It might be better to monitor deaths from the last minute as a sliding window, to put a 'cost of exchange' figure somewhere? For spectators, the spectator panel would be a good place to put it.
Two things that would really improve the game for me: First-order build queues PROBLEM: You select a cloud of builders, give them a list of buildings to construct, then you grab all of them and send them off to do something urgent for a bit. Your original list is now lost. FIX: Instead, display a small icon next to the next-to-be-constructed (or currently-in-progress) building. Clicking a worker onto the icon assigns him to the entire queue, not just that one building. Smart builder allocation PROBLEM: You have a swarm of 20 T1 builder and one T2 builder. Tell them to build 20 advanced buildings. The T2 builder makes his way to the building, starts construction. The T1 builders swarm around him, slowly getting into range to help out. The building completes, and the T2 builder has to fight his way through a dense sea of T1 bots to get into range to start the next building. This is highly suboptimal. FIX: What if it worked like this? T2 bot gets to the building. Builds for a few seconds, then moves on to the next building. Bots cluster around the first building. Once the T2 bot moves on from the second building, a few workers immediately peel off to continue it. Instead of clumping up, the T1 bots space out to about five per building. This reduces pathfinding delays and improves total completion time. Sadly, IRC informs me neither of those are currently possible given the limited API. Nonetheless, I wanted to propose them in case some dev is looking for ideas to expand the mod API.
The easiest way is probably to require PA Stats and use that data. Deferred Commands Press a button to initiate deferred commands. You then issue commands to units, which only get sent to the units once you press the button again. It will be a bit of a hack given the current screen coordinate situation, but usable probably. You could do things like firing n nukes to n different locations, where they all leave their launchers at the same time. Or set up pincer movements, or attack a base from 5 places at once. This would be useful for anything that requires precise timing really. Implementation thoughts: Monitor engine.call for things we want to defer, add them to a queue. Capture camera anchors and unit selections as necessary to replicate the commands Cry when we realise it's more complicated than that
Planet Rings Modify the atmosphere shader (light_fog.fs) to produce a series of concentric rings around the equator instead (or in addition to!) of the normal effect. I don't know much about shaders, but this looks possible to me. Bonus points: Have a conditional in the shader that only does this for planets over a certain size.
It's not part of the system panel, but I've started something along these lines. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-missile-command.58542/
I'm still pouting because the power generators don't flicker anymore. Has someone made a mod to put this back in the game?
Team Colour Fix Is it possible to change the team colours to anything we want? Pink and red are too similar, white is too hard to see. Often this leads to rehosts for casting, particularly in tournament games. Make white grey, change pink so it doesn't look red, etc. Challenge Mod A mod which presents the player with a set of goals. Either the challenges could be done in any game at any point, or the player selects a challenge to do and a game is set up especially for the challenge (on a particular map in a particular scenario, poor mans single player mode). The challenges could be time based (fancy). The mod could use PA Stats to gather the information and check the user isn't cheating by doing something against the rules of the challenge. Either the unit that shouldn't be built gets deleted (fancy), or the comm gets deleted so they have to restart to try the challenge again. A few possible challenges against hard AI: Only fireflies Only T1 No air on a naval map Leave comm idle for one painful minute before starting Boom bots only Orbital/air/naval/bot/vehicle only (5 separate challenges) No fabbers A few other possible challenges: Get to T2 asap Launch a nuke asap Suggest challenges, my mind is numb There could be local best times (personal) , and/or a top 10 scoreboard online showing your performance against others (fancy). Gentlemen's Mod There are all these different types of rules to choose from (like in the challenge mod). You and your opponent(s) follow the same rules, compliance governed by the ever-watching PA Stats. Maybe a ladder for each ruleset, but probably not viable unless we focus on just a few specific gentlemen's rules. Milestones mod Global milestones, possibly local milestones too, of games over your PA career (with PA Stats enabled of course). Built x of y overall Built x of y in a single game Defeated n opponents The main work would be a tool to parse data collected by PA Stats, to create the actual data used in the mod. Once we have the data we need, it would be trivial to display milestone badges or a page in-game showing the milestones achieved.
Server mod: Up to 11 All the units are 11x quicker than vanilla. Should make for some fun, if not entirely serious, games.
Teleporter portal colour Colour the portal/glow of linked teleporters the same. ie like this but not like a child did it:
I'd like a way to reliably detect big battles or important events using the alert system. Maybe a lot of unit deaths close together in time and location, or nuke launches, halley activation, etc. This would be a really hard mod to make, but it would be really great because then we could do things like send special notifications for big events or automatically open a pip.
Replay subtitles A mod which overlays text to a replay. Could be used as a poor mans cast, or anything else that could make use of annotating games. Would require an external server to store the subtitles. Each user could store one subtitle per replay. When playing back a replay, a user with the mod could pick the subtitle to use from a list. The subtitle files could be a simple json format. Replay commentary The same but with audio tracks.
Surface Area Display the estimated surface area planets and systems in the system editor, in order to provide a sense of game size, load times, and memory usage. Edit: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-surface-area.62643/ Programatic System Creation Any time I think of adding multiple planets in Instant Sandbox code, I stop at the point of having to provide coordinates and vectors. Take a specification of what-orbits-what, filling in any other missing planet details. Mainly a support library, but it might be possible to build an interface for system designer as well.
Multiple factory waypoint queues Micro is fine and all, but being able to have multiple sets of waypoint queues defined for a single factory would be good. Being able to define a single queue for a unit type, or a set of queues that are cycled through by whatever is built next (do both, but only allow one type of multi-queue per factory, for ease of implementation and intuitiveness). An air factory could have three queues, one for each of firefly, hummingbird, bomber. Fireflies are set to area patrol the planet, hummingbird to patrol the perimeter of the base, bomber to land nearby and amass. A bot factory could have combat fabs assist something, grenadiers congregate here, stingers patrol the base A bot factory could have a queue to go to each of the mex clusters. As units roll off the line they each go to a different mex cluster Set up queues to attack the same spot from multiple directions Maybe one in ten units area patrols the planet for vision/light raiding potential, the rest congregate This would require the queues to be in the UI to take over queue handling.
Balance Lab Set up a game spectating two x0 AI, Create-unit and Change-control enabled. Track unit copy-paste buffer per player. Maybe enable normal-style unit hotkeys for setting paste. Hotkey to swap player. Additional controls to set number to paste for each player, with a metal cost control that sets number for both players at once based on current unit. Galactic Intelligence Show some information on the GW map screen. Number of opponents with evaluation (weak, competent, highly-dangerous, etc.) Show tech that can be gained - technically cheating, but it could add an additional layer of strategy to system selection. Edit: - https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-section-of-foreign-intelligence.64173/ - https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-section-of-research-and-exploration.64227/
GW Cleanup Sometimes you find a bug and end up with a bunch of unplayable games. Add a delete button to active wars with confirm dialog. Meanwhile, you can do this with the debugger: On GW Active Wars: Code: require('shared/gw_manifest').removeGame(model.activeGames()[0]) Replacing '0' with the appropriate index.
Please, can you explain how to delete those inactive campaigns in GW if it can be done without any knowledge of coding? Thanks!
Launch PA, go to Galaxy War List. Open a Windows Explorer at the same time. Go to the following path inside PA folder : stable\Coherent\Debugger and launch "Debugger.exe" (mine is D:\Games\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation Launcher\Planetary Annihilation\stable\Coherent\Debugger as an example) Click on Go Click on Galaxy War : Start Then click on the following icon in the bottom left corner: And copy the text above and press enter. If you go back to PA, first GW should be removed.
