Chris Taylor's opinions on PA

The same netcode? Supcom chewed up an endless 24KB stream per player. How was that ever going to work with more than like... 4 players? The netcode also incorporated lag of 2 or more seconds when things got intense. There was no way that would work on a game depending on low latency micro.

The problem of available bandwidth can't be really blamed on the game. It's more the fault of greedy internet providers, who charge exorbitant rates and refuse to to reinvest in infrastructure(I hear swiss banks give great ROI). It ends up hurting everyone.

Back in the "best" days of GPGnet I was on a 2Mbit line and I was able to play 4v4 just fine as long as nobody else was using the line.
By now FAF mods FA to make 6v6 possible, given a moderate line it actually does work.
... Well 12 people with a moderate line are not that easy to find.
Also extreme game situations led to CPU-related laggyness, even in singleplayer, that is not necessarily the fault of the networking.

It'll be pretty interesting to see how much upload a PA server for 12 players is gonna need. It will need to send the whole game state over the network to each of the players and thatt like 10 times per second.

The net code is the same, but what is actually sent over it is obviously different.

No, Supreme Commander needed ~25kbps per player (i.e. 3.05KiB/sec).

While the bandwidth needed is not as high as you initially thought, it was still a problem for some people. Especially back then and in certain countries or regions, upload bandwidth was often very limited. E.g. it's physically impossible to play a 6 player game on a connection with only an upload bandwidth of 128kbps. Even some users with a connection that supposedly had an upload bandwidth of 256kbps started to get problems with 6 players and more. Probably because a) the actual upload bandwidth was lower, b) it may not have been steady and c) there is some additional overhead.

Other than that, 6 or 8 player games in Supreme Commander or Forged Alliance were a rather common occurrence. 8 and 10 player games in Demigod often took awfully long to set up, because there were always people who could not connect to each other.

The engine has a net_lag value which delays commands so that a high latency between one or more players in this synchronized peer-to-peer environment does not constantly pause the game. This value was 500ms in Supreme Commander and 350ms in Demigod. When you see the game pausing in Supreme Commander (pausing, not slowing), then the latency of one particular player to another exceeded those 500ms (either momentarily or all the time).

Not the whole game state, just whatever you can see at the current time. And if you don't have enough bandwidth to handle that you will get some lag in what you see but the game won't slow down or break for everyone else.

I still find this conversation on the other site and here still avoiding (or going around) the main issue of the game. It was the just connecting period. When we "did" get a game to actually connect most of the time it would last, sure we had drops etc and that is probably due to exactly what is being said. But when we did get those game sessions to work, I don't care if it was 1v1 or 5v5, the same % chance of a crash or dropped was pretty much the same. Mind you yes, it might have had a 5% better chance with less people that just = "playing the odds" but in the end the netcode in general was pure fail. Be it due to old tech vs new tech, server issues whatever, it wasn't thought threw or tested and ended up destroying a title that would have been a huge success. I have no doubts on this what so ever, it was a game based on MP, you don't have a way to connect in MP guess what, you have no game based on MP! Wow, what a concept.

The single player aspect was amusing and a way to "get to know the game" but in the end, it really was never meant to be the core of the gameplay, if it was, this was a bad design to begin with. The MP of the game however was a great concept and again people that try it to this day all have the same response I posted before "Dam, awesome game, where is the community?"

In some situations that will (gameplay-wise) hopefully be a lot.

If the server does not have enough upload that will basically kill the game for everyone, or not? I can imagine that ending in a total lag-fest.
If a player in a teamgame has not enough download he will be unable to play on, which is usually gamebreaking. Well most people have a far bigger download than upload, so this should rarely happen.

Sure will be in some cases.

If your server doesn't have enough bandwidth for the size of game you are trying to run then you will definitely run into problems. I expect servers for big games to be out in the cloud. Servers for smaller games are a different story.

I think Chris Taylor is at least partially right. For TA, Supcom and for most games, numbers of players go like that:

Solo Campaign/Skirmish players > Coop players > Competitive players

For some reason however, activity on forums and general loudness and agressivity scales in the opposite direction .

Even if you only sample the residual community after a few years, huge mods where you get to play with ridiculous-size robots and don't give a **** about balance outnumber competitive multiplayer-focused ones. In TA times, you had Uberhack and a couple others that had some semblance of balance, and the rest was mostly pure insanity (and hilariously amazing in coop).

I've always thought that balance should be left to the community through integrated use of balance mutators, and that the effort should be spent on a great solo/coop experience. And it looks like he's focusing on those last two areas, so kudos to him.

Regarding scale, it is amazing in FA but does have the major drawback that you never have the occasion to zoom in long enough to appreciate your units. I really liked the details in TA such as the way cannons were animated, or the palm trees on white beaches, but in FA I found only the largest units to be recognizable. So the end result is that you have "normal-sized" units (the experimentals), and "ant-sized units" (the rest, they might as well just have icons to save on computing power).

And overall bigger doesn't always mean better, though it can be a plus. I don't think any of us wants a huge game with bad gameplay.

oh wtf

Why did you circle the time and not the $- 125?

The -125 is easily seen, but the fact that is there after 5 hours in the day. Thats weird.

Why would that be weird. If since 00:00 UTC-6, for example, five people reduced their pledge by $30 and one new pledge with $25 was added, it would show $-125 now.

well the project needs like 1,5 thousand $ per hour. In these 5 hours they made -25$/hour.
I am not really a fan of wildman, but seeing GPG fail like this hurts.

US is sleeping right now and I think most of the Kickstarter pledges come from there. But yeah, not looking good.

I actually think its in about the same position as Elite's kickstarter was at this point in the campaign:
- The "hey it's that guy" people have pledged.
- The pledges are stagnating
- Everyone else is like "ok, what you have said about the game is awfully vague, we don't actually know what you are trying to do here, and your updates aren't really telling us anything*"

- The next update really needs to take the GPG finance issues out of the limelight and start giving more detail about what the game is about. Don't give us new pledge options, goodies don't convince us of game quality**. Don't give us concept art, it tells us nothing about the game's direction. And FFS don't say "It's primarily a Single-Player MOBA*** with RPG and RTS elements". I don't know who the hell started with the "It's like [genera] with [genera] and [genera] elements" but the damn thing is contagious and tells us nothing.

*Instead they are all about this layoff debacle. And it IS a debacle, there is no way CT wouldn't have been aware of impending layoffs prior to the release of the kickstarter. He has either spectacularly poor timing or wants to guilt trip as many people as possible, in which case it is having the opposite effect.
**Some AAA companies would beg to differ.
***Single-player MOBA is an RPG, just sayin. Maybe cross hack'n'slash.

Elite is a space sim, anyone who want to revive that dead genre would be at least interested in it, without that I don't think it could get funded.

Maybe Chris should have just started a moho engine based large scale sci-fi RTS kickstarter project without a name and detailed design yet, just like what Tim Schafer did with Double Fine Adventure. That would have a bigger chance to get 1.1 million.

My point about elite is that no actual game information was released until about 4 weeks in.
As for Double Fine, they asked for 400k for an experiment they admitted might fail, as well as a documentary.

Easier to survive a slow start with a 60-day Kickstarter (as Elite: Dangerous was) instead of 33 like Wildman.

well but you really have to say: the idea of a MOBA-kind of game with NO multiplayer, which needs to compete vs LoL and DotA2 in a way, with a company you know is nearly bankrupt, you wanna "waste" money on this? Come on, you really must be a total CT-Fanboy to do that imo.

My point is there are failed kickstarters with a lot of information like Blackspace, there are succeed kickstarters without much information like Double Fine Adventure, so some other elements might be more important than actual game information.
Wildman just doesn't sound like a really attractive idea on paper (although it might be a great idea in practice), I really doubt more information can change that.