Thank you for the tech talk

I really appreciated the talk about the underlying tech of an rts game. I find the flow field especially interesting. I was always fascinated by the tech behind the pathfinding in rts games.And I will definitively look into the book when it's released.
On the other hand I understand that there are a lot of people who are not on that level of technical knowledge. And quiet frankly it could scare some people off as the algorithms and debug tools are ugly to the eye. So I agree with neutrino that the live stream is probably the wrong place for such a techie talk.
It would be a shame though to lose all the knowledge you offer us. In my opinion probably the best way to present the tech related talk would be in a blog like neutrinos or sorians combined in to one, where every developer can show off his part of creating PA or a concept from a technological standpoint.

thanks & regards
Bloedhren

Just a quick reply to 2nd this notion. You guys did a great job and I enjoyed this more than any other talk so far. I hope you continue to put up videos showing this stuff and don't get deterred by the live chatters. I for one count as one of the audience members who understood and enjoyed the content. Keep up the good work!

I think the Simcity experience has shown that the kind of people who play these games will try to push the limits of the simulation and pathfinding whether you try to hide it or not. Sharing this information early will help us understand how it works and encourage us to participate in the Beta testing.

I agree.

It would be a shame not to see these at all becasue they are extremely interesting.

Would it be possible to get a list of your blogs maybe? Somewhere where you talk about this technical stuff?

Wish I was there for the stream, would have asked quite a few actual questions

As said above, thank you for doing this!

www.mavorsrants.com for my blog.

Elijah is going to set one up I think...

Hey guys, I also wanted to chime in and thank you for doing this livestream, I thought it was a great one.

I also wanted to provide some feedback on what I saw, and this is from the top of my head and by no means a comprehensive response to the entire program:

Pathing:
-Actually no feedback here, other than when I signed onto this Kickstarter I was interested to see how a game like this could take shape, and this portion of the talk definitely fascinated me. Dodge harder little cubes!

Art of of the Planet:
-The initial art style of the Kickstarter trailer did a lot to draw me into this project, and the thought of robot armies fighting over Caribbean style worlds was intriguing, with palm trees and azure water. However after playing back the livestream feed of the planet a few times I am really digging what you guys have going on here, with the actual look of the biomes and general layout of the planet.
-The craters rocked my world, especially the ones that intersected. I can't wait to see the lava bubbling from the bottoms of deep ones.

Dark Side of the Planet:
-The semi-dark Twilight look that you guys had going on did not bother me. I like seeing the battles, and having a toned down darkness is not a bad thing.
-The light simulation, while even very early obviously, pretty much was the highlight of the talk for me. Accuse me of being distracted by pretty lights all you want, I accept it =P I know there had been rumblings of the 'bots and tanks and whatever else having lights to help identify them on the dark side, but actually seeing what you guys had in mind was awesome. This leads me to my only question.

How far are you guys going to push the lighting? Will there only be simply discrete headlight type lights? Or for example, will the Yellow/Black caution strips on some of the bots and the Fabrication buildings be back-lit so to speak, simulating a look where the yellow strips are semi-clear plastic with lights behind them giving off a diffuse low intensity, non-point source glow? I guess a light panel would be a good real-world analogy.

Not really asking for something like that, and perhaps way to early in the development process to think about art details like that, but I am mostly curious and wanted to throw it out there and see if I could get you guys to spill the beans on any awesome lighting effects you might have in store.

I guess I did not have any negative critiques, just wanted to let you guys know the portions of the livestream that really stood out, looked awesome, and are keeping my excitement levels pretty darn high for this game.

Edit: Stupid grammar.

I agree- the last one was your best livestream yet. I am unsurprised that a lot of viewers didn't understand the technical aspect in the slightest. However I thought you did a good job of explaining, and I felt I learned a lot about the game design process and about flowfield pathing.

Hopefully those who are confused will be prompted to go find out more. I doubt it, though. People are generally quite thick.

I concur, +1

Thank you a million times over. I am currently going to college for game programming and very much enjoy seeing what developers are currently doing to solve critical issues.

Tyler Seacrest

I would also like to thank you guys for not being afraid to talk tech, as a games developer myself I really loved hearing about how things were implemented .

I'm currently working on a tower defense game using a flow field type path finding solution so it was particularly interesting to see and hear the differences between how I'd implemented it for my game and how Elijah implemented it for PA. Being much smaller in scale and needing very few large changes to the flow map (I only really need to generate it completely once) I went for a highly precise method that always directs units to the absolute shortest path avoiding high cost areas long before the units get there, but I was really impressed by how well your implementation works without needing to do such a computationally high cost flow map generation. I look forward to PA's path finding blowing the minds of other RTS developers when it's released, though I think they are probably already keeping an eye on you guys .

On the topic of lighting, I'm glad you chose to use deferred rending as I think it really suits RTS games and will add some really impressive visuals. If you haven't checked it out already you guys should take a look at Earth 2150, they had a really great day/night cycle with units turning on/off their lights appropriately (you even had control to turn them off manually to do a stealthy surprise attack at night) and it also had some interesting ideas for the day/night cycle such as having solar panels that work correctly providing power during the day and charging batteries that needed to last throughout the night. I've long held Earth 2150 as the most technically impressive RTS game, though I strongly suspect PA will steal that title away .

Thanks again for the tech oriented Live Stream, I really appreciate it, I look forward to more in the future as well as keeping an eye on your blogs .

Thanks a lot guys for this wonderfull streamlive.

I'm frankly impressed by the amount of stuff you've done within a such short time.

I really do not regret to have put 250$ in this project.

As far as i understood, all the things we have seen is not reflecting the exact final game.

Do you confirm it's the same for rendering ? I mean; can we really expect (from a rendering perspective) to have the game look like the very first biome concept which are available as pictures in the backer lounge ?

To be honest, i'm a little bit reluctant to watch a livestream that would show us the game running if it's not reflecting 99% of what we'll have in the final game in terms of rendering. Simply because as this livestreams are public, there could be people propagating wrong ideas over the web about what the final game will be.

We're all of course dying to watch you play the game for real, but as far as i'm concerned i prefer to experiment all this during alpha stage even if it means waiting much more time to enjoy all this stuff.

At the current stage, do you think you would have enough definitive stuff in terms of rendering, units, animations to make some kind of video that would reflect the final game ?

Would it be time consuming (i guess yes).

Have you plan to go to E3 with such stuff ?

Thanks again for being so close to your fans.

I am among the appreciative in regards to the tech talk.

For your live stream, as mentioned before, you will have many people who are expecting to see game content, not game mechanics.

My idea to solve the dilemma of having people scared off would be to separate the live stream into two halves.

The first half could cater to everyone by revealing any new information you have to reveal, and the second half could be catered to those of us who want to see your awesome tech at work.

You could take a break between the halves, or even record and stream them at completely different times.

If they were labelled as a "Game Progress Update" and "Tech Talk" segments, you would be likely to get a more appropriate audience for each segment.

I am super impressed by the tech segment, as no other developers really dive into this sort of deal. It really gives insight and inspiration to those of us who actually know what you are talking about, or those of us who have the capacity to learn. It would be a shame to see you do this once, and then never again because of some less educated individuals.

Lastly, I like how you smirked when you cracked open your sprite and clearly made a small interruption, and I like how you dealt with the people who asked stupid questions. Kudos all around, and I really hope to see more of your work some time soon!

It's was great to get "inside" the development of the game and especially into the pathfinding system (one of the most important thing in a RTS) and the flow fields.

One doubt if how the flow field will take into account the unit vision / fog of war, so until a unit sees a building it does not change it's path.

Although some of the more technical parts went over my head (and I watched it later via YouTube) I really appreciated learning about the behind the scenes stuff.

Thank you

Actually wished Mavor wouldn't have interrupted the other two all the time, it's like he desperately tried to get some screen time in between all that tech talk. If the developers want to talk about their current research topic, let them do so.

Well, there is nothing wrong with a round of "Ask Mavor" format where you confirm / deny rumors about upcoming features, but the tech talk is just waaaayyyy more interesting.

I think he's more just trying to get back on topic and keep it simple, almost as though he is used to showing this sort of progress report to someone who doesn't understand anything about coding or game development.

That's the impression I got too, basically they were just tiptoeing on the surface of these topics, if you get much deeper into them you can rant on for hours on end about the choices made for the implementation and what affects they have, but TBH as much as I'd enjoy listening to all that I doubt the majority of the audience would have understood it so that sort of in depth thing is better left to their blogs.

Earth 2150 had individual (and toggleable) unit lights for lighting as well as a dynamic day/night cycle back in 2000. Here is an example of what it looked like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKh_rkaGs-Q

I wish they'd put out a stream that just let the developers rip - talking in their technical tongue, without regard for anyone being able to understand it. I eat that stuff up, because if I don't know it, I research it.

Speaking of their tech (sorry, this is slightly off-topic), has there been a thread regarding what development languages or other technologies they're using? If not, I'll make one!

I loved this too, I think the most vocal crowd(the ones who seemed not to understand) were those who weren't actually watching very closely or paying much attention, those that were paying attention probably weren't confused and thus didn't have to ask so many questions. I have seen this so many times in classrooms in college it blows my mind. Everyone is on Facebook or somewhere else not really paying attention and then when they start paying attention again they ask some of the silliest questions. If they had just been listening in the first place they would have understood just fine.

Not sure if there's been a thread already, but IIRC they said they were using C++ for the game, HTML for the UI, and it's mostly their own code (no third party engines/libraries except maybe for audio but not sure on that). I expect that when they make the announcement to modders that they mentioned they'll probably go into more of those sorts details.