Planetary Annihilation LiveStream: April 19th, 2013

RPS still likes how the game is progressing.

Two things:

* Freely rotateable and condensable structures makes me so happy!

* I notice the missile tower structure is simply named "Air Defense". Will universal targeting not be returning? Also, naming turrets defences gives the wrong implication to players that turrets can't be built offensively(i.e. turret creep).

Looking great! Just one question:

How will you handle strategic zoom?

I'm really hyped right now. Will we see some new ingame action next time? And what about the AI? How big of a priority is that for you?

I'm pretty sure those names are just placeholders.

They've just made some small amount of units in the game, giving them interesting names will come later. :ugeek:

Well, they hired Sorian just for his ability in making good AIs, so I don't expect you to be disappointed.

Very impressive stuff, the game is coming along nicely

Great job guys, that is one impressive stream! You really captured they planetary feeling. I am dying to see how playing this through multiple viewports / windows will be.

I noticed many of the high ground was flat, that is obviously needed for building on it. I did also see some mountains with peaks on the horizon. I am wondering about the balance between mountain peaks vs flat high grounds. The reason I'm wondering about this is because I feel the mountains add to the realistic look and fell off a planet. Any comments Uber?

I really love the way the air fact built the unit in terms of animation, much like 3d printing which I'd a developing tech in real life now.

Also thought the way biomes existed id's great and the massive forests and how dense these were.

Again thanks for sharing and can't wait till the end of may!

I love the way the planets look, but I'm most worried about the scale of these planets. The planet showed in the video was actually a little "smaller" than an average planet in Spore when you compare tanks in both games. I realize that tanks in this game are like 4 times larger than modern day military tanks, but I'm speaking relatively. Anyway, Spore planets were pretty damn small, but it was okay because there wasn't a whole lot of depth of strategy to that game.

For PA, that planet would be good for 1v1 at most. Remember when a dev said that the surface area of these planets will be about as large as an average TA map? As ideal as that sounds, we will have to up the scale of planets because of the wrap-around nature of spheres. Think about it.

Let's say the average sized TA map was 1000m x 1000m. The surface area of that is a million square meters. On a 2D RTS map, the furthest two bases can be apart is the length of the diagonal of the map. That's equal to sqrt(1000m^2 + 1000m^2) which is about 1,414 meters. On a 3D spherical map the furthest two bases can be apart is half its circumference. If the surface area is 1,000,000m which equals 4*pi*r^2, we find the radius to be 282m. Circumference is 2*pi*r which is 1,772m. Half of that is a measly 886 meters.

Ideally we want to bump that number up to 1,414m to get up to average-sized TA map standards. So let's do that and find out what kind of surface area we really need:

circumference = 2*1,414 = 2828m
diameter = 2828m / pi = 900.2m
radius = 900.2 / 2 = 450.1m
surface area = 4*pi*(450.1m)^2 = 2,545,710m^2
ratio of 3D to 2D map surface area = 2,545,710m^2 : 1,000,000m^2 = 2.55 : 1

So if you TLDR'd, we need planets to be about 2.55 times larger than planned. Otherwise we may have a clusterfuck situation.

Wait, what?

If you want 1000m x 1000m you are looking at 1,000,000 m^2 for your TA map comparison.

To get that on a planet you need 282.095 m radius which comes out to almost exactly 1M meters sq of surface area.

The planet we showed in the demo was 650m radius which is 5309290m^2 of surface area or FIVE times the surface area you are asking for.

The largest planet the slider goes up to at the moment is 2000m radius which is 50265500m^2 or close to 50 times what you are asking for. Now you can include your theory about closest points and it's still pretty large. Now start to imagine there is more than one planet in the game...

Anyway all of these numbers mean literally nothing if the games don't play the same at the same scale. For example if all vehicles move twice as fast in one game then even at the same scale they are going to play very differently. The scale in SupCom for example was bigtime screwed up. It was more like 10m = 1m for realize. So realize that how the game is tweaked makes much more of a difference than the actual units we are using.

I continue to be astounded by the idea that we are so stupid as to not make maps big enough to have fun on. This kind of falls under my "everyone imagines the worst possible implementation of a game idea" theory.

Screwed up as in "bad to play" or as in "very unrealistic values"?
I agree with the 2nd, but I think from a gameplay-standpoint SupCom:FA is pretty good scale-wise.

I would assume people don't think you are stupid. However one of the big letdowns of SupCom2 was its scale. Without the happening of SupCom2 I would have thought it is impossible to **** up the scale of a game that badly. But it happend. So while my rational mind tells me that you guys are way too good to ever fail upon such a trivial problem, some part of me reminds of how small SupCom2 maps feel and gets worried, even though I know that the size of the planets in PA will be basically configurable by a single number that anyone can play around with.

EDIT:
SupCom2 is actually a pretty good example of your point about the scale of units to the map, since it is using the exact same mapsizes as SupCom:FA, but with bigger units.

The 2nd. Originally we tried to use meters and make everything work correctly but that got lost as tuning happened. Basically things are way off compared to real life.

Lol SupCom2. You guys realize it was designed by StarCraft fans right?

Forwarding this quote to Kotaku to collect a referral check.

"Former GPG Dev Lol's SupCom2"

kthxbye

:lol:

I don't know what else to say.

lol, do I sense some hate :lol: ? Just out of curiosity what's your rank in StarCraft 2 (assuming you have it )?

I don't play StarCraft games. Not interested in that genre.

Wait a second!! this is interesting, are you saying you NEVER played Starcraft :? , or not anymore? Fear not, I'm not judging you

I've checked out both of them but I've never played competitively except on rare occasions. Lack of strategic zoom is kind of a barrier for me.

I mean you do realize those guys have been "the competition" for many years, right?

I was more of a Command and Conquer fan than StarCraft or WarCraft.

Aww, come on now. The fact that people care enough to spend their time working out all the math to make sure the map is theoretically big enough should tell you something. If people really did expect that you guys would screw it all up - they wouldn't back PA or bother posting the paranoid stuff.

You can get a new Starcraft or DOTA clone about every 6 months or so it seems. There isn't much of anything out there like TA and SupCom, so you can kind of see why people get a little OMG THEY WILL SCREW IT ALL UP! AND THEN WHAT! Just shows that people want it. Good!

I don't disagree with anything you've said here.

If you want to be a critic then you should be prepared to take criticism as well as give it.

In general I try to keep my comments focused on what we are doing and not reply negatively to stuff. But that's in general, sometimes I will pick out specific comments to reply to. Stuff around planet size makes sense because there seems to be a large amount of comments about it. I want to make sure that I clarify stuff like this so that 3rd parties don't read it and assume it's correct.

I'm with you 100% but the simplest way to silence the doubters is to post something demonstrating a HUGE planet.