Planetary Annihilation LiveStream: May 3rd, 2013

I thought it looked great! The only complaint I had was that the explosions really seemed to block out the units, the only way I could tell there were still units at all was because of the health bars. Which looked cool, don't get me wrong but the readability suffered.

It looks awesome so far and i am really happy to finaly see it coming together. And for being it a pre-alpha you guys did a amazing job!

The only thing that bothered me was the strategic symbols, maybe it was because i wasnt used to them or at some points it looked not disinguishable.

The commander to say it was rather hard to tell where he was actually. Maybe a little "golden command symbol" at the chestpiece of the Art.

You only showed ground units so far as you said, but i cant imagine how you can later on see on a glance what is air what is ground what is navy. Thats one thing i liked about Supreme commander.

The different categories, triangle for air ect. You could see directly what type you were dealing with.

Again doing a great job so far, cant complain at all the best think was hearing about the Voice-chat planetary annhilation will not get!
First developer ever, realises what a bad idea that system is most of the time in a game

Try to hear "Units under attack" when your oppenent has a second world war bunker radio transmitter trying to communicate with you.

Ok, so it wasn't just me as well.


One of the biggest concerns I have for the game is how "lost" you can get with the spherical system. For SupCom, I use my entire 2nd 24" monitor as a minimap and only sometimes use it to monitor 2 battle fronts.
I hope that PA will have something fancy developed for giving an overall "commander's view". I must admit, I got pretty confused during the gameplay bit.



I would also like to echo previous points about the strategic icons.
I think it would make more sense if the icons were aligned with unit orientation?
I found the factory icons a bit big?
the "robot" icon, though cool is over complicated I think?
My thought on this would be go simple, and shoot for clarity.
Think of roadsigns. And octagon means "stop". It's pretty clear. A triangle means yield.
No need to over complicate things.
Just something really, really clear would help to relay information so it is easier to understand.

This was the highlight of my week. The game looks like it's coming together nicely, and even for first pass artwork, it's quite pretty. The projectiles look quite substantial, and I love what sound effects I can hear. (The firing sounds are nice and substantial, right on par with TA.) Keep up the amazing work!

No thanks, do not limit the zoom, if you want to zoom in, zoom in.

Simple.

The point of games like Planetary Annihilation is being big.

If people are really going to complain, Perhaps Uber can make it an option, or modding community can make a mod.

nice Stream as always, spread the news already on our site

Question: In the stream you said that you won't increase polygons of those plateaus and cliffs. I think that question came up because currently they do not blend so well with the ground and look out of place somewhat. But I guess you will still work on them since this is Pre-Alpha, right? Will the game in the end look like those desert concept screensots you released earlier? There the plateaus had perfect blending and looked more detailed

Make health bars in team colours.
Don't limit zoom.


And speed up scrolling and zooming,.

IMO

I know you said the icons are very early, but I would hope you are going to go down the route of symbols and shapes rather than little pictures of the units. It looked far too busy when zoomed out IMO.

I find shapes much easier to read, might also be nice if they coalesced into a single icon with a number when zoomed out...?

Apart from that, loved it and I can't wait to get my hands on the Alpha. Awesome. :mrgreen:

Livestream was interesting and fun to watch.
Also nice to see the office and the people.

Tank icons look so familiar...

Sounds solid, though I pity the uber guys for a few of those questions. (We won't discuss the youtube comments, my god . . .) Nice answer involving no unit abilities, retaining a clear focus is good. Good balance on the e-sports answers as well.

People seem very confused involving replays, am I missing something that is confusing them? It seems as if they work like movies which can treated as savegames as well. Not a hard concept.

My faith in Uber as developers is confirmed (again). I continue to have very high hopes for a balanced, unique game in the style of TA. Thank you, I feel my investment will be cheap for the quality received.

I think their numbers are . . . accurate. :lol: Ok I'm mean, but the number of times people have brought up limiting zoom . . .

Just watched the stream on YouTube and its all looking great, really coming together!

Can't wait to see more on the next Livestream. The replay function looks like its really coming together and when you are able to implement the ability to load up from points within the replay, well this kind of feature is unheard of and if it doesn't set the benchmark for future RTS games then they'll be doing something wrong!

One question I have, which probably is something you've already thought of, but I'll ask anyway. Will the game have a form of notification or alerts system? E.G when you are attacked will you get a warning? As we saw in the Livestream you didn't realise you're base was getting attacked at one point.

I don't mean alerts for everything, in the end you don't want a game to hold your hand the entire time but with the long term scales of whole systems of planets I think at least something to tell you when you are attacked and maybe a shortcut command to take you to the source of the alert? Especially if its on another planet, by the time you've found it it could be over!

I just think at least there should be something to warn you about attacks and maybe a specific one if the Commander is attacked. I don't know if you need more than that, everything else I think should be up for the player to notice.

Looks like a dream come true. I don't say that lightly. Graphically this could be a shipped game, the only thing that looked a bit weird was the smoke effects when a commander died, but I'm sure that won't be there forever. When the robots started fighting it was like all I've ever hoped for from a next gen successor to TA. I... I think I got something in my eye :cry:

But there's still that big red flag. The camera.

If you have to rotate the camera all the time, doesn't that defeat the point of strategic zoom?

And won't that get exponentially worse as you add more planets?

From my impression of the video it looks like the Starcraft minimap actually gets you a better view of the playing field. And that's just with one planet. As far as I can tell there's no way to show the whole map at once which seems like a pretty big weakness compared to Starcraft - hell, Dune 2 - let alone Supcom. Do you have some tricks up your sleeve here, or do you really plan to ship with a weaker camera system than any other RTS I can think of?

BTW did my eye spot a playbutton when the commander died? As of neutrino's idea of popup window with death-replay?

Yeah that thing looked like a button somehow. Might have been a random part of the explosion, though.

the camera system is not weaker, it has just a far harder task of showing a map that is not just a flat plane.
Maybe they could add in a "minimap" that always shows the hidden side of the planet you are currently looking at. Apart from that it's pretty good already imho.

I am really impressed with what you managed to come with in just a few months. I wasn't expecting the pre-alpha to be that good. Congrats to the team.

My concern is also with the battles, which were kind of hard to read. It felt like you just threw units to the field and waited for the explosions to be over to find out who won. Many pointed out the health bars as the problem, but I think they are needed and are absolutely not the issue. The problem, in my point of view, are the explosions themselves. Way too many fire effects.
The dynamic lighting effects remind me of when I first used Photoshop. I discovered the "lens flare" effect, and put those everywhere on my pictures. Now when I look at them, I find it awful. The lightning effects are cool, but they shouldn't be the star. Units have to be the stars. Reduce the explosions, and my guess is the battles will look better.

If other RTS can show the whole playing field but PA cannot, how is that not weaker?

I guess we'll see how it works when it gets into players' hands.

It is simply impossible to show the whole surface of a 3D planet on a 2D screen Other games don't even try to solve this problem.

Wow ! I saw the livestream on youtube it was just incredible !

I'm very impress on how quick a small team manage to do this amount a great things in a so small time !

Many thinks working already so well (happily I saw some bugs, so you still humans ^^)

It was already looking to something really playable (as it still many work to do).

Light effect (long shadow, fire effects, units lighting, etc.) are awesome.

All look sweet.

The idea of strategic icons is really smart (even if it needs some tweaks)

I loved the commander explosion.

For health status bar, do not worry I'm sure that anybody will be able to set that as it wishes but adding some damage visual effect can be great to (unit smoking and damaged when close to death)

I must see this video again and again to see the details of all of this working.

Thank a lot to you guys to spend so much time to share this !

Keep in mind.. this was kind of a staged match. We'd had some all out fights just to fight, but this one, we were playing to show off some of the best visuals and interactions currently. None of us were playing to out right beat each other. Sorry to break the illusion.

As we said near the end of the Q&A, we will probably do that at some point soon, as we're getting very close, but not quite yet.