If you had the power to change anything and everythign about this game, what would you do?

Tiberium grows back.

obviously not as fast as you can spend it
I've only played generals and I'm p sure generals has finite resources

In generals every faction has an infinite money maker. GLA has black markets, China has hackers, and USA has supply drop zones.

Don't forget oil wells.

I don't see why "not as fast as you can spend it" is an argument. You an build more factories than you can afford in PA as well. The point is moment to moment how many units can you create given the resources on the map? Right now the answer is a lot. Very many. Too many. In C&C it is far less, so those games don't run into performance problems just from regular play.

Multi Thread Sim.

You right PA could have less eco available or units could cost alot more to the point where most games you only have like 50 units at one time.

But i like the pace of PA with lots of units early game. So it would still be nice to have a unit cap option so late game doesn't slow down.

what would that be good for?

generaly i don't like a veterancysystem because of a chance of snowball ...
and keeping units alive should be a general incentive anyway because you do want as much damage as possible with those units ...

It's cool in Dawn of war 2 and company of heros, becuse the game is built around keeping units alive by retreating them and such.

It's not great when even elite units in games like Supcom and PA are more like cannon fodder then the specific cannon fodder unit in other rts games.

Zerglings are worth more alive then T3 assault bots to me.

tiberium grows back at a rate slower than that of mining it, so you can't sit on just one tiberium source the whole match

To the game reach its full potential, we need a faster sim as faster sim means bigger battles. I remember someone saying that a modder did mult thread sim in Spring, is it possible to create a custom simulation to PA?

We don't have the source code for the PA engine unfortunately- the mods we can do are because uber specially created a mod system that allows us to create content. They still own the engine however.

Spring on the other hand is a totally open source project, which is why zerver was able to create the mt sim version. That was stripped out however as his version of the engine wasn't open source.

Thanx for the reply. Did you had the chance to play the mt sim version?

Ultimately the simulation may need to run parallel on a GPU(if possible) to get a significant speed up.

It's currently limited to one thread (!) so it's only using half of 1 core on most modern CPUs.

Allowing the Sim to scale to even 4 threads would be a huge (4x) potential speedup. The Sim probably isn't something you can accelerate with a gpu either- whilst gpus have huge arrays of small 'cores' (shaders) they are very slow and only work for massively parralell tasks. An RTS simulation is a linear task however so can't be easily broken up like that (which is why PA didn't implement it). I think it would actually be much slower on a gpu.

That said it isn't impossible to multi thread it, however it requires some clever work around to split it up in a way that doesn't break it. The best idea I've heard for PA was Jon Mavors' early thoughts of making the sim *per planet* rather than global. That does have it's issues however as with units being able to move between planets there needs to be a way to hand then off from one simulation thread to another (not impossible, but tricky).

Zerver managed to create a multi thread sim for a single map game, and it worked well, however no one besides him knows exactly how it did it (as Zerver never released the source for his version of Spring).

Yes, I think it was by far the best version of Spring there has been. We are talking smooth frame rates at the end of an 8 v 8 team battle with several thousand units on screen. I remember I was one of a few people who used it and we were sitting there still with 30+ fps when everyone else in game using the default engine were crawling down at 10 fps

It did have some limitations however- Spring has integrated a powerful mod system called 'lua' into the main game that allows extra UI features to be added easily. When running the MT version I had to disable most of the lua widgets as many of them weren't compatible or ran very slowly on the MT version compared to standard. That's the thing- there are *always* trade offs. Personally I'd take a less powerful UI with better overall performance any day.