-ton, but the devs continue work on it and it only gets better. It is noticable every update, it is fine.

http://steamcharts.com/app/233250
Look at that and tell me it's not worrying

There's no public interest in PA because it's widely known as an incomplete game and apparently the only way to fix the game is by having people buy it?

Think about that model for a minute and you'll realize just how ridiculous it is

It is a great game that irks me because it is known as an incomplete game like it is a car without gasoline, when really it is like a car with synthetic seats instead of real leather interior.

And the only way to develop the game, is for the game to be be sustainable so development can continue work on it. That is the way reality works. If it wasn't, nobody would have to worry about any of this. Heck, if it wasn't, Uber would work on SMNC with a smile on their face and I know they would.

Btw no idea why you linked that forum post. Latest dev post is from July 25th, which confirms exactly what I am saying - namely, they are not posting anymore.

Yup. PA is in the top 100 of most played game on Steam right now (total on steam db = 19356).