Online? Offline? However you want to play Planetary Annihilation, it’s your choice. Starting now, you can take your battles completely offline. We’re happy to announce the release of the offline server. Offline server allows you to take over the galaxy in Galactic War without connecting to the Internet. You can also battle against your frenemies or the AI over a LAN. You'll also see your massive armies moving around much better now. After almost two months, and a team focused on improving pathing, you should see major improvements on unit pathing, reliability, and performance across the board. And as always, each build includes a host of bug fixes, performance improvements, and even more polish. Notes for offline play: We have had a few reports of people unable to launch offline server mode. If this happens to you, please go to settings and change Local Server to “OFF”. We are exploring the issue internally, and will be getting out a fix ASAP. Thanks for your patience. Local Server Settings: “AUTO” will determine the best mode to use based on your system specs and requested game mode. “ON” will always try and use the local server for any supported game modes. “OFF” will force your client to connect to our servers for all game modes. You can always find more information and help in our FAQ, located here: http://support.uberent.com/kb/faq.php?cid=1 For more detailed build notes, please keep reading: Hotfix 73823 provides a number of fixes for stability, Mac player local server issues, Area Attack Move order issues, and a number of other issues uncovered in the last day. [Server] Disabled the idle timer for local games. [Server] The server is 64-bit only. Due to memory restrictions and a number of other technical roadblocks, there is no 32-bit server version. (This only affects Windows, since Windows is the only platform that still supports a 32-bit client) [Server] The spec that the server looks for to run locally is the same as our recommended spec - 8GB of RAM and quad core. You can override this by setting Local Server to "ON", which means it will try and use a local server for everything - except online hosted games, which still go through Uber's online server management. [System Editor] Planets now look exactly the same in game as they do in the system editor. [System Editor] Metal spot placement now looks exactly the same in game as it does in the system editor. [UI] Spectator UI upgrades [UI] System editor UI polish Detailed Pathing Notes: Flow Field Integration has much improved CPU and Memory performance. Sectors are now independent from terrain meshes, resulting in much smaller sectors. Better Path Planning: Smaller sectors make the higher level path graph more granular which results in more 'accurate' path planning. In the past units might go 'right' when they should have gone 'left' around a rock. This change fixes that. Dynamic Walls support: If you surround yourself using dynamic wall pieces, the pathfinder behaves correctly. We now rebuild the path graph and small / large pathable islands so 'pathability' queries are correct. Faster Nav startup time: Nav Voxels now use an inlining Octree container, which improves start up time as well as run time and memory usage. General nav bug fixes and improvements
Nice work! You said you'd deliver offline, and you did. Give everyone on the team a big pat on the back I'll be updating my Steam review accordingly (it's actually really high up, so gets lots of visibility).
So it is a 23:30 thing. At least for me. Anyway, great work. The performance/memory-stuff and offline is a pretty nifty package!
With all this talk about offline, we will get also a standalone installer besides the client? I prefer the offline installer.
Not quite sure what you mean? Are you talking about our launcher? We will probably have a way to launch built in without having to patch, but patching will still require a login.
I am giggling like a school girl with this update. Thank you Uber for making the best RTS since Emperor Dune!
"We have had a few reports of people unable to launch offline server mode. If this happens to you, please go to settings and change Local Server to “OFF”. We are exploring the issue internally, and will be getting out a fix ASAP. Thanks for your patience." garat: It's PAMM, if they launch the game through PAMM they can't start local games.
Just tested a game and all I can say is that I am impressed. Performance with path finding is much better and the game is tons faster locally
I confirm that for PAMM. I couldn't launch local games when i launched through PAMM but worked fine when launching PA.exe
garat: Actually I have a serious problem because of this. I'm currently only on a 2mbit connection. Without the PAMM mod "Faster server loading", which turns on Gzip for downloading the game list, I can't use the lobby to join games.
You don't need to launch through PAMM to have the mod loaded. If it's enabled in PAMM, no matter how you launch the game (Uber Launcher / PA.exe / Steam / PAMM), mods are loaded if enabled.
I haven't been here in a while, but for some stuff it's worth to come out of the bushes. So to everyone at Uber who's tirelessly keept working on PA despite a lot of negativity: Well done! I just played my first game in months, trying offline server, and it's been my smoothest experience yet. However, and I don't know if this is a known issue, I got negative wasted econ. Man, I'm efficient... at 18 APM. Or is that a feature to show you how much you overburdened your economy in total? I also have a small tid bid, that's probably for @varrak: Open system editor Load any system Preview a planet Open GPU memory summary Wiggle one of the sliders that causes the planet to go back to single color (this will cause Index & Vertex Buffer numbers to drop with each frame, until they underrun) -> GPU memory now shows Index Buffer and Vertex Buffer at around 4GB each (actual memory usage is unaffected): This must have been in for a few versions already, because I saw someone excited about vastly reduced memory usage, who was comparing before (bugged) with "after" (not bugged). Anyhow, great job.
Ahh I see what's going on. The mod no longer works in this version. So I'm unable to play >.> This really needs to be fixed. It affects everyone with a connection of less than 3mbits. We can play ingame but we can't use the lobby to connect to a game
Faster Server Browser (and all my mods) disable themselves on new builds.... I'm reviewing the code changes now and will enable soon.
