REMINDER: Please disable all mods. New updates often introduce compatibility issues in mods, which could make your experience way less excellent than normal. This latest update is sponsored by ... Performance. Stability and performance across the board have been improved. Client multi-threading, for instance, has been introduced to the game making it stronger, better, and faster than ever before. Along these lines, the UI has been given a new round of polish, which will make the game feel a lot more snappier when it counts the most. On the gameplay front, we've done another pass on strategic and build icons. Building and unit icons now have more graphical sizzle, making them more readable when the action gets turbo-hot. Also, strategic icons have received a similar overhaul. As always, we've included the full notes below. Oh! And if you want a sneak peek at what we're working on right now, press Tab while playing. Delicious, delicious live stats are coming! Build 68767: Provides a small change to allow casters to squelch chat from automatically appearing. It's on the social bar, it looks like a chat box. Click it to get a red hash through it, and text won't automatically show on your screen. Pressing enter WILL still display the text currently. Build 68568: Addresses an issue with control group selection, and rapidly switching between them. Addresses an issue where "Normal" AI's were not actually normal. They were accidentally being set to Absurd. Oops. If the AI was stomping you in skirmish games, please try again! Detailed Build Notes for 68331: AI: Re-vamped the AI difficulty levels. AI: Added a new difficulty flag to set whether the AI prioritizes scouting areas of the planet by metal spot count. AI: AI can now build the TML Bot. AI: Increased the value to the AI of destroying metal/energy producers and consumers. AI: Improved AI attack location selection. AI: AI will see fabbers as a threat now. AI: Modified the AI fabber to factory ratio. AI: AI will build orbital fighters to defend against orbital threats better. Alerts: Fixed the alert preview border. Audio: A ton of weapon and move sounds Client FX: Delta V jets should now appear at any distance. Client FX: Fixed particle system frustum culling, to actually do it properly. Gameplay: Dead enemy units (especially cmdrs) will no longer trigger sight notifications. This fixes the bug where dead cmdrs triggered VO. Gameplay: Fix to allow spawn effects to play on non-primary planets. Gameplay: Fix for SXX not attacking targets while on patrol. Gameplay/UI: Updated build bar icons. This is a major overhaul of all unit build icons, coloration, etc. You will probably need to re-learn the icons a little bit, but they should also be a lot easier to learn now. Gameplay/UI: Art pass on all strategic icons. There is now consistent UI language on strat icons that should make it easier to quickly assess your armies/opponents. Lobby: Spectators will no longer hold colors. Lobby: Adding a new slot will no longer reset ai difficulty. Also includes various layout fixes. Linux: Disable persistent buffer mapping on Linux. Turns out there's some issue with it on at least NVIDIA proprietary drivers, so disable it. Mac: Fix PA.app icon on Mac. Mac/Linux: Fix period, underscore, etc for Mac & Linux. Settings: Changes to the keybinds will now correctly register as a change to the settings which allows the keybinds to correctly interact with the restore defaults button. Settings: The server region selecter will now correctly interact with with the save/ save & exit buttons. Changes to the server region will no longer be applied until the settings are saved. UI: Fixing the position of the advanced radar in the build bar. UI: Fix cases where the planet list panel did not sync up with the camera. UI: Fixed the border around holodecks. UI: Fix typo in advanced defense tech for GW UI: Fix for stale error messages showing up in the transit scene. (e.g. Incorrect "failed to connect" style messages) UI: UI actions triggered by the keyboard should now play an audio response. UI: Fix for the notification alert acknowledge keybinding (defaults to 'space'). UI: Players (self) will no longer appear in their own friendlist. UI: Fix for displaying KS backer cmdrs when the backer name is not given. Improved behavior if you redeems a coupon for an item that isn't in the catalog. UI: Fix bug where players panel was not informed of each armies allies. UI: Explicitly setting strategic icon priority for base unit specs that use the default value. UI: Adding the gamestats panel (bring it up with 'tab'). UI: Fix bug in econ display where shared resources could show more pips then intended. Complex Changes Lists: [Graphic / Client Multithreading] - Parallel-for implementation for performant asynchronous and parallel-for processing. - New lightweight mutexes for high-frequency locking. - Parallelization of some heavy-weight CPU workloads.... - Many client update operations are now threadsafe. Or should be. - Particle depth sort is now done asynchronously, saving up to 20ms/frame of CPU time for late-game. - Animation update is now spread across many cores, giving a 2-4x speedup of this code (typically up to 10ms/frame on late game, now down to 4ms or less on a quad core system). - Post animation client update is now spread across many cores, giving a 2-4x speed up on this. - Particle update is now done in parallel-for, reducing execution time by 2-4x. - Strategic icons are now depth and priority sorted, with the commander on top. - Particles are now distance and camera-frustum culled (reducing rendering overhead by (sometimes) a significant factor (2-6ms observed in late-game). - Various bug and correctness fixes in particle update and rendering. [Gameplay] Weapon work: - Clients can now show units targetting multiple entities - Any given unit can target up to four unique targets - Autoweapon task now uses weapon position to calculate distance for determining closest target. This does not change the max range of any unit or weapon, but individual weapons will prefer targets that are closer - This is most noticeable for the battleship where the front and rear turrets are quite far apart [Gameplay/UI/Modding] Start of match features: -Added a 5 second count down after all players select a landing spot. -On match start the camera will now look at the players choosen spawn. -the Commander spawned for each player will be selected on match start. -Added an api call to set your commander id, and updated api call for commander selection to select the commander from id if set. (maintains old functionality (select all commander in an army) if you switch armies or never set commander id) -Added commander id to the server state message, and set commander id from this (so each client knows the id of the their commander) [UI / Modding] Hover Panel Information - The more information is now passed to the ui on hover. Cleaned up the way target information is sent. New information includes: target team (color), damage, rate of fire, build arm metal/energy cost. - Added names and descriptions to the buildable ammo types. This information will be displayed when hovering an active launcher. - Hover panels now show extra information, including: thumbnail image, s.icon, team color, damage, rate of fire, damage per second, build power, build efficiency. - Also includes various fixes to handle the merge to main (the gamestats panel has been included and the game options sidebar has been fixed). Free Cam - Debug and free camera controls are now editable - Free cam now has 6DOF controls in planetary mode - Free cam controls override any other controls that interfere with it (aka s and f don't make lots of noise in debug camera!) - Groundwork is laid for unit and celestial based 6DOF controls - Change your keybindings to get into free cam mode with the 'toggle free camera' option Updated community translation strings for: - German - Dutch - Spanish - French - Russian - Polish (Poland) - Turkish (Turkey) - Czech (CR) - Dutch (Belgium)
Tasks closed/fixed on bug tracker for 68331: PA#3427 - OS X: Undesirable strategic icon layering PA#3544 - OS X: Icons missing on hover info panel PA#3614 - OS X: PA.app using system default application icon PA#3608 - Linux: game don't work on systems that only support OpenGL 3.1. PA should work on Sandy Bridge and RadeonSI drivers out of box. PA#3746 - Linux: now game should properly fail to start on 32-bit via Steam Before it's was silent startup fault, now it's "missing executable". PA#2128 - UI: Previous error message shown when moving to lobby PA#3004 - UI: Planet select menu out of sync after camera anchor hotkeys used PA#3478 - UI: Notification voice for enemy commander detected for wreck PA#3626 - UI: Cannot switch server in settings Finally fully fixed, now "Save" button work as expected by default. PA#3631 - UI: Cannot unpause game, or quit from in-game menus after pausing PA#3750 - Rendering: PiP causes visual glitches when on PA#2942 - Other: "scenario" spelling error in sim stats Tasks closed/fixed on bug tracker for 68568: PA#3700 - OS X: crashupload program doesn't have execute permissions PA#3801 - UI: Unable to rapidly switch between control/ctrl groups Will be updated with more fixes soon once I found out what else fixed...
Option to force enable those needed. I didn't have any issues with this feature on Intel driver and AMD FOSS drivers.
Is there a reason why I am still not seeing any performance improvements, I mean my FPS is worse than it was before...? (I'm using a mac btw)
Bugs I noticed on PTE; will likely be assigning bug tracker numbers soon. FS#3773 - Unit Icons missing in hover bar during Galactic War Code: -1 14:06:48.036955 W | PID: 11385 | -1 14:06:47.973416 Requesting resource read for coui://ui/main/game/live_game/img/build_bar/units//pa/units/commanders/imperial_invictus/.png with internal id 2137 reported FAIL PA#3774 - Unable to "Return to War" after reviewing game "Abandon War" is shown in ESC menu instead. if you quit (e.g. cmd-Q/Alt-F4) the results will be recorded when you return. FS#3775 - Health bars not show for mobile units Does appear for buildings and commanders. Intentional? FS#3776 - Hotkeys can select things that the unit can't build e.g. commander can get the build outline for an advanced factory, but can't build it. FS#3777 - Planned building outlines can overlap At least one of the buildings doesn't get built when the builder arrives.
SXX is correct, but there are other areas. While your initial FPS may not be drastically different, also watch for later game. One of the main areas these changes can really help is late game. I would love to know your system specs though. This will not make low/min spec machines suddenly scream, but it should make a low or min spec machine maintain a better overall performance curve for the entire game.
Saw some weird ai behavior. Two ais sat there for half an hour fighting against each other but didn't really expand. They were stuck with 40 - 70 metal for the whole game. One of them built a huge blob of units but only used it to chase down the other ai's small raiding forces that it used to constantly attack (that one only built a decent air force and used it to surround the other ai with it..but it didn't expand past it's inital base by building more stuff...). I think that behavior is really cool for new players because the ai doesn't spiral out of control and has a nicely contained base that they can fight against. But I am quite surea that I set both ais to absurd difficulty Also, I noticed that "breathing" idle animation for the bots. Breathing robots. That's creepy
Hey, So I just played a decently long game, a big 2v2v2v2v2 and, I didn't really see any improvements, more or less the same, my specs are: Processor 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 Memory 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Graphics Intel HD Graphics 4000 Software OS X 10.9.3 (13D65) Now I could run this game fine before, maybe a little lag, ( I would get like 10 fps when it was a large system) but a lot of people have told me that they have seen a major performance issue and I guess I still haven't really seen any....
Cool! Am I right in assuming that the BP_Bend projection mode has been fixed? Brushes seem to be deforming much better than they were before (this is very obvious with the jungle temple, but also noticeable with other larger brushes). And when I say before, I don't just mean when they weren't deforming based on height variation, I mean they're better than they've ever been. Oh, and a bug I kept forgetting to mention; the sliders in the system editor don't synchronize if you change an attribute's value directly. Not all that important, just thought I should mention it.
Just played (terribly) on a 3-planet system in Galactic War for 58 minutes. I was attempting (in vein) to invade a planet the AI held solidly, when the AI commander used an Astraeus to plop himself on one of the planets that I held solidly. In the middle of my fierce invasion the game was suddenly over, and I had to replay it to see the not-so-wise decision. Otherwise my butt would have been stomped by the AI (again). Very damn fun though! The balance is really coming along and the explosions are looking better than ever.
Are the colours in the bottom left UI supposed to correspond to the colour of the player, or is it simply friendly/hostile?
Nice update. I'm a little disappointed that UI lag hasn't been improved that much (I'm talking about main menus and stuff. In-game is great!). But I have a less than great system (4 GB RAM, GT 430). Hopefully this will be optimized further in the future!
I just got what i believe is a UI crash during a GW match, basically, the UI stopped responding, couldn't click drag, or select anything. However, after pausing my game, going into settings, and clicking save and exit without actually changing any options, my UI fixed itself. If other people are having problems with this, they might like to try that as a work-around. EDIT: Also, I'm able to play multiple GW games in a row now instead of having to quit out and reopen PA to play multiple games. Also, area build commands are a little bit janky on metal planets, you can't drag your cursor directly over a trench, so if you want a build area command that encompases or passes some of the impassable trench terrain, you have to skirt your cursor around it, which can be frustrating in some places when trying to slap down MEX build orders.
Welcome to the Forum If you can I recommend getting your RAM up to minimum spec for PA which is 4 GB RAM. Also update your graphics driver to the latest see if that helps; if its not. --> http://www.geforce.com/drivers e.g. Manual Driver Search
Is this an automated post? I did say I have 4 GB RAM, after all. Jokes aside, yes I did update my drivers and I did follow the performance improvement guidelines thread. Still, the UI is pretty laggy in the main menu, settings menu, lobbies, etc. On the other hand, the in-game UI is pretty smooth and responsive (except for that damned build menu), and the game is usually at around 30 fps. It's just the main menus that take a while to respond to my mouse hovering/clicking. Anyway, I'm willing to bet that it's more of an issue with optimization than an issue with my system, since I don't normally have this kind of lag in other games.
Are server mods working okay? I tried to host a game with the cheat server mods enabled, and my friend could not see the game in the lobby browser.
