Planetary Annihilation LiveStream: April 19th, 2013

In short: LOVED IT! The graphics style makes me nostalgic about TA while it brings it to whole new ROUND world.

During the week I thought about upgrading to the galactic limited edition. Seeing the livestream made me do the purchase.

Uber, you are making my dream game!

Impressive work! Loved seeing it in action, loved the replay functionality, lots to love in general!

I'm just glad you're making sure to take into consideration how to keep the player best informed. As I said before, I don't care if it's a completely different system than a minimap, as long as the information is cleanly presented. It seems I have nothing to worry about.
[EDIT]
Last half a second of the livestream showed the most epic gameplay . . . now I'm so pumped!!!

Best feature: The ability to rewind the time to watch what happend while you werent there. Thats a true "next step" in RTS gaming.

edit:

What I would like to see instead of a mini map is the ability to split your screen and have a different view on every section. Bit how 3D drawing programs, like 3DSMAX, work. It would be even more UBER if we could give commando's in every section to our units, giving us the ability to wage war on different fronts simultanious.

Orange, grey & white... Love it

In-game rewind is a really awesome idea!

The demo was really impressive. Very glad I backed enough on Kickstarter to get into the Alpha. Bring on May!

Great show guys, looks awesome. :shock:

Cant wait for end of May!

Bloody, EXCELLENT!

I really wanted to see how the camera worked with a sphere, and if it was easy to use etc. Definitely seemed like it, but I will have to check for my self once I get my hands on the game.

Well done Uber!

This is incredible! You guys did an awesome job and I'm really excited to see this go into Beta so I can play around with it as well

I like it very much. Looks totally awesome, through a little bit more color on terrain wouldn't hurt.
Also, question: How powerful was the machine the game was played on?

Hardly needs to be said, but
wow
It looks great and was even better than I expected... Can't wait for this to come out!

I'm really interested in hearing more about the differences height will make, early on I saw all the mountains and hills and stuff and thought "too bad they wont have a gameplay impact" its really exciting to know they will. On that note though, it might be nice if mountains and hills were a bit higher, at the moment things feel a little squashed but that might just be the settings for that particular planet.

Really cool, can't wait till I can play myself!

Yeah I far prefer a quick zoom out and in to jumping around the map by clicking the minimap. In Starcraft casts I can never quite tell where the current view is on the map unless i'm watching the caster's mouse 100% of the time =P

First off I must say, congratulations! The game looks amazing at just this stage! I had actually been playing some TA before you went live and you've captured it's essence, triple filtered it and distilled pure awesome! I especially liked the building of defences on higher ground, something I've never really thought about but on seeing it think its great.

I also think that a minimap isn't needed, for a game of this scale it won't be able to include enough information at a glance to be worthwhile. Zooming out is a far better way of doing it, Sins of a Solar Empire requires you to zoom out because of its scale, again a minimap would be pointlessly undetailed. Different games need different things and I think you've made the best call here!

I only have one question really, might you have a way to quick move the camera to certain spots? For example a quick command to find the Commander, zoom to a recent alert such as 'Under Attack' or something similar? I only ask because the downside of massive scale (I know, who'd think there could be a downside to massive battles?!) is that when something happens you could be on the other side of the planet or solar system and if you have multiple bases on multiple planets you might not actually find it in time to act on it.

Hope this makes any sort of sense. It does in my head!

the live stream was great, but i'd like to point out a few things that i'm worried about. i may sound like someone grumpy or pointing only bad things, but it's only in order to make it better

i put the link to the video because you'll need it to follow : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugz7I8Z1bkI

the first thing i noticed is about the strategic zoom, it makes sense to make the camera vertical when you have the hole planet on your screen, but i feel it gets vertical too fast and makes it quite disturbing. for example take the video at 3'40", we're still close enough to see correctly individual buildings, but you're already watching everything from atop.
of course having a spheric battlefield makes things harder to set properly, but i think i would feel way more comfortable with a level of "obliqueness" similar to what we can see at 3'54", this level of zoom is probably the one players will use most of the time, so it is important to make it as pleasant as possible.

well, after a bit of thinking i suppose the course of the camera responds to relatively simple settings, so if you make it accessible i guess everyone will be able to set it as they please.

the second thing is about planets, take the video at 5'39", i see that there is no north pole and south poles. i'm not saying that i want ice caps or stuff, i know it depends of the warmth of the planet, what i mean is that the rotation axis of the planet should be indicated, with a bit N and a big S to indicate north and south pole.
but why am i asking that ? well, that's simply in order to find back your base more easily if you go wandering around with your camera, you may end up turning the camera in some random direction and then you don't recognize anything and you can't find your base back.

maybe i'm actually worrying for nothing, but if you can understand that your are upside down because the south pole is on top just by zooming out, you would probably find your base way faster.

since we're talking about the planets, i noticed that oceans are usually more lakes than interconnected oceans (okay, some are fairly large), building units that will be restricted to 1/10th of the planet feels like a waste of resources. you can take a look at the planet at 7'42", you have a large sea separated from an other very large sea by a dumb strip of land, while the rest is essentially useless puddles of water

i don't know how biomes are defined, but i think they should have a specific "shape". for example, mountains should be elongated and filled with so much obstacles that they end up being mostly unpassable (and therefore easier to defend). I suppose the shape of seas is defined by the shape of the surrounding terrain and its elevation, but wouldn't it be better if water was an actual biome ? for example with a very large number of small spots close from each other, this way you would have seas, rivers and stuff, all of them interconnected. i don't think it matters if this ends up making continents since land units can be transported by aircrafts, but what is sure is that a boat stuck in its own sea is pretty useless (well, except if you make ship-transporting aircrafts, of course).

that was about all i had to say, i'm not so fond of the "wavy" aspect of the green nanolathe, especially on the commander since it's building range is way longer than the length of the animation, i liked more the "straight" way it was in TA, but that's really a detail ^_^

and just to remind everybody : if i didn't talk about something, that's because it's already as awesome as it can possibly be, especially the "in-game replay"

That was a high temp desert planet you were looking at BTW. It still had some water so there were trees and stuff but no arctic. If we moved the temp slider down the ice caps will start to grow.

My jaw...it is on the floors. Thanks Uber, now I have to go clean my tongue off.

Amazing guys, just, simply amazing.

In regards to planetary indicators, I would agree.


It would be nice to have a grid?
Maybe a plane across the equator and a north/south pole indicator?
I'd even go as far to say maybe custom # of sheets? Like 2 sheets would divide a planet into quarters. That would be help with context.


Also, in terms of scale, if this a small/mid planet, how big would a "big" planet get?
This "felt" very small, not even close to Fields of Isis let alone Setons.


Overall, thanks for sharing. This got me so much more excited!

My comments:

[*]Love the UI mouse icons, very TA-like
[*]Love the mechanical noises I could hear behind the commentary, again very TA-like
[*]Love the wireframe/green/texture transition as building are being built, again very TA-like

I'm assuming the finished nanolathe animation will behave more like it's targeting the current building, rather than generally spraying in front of the commander.

Given the artillery turrets were rotated before being placed, and they're slightly longer than they are wide, am I right in guessing that will give them a kinda fixed cone of fire? That would be neat.