Sneak Peek at Area commands

Is it odd that I'm more excited for line building than area building?

Either way, fantastic.

How is the game determining that in which order to build the buildings, especially the mexes? Do you have some solution to the traveling salesman problem? I think that it should first build those mex clusters that are the closest, to prioritize for increasing production as early as possible. Also it should avoid getting the bots trapped between power generators.

Huh? Please elaborate.
I'm an efficiency freak. If you have insider info, Uber needs to knoooooow........

Traveling salesman problem is a notoriously hard problem to calculate with computers - in which order a salesman should visit towns to visit all of them with the shortest amount of traveling. Calculating the optimal solution is not feasible in reasonable time, but there are algorithms that can produce a good enough estimate in reasonable time.

In PA's case the algorithm should not optimize the amount of traveling, but more about resource production over the whole time; the sooner you build a mex, the more value it produces over time. For example, if you have two clusters of metal spots in opposite directions, 1 on left and 2 on right, it should first go build those 2 on the right.

That's the travelling salesman problem, just expressed another way.

This! Is! Awesome!

Well Spirited! My sentiments exactly!

I am led to believe by personal thinking and no other sources but myself, that they are probably going to be first pass, so I am not expecting things like distribution of damage when area-select attacking, possibly not even "building mexes" locking to the metal spot when area building them.

I am just glad that once we see a system implemented, we can start to see improvements onto it.

This was probably a lot of hard work by the devs as well. This isn't something you can add to the coherent to get to work. The engine has to recognize where something can't be build and adjust the grid to it, and they will also have to put in engine comminucation for damage and health values if units are to correctly decide how to split their attack up. I remember players modding this into other rts games but it is still a lot of work.

Exactly what I thought! This would make unit management so much easier and more efficient!

Exactly what the game was missing until now.

Excited!

But are you also going to add linear building commands? That would be helpful for walls and turrets.
It didn't watch much of the video, so if that's already in, than my bad.

Too bad I can't watch it. Twitch should really do something about either using HTML5 on the site, or updating the iPad app so it isn't useless. (Sadface)

I believe it is structure dependent. It comes as ambiguous to me as well. But I believe the short answer is yes.

Nice - How does this work with artillery fire and aerial bombing? I'd like to have an option to blanket fire on an area to deny it for my enemies.

But mex building isn't the TSP. Specifically, you don't have the requirement of visiting each mex once and only once, and you don't need to include the point of origin. TSP is also really only relevant with fixed paths between points.

To build all mexes in an area, you do need to find a way to do that in the shortest time possible, which is complicated by the existence of barriers which may cause some metal points to effectively be farther away than they appear. It is definitely not a trivial problem, but I doubt it can be reduced to travelling salesman.

Neutrino said he was into those in the last livestream (if memory serves)

I notice they didn't start with the inner one, I imagine, this will be "enhanced"

this, definitely too spread out, but then again, so is the snap grid.

He's made it so walls and turrets build in lines. I used it in the play test, somebody mentioned the times.

Can we build factories in lines, too?

Yes! I was doing it with bot factories in our playtest yesterday.

I can start marking things off the UI wishlist as completed.

Awsome, that is all

I should have thanked them both, one of putting this here and another for sharing the post on twitter

But if you need any assistance with twitch you know where to find me! Finally getting back on track with everything so I'm available for whatever you need, even if it is sexual.