Forum is dead.. is PA Dead too??

i like to disagree .. a game focussing on multiplayer doesn´t need a campaign ... that doesn´t even make sense ..
a game needs to have compelling gameplay and contentvariety (examples: unitpool, factions gamemodes, good multiplayerfeatures and modes) ..

many multiplayergamers don´t even play the campaign and go straight into multiplayer after a tutorial or knowing the basics
and that´s what matters for multiplayer : to give a proper intro to the gamemechanics so a person can quickly understand how to play the game and use the content provided .. the problem with campaigns is they tend to be overblown to be good tutorials

.. also games with limited budget simply can not afort a singleplayer campaign due to how costly it is to make one especialy if you offer more factions ..
basicaly going by your logic you doom any MP game that has no campaignmode .. and this is simply not true ..
games like dota smite and battlefield or teamfortress showed that a campaign is not neccesary for succesfull multiplayergame ... if at all a multiplayer game should have always the option to play against ai if you want to experiment with the provided content ..

... campaignmodes are merely good to bring in newblood to a game or genre .. they are however no guaranty to make them stay for the multiplayer ...

<MY ORIGINAL POST>
<This is a multiplayer RTS, with scant lore. Online RTS is a tricky genre. To be be a successful online RTS, you need a good single player campaign (Starcraft 1&2) and a rich lore (Sins of a Solar Empire). PA lacks a single player campaign of any note, and is lacking in the lore department.>



Planetary Annihilation is a Multiplayer RTS (Online RTS). DOTA Smite and Battlefield Teamfortress, are not Real Time Strategy games. As for game budgets, listen carefully, what you hear is the world smallest violin, playing “who gives a darn”.

@ufarax
I sure don't give a darn about people giving dongbutt responds after half a month so you may better have not replyed at all it would have had the same effect ...

be my guest if you are willing to understand the point i made and give a proper reply ...
what genre a multiplayer game is rather doesn't matter

My first post was quite specific, I was talking about Multiplayer RTS, PA is a Multiplayer RTS. As for the delay in my reply, I was busy playing Starcraft 2, Company of Heroes 2, Command and Conquer 3, Supreme Commander 2….you know…games that have a single player campaign.

I think you are wrong.
- Grey Goo
- Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

Both not so old or brand new. Both have single player campaigns and good lore.
I don't think there's a magic formula at all.

to which i replied to you that multiplayergames of other genres do pretty well without storycampaigns ... why shouldn't that be the case for a multiplayer rts ? and as @proeleert said and i mentioned before other rts games did have a singleplayer .. pretty solid ones and still fell flat ... it's not a guarantee for a succesful game

I think that we have found the main source of *your* issue with PA. I agree with you in part that it would be great if PA did feature a traditional single player campaign. I enjoyed playing through *some* of the campaigns in RTS games (Homeworld 1 and especially Homeworld Cataclysm were two of my favorites, I also enjoyed the SupCom FA). That said as a HUGE TA fan, I never played through more than about 3 missions of the TA campaign. That game for me was all about the multi player, as is it's direct successor TA:Spring.

Would PA have been more successful with a campaign? Quite possibly, I certainly don't think it would have hurt the game. The fact is though there was never the budget for it. I mean maybe they could have added it as a top level stretch goal but chances are it simply wouldn't have been reached (remember at the time 2 million was one of the biggest ever kickstarter campaigns as it was).

I mean you can make comments about how the lack of budget doesn't matter, but on the flip side of that coin as a business owner I can tell you if the budget wasn't there it wasn't going to happen. The simple fact of the matter is there was (just) enough money to get PA in it's current form. The real question is, was it worth the effort? Is the RTS genre enriched for having PA? I guess the answer to this is highly subjective and depends on the individual- for me I'm very glad they did it. I love the game, and have gotten many many hours of enjoyment out of it.

I also think that now PA exists it opens the possibility for it to be the basis of a future game. Probably not for a while now, but I'd be interested in a few years time to see what ideas they've come up with with a PA 2 Maybe they could get that campaign mode in there for the next version?

People really, really underestimate the amount of dev. time that goes into a fully-scripted campaign. Especially when you add in voice acting costs, cinematics, etc.

That's not all too ...
Then you need to work out the cash burn rate on paying those devs to add in a scripted campaign.
If it takes 3 devs (1 programmer, 2 level designers/artists) to script out 20 missions and to add in some basic cinematic cut scenes it would cost on average $240,000 per year of development on the campaign.
A quarter of a mill is a lot of money to put into something that will only be played a few times, by a small group of people, the other factor is will the $240,000+ campaign pay for itself with an expected small player base due to this being a nich genre of games with a small group of followers.

Procedurally generated campaigns and content are the way of the future, look at Minecraft and No Man's Sky, it's far cheaper and easier for smaller dev teams to generate content and missions than it is to script them, it saves dev time and resources.

Well, I actually think the future will be the game that successfully blends both. I mean a good story really needs some human creative input. If you could however mix that in a non jarring way with some procedural generation you could create fleshed out campaigns with much less dev time (in theory at least). I guess a kind of guided procedural system.

The main problems I have with the PA procedural campaign is there's no story that binds it together beyond 'you are an angry robot dude that is compelled to destroy the galaxy, now off you go', there no counter attack from the opponent on the galaxy level (it would be much more fun imo if an opposing ai commander was trying to do the same) and finally there's little persistence between matches. Yes you get a few bonuses but it's minimal.

Now I think all those above points could be addressed with a procedural campaign. Certainly allowing your opponent to take turns. On the lore side, they should seed some events that could spawn side missions and a story (e.g. you find and reactivate a neutral com in the mission- upon finding it in game a notification gives you the choice to destroy or repair the commander, after the mission the results of that choice drive the story forward ' the commander you reactivated has informed you of the location of his faction leader, they will join your cause if you reactivate him' and so on.

I think including a few encounters like this would improve it immensely.

Successfully blending both is still somewhat a procedural system,
It's the tweaking of the rules that govern the generation system to make it less random and more to what you desire that become the form of scripting you do in this situation.

I do agree that the current campaign is a bit bland after a few runs, and I would like to see someone make a mod that turns galactic campaign in to something more similar to the Galactic Conquest mode in Starwars Battlefront 2 where you have the enemy and you chasing each other around the galactic map taking systems that are free gaining their perks and fighting over systems that the enemy owns to take them and gain their perks.

But in the end i still don't think people see the true potential of the PA engine yet and wont for a few years,
When PC's are on average sporting a nice 32gb-64gb of ram and have octa-core processors, and servers on the net have terrabytes of ram at their disposal that's when i think this game will shine the most.

It's a nice idea however sadly this won't happen with PA in the way it did with TA and SupCom, for the simple reason, PA doesn't support multi threading for it's simulation. The simulation is the 1 biggest issue for causing slow down. Processors are going wider as there is only so much you can do for IPC (yes some special instructions like AVX 512 can give massive gains but the engine would need to be modified to use them sadly, processing speed on legacy code hasn't improved much since Sandy Bridge).

I'd not be that pessimistic, if you think long term 10-20 years from now I am sure you'll see a decent and very noticeable improvement. Yes it might not be as mind blowing as the different between 1998 and now, but it'll still be a lot.
It's just that shorter term not much is gonna change and having to wait 10+ years sucks
With SupCom 5 years after release it already had quite major improvement. Mainly due to how more people had dualcores, so it could suddenly have one full core for the sim and generell nice IPC improvements back then I think.

They will eventually make 128bit processors then 256bit and so on and each time they do computing power will grow exponentially like it has over the last 30 years.
If not the average home user will end up with multi processor boards to compensate.
I only think this because the demand for MOAR POWAHHH is huge in the market.
People want faster and faster devices with higher and higher resolution graphics and the only way to achieve this is to grow exponentially again,

I do not recall that there is a substantial performance improvement between 32bit and 64bit architecture. So why would 128 bit be better? Isn't the main point memory and 64 bit allows for insane amounts already? I do recall I was once corrected on some statement on this topic, but don't recall in which direction. Either way I am sure that empirically there is no big plus of a 64 bit application above a 32bit application, except in terms of more available memory?

It's not just memory, it's technically simulation accuracy too. You can quite easily hit 32-bit overflow exceptions when working with precise mathematics, and a lot of game tech these days is founded on very precise mathematics. Even my rudimentary 2D physics implementation is going down to nanoseconds (as a long though, so I kinda skip 32 / 64-bit integer issues there).

But you are right in that 64-bit provides so much additional utility that it's unlikely we'd ever need to expand to 128-bit, nevermind 256-bit. The additional capacity provided in memory / address space is similar to the amount of additional precision you get in defining variable types.

As far as I am aware the typical game simulations all work with 32bit floats and care more about reproduceable results than super accurate numbers?

It depends on the game. Star Citizen was forced to go 64 bit for positioning (it converts back to 32 bit for rendering), due to the fact they have a continuous play area that is several million km cubed. Other games circumvent this problem by segregating areas and using streaming + 'load hiding mechanics' to segregate large areas into smaller chunks.

Edit: I think the way SC is doing things is a precursor for more games though. The thing is players want to feel that they are really in these huge areas, and don't want to have to be disturbed by loading screens when moving between areas.

The real power comes from a decrease in transistor size until we have issues with quantum tunneling.

Well that's the part were the physical limits are a pretty big wall that is already quite visible at the horizon. I think something below 10nm is supposed to be the last step planned by Intel, but I might be wrong.

ah well yeah I remember reading about how they had to change how the cryengine works because of their exceptional large play-areas. But I'd say the Star Citizen is the outliner here, considering how a high tech engine like the cryengine defaults to 32bit. For the average game that is plenty I think.

EDIT:
Also nothing stops you from using a 64bit double for your math, even on a 32bit architecture. The architecture bits are just about the pointer size.