Ashes of the Singularity

From what I remember of sins, the tech tree functioned to unlock units, rather than modify them. Hopefully they'll follow that paradigm, so the tech tree presents a choice of which units are available to you, rather than 'now my basic tank can pwn yours'. Obviously far too early to know however.

the upgrade and tech research idea was godawful.

it meant there was no such thing as an "early game" and that was the whole point.

it also was contrary to "the UI is on your side" philosophy of supcom.

I mean common??? a window? with tabs? that you have to navigate? IN THE MIDDLE OF COMBAT?

a) know that you can press tab to open that
b) know the whole tech tree by heart
c) know what you want to make and where in the tech tree it is
d) it now takes maybe one second to enable the techs you want.
profit!

The main issue with a tech tree that I see is that you can't "scout" what your opponent is teching. He just magically suddenly has that new units or that new upgrade or a nuke while you didnt tech towards antinuke. ...

Heh, I always found it ok, but it does have issues.

Like upgrading existing units in the middle of battle, and the research reward for killing units rather then just being in combat that can lead to gimmicky unit suicides to not feed research. (Most of the gimmicky stuff I never use, as it is really kinda silly.)

But it wasn't what the IP needed.

So I wonder if all this cool technology will make my wildest dreams to come true, like submarines that go under the water.

... naaah.

>InB4 "they do now!"

they don't fully submerge.

I wonder if somebody could make a client side mod that just offsets the model deeper into the water

Maybe. I really wanted to be able to define an indefinite number of custom layers and script units to transition between them based on detectable events, to kind of fake in the dimensionality that I wanted to see. Same with aircraft and the whole "glass bubble" effect. It just doesn't seem possible at the moment.

But I'm just teasing because I find the sub situation amusing (and slightly frustrating, but I've gotten used to that). I know Uber is just trying to make good on what they said they'd do without having to re-make the game.

I was actually thinking of just offsetting the model, nothing more than that. That's very likely possible. I don't know why Uber decided the submarines to be like they are. My best guess is visibility and graphical style. I don't think there are technical reasons, as just removing the part of the submarine that is "above" water would not be hard.

my guess as well, If you turn off Alha water mod (which I bet UBER doesn't use) then you can't see underwater.

From this it seems they also multithread the simulation.

so livestream for any interested over at http://www.twitch.tv/stardock when : http://www.timeanddate.com/countdow...am to showcase Ashes of the Singularity&csz=1

http://www.howtogeek.com/56701/htg-...fference-between-32-bit-and-64-bit-windows-7/

• You’ll see increased efficiency. Not only can you install more RAM in your system (easily as much as your motherboard can support) you’ll also see more efficient use of that RAM. Because of the nature of the 64-bit address system in the register and how Windows 64-bit allocates memory you’ll see less of your system memory chewed up by secondary systems (like your video card). Although you may only double the physical amount of RAM in your machine it will feel like way more than that because of the new efficiency of your system.

I saw today that they also use the built in video accelerator on the CPU to help speed up the game in addition to the dedicated graphics card.

Despite the fact, that the statements in this citation are a bit wonky (What does the RAM allocated for a graphics card have to do with the "bit"ness of the host system?), there is nothing that contradicts ColaColin's statement. Usually switching from 32 bit to 64 bit just means that it gets easier to handle more than 4 GB of address space in an application. Note, that even 32 bit windows was capable of managing more than 4 GB of RAM efficiently, (just look up PAE <- that's the Intel acronym for physical address space extension) theoretically PAE would allow up to 2^52 bytes, which is something around 4096 TB.

The usual suspects where you really see performance gains are applications that need a lot of memory (like PhotoShop CS with 36 MPix RAWs, or games with huge texture assets).But applications not reaching the address space limit on 32 bit, will usually see no performance gain, or even worse, lose performance. There are - of course - exception from this rule of thumb, especially if your program deals with a lot of 64 bit wide data. But this depends on the program and mostly on the instruction set / CPU you are looking at (x86, ARM, MIPS, DEC Alpha, IA64, et cetera...), but from this point on it gets really complicated.
There is no easy answer to the question: Is it really faster?

anyways, there's a livestream in 1 hour guys https://forums.uberent.com/threads/ashes-of-the-singularity.68182/page-5#post-1091683

They had big plans for PA too and now its about getting the game finished and I hear no more words about getting the big franchise started.
Everytime I see the update progress for PA I ask myself if it is still valuable for Uberent to put additional money into PA while considering the steamstats of PA, Supcom and Supcom2.

SupCom FA is still strong if I recall.

And any stats for supcom2 is just a downright miracle.

But I don't have PA on steam, so it doesn't pick a lot of us up.

more than.

on FAF we have a 500$ tourney going on right now.

and I've been working on a fifth test candidate for a newer lobby.

so i played ashes of the singualirity at gamescom today for a good hour .. and even though it is still pre-alpha and normally one shouldn´t judge too early i´ve gotta say .. yes it looks good and has a good scale but it doesn´t realy offer too much yet and from what i heard from the dev there does´t seem too much that can be expected to be added in the future .. but there was some mention about a possible expansion/dlc .. obviously that all depends on sales and success ...

to give a rough (as in not nessesarily 100% correct and with stuff eventualy missing/not mentioned) description of how the game is build up ... (again consider pre-alpha and one demolevel, so subject to change)
big maps are a thing ... gameplay revolves around company of heroes/dawn of war style pointcapturing/domination which acts as resources and victory points which means you don´t have to destroy your enemy entirely but territorycontrol will matter ... most noteworthy you have to keep up suplylines which means capturepoints (generators) are connected to each other meaning you can lose potential resources and victorypoints by having those suplylines cut from your main line that goes into your HQ ... which makes army and defensepositioning the more important as it takes a while for your troops to get anywhere ...
the ammount of structures you can build as far as i can tell are limited by the ammount of generators you control which makes considering what structures you build more important as you can´t just spam out factories and build away .. as far as i can tell you can build structures anywhere you want ... i however don´t know if loosing control of a generator affects structures in that area as i build most structures in areas i was in control of ..

what else?
there is a bit of a techtree and research in which you have to construct researchcenters and spend resources to unlock tech and units (there don´t seem to be upgrades), the more researchcenters you have the higher tiers of tech you can research which at the moment is up to 4 tiers each tier having 5 techoptions to research ..
additionaly if you want to build larger armies you have to build logisticarrays that basicaly act as suplydepot giving a fixed ammount of logisticpoints ... and there are storage buildings for metal (your main currency for building stuff) and i think the other was radiation which acts as powersource the ammount of what you produce/have awailable to you is again factored in the ammount of territory you control in which you have to capture generators with your troops but you can produce extrametal with refinaries or radiation with powerplants for when you got the tech unlocked ... resourceproduction for metal is done in a semi-streaming economy in which you don´t have to spend metal beforehand but is spend as you build, that also allows you to asign mutiple engineers to speed up a building however if your metal deficit is too negative and your storage emptied you can not asign a new buildorder but have to have metal in the storage first .. as for radiation : similar to logisticpoints they are more like having a fixed ammount than having it continualy produced ..

units for the most part are produced in small groups meaning if you asign a factory to build a unit you get depending on the type a small squad of 3 units or if it is higher tier units you get one and depending on importance or strength units are worth a certain ammount of logisticpoints ..
unitypewise you have aircraft and hovercraft .. and it seems rather unlikely that there will be more groundunittypes due to budget and hardwarelimits .. so the devs decided to go for units that don´t require many animations ..

one intresting thing to mention about unitcontrol is if you have a good number of units together no matter what type or tier units will form bands automaticaly and move in formations .. this means you don´t have to constantly put rectangles over the units you want to control but just click one unit from the band to select the band itself .. you can also disband units from an existing band if you want to split your forces up by clicking on the disbandorder button or fuse units or bands toghether manualy ...

unit readability is done to a similar fashion than sins of a solar empire in which your units are represented as icons in a corner of the screen ... uniticons that are blinking are in battle and by clicking on them you can immidiatly switch the screen to their possition ..
you can zoom in and out from the map but not to the extend that allows you to see the whole map .. notifications weren´t implemented yet ...

regarding intelgathering you can built sensorarrays which similar to the annihilationlikes merely show the position of enemy units and structures in the form of orange fog on the fog of war but not what it is neither do they enhence visionrange ... it has been stated that stealthunits are not in the game and it´s unknown if they will be implemented later ...

there will be no singleplayercampaign in the starcraft or command and conquersense but a series of missions ..

i think that about covers it what i could get from the game ..

so all in all i imagine the game to be okay/solid but i don´t think/feel it will have content that realy makes it stand out from other RTS games to realy be excited about .. but it seems to be a good choice for players that like a rather slowpaced RTS .. on the flipside i don´t realy expect the game to be that competitive or get a decent multiplayerbase so i imagine it to be more for the casual singleplayeraudience ... but that also obviously remains to be seen ..