How many times can Uber make the same mistake?

It simply doesn't make any sense. Unless you look at it business wise, but in that case it's a plain lie for the ones who are ignorant enough to believe such a bullock.

OP is hilarious.

No idea that the game is no where near finished being optimized and is always being worked on.

Usless thread is useless.... so... in b4 lock.

Defending the game as "nowhere near finished" on any front when they've officially released is... not logical.

I'll admit the release is flawed, but the game is still fun enough to play, more patches are in the pipeline and I'm not gonna complain. But I'm not gonna decry legitimate criticism, either.

Yeah, I don't know why I feel compelled to even participate in this discussion, but... I can also see why the OP takes umbrage at that quote from the kickstarter.

For the record, I applaud the new approach Uber is taking vis-a-vis updates, BUT, I also find it a bit disingenuous to see them claiming that they delivered a game that handles 20,000 units and more. Yes, it's theoretically capable, but since it was a PR piece, the important distinction between technical capability and practical experience is intentionally obscured. But that's the OP's point.

I find two other things strange about John's post: that he says they delivered on "Asteroids", which is a feature I personally find conspicuously lacking (asteroid were a distinct, beachhead-establishing feature that was explicitly promised, was it not? I feel as though they would serve an important gameplay function, but whatever).

And then there's this thing: "It's no secret our reputation has been hurt by the very passionate fans of Planetary Annihilation." The fans are what has hurt Uber's reputation??? Ahem. Make of that what you will.

People calling out the OP as a troll and for the thread to be locked are... the real trolls here.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

What the OP is saying is extremely reasonable. His only mistake was not waiting to reach a 10,000 post count before he made it. I.e. he made no mistake.

I don't think any accusations of trolling are a good idea, please stop. Let's stay on a technical level here.
Reading this post, especially the relation between sim speed, unit count and player number on rather powerful servers: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/testing-server-performances.65348/ makes it very obvious that 20k+ units may be "supported" or possible by building 20k walls (though later he talks about commanding an army of 20k tanks pretty directly), but nobody really wants to play like that. That's a cold fact. Uber sure still has time to fix that by introducing:
- massive optimizations
- multithreading

We'll see. I hope for the best, especially for multithreading....

Yeah I found the Uber response very bullshitty and just a tad insulting.

AFAIK Uber counts buildings as units. All buildings, mind you.

Though to be fair so did Supcom and I believe TA. (Funny how a similar del team thinks the same! )

I think if Uber announced that HR would have offline or be supported on Mac and Linux they'd get a lot more support. Though I understand the cost benefit isn't high considering how expensive developing for three platforms is. Offline and server though I'm positive would have gotten them a lot of what at the moment are potential buyers driven off by DRM.

From an engine point of view, a building is just a mobile unit that doesn't move. There isn't separate types of units, just different attributes within each that determine whether it acts like a structure or mobile unit - eg., the concept of "structure" and "mobile unit" are just the product of the players perception, the engine makes no such distinction (although it uses the values of various attributes for optimization purposes, of course).

I would comment but probably best I don't lol... PA just isn't built for todays computers not really.... I think when we have 32 core CPUs and 128GB of RAM is the norm then perhaps we'll be able to have 40k units and more then 6 planets bigger then 1000 radius in size.

32 cores really won't help, because the server isn't multi-threaded. That's the real issue in sim performance, at the moment the only way to get better is having a faster CPU. Honestly even two threads would probably hugely help sim I'd imagine at least. If they could get the game to use one thread per planet... Oh boy, it'd be awesome.

Yeah I just saw cola's server posts, really excellent info on there thats amazing and quite shocking their not multi-threaded... hmmm 1 thread per planet man? yes that would be huge!!! great idea thought that would hinder how many planets you could have though, not much different from now though ha!

I'd love to get an official word on multi-threading the CPU for the server. My cup threads I have to say, get do get used when I play though, and used a lot.

To all of the people talking about static units being counted in that 20K or non-moving units being counted as well, I don't think you read my post or what John wrote. John specifically said:

"We did release a game that you can smash asteroids into planets, fire giant lasers, commander armies of 20,000 tanks"

If I hear one more person talk about walls, I'm seriously going to bust out more gifs

Anyway, I'm not being super serious either really to be honest. Just poking a bit

They've commented before, honestly multi-threading is a very difficult thing to do so at the moment their main priority is optimization, hopefully multi-threading will come.

Supcom was never multi-threaded either, which means even today you can have sim issues. :/

I mentioned this in some other thread as well, but you know what it might even just be a bit of an economy problem with PA. In SupCom, it took a really really long time to get that many units rolling. In PA, the economy is completely on crack and in no time at all you can have 10+ factories rolling out hundreds and hundreds of units in no time at all.

If they halved metal & energy income across the board by half, that in itself would probably even go a long way to solving the problem (downside being - less epic battles).

That wasn't really an over promise though, he didnt say "in the future you can/will be able to" or anything, it was just hyperbole. Just over exaggerating, considering the large scope of the game I can see why it'd happen. I can find myself saying you can commands thousands upon thousands of units to my friends.

I remember when 1 million units was the goal (eventually turning into a dream goal, and finally just a dream).

So Human Resourcecs is expected to have 20,000+ units?
40 unit limit confirmed.

Seems more than enough to me anyway. The HR kickstarter trailer didn't involve more than 1 harbinger and a handful of harvesters anyway.

(Also, surprised no one mentioned it: I can't think of an RTS with a 100 unit limit.)

I know - it just ticked me off especially since the average experience a person has with this game is the sim will get crushed with even a fifth of this number of units in a standard multiplayer game. You've got to remember, multiplayer games are being played right now on Uber's servers. So the experience pretty much all of us have with this game isn't even remotely close to the soundbytes the Uber guys keep putting out there.

And if there is one company that could learn a thing or two about not overpromising (and should have learned by now), it's Uber. Hence, my thread title.

I can! Halo Wars I think. X3

Anyway, one million units isn't a goal, nor dream goal. It's an engine goal!

(Basically the engine can do it if you have a super amazing super computer of impossibility)

Also, no, HR is probably going to be capped pretty early and about small groups, etc... opposite of PA in a sense! 20,000 is what he said you could do in Pa.

1 million units was only ever a technical goal - ie., don't code anything in a way that could not support 1 million units, given adequate processing power. That doesn't strictly mean that current computers could handle 1 million units, although it's a good point to aim for. The main thing is to not make any design decisions that would outright prevent this from happening (eg., having it be a 32 bit game).