Fractal Jaguar's videos (POV & casts, 1v1s, 2v2s, FFAs) - latest vid: POV vs Relentless AI on Forge

Latest video:

I'm back! Recorded this game against the Relentless AI, hope you enjoy!



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I love playing videogames, mixed martial arts, fractals, programming, computers and the Internet and a lot of other things - now sometimes I record my gameplay and upload to my Youtube channel, 'FractalJaguar' (I am 'Jaguar' in game and on the Internet in general).

Mostly playing PA at the moment but I have some Minecraft videos on my channel as well, from modded servers. Last server ran 270 Forge mods on an eight core processor with 32GB RAM. I sometimes use the same server to host custom PA servers, mostly FFAs but sometimes team games too, and 1v1 games on HUGE planets

I hope you enjoy watching my videos and I would really like to hear your feedback. Apologies if my current microphone is a bit naff, I might well invest in a new one soon!

************ initial post **************

Hi everyone, I'm Jaguar in-game and on IRC, my UberName is Zihuatanejo. Some of you know me, most of you don't

I took part in the 32 player free-for-all game that @cola_colin hosted last night on a custom dedicated server in Amsterdam. Decided to record the game since I've been tinkering with OBS recently and it seemed like a unique event, worthy of broadcasting!

So first video is online, it shows my POV of the game before my commander was destroyed. I went on to record for another hour or so, casting the game. I'll upload that later.

So yeah, please watch the video and let me know what you think, and subscribe to my channel, and more than anything, share the video with anyone and everyone! Let's spread the word and get PA the positive exposure that it needs to grow.

I really like what's going on here... but I just can't handle the slow sim speed.

Neither could the server!

It was a great game, and definitely held back by lack of server optimisation. I'm confident that Uber are working on it though, or at least, intend to work on it for a future update. Of course, it would always be nice to get confirmation... @BradNicholson, @jables...?

Uber's stated goal since the Kickstarter is to support 40 players and up to a million units over the course of a game. I'm sure they want to reach that goal and not have the sim speed at 1fps! The engine is already quite remarkable I think, but optimisation, and in particular multi-threading, is always a very difficult task for a game at this stage in development.

The one million units should be taken as the ability to technically handle it, not a realistic target for current world hardware performance.

Great video!

Just to comment on the question asked. Currently we do not support games of this size officially. We left it open for people to mod things in, which is what you are playing. In the future when we do officially support the 40 player games, you will see the optimization in place for it though (and honestly, every update is optimizing things more, so you should see incremental improvements as we go)

I'll be very interested to read how you will achieve a ~400%-500% sim speed improvement.
I wish I knew how much easy optimization potential is still in PA's server side.

EDIT:
I know this post can be read in a pretty negative way, but I don't mean it like that. I am really just wondering what are the things that can be done. Are there still obvious "we need to fix this for epic improvements" things? Or will more improvements only be possible with large scale changes? multithread the sim

Actual picture of the optimization toggle at Uber. When they hit 11, real life will feel like 4 fps.

I can't wait until you release official support for 40 player games! I'm just glad you wrote the game engine with modding in mind, so that thanks to modders like @cola_colin, we can do this kind of thing. It's pretty cool

Looking forward to the optimisations, and I too would be extremely curious how you achieve them.

Greetings, fellow commanders! Recorded and uploaded a new video yesterday, a ~20 minute 1v1 on a single planet (Clarke, from the PA Stats 1v1 match-making map pool). I hope you like it, please tell me what you think. I'd really like to get some feedback. Got some 2v2 games coming up soon, as well as more 1v1 games.

In this video I tried to focus my rambling on explaining why I was doing what I was doing, what my plan of attack was, and pointing out mistakes that I believed my opponent was making. Finding it surprisingly hard to talk continuously whilst playing though, but I guess you get used to it?!

Also, apologies for the quality of my microphone. I'll be getting a new one soon. Only really just noticed it. My Sennheiser headset is quite old. Any recommendations? I'm thinking of getting a Blue Yeti or a Shure SM-58.

So last night I tried the match-making feature in the PTE again, and I got matched against @elodea! So have fun watching me play the best PA player right now, the reigning King

New video up! Apologies for lack of content on my channel recently, stopped playing PA for a while and various commitments and ill health etc.

This game was my first after a long absence, so I was very rusty and hadn't learned the latest changes in the last few updates, aside from skimming the changelog in the forums. So have fun laughing at my noob mistakes!

Another new video. Was trying out @burntcustard's air mod in a few games, ended up recording this one.



5v4 (due to skill imbalance), single planet, and a few of my teammates on TeamSpeak, so you don't just have my own dulcet tones to listen to! Unfortunately TS voice detection level was set too high, so a lot of my comments to my teammates were not heard by them. I fixed it mid way through the game though.

Found this game rather difficult and let my team-mates do most of the battling, whereas I focused on production, eco, radar coverage, and orbital. Being a bit out of practice, especially for team games (I only ever really do 2v2s), did not help! But it was a fun game, and the air mod tweaks are rather nifty.

New video, 12 player FFA game on a single moon (radius 700), designed by yours truly. Unfortunately the spawns did not work as expected, which I am about to fix (possibly they were broken by the new patch, or I just made a mistake!). But ultimately t here are 12 equidistant spawns with 5 mex within the landing zone, and then in the middle of each cluster of three spawns there is a single solitary mex to be fought over. I might make variations on the map with more and less metal, curious how it affects gameplay.

Thanks to everyone who joined at the last minute. Feedback on the map welcome, I'll publish it soon in the forums somewhere and push it to system sharing or one of the community map packs.



Apologies for lack of narration but I recorded this in the middle of the night whilst my lady was sleeping, and my deep voice travels through our tiny flat easily. Can't wake the lady! Might record an audio track to go over it later.

Server details:
Hosted by www.laerad.net, server rented from www.hetzner.de
E3-1270 v3 @ 3.5GHz (8 cores, great single threaded performance!)
32GB RAM

Three 1v1 games against Jonuz and Dreadnought in the new PTE

I've started streaming to Twitch!

http://twitch.tv/fractaljaguar

Recently I upgraded from ADSL to FTTC and now I get about 16Mbps upstream, so I can stream to Twitch at good quality (I use OBS and set it to 3500kbps and 30/60fps). I'll probably be streaming a bit at weekends and sporadically on weekday evenings. Most of my gameplay happens late evening/early morning, UTC time.

I'm only a gold scrub at the moment though, but you may wish to watch me try to get into Platinum I mostly play 1v1 games but also 2v2 games with a friend of mine, and I do like a good FFA, particularly with as many players as possible on custom servers.

Anyway, two new videos on my Youtube channel now, recorded from my Twitch stream two days ago.

I hosted a 20 player FFA game on http://laerad.net. It was fun! I'm working on making custom maps for >10 players at the moment, but according to my tests, the game simply doesn't allow for it right now. A map with 20 landing zones for instance will work for 10 players, but 11 or more players and they will end up spawning randomly across the planet. Still, the game seems to do a decent job of evenly spacing the landing zones.

A casual 1v1 with my friend Spy, with some post game analysis for his benefit. Going over the fundamentals of 1v1 games, particularly the important of scouting!!

A casual 2v2 game with my friend Spy again, playing against calpernicus and sc0rchm4ster103. A rather epic 40 minute battle that was quite close!

A casual 1v1 game against warhamernl. Just trying out the new build after not playing for about three weeks or so, so I'm a bit rusty and i make mistakes right from the very start (I meant to open with a two factory, one fabber build, but instead i immediately queued up a mex, two pgens, and another mex before my second factory).

2 factory 1 fabber isn't a good idea or did that change with the tiny commander changes? I thought it was factory, mex, pgen, pgen, mex, factory. The recent change maybe allows for a slightly later 2nd pgen or so.