Jables 3 questions chat log

This thread will be a dedicated log for @jables 3 question game he by now usually plays on weekdays around EU evening time. So something like 17:00 to 20:00 UTC usually.

You can be there and ask him questions in PA Chat, either by installing PA Stats ingame or by using the webchat on https://palobby.com/chat/

17.9.2015
Q1) Sleeser: what will be the way to transport titans between planets? teleport? launching? etc
jables: no plan on that currently. We will see what tvinita brings though

Q2) rusty: ever consider a modern wz2100 remake, in the style of uberent?
jables: i loved that game! We haven't talked about anything like it at Uber however

Q3) AndreasG: why dont you just make the ladder scrollable? It is easy done, everyone wants it etc
jables: nothing is ever as easy as you think it should be (rule #1 of game dev). rule #2 is probably something like everything costs way more than you think it should

16.9.2015
Q1) [RLM]Mot9001: Question: Will it be possible in the future to make a toggle button for symmetrical mexspots/spawns and csg because at the moment you can only disable it and you can't enable it.
jables: I don't see why not.. I'll add it to the list. Seems like a reasonable addition (though an engineer may yell at me for saying that)

Q2) N30N: jables is the any planns for a automated tournament system, like this?
jables: no plans for that currently, though it's cool



14.9.2015
Q1) [RLM] Walrusstorm Are you guys going to fix the invisible unit glitch?
jables #1 Walrusstorm is it in the forums? Will need to get repro steps for it and then yeah we'll get it fixed

Q2) PAG_Matiz are there any plans for tournaments by uber?
jables #2 Matiz honestly with the resources we have available, Exodus has been doing a better job than we'd be able to on tournaments. we will be glad to help support them however
PAG_Matiz so are there any plans for more tournaments by exodus supported by uber ?
jables mikeyh would be the guy to ask for that one


11.9.2015
Q1) PRoeleert: anything cool up the pipeline for PA?
jables: we're mainly still working on improvements and polish. There is one thing we're poking at that might come out later, but nothing to announce as of now

Q2) PRoeleert: what's the top item on the polish list?
jables: top pri items are - static bug and AI placement bug, then whatever is reported on current build will be added to that list. things like static bug are going to take longer as we still don't have a solid repro.

Q3) Clopse: is there any balance coming jables? or are ye pretty happy with it?
jables: I believe Tvinita is currently pretty happy. He's been watching games though, so depending on what he sees players doing we may make tweaks. I doubt you see drastic changes though

10.9.2015
Q1) Your only friend/[ONET] Bakala: Is there the possibility of a naval [or air] teleporter?
jables: #1 no plans for a naval or air teleporter currently. they were never designed with teleporting in mind.
Your only friend: Fair enough. Would be a nice way to compensate for speed
jables: yeah, we did speed them all up considerably back in January to help there too.. they used to be very slow hehe

Q2) Thurgeron: how about a titan that burrows through a planet and appears on the other side (titan, or teleporter-tunnel type thing for other armies)
jables: #2 - no plans for a burrowing unit. Would take a decent amount of design to figure out how to do it, and in the end would most likely end up being a teleporter with different art as having a path through a planet would most likely play havok with the pathfinding

Q3) wondible: Have you considered offering larger servers as an additional income source?
jables: #3 - we are looking at possibilities on server changes. nothing to mention publicly as of yet as we are still in exploration stage and it's possible nothing will come from it still

9.9.2015
Q1) Jonuz: will u fix system editor soon?
jables: we'll have bugfixes in every update.. as to what gets fixed in each, that is determined by priority. Currently gameplay is higher pri than editor

Q2) Xanoxis: What changes were made to music in Titans, and where they made in opera, you know, live, or simulated? Because I noticed some new music
jables: music for TITANS was done by Howard yeah.. he did have a few individual musicians I believe, but most of it was done simulated

Q3) Matiz: jables, any thoughts on ares? it has problem shooting at targets on small planets
jables: I'll get Tvinita to take a look.. as I don't have insight on that one

continue to read here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/jables-3-questions-chat-log.69348/page-6#post-1111006

Anyone please feel free to post questions and answers given in this thread that you remember from the past.

Please notice that none of the answers are to be taken as absolute promises


If anybody remembers past questions please post. I will keep the OP up to date.

Those answers are really close to my wording. The map editor one was never fully answered due to question never really being agreed upon.

To note on these, I answer to the best of my ability, which means sometimes the answer is "I don't know" or "I can't say".

I do recall that question (2.) being answered a couple of weeks ago when I asked it. The answer then @jables (feel free to correct if I remember wrong or it has changed) was that it wasn't top prio atm but that they would look into it later because they really feel the map editor can be improved a lot.

I got to say I have been keen on making some maps for a long period of time now, but never manages to finish any of them it due to cgi issues, metelspots disappearing/bugging and lack of spawning features. I hope that will be fixsed

The second one was about placing and moving spawn points and how Uber also wants that, or something like this.

Time to watch this thread!
Small answers like this are very interesting
Please comment if the OP is updated

13.8.2015
Q1) nixtempestas: any news on an in game mod manager
jables: nothing official. I'd like to get something in eventually, but lower on the list due to making sure we are not "officially endorsing" mods, as that can get us in trouble since we really have no control on them, and no resources to really moderate it.
nixtempestas: is a "use at own risk" disclaimer not enough legal protection?
jables: not really if it's on the main menu or something that makes it look like we did it. most people skip that and just see it in game and think it's official. so we have to be careful on it
nixtempestas: fair enough
jables: buuuut i'd like to do it eventually.. just can't say for sure it'll happen

Q2a) wondible: I realized that lots of mods have derivitive works from units, models, and code. What, technically, are the licensing terms?
jables: wondible i won't make that #2 as i have no freaking clue.. those were all put in terms before i started I'm sure there's something somewhere.. and we aren't chasing anyone down unless it's actually hurting us. but it's buried in copyright, which I do not deal with

Q2b) wondible: Will you ever actually have the fight for the tank name?
jables: #2 - we've tried to do it a few times and one side or other was busy with a release or school at this point no idea if it'll ever happen.. it's been so long

Q3) nixtempestas: well, since no one else seems to have one, a not so serious one: Are there any practical jokers in the office?
jables: #3 - no actual jokers, but the team has fun. lots of puns, lots of joking. Most of us have worked together for years off and on, so we've been friends a while

Q4) [BRN]Carl_Johnson: jables are you a programmer
jables: bonus question Carl. nope, production.

12.8.2015
Q1) [BRN]Carl_Johnson: am i handsome?
jables: Never seen you irl, but let's go with yes.

Q2) ace63: Are there plans to improve how units perform orbital transfers? At the moment they simply plop in and out of existance when leaving and entering a planet's orbit which looks kinda strange.
jables: you mean visually? or gameplay?
ace63: both
jables: yes on gameplay, though nothing promised as exact details still ironing out. visually, i doubt it.. it's they way our LOD system works with layers for perf issues i believe.. though an engineer could correct me on that

Q3) ace63: Could you give an estimation of how heavy planets are polygon wise? Lets say we take Forge for example as a reference.
jables: let me ask artist. he said "no idea.. bascially as many as we can get in before engineers yell about perf". so bascially they have a general idea of how much CSG they can use

11.8.2015
Q1) Julien: What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
jables: this site will actually step you through the answer for both african and european swallows http://style.org/unladenswallow/ tldr: the average cruising airspeed velocity of an unladen European Swallow is roughly 11 meters per second, or 24 miles an hour.

Q2) Oksidi: are there any plans to make gas giants destroyable or be able to be nuked?
jables: not at the current time, no.

Q3) Julien: are there any new balances changes coming with asteroids/halleys? At the moment with asteroids in a system they become more effective than anything else.
jables: currently no major balance changes going in. Game is mature enough at this point, making major changes to meta upsets casual players enough to make them quit playing as they don't want to relearn. so we are playing it safe on changes, bringing them in on a need to basis

10.8.2015
Q1) Xanoxis: Will we have more win conditions, like supremacy from SupCom? (kill all fabricators, factories, commander)?
jables: we have a new game mode we are testing, so there could be more in the future yeah. I doubt we'll have the kill all fabber one as that turns into hide the wisp in the woods scenario

Q2) krazyflyinchicken: Is Human Resources still a thing that you'd like to do in the future, even given the kickstarter not succeeding?
jables: We loved Human Resources and would totally like to work on it again in the future, but yeah the KS failed so that version of HR is dead

Q3) PRoeleert: Do the devs ever look through the api request threads on the mods support forum? (https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pa-server-api-requests.61182/)
jables: they do. mainly pinbender is the one working through API stuff. he's been doing changes for puppet work lately and he's the head of the tech team so he's got a lot of other things on his plate. but he does try to do API work where he finds time. they don't concentrate on just that thread however.. as it's fairly old and doesn't get updated often. they tend to read over all the requests

07.08.2015

#1 [MBC]pieman09 : Will the avenger ever be buffed so I can use it against anchors or will there be a t2 avenger to counter anchors?
jables : tvinita can clarify if I'm wrong, but currently you won't see major balance changes hitting game.
so I don't think anything is planned for that change

#2 [RLM]AndreasG : how long will you develop PA untill you drop it? for a sequel or anorther projekt
jables : We'll keep doing PA as long as we can afford to. We are hoping that is a long time

#3 PRoeleert : what feature would you add when time, money and technical issues weren't an issue?
jables : so personally, i'd add Chat to the game
team wise, the answer would probably be a full scripted campaign, which is awesome, but expensive

#BONUS tommybananas : the performance improvments since well alpha ect have been insane tbh. Do you see there as being much more you can streamline / rewrite for more units ect
jables : we actually can still pull some fairly major perf increases.. but we never honestly know how much of an increase it'll be until it's in
which is why you see so many go in with every update
we do all we can hoping they will be huge hehe
I don't think we've hit max.. there's still lots of gains we can get here and there

06.08.2015
#1 Quitch : Are you planning to allow the modding of sounds and if so where is it on the backlog?
jables : Okay so sounds. I'd have to ask tbt. I would assume you could just replace current sounds, but what was asked for by modders in the past would require releasing the entire sound project, which I was told we would not do
soooo answer to question is, you can replace things locally, but having access to overall sound project for modding is probably not going to happen
yeah not all my answers are good. sorry man

#2 (P)MangoMango : are you going to add more Tactical Missile defence/offense?
jables : So tac missile stuff
we aren't planning on doing new units for PA.. so I doubt you see a change on current
we are doing neat experiments though.. we'll see what comes from them
which is super vague and awesome haha.. we'll make the promises when we know we will release them

#3 (P)BattleBear : is that balance wise or gameplay wise in units having other roles/functions
jables : all of the above
we are doing experiments on a ton of things.. so honestly it is all of the above
but nothing to mention until we decide they are good.. some are showing a ton of promise
but aren't for sure
so no promises until they show promise. SEE WHAT I DID THERE?

5.8.2015
Q1) ace63: Any plans on improving the Unit Cannon UI (Displaying how many and which units are loaded)?
jables: we actually have people in house who hate the current one, so i'm assuming someone will do this in spare time if not, it is on list and will be hit, but probably september or later

Q2) ace63: Do you have any plans for improving the planet surfaces (plateaus, mesas, etc..) to increase the impact of terrain on the game or allowing custom CSGs?
jables: yep. that one was easy improved planets, more impact on terrain. no on custom csg's

Q3) (P)MangoMango: if you had a feature you would love to add, what would it be?
jables: me personally, i'd add chat to main game. uber, there's a huge list of things. the game was huge, but the original ideas were much larger hehe
(P)MangoMango: can we get a single example?
jables: single example of unlimited money/time. add a campaign. campaigns are fun,
but expensive


continue here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/jables-3-question-game-log.69348/#post-1097081

I remember one from last week:

Q) Is Uber planning some sort of Orbital overhaul with new units or at least a revamp in the near future?

A) Short answer: Not really. Long Answer: How the hell did you get in my house, Mered?

I'd say if we do post them to forum, let's get exact quotes moving forward I'd hate to be held to something I didn't say.

4.8.2015
Q1) ace63: With the advent of many effect-improving mods: Any plans of improving and diversifying the vanilla PA visual effects?
jables: that's a good one. currently our effects guys are buried with work, as we are doing more than 1 project. they did just spend time on the asteroid effects though, so coming back to PA every once and a while is a possibility. but as a small team, the shared resources like Audio and Effects usually work on all the games. if you saw the wayward sky trailer on E3, those effects were from same guy who did the asteroid explosions

Q2) mikeyh: jables is neutrino still involved in the development and design of PA?
jables: neutrino is involved in an advisory and management role. he's CTO of company, so not really heads down on any games. that being said.. i talk to him on everything going on, and we do make adjustments when he wants them.. but he's been fairly happy with how PA has been progressing

Q3) MrTBSC: any talk about adding hovercraf or multiunit transports in the future to make gameplay more flexible
jables: hovercraft is a pain in the butt.. which we know as we've been playing with it off and on for a few months. pathfinding, and perf are main hits, since we don't have a hover layer really.
so no promises that you'll see it, but yes we are playing on making it possible.. we'll see if we pull it off

Q4) (P)MangoMango: can I ask when we might hear about the next big thing, whatever that may be?
jables: we aren't announcing this one.. it'll come out when it hits live :O
which should be somewhere before MYSTERY MAYHEM TOURNAMENT

3.8.2015
Q1) PRoeleert: how many commanders you still need to finish?
jables: quite a few, but still waiting on people to lock down designs.. i'd say we are about 2/3rds through them and just waiting to hear back from folks on most of the others

Q2) PRoeleert: will you guys do improvements to the ranking system in near future? Revise timeouts / let people see full rankings?
jables: we have designs for making it more robust, but i don't think you'll see it in the next few months, as the guy working on that is buried in other items currently

Q3) krazyflyinchicken: If you were a type of marine animal, what animal would you be?
jables: I don't much like the ocean.. so that's actually a hard question. umm let's go with sea lion. they are fat and sit around a lot. that sounds pretty fun. also whiskers.

31.7.2015
Q1) Cola_Colin: jables random question about FA: had development on FA already started when vanilla released? FA came pretty quickly after vanilla and was such a big jump in quality
jables: Colin FA started right at release. Took about 1 year for dev

Q2) Xanoxis: I got a question, Will we get better resolution support? people complain sometimes about 4k. And maybe say something about multi monitor support
jables: (P)Xanoxis # something, we will eventually get that in place for the 4k. we do have it on list, just still doing gameplay stuff first (same guy who does 4k has a big item he's been working on). multi monitor is very low priority currently, though we are working on making notifications more useful to help with keeping track over large systems

30.7.2015
Q1) PRoeleert: do you guys do PA competitions at the office?
jables: we do daily playtests.. usually rotate between shared team games and 1v1s.. testing new maps, new meta, and new weird design ideas that usually don't make it past those tests

Q2) Cola_Colin: which design idea played out worse? in those tests
jables: usually tied to distances, changing firing arcs, weird planet ideas where units don't pathfind well or fire into walls. Also balance changes to units, though those are more rare now days as balance has been feeling pretty good

Q3) AndreasG: will there be possible for modders to create new biomb on a later stage? (like in sc)
jables: you can change stuff now, but it's annoying to add new CSG (if it's even possible) without replacing old ones

Q4) xankar: will we ever see games with thousands of units without server lag?
jables: yes. if TA and Supcom are any indication, as game gets older computers get better, and unit counts will go up, and up, and up. We had this in mind when not adding unit limits (lesson learned in the supcom dev days)

29.7.2015
Q1) bobchaos: you hiring remote sysadmins? I could use a job :O
jables: bobchaos #1.. nope we aren't doing any external hiring currently

Q2) maxpowerz: Hmmmn, where's AsteriodBelt.PFX being called when you make an asteriod belt?
jables: maxpowerz #2 I'd have to ask bgolus who is currenlty in a meeting.. I'll get it as soon as he's done. maxpowerz the effect is found in the effects folder, effects specs he said. (I) was told C++ code is what calls it into existance, but you may be able to make use of puppets to bring it in

Q3) murcanic: How is everyone doing in the office and are people happy?
jables: murcanic #3... currently rather well. morale is good and we are excited to get this PTE live.. hoping to have a drop to PTE today that is a release candidate


28.7.2015 (from memory, dont have chatlog anymore)

Q1) What do you think about the suggestions to have a one week event where everyone who plays N ranked games get some free commander model?
Answer: Jables is thinking about ways to push ladder activity. Short term the mystery update in august may help, long term he is wondering about things like seasons, etc. He does keep tabs on good suggestions for sure

Q2) Something about the map editor and spawns. To be honest I am not totally sure anymore.

Q3) What's going on with the documentary?
Answer: Uber has 30 gb of videos. They are looking into getting somebody who knows how to make pretty videos to make it good. Will probably happen by the end of the year at earliest. Uber is still busy with the game itself after all.

Just as long as it doesn't end up like Twitch Plays Pokemon - three really good questions lost in a sea of "which hand do you wipe with?"

Logged questions of the 29th july

I'm concerned about post word limit, and that sooner than later we need to post them somewhere else, and have link here.

There's many posts below the OP I can re-purpose

You monster.

Excited to get a new PTE today!

It's the word of seconds to make a Google Doc and copy/paste it all on there

logged todays questions

Ooh, bonus question.

I love those questions and answers. Little AMA everyday.

Edit. And when I said that, I had an idea, or question. Will Uber do AMA on reddit anytime soon? Maybe after asteroids release, or documentary release. Just so people see that devs care, and are alive like never before.

"like never before"?! You obviously missed out on @neutrino 's lengthy Redit discussions with the community during early development, along with the detailed technical blog and the lengthy live streams

You should go back and check out some of the early stuff- trust me when I say they definitely care...

Just be careful: neutrino was not promising things, he was often talking about what he hoped for himself.