I would love to have a 'technical readout' that displays exactly what is going on when I start a game with someone, so I can know when things have gone sideways and I should abort. Examples: Asset loading percentage. Sockets connected, socket health. (data transferred, ping times, etc) I would think this is even more important early in development. Maybe there is a log window I can pop up (or attach windebug or similar?) cuz the stalls during loading are disheartening.
There is very few assets, they load too fast even from HDD. Everything loaded on demand. Why would you need it inside game if you can use external tools? You can run game from command line, but it's also write logs here: C:\Users\YOUR_WINDOWS_USERNAME\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\log\ If you want some advanced debugging you need to check Linux version.
Log file: doesn't exist. When I attempt to join a game, it takes minutes. The assets must take 'some time', and connecting must take 'some time', neither are below human observability threshold (<10ms). The media folder contains 800 megs of data, even the fastest SSD would take seconds to load, assuming no CPU time is spend processing. Upon loading, the frame rate remains low for another minute, then speeds up. Therefore, SOMETHING is going on. The whole point of showing 'health' of the game is to re-assure players that everything is proceeding normally, or perhaps it isn't, which they can use to diagnose problems. I'm not going to fire up wireshark and reverse engineer their network traffic. For example, Jimbo joins my game, we attempt to connect, but he ends up stalling on an asset, so he can check that asset. Or the TCP sockets work, but not the UDP ones (if anyone still uses UDP that is), so one of us needs to check our firewall, etc. This is feedback for the Uber guys, cuz I want this to be the ultimate RTS. Having this status, even if accessed by special keypress or whatnot, would be great to have. Its not here to be dismissed by a random forum poster.
