How long until planetary travel is implemented?

Just me finishing up a match and thinking to my self how excited i am to travel planets. Is there an estimated time until the planetary travel and systems to be implemented, or is that going to be a beta or gold game copy thing.

Best Regards

BlackWood

no estimate, it'll come when it's done

Between now and December

or more accurately, it'll come when all more important core aspects are properlly implemented, from what I've seen the Core Gameplay still has a good ways to go before I'd consider it complete enough to move onto the inter-plantary stuff, the Topic index has some threads on it if you want to see what others have thought about in terms of potential executions of it if you're interested.

Mike

I would rather they waited until all the core stuff is done with a small amount of polish.

From what I have seen there are some big things that need some polish and finishing before something that big is added. I think Planetary travel is more Beta stage than alpha.

- Reply feature needs a little work
---- You can't grab and more the slider and it will still reverse time if the player bar is hidden, leaving you with no indicator that your going back in time.

- The mass unit selection and management keys that have been in TA and Sup-com are not done. (IE: Ctrl+A to select all air, etc)

- Building and resource placement still needs hashing out.

- A ton of work on units to make planets seem smaller once your econ gets going.
---- The subset that we have now will simply not hack it once you have increased the play field by over 9,001 percent.

- Victory conditions need work.

- The terrain generator is not yet finished (I played on the exact same planet twice)

- AI is still unfinished and most likely will not be until the end-ish of beta because other stuff needs to be done before you can tell the AI how to do XYZ tasks.

- (add big long list of other stuff that I missed here)

If they where to put in planetary travel at this moment without finishing out some of the basic core and management stuff, then big games would be impossible to manage.

Unless the game mechanics for a single sphere of influence work correctly it would be premature to add other planets, moons or asteroids.

I haven't played the alpha yet (as Linux version is not available yet and my Windows box is 170km away from me). But from the videos I could see stuff like disappearing engineers that could then build stuff on the placeholder moon for example. As funny as it is it is far from functional .

My complete base and enemies where transported to the sun.. so in a sense planeraty travel already exists :mrgreen:

I lol'd.

And yes, the alpha isn't a finished game. If you want finished wait until the actually release date. The alpha is for the people who want to influence ongoing development directly.