What's up this week?

This sounds like a great solution to the server-based game-play that I am enjoying hearing about so much; it appears fog of war might just delay a computer upgrade for me. This approach seemingly allows for saving a game state, at any point, without being as rigid as other "replay" systems—does this mean I will need a super computer to render all curves in a 48-player game, or just those on my screen?

So far as I understand, I really appreciate your approach of not just an awesome game, but internal game-engine "awesome", this sort of flexibility will always wind up being evident when the game ships. Do you mind the suggestion that you are truly old school in your approach to game development; where creativity is king, and the sky is the limit? Brilliant. I love nuts and bolts, and am looking forward to hearing more.

Something good did just happen. There is no doubt that the AI will be top shelf!

come on guys give us the flair. i just want to know that im not getting scammed out of my rewards

Dont be dumb. They arent gonna do anything like that.

All this talk of curve information is making me think of div and curl functions. Damn, I've not used calculus since I read for a physics degree...

Sounds awesome though.

I hope the next weekly update is exciting too.(Must be Monday, I think)

I try to pop and in here regularly and write the occasional update but I can't promise they'll be like clockwork. Especially as I get sucked more and more into engine coding land.

I see you as the UEF supreme commander with tons of neuronal networks linked to your peta core brain focused on delivering the best RTS game ever made :twisted:

Keep coding commander !

More seriously : regarding Sorian joining the team for working on AI, will sorian be responsible for coding AI inside the core engine, or will he be only working on scripting ?
Any idea of which part of AI will be exposed to modders or do you consider to remove any kind of scripting and put everything in native compiled code ?

In many peer to peer network games, each machine gathers a minimum amount of information about all the important objects in the simulation. For each important object it has to simulate where it was, where it should be now, and where it will be going. So yes if they make this game like most every other peer to peer game it will have to process a lot of data.

But computers today can process a lot of data if you arrange everything just right. It all will boil down to how clever they can be with this new system. The concept of using curves is intriguing, and honestly I would love to hear much more detail. In my game, we sent a timestamp, the current point in space and the object's current movement vector, along with its desired direction vector. So the computer would in essence go back in time, establish the location of the model at that time, apply the movement vector as well as the turning updates and it would get pretty close at keeping track of where each object was in time.

I'm not sure how curves fits into that model. Perhaps it leapfrogs the old dead reckoning tricks and opens up a new way to handle async games. I hope they revisit this topic with a bit more detail for those of us that like wrapping our heads around things like this.

I think Sorian build the AI from ground up with all the source and linked directly to the engine not only script editing.

P.S to Neutrino:In which timezone do you live?I have to set up my sidebar clock again.Because I live in germany and its the CET/MEZ timezone here.

If memory serves, Uber is in the state of Washington, which is on the Pacific coast. This puts them on PDT (Pacific Daylight Time). This is supported by the fact that the forum time is defaulting to UTC -8.

Ok thanks for the answer.

As William and I sat around hashing out the design for this stuff we really challenged ourselves to think outside the box. It didn't hurt that I threw down some pretty hardcore technical goals (see my other posts about replays etc.).

One of the big things that you'll realize after thinking about the problem for a bit is that this game isn't a first person shooter that requires ultra low latency. In fact we know that a fairly large amount of latency is tolerable. Most of the reason that fps games have to do client side prediction is to lower input latency. However, if you don't need to worry about latency as much you can take a much more "pure" client/server approach. This is how, for example, the original Quake worked. Carmack fairly quickly realized that he was going to need a hyrbid approach with some prediction to make the game play well (I think he called this rewrite Quakeworld).

So once you factor that in your options open up a little bit. Clients send orders to the server. The server contains the entire simulation state and runs the game. The output of the sim is a curve for each property that has to be replicated to client. A separate process then selects the most important curves, compresses them as much as possible and sends a selected set of them to each client (based on camera location among other things). Note that since this separate process is simply taking the data stream from the sim and sending it out to clients that you could have more than one server doing this (for example for spectating).

Anyway there are lots of other cool things we get from this. e.g. instant replays for example. Want to know how a unit died? Watch the replay for it's death. This is the 3rd generation RTS engine I've been involved with and it's also the 3rd different technique we've used for client replication. So far we've done async (TA), sync (SupCom) and now client/server.

Someone get this man a red or orange name.

Yay, Sorian! I'm glad that you were able to come aboard the Planetary Annihilation team! It was your SupCom mod that got my friends and I into 4v4 comp stomps. This really seems like an ideal team to work out something fresh in the annihilation universe!

I used to post in the GPG forums as KrogothKiller, but I figured a new IP merits a fresh start. Looking forward to what you guys have to offer!

I love how neutrino completely blew off my PM and didnt reply. Lolz

Seconded.

...Thirded?

Hi Sorian,

Would you be able to fill us in on the design of your AI over time? Give us updates on your ideas? I'd be very curious about that!