I realize that I know very little about the inner workings of PA, but... If you create a system with the system designer and generate the terrain and gameplay, you'll notice that the system is identical during an actual match. Why then, in these cases, is it necessary to build the planets again during the match setup? Thank you!
Because you don't want to store gigabytes of data for a single map. Imagine you join a game with a map that you don't have. Yes it would use less cpu to send you the fully build build planet directly. But that can be gigabytes of data. Your internet won't be happy about that.
Thank you for your response cola_colin. I understand your point of view, but I am talking about the very specific case where you build a system on your own computer, than use that system on your own computer. If it is a multiplayer game over the internet, the other internet players should need to build the system. However, as I have already built the system locally, why should I need to build it again?
Because you probably don't want to store gigabyte sized map files. If you are fine with that then yeah I guess you could improve load times for totally local games. But those few seconds only for those local games are not really worth it and most people dont want to store gigabytes of maps. Not to mention the premade maps. They can't be included as prebacked gigabyte sized files, or else the game would be a pretty damn big download.
Thank you for your responses. Hmm, cola_colin, the thing is you exclude totally local games like they are not important. You say "those few seconds" but the truth for me is that it is at least a few minutes. The length of time will be even longer when I try to make larger systems. I am not talking about premade maps; I am talking about custom made maps that I created seconds before in the system designer which then get remade again during the match setup. I believe other players want to play totally local games against the AI; just for the ability to test the system. Excluding them is a mistake. Let us say that you start PA, create a custom system using the "system designer" for the purpose of playing a multiplayer game online. Then you exit the "system designer" and setup a multiplayer game. The internet player should have to "build planets," but why (when the system was just locally created) should the local player also need to "build planets" a second time? This question clearly does not involve disk space or RAM amounts since the system was created locally seconds ago! While I could be mistaken about that, I would invite people to comment with specific details about it. On another note, I have plenty of hard drive space (>8TB) and RAM (16GB); so, for me, I would prefer storing map information if it means seconds versus minutes (and, more importantly, reliance on servers).
Nobody is excluded it is just a common thing that games do not keep all raw data in memory all the time and also don't store maps by storing all related data on the disc. Loading times exist because of that. It just makes a lot of sense for technical reasons as well. For example the bigger and more complex the data you store, the less easy it is to patch in the future. A few month ago the whole datastructure for pathfinding was changed. If they had maps that store all data that is generated on the start then all those map files would have turned into dead weight in that second because the new pathfinding system would have not understood the old data at all. (actually I am sure a lot more often, as even much smaller changes would break it all) Really that kind of improvement won't do much good. In the end loading the map file probably won't even be that much faster, because loading a gigabyte sized file isn't guaranteed to be faster as well. Adding this kind of thing would just be a lot of work for Uber and would have very low return on the work while introducing a lot of issues. You are basically asking for some developer to spent hours and hours of work to help a very specific edge case that most people won't use at all and some other people will see the gigabyte sized map files and go "wtf how bad is this". Then uber will patch pathfinding and suddenly all your maps are dead files.
Perhaps the system editor could have a "start local match" button which would keep the built system in memory and start a match. Could be useful for local only players and map makers alike. For mapmakers the victory/annihilation screens could have a "return to system editor" button, and for local players a "rehost with same system" button.
Another point is, that we don't know if the system builder is using the full data structures that are needed for the game engine. I could imagine that the system editor does not generate the navigation data, or the AI information that would be needed in the game.
I think when you generate the planet "fully" it does generate the nav data. That is one of the differences between the "terrain" and the "gameplay" preview.
Are you sure it uses gigabytes of data? I'd much rather have faster load times personally. I have lots of ram and hdd space.
well look at how your ram usage increase during the loading of the game. You are basically asking them to store those exact bytes into a file and load that file instead.
The developers aren't going to waste their time to bring marginal improvements to people who have SSDs and only play offline.
Probably not too difficult, but it would only be a real improvement for a very small percentage of the playerbase.
Ok, thank you everybody! Truly there are larger issues than this! Hopefully I did not offend anybody.
