For Backers Only: May 3rd LiveStream Preview

But in the SupCom vanilla trailer the Atlantis still had rocket-launcher-AA that never made it into the finished game somehow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... epgA#t=95s

I only found out about about SupCom's existence right at it's launch (to be precise 3 days ahead) so I only saw them much later. Since I knew the game before I saw those screens I thought they were paintings or render artworks or something. They were meant to be real screenshots?

I wonder if this is correct. You should show us stuff early to gather feedback, not to impress anyone (you impress me, though. The screens made me smile tomorrow.). So we need to tell you mean things like "X sucks, Y sucks". I think that most people who do this fully understanding that it is work in progress. They are trying to influence you to make sure the final product will be really good. You should gather such feedback and let it influence you to a certain degree so the final product is sure not to be a disappointment to many people. If people ask for things you are planning to do already just be happy and maybe tell them that you'll do it. Even if you don't respond at all they will be happy once they see the changes implemented.
This actually should be a huge advantage, you "only" need to make sure that the communication between backers and developers works. People in this forums already bought your game. You don't need to impress them as much as you need to impress potential customers.

In the "development behind closed doors"-concept you usually only release stuff to impress people. You need to make sure to put away that concept entirely. You don't need to impress us, we showed our trust in you at KS already. Your goal should be to get feedback instead. The kind of feedback that was missing when somebody at GPG decided to increase unitsize and change the economy in SupCom2. That's the risk of the closed-doors concept: You might develop something that most people will dislike, but you never have any chance to gather feedback until you have over committed into bad ideas.

So far you've done a very, wonderful job!

Good on you. Those people who are crying about wreck shapes in a pre alpha build or what not can bugger right off.

hey, just finnished watching the live stream, The short video was fantastic to say the least on the destruction of units plus the destruction effects that are in place as it stands atm.

Looking forward to geting better a.I, Im not sure as yet weather or not i like the idea of having say dead bases left on the planet surface unless you have to like build tech to bulldoze those buildings or re-establish them would be even better if that was possible. Maybe make it so it takes a lot of say $ or time to resurrect a dead building on a planets surface.

The commander explosions are damn brilliant to watch and im wondering if your going to make them say put a decent creator in the world ?.

It was fairly hard to see what units where fighting what in the stream as it was just a bunch of units going after another which looked sweet might i say .

Is it $ or time spent that affects how long it takes to build units?. say if you had a planet according to stream where you go up ageist 3 lots of opposition on the planets surface. If its time spent then its a matter of coverage and how many say buildings you can have that churn out units that could affect the side of the battle.

What will happen if you have too much opposition on a planet and not enough room to establish a decent base and say it doesn't have any nearby asteroids you can smash into the planet ?.

Think thats all for now thanks for the stream guys.

Nah!
Lets all do a commuinty hug!

*Hugs Neutrino and Community*

those poor robotics soul, anyway love update guy's!

This is the only way to do it.. I wish more Game Companies would do this.

I watched the VoD on youtube and enjoyed the whole thing, except for one bit.

The question about replays and patches. I really didn't like how you guys just laughed it off without even answering it. Unless there are plans to make sure you won't change any in-game unit values through patches, how replay system will interpret different patch version of replays is a valid question that warrants better answer than "won't be problem because our replay system won't be broken (which sounded like snarky remark at RTS industry more than anything)".

Even if there are going to be zero balance fixes, say you fix bugs and older replays had games that had certain outcomes based on the bugs. How will bug-free version of the game replay that game out?

The replaysystem works DRASTICALLY different from any other system.
Lets go with the simple example of 2 tanks A and B fighthing each other.

In the actual game A has 40hp and 5dps and B has 20hp and 20dps.
So the fight ends with A dead and B at 10hp and the replay is saved.

Now the game is patched. B only has 5hp now.
But this does not matter. The replay does not care for the new patch, because it is a recording of "everything". It tells the client: At second 0 you have tank A and B. A has 40hp, B has 20hp. In second 1 you have tank A with 20hp and B with 15hp. In second 2 you only have Tank B with 10hp. The replay does not care anymore about dps-values. It does not care about how much those tanks have in the current balance. It does not need to.
The same applies to all kinds of movement of units, building placement and other stuff.
A bugfix would not have any effect, since the recorded data was recorded with the bug in place.

With this kind of concept you can change a lot of the game without breaking anything.
At least in theory. I wonder how good it will really work. But it definitely has a good chance to work.

How do will we know where is the best place to place metal extractors? does it tel you on the map or is it just you place it and find out how much you are making.

I'd assume in a similar Manner to how SupCom did it.

Mike

EWWW I did not like all the map icons that were an eye sore >.< please no more

Yeah but they worked great from a Gameplay perspective, there is no ambiguity, you can easily and intuitively understand where Extractors go. Essentially it's very user friendly, and that's important.

Mike

For what it's worth, seeing the planet in action really made my thoughts change on the mountains looking odd. Combination perhaps of the bigger planet and the rotation of the planet itself, but they really did feel a lot better in live action.

They still looked bad though.

How about a compromise, the metal patches from TA, strategic icons for it when zoomed out and additionally when you hold shift you get the indicators from SupCom.

Are you sure that this is actually the case? The problem I see with this, is the possibility to jump into the replay at any time and just start playing. At that point the game will need to know all the dps data as well. Would that mean that once you jump in, you will play with the post-patch dps values (5 both) or would the game realize that it is an old file and continue to use the 5/20 values?

Both are actually kind of interesting. On the one hand you can look at old replays and how much new balancing would have affected the outcome of an old game. On the other hand using the old balancing obviously is the only way to go, if you want to go and see how you would have done in someone else's game. (which is what they were talking about in the live stream.)

On a different note. During the livestream as a programmer myself I kept wondering how the replay data is actually persisted. Does it stay in memory during the whole time the game is run or is that data written to the hard drive even during gameplay?
Keeping it in memory is faster which might be necessary for the seamless scrubbing you showed and it's usually less of a hassle on the programmers side, on the other hand if you really track EVERYTHING you will end up with millions of data points rather quickly so those replays could easily grow quite large and then you'd run the danger of running out of memory in big long games. ( I know the game will have 64 bit because 32 bit sucks. That fact alone would have made me a backer. Frustrates the hell out of me that virtually every game still is 32 bit)

Also since all the heavy lifting seems to be put on the server, I assume the replay system and it's data is also on the server? Or is that something that the clients also need to do. I could imagine that it's a bit of a problem to push all that data, once you go away from big fat Gbe cords and down to lowly DSL lines.

Keep in mind there's no critique in here. Just professional curiosity. I'm just really interested in the decision process that goes into implementing these complex system. That's a topic that has sadly been sorely lacking in my recently finished education.

That's a question that I would like to see answered as well. Currently it seems you will only be able to play on using the new balance, which might be weird in some situations. I dunno.
Considering that replays = savegames in PA I guess it will probably be like this, since savegames usually just adapt to new balancing as well in most other games.

The replay is kind of like a huge collection of functions depended on t. So you put in that t and you get the state of the game at that point in time. The question of how much data this will be is still unanswered, but I would not be surpried to see replays that are far bigger than what we are used to in other games. (Which are usually below 1mb, so this does not necessary mean replays will be impossible to handle)

See here for a post of neutrino about this: viewtopic.php?p=580100#p580100

Loved the video, guys! Game may be pre-alpha, but already looking like a lot of fun! Lighting with the explosions also looked great!

And some nice music during the intro.

All-in-all, great work. Keeps looking better every step of the way.

The lighting made me happier than a mongoose on Snake Saturday. Though it made my graphics card weep in terror.

Ok, it's been a long time since I have posted here. What wonderful progress you've made. Glad I backed!!

The last two videos have been great (so was the flow fields video). Only one thought - in the last two videos there have been no 'metal points' so metal extractors have been put anywhere. I much perfer that style of play than having metal points. I heard John answer a question that there would be metal points. Any chance of a built in switch that would make all maps/planets 'metal' or an official mod that would do that?