Flat maps?

I doubt PA would see any performance improvement without adding a lot of extra code to handle "flat maps only". The planet code may be fixed up so it works on flat surfaces better but that would not increase performance.

you neglect unit pos updates are not independent of the solar system map but actually updating with the planet's position taken into account.

the planet's movements causes the unit's traveled distance and speed to be huge.

we can imagine that playing on a single non-mobile map would unlock not only a certain extra overhead for unit movement speed, but a boost to overall performance.

We still talking about this? To "fake it", couldn't we just make csg like craters block air travel? Then a manually made flat map would function like a flat map, orbital removed, which orbital wouldn't make much sense anyways unless "global" or "one use superweapon" like radar or death weapon based laser.

That's not true. Unit positions are relative to the center of the planet. I've seen the structures of that in the memory of server.exe a few days ago.
The planets move through space, the units are linked with the planet. There is a data structure for every planet that has a list with the units that reside on that planet.

#1 If it wasn't popular, we wouldn't be talking about it still, as it appears some contrasting opinions are present.

#2 If it was that easy, wouldn't someone of done it by now?

Any chance we can see this something in the future?

well then that knocks what I said off the list but I doubt that's the only potential perf gain.

what about no more math around the unit position, since no more ball's center to which units are pinned?

what about less math for the pathfinding?

Sure code specifically written for a flat map is faster than code that can handle any 3D form as a map.
Writing code specifically for flat maps would however mean to probably rewrite substantial parts of the engine.
Financially unreasonable to do.
Though nearly flat planets show that PA mostly supports that. A few fixes would be required and it would "work". Just not with better performance, because PA would still only have one code path to simulate the game. A very flexible code path that can handle spheres, flat maps and anything inbetween. Flexibility usually comes with slowness.

this is why I keep on campaigning for this.

short easy experimentation could allow uber to guesstimate how much work is behind this.

if it ain't all that much, why turn down what could be incredibly beneficial to the PA scene?

I couldn't agree with his point more!

Ashes of the singularity will capitalize on this and give people who are looking for that old school TA feel. I really enjoy what PA has to offer, but having flat maps will only add to an existing game.

If you want to see unit positions, this is easy:
If you run a local server instance manually, enable nav-debug by pressing f11. After this press the d key, then the server dumps the complete history data curves to the console output. This is basically what the server sends the client for each frame.
Profit.

If you mean flat maps, now that's a different matter.
Reading the posts of those rare occasions when a Uber developer actually took the time to write about the internal of the engine, I imagine that Uber did drop some optimizations that are usually possible for flat map engines, but aren't possible or hard to implement on a sphere.
Without the spheres, PA is a engine that probably has a hard time to compete with other engines that are specifically written with the knowledge in mind that you can optimize for flat maps. (Look at the upcoming Nitrous engine from Oxide)
Of course Uber can add all those optimizations and build a second render path just for flat maps, but the question is if this man power isn't better invested in making spherical maps even more awesome.

Ashes of the Singularity will be nothing like TA.

It's A different subgenre of RTS. Now it'll surely be freakin' awesome- But it won't really be like TA from the information we've been given on its proposed gameplay.

Actually somebody from stardock said that they do hope that SupCom players may move over to Ashes. I think they don't understand what SupCom players want though. They don't want to show icons on units to push players to zoom in and micro or something while at the same time they talk about being "strategic not micro" (duh).
I am skeptical.

really? why not?

they plan to dispel strat icons from it, very TA-ish if you ask me.

and all the other main points are there, flow-based, infinite economy, massive armies, simulated projectiles, two races, both robots.

am I missing something, or are there serious similarities?

I don't think many TA players liked TA because it had no strategic zoom. All games after TA (and with patches even TA) have some form of zoom.
Also Ashes will have some sort of "control regions" on the map mechanic

How's this for a flat map?

Community patch of TA has a strat zoom and the minimap had unit icons.

Nobody really plays vanilla TA anymore, the community patch is much better. Do we want them to go back to left click as the main button? Oh gosh I cringe... x3

it just doest work like that with the spherical nature of planets nor the orbital play ..

i don't know how ashes will perform ... neither is there anything to it i care about ... wow large flat maps and numbers of units ... ok, and?

it was with this specifically in mind that I said this.

Okay we get it, you don't like flat maps. No sense in continuing on as your point has been firmly established.

Concede the fact that some of us out here, want to have flat maps, if it's 1 or a million, it doesn't matter. The dev can ether help us, make it for us, or tell us to go to hell. I have personally met some of the dev's at pax and asked them this very question. I am wondering how we can get this ball rolling, ether that or I sink my money into Ashes.