For Backers Only: May 3rd LiveStream Preview

These were done over the course of today, as we were prepping for tomorrow. These will not be released to the general public. One of these is clearly a goof, the other is a preview into scorch marks and bases getting destroyed.

It has been a fun, and crazy, day.

Interesting!

I take it we'll get a full demo during the livestream? ;p

Mike

Looks like fun!

Looks awesome.

Is the big 'MAVOR' written out of burnt-out tanks?

Indeed.

Look at the energy resource generator number, you are clearly cheating. REPORT

I like how the MAVOR writing appears to be in sync with the perspective, the planet feeling is totally there

Well he may have been cheating, but those are fairly accurate econ numbers. Metal and energy are intentionally on different magnitudes.

I know you're taking the same ratio like in TA/SupCom but I never understood why is that the case. Of course metal is getting sucked out of the planet and energy is being created with machines but is that the only reason its such a difference?

Those....cracks....

made by weapons??????

Because that would be so incredibly crazy cool.

On another note, for the guessing game, I bet those star things are mexes and those gas-station looking things are pgens. Or the other way around :?

Graphically this game looks almost done. It just looks better every time I see it. A little more work on lighting and its finished in that department. The scorch marks look amazing. Just trying to imagine a long trench burned out by the uber cannon with scorch marks all around it. Now that would be epic

Does anyone else here think the mountains & features look extremely odd compared to the planet itself?

Perhaps it's just the ability to zoom in/out that makes it stand out so much. Or the atmosphere / lack thereof.

I was thinking Populous 3 didn't have that problem, but looked at some old screenshots and realised they hid all those problems with a horizon and no zoom.


Perhaps 'small' size planets should be limited in the feature set they can pick from to generate the terrain, so that small-size features don't look quite so out of place.


Also can't say I'm a huge fan of the star-type explosion decals. It's like a conversation with shouting atm. 'Look at this factory it went BOOM when it exploded! This pgen went BOOM TOO. BOOM BOOM BOOM! BOOM EVERYWHERE! Tiny building? it went BOOM TOO!'

It seems like you guys are perhaps going for a good readability of what died after the fact - I wonder if it's even necessary, if it's possible to click on the wreck and get a replay of what happened to it? What if you upped the destructability of models and broke them apart a lot more when they are destroyed?

Standard disclaimer: Yes I realise it's alpha, and that things shown were probably worked on yesterday, and no I don't hate the game or the direction the style, art, gameplay, engine or anything else is heading. I think it's awesome and you guys are doing a great job!

It was the same way in supcom. I'm guessing that enough damage will break make the wrecks not even appear. And remember, replays are real time, meaning that while your looking at the replay, you're also not doing anything else, when all you needed to do was to look at the wreck.

Actually I was under the impression that replays were going to be able to run asynchronously from the rest of the game - namely, that you should be able to click a wreck, and get a popup window that shows the last moments of the unit's life.

A better question to ask is why do we care about identifying wrecks at a glance in the first place? Ok yeah, Supcom had the oddly inefficient 'rebuild for half price / half build time' feature, but, barring that, how often do you care about what the wreck was? Wouldn't a better design goal be to make the experience of blowing things up be as detailed and exciting as possible?

Just waked up to this
AWESOME!!!

Being able to know exactly what a wreck was is crucial for reclaim gameplay. It gives you an instanteaneous info about roughly what that wreck will be worth if you commit a fabber.

While it looks exciting, still in the dark about Modding O-o

Wasnt Jon gonna make a blog specifically for that? Or are they still working on the mod program they were gonna want us to use?

I have to disagree. Apart from very rough generalizations, this does not hold true, and in fact, the wreck model can give a deceiving look to a large amount of metal, eg, t3 bot wrecks vs factory wreck vs ship wrecks. All this means that a player must memorize wrecks and match them to units, and remember their mass values in order to make snap judgements on the strategic importance of a wreck - I believe that could be made much much easier.

I do think it's a cool concept to visually be able to see the quantity of metal in a wreck, but I believe that you could do that much better by literally linking the amount of wreckage visible on the field to the amount of metal left behind by a dying unit. Blow up a unit, and scatter its bits around, and if it's a low value wreck, make most of the bits disappear in a secondary explosion. If it's a high value unit, make it blow into larger chunks, and spawn extra chunks if necessary from inside the explosion. Cheap factories should become empty shells with a few frames and support beams askew, not a huge meaty block on the battlefield. Expensive defenses should detonate their under-ground components and spew bits into the air as they go down. A destroyed base should be rubble and twisted metal, not a neat square of 'factory here' and 'dead row of gens there'.

^ Picture of German machine gun emplacement after being hit by an artillery shell.

Hmm, we most certainly are far apart on this one. I always considered 'easy to learn, hard to master' to be the best games. Having a wreck that looks extremely similar to the unit destroyed makes it easy to learn what is worth what. Getting good enough to know what all the wrecks of all the units look like within a small fraction of a second (instinctually) should take some time and give you an advantage through 'mastery' of efficienct reclaim strategy.

Make it so hovering over the a wreck displays remaining metal reclaim, so you get the best of both worlds. The guy with the memorization will know without wasting the time to look, but the noob will only lose a second or two comparably.

Seconds add up, so the advanced player will have an advantage, but it wont create this huge barrier for new players to start working towards efficienct reclaim play.

Wreckage which looks almost the same as the built unit stops looking like wreckage.

It is jarring how wreckages in Supreme Commander(and here, assuming these are not early model passes), despite being charred to a crisp, look almost structually intact, with only slight model warping. Where are the broken bits? Like, not even the fragile antennas?

I also agree with Pawz that the disparity between wreckage size and metal content between units was decieving.

Total Annihilation did a good job of having wreckage with details twisted beyond recognition, but could still be identified as a whole. Mousing over them also told you what unit it was. Their pallete also was not just darker greys - they had some lighter tones to add volume too!

"mavor" lol