Maybe this have been on the table before, but feel the planet is too small. Maybe there will be larger planets later, but for performance reasons I would really like the planet to be a bit bigger so that the camera get to view a more flat area. My Surface pro can run the game fine when it doesn't have to deal with textures, etc.. peeking around the corner (aka long view distances). And I would really (really) like to be able to keep playing this game on my Surface Pro.
Too bad, you're stuck with this and smaller planets Of course there will be larger planets, but server optimization still has a long way to go.
There are currently 4 sizes of planets. Moons are the smallest. Ice planets are bigger. Tropical planets are larger than Ice. Earth-type planets are the largest.
Yes I understand that, but the problem is that when the camera sees the horizon, it murders the performance. Also, even if I ignore the performance issue, I still feel all of the current planetsizes are way way too small. Feels like playing on the surface of a small football.
So basically, you want flat planets so you can play this on a device it's not meant to be played on? No.
No, that is not what I want, and please refrain from putting words in my mouth. And 'no'? .. don't try and give the impression that you have any say over what Über does, or does not do. That is not your call. So unless you have anything meaningful to add to the discussion (like actual reasoning) I will most likely ignore you. Finally, I am a programmer since 1982 (been part of the demo scene for years) I would like to think that I know a thing or two about what is, and is not possible as far as graphics programming is concerned. And with that, adieu good sir.
I think the planet size currently is good. It's hard to get a feel for it with only 1 planet atm too.
Let's not get hostile here. From my PoV, it looks as if what's needed is some optimizations and graphics options to turn off those atmoshere shaders (assuming that's causing the issues). Bigger planets are just an ultimately temporary fix for your issue, and more likely than not the extra polys in having a bigger map (so that when zoomed out a reasonable distance you can not see the horizon) would completely nullify any fps gained.
It's an alpha what is needed is optimization. The size of the planets contributes to the overall feel of TA, war waged on endless numbers of planets leading to the utmost destruction of the planets. The global level is more immersive jn the position that it is.
The planet should feel small, Devs have commented that its about the right size for a 1v1 ATM and thus the cramped feeling from having 4 players is to be expected. Also as causeless stated, a larger planet would likely only be a work around and not actually solve your issue, and the greater detail(and larger number of terrain features) could cause additional issues. PA does need a lot of optimizing, but given how early of an Alpha this is(95% of Alphas wouldn't even be public at this stage) and how all this has been achieved in the last 9-10 months and the speed of builds being up out by Uber wait it out a bit longer, things will get better. Mike
I agree on the point that it is (the performance) only a temporary fix. However, let's ignore that for a moment. I still think/feel the planets are too small. But I 'do' also accept that for a 1x1 match those sizes will do, despite my very personal feeling. I merely feel that there is a lack of "grandeur" to it. It is mostly my own mental image though, because when I hear "planets", I expect "planets", not footballs (obviously not stating that I want real sized planets here) But I hope that for 4x4+, the planets are significantly larger. Now, coming back to the performance point. Yes, having a few % larger planets would help improve performance, as the camera (assuming it sits at a somewhat comfortable distance above ground level) would be able to cull away large chunks of the terrain. And I agree that would only be a temporary fix. Needless to say, this is an alpha and there are much to do when it comes to optimizing performance. And as @causeless stated, shaders typically play a large role in performance. But, having said that, I am also able to play 'Riddick: Assault on dark Athena' just fine on surface pro. So, I don't worry too much about shaders specifically. Turning off post effects like heavy blurs helps a great deal, and turning off shadows helps about just as much. But, I get the impression the largest issue in PA is with the texture streaming. Now, without access to source code, I am 'guessing' the streaming code is set to be far too aggressive. Dropping textures that are out of the way, far too early. And having to reload and recalculate the textures takes a heavy toll on the performance (this is me guessing of course) Also, loading from the disk on some computers may be prohibitively slow. And that may be true even for normally very potent machines. I am guessing that if they have a smaller set of caches, ready for switching, rather than dropping and reloading, would go a long way to improve performance. Because I have less trouble with ugly graphics, as long as the game flows. Just look at Borderlands, and how those textures drops in your face. And it's OK, because the game flows. But yeah, I am jumping the gun here with my comments. Probably because I really want to see this game doing well, and is really looking forward to battle with my mates.
All Performance related things aside, I too see some problems here, mostly regarding ships. One thing is immersion, doesn't feel right when you build large battleships and the water ( ocean, sea) is more like a river, taking the ship twice of its size to get to the other coast. Coupled with that there might be some balance issue problem as well. Depending on the power of ships, it might give a player with access to some sort of water an advantage if he manages to get a large battleship out. The latter of course is pure speculation depending on how naval stuf is being fleshed out and balanced. But the first point still persists. I don't see a serious solution though other than some sort of scaling which at the end of the day comes back to planet size. One might just have to accept it, not sure if I like the in a different thread proposed idea to have a huge planet and then just place a supcom like map in it, and make everything else not accessible or water.
Well.....don't build ships in tiny rivers? We can't really know if this is an actual issue yet as we don't have any real control over planet generation and we haven't played on any true water based maps. Don't forget that the original intention was essentially to not have any naval at all, but they were added in with the additional condition of Water Maps. Just like if you're playing on an island map, you don't fill your island with land units that aren't amphibious, you similarly don't fill tiny bodies of water with ships that can't leave it either. Mike
Common sense +1. Mike has gained a super power. Go-go super hero! Though, planets might seem small. I could do with some of the boats getting a wee bit smaller, too. Some of them seem a bit- large. Though that's really a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, honestly. As well as planet sizes. Considering the numerous other features that really need smoothing out- I think the priorities of Uber are fairly spot on with what they're working on currently and have thus far. No offense to anyone at shooting down ideas. We just need to focus on the more basic things, considering this is still fairly early alpha. Movement (Pathing), building placements, stacking, intel, Fog of War, and various triggers. (Such as when the commander explodes, all your units do as well, now.)
That isn't what he said. What he said was that even when you're given a fairly large ocean that spans most of a planetary hemisphere: 1) The ship construction bays are huge and take up a lot of space. 2) The Advanced Ship Factory is ******* huge. 3) The tier II ships themselves are so big that suddenly your ocean looks more like a pond, and giant bays and inlets are now closer to tiny creeks. On the terran planets we have, with the naval units the size they are, there simply isn't enough space for naval units to have any practical use. I've never seen a body of water large enough for two enemies to build naval units in and have naval battles. Making naval units only for oceanic planets is a bit of a waste. Your average-sized ocean is barely big enough to build a Ship Factory, Advanced Ship Factory, defenses, and then some units. It'll get crowded instantly and suddenly the enemy on the other shore is blasting your buildings under construction. Compare this to the size of the oceans on, say, Seton's Clutch. Here's a typical-sized ocean on a Terran planet. http://i.imgur.com/n45b0gi.jpg - I think it speaks for itself. The only way an enemy could develop a fleet without my units literally running into each other as they leave the ship bays is to build at the super-duper far end... and even then, once you factor in the space wasted to build his own factories, you end up only a tiny playable area in the middle. Even my Tier I units take up over a full third of the ocean with their SOI (pictured). I kind can't help but feel that the size of everything in the game should be reduced by about 33%, and then further reduce the size of the Tier I naval units by maybe 10%, and Tier II naval units and structures by 20%. It would be an easy way to expand the effective size of the planets without having to actually do anything. Building big bases feels just really weird to me, especially when suddenly you need to drop an Advanced Vehicle Plant and it takes up a relative size on the planet that could reasonably be described as the size of Egypt. This also has a tenancy to make terrain less important because unless it's a crack in the earth spanning a huge distance, the little mountains and plateaus become less like mountains and plateaus and more like bollards and speedbumps. Rather than tucking a base into the shelter of a mountain range, you just kinda end up dumping buildings all around them haphazardly. Which really begins to play hell on pathfinding...
Congrats frostiken, your ability to focus on singular aspect of a post(and the wrong aspect no less) and construe a bunch of garbage from that, instead of of reading the whole post, I knew there was a good reason to having you on the ignore list.... Mike
Are you serious? Is this serious time? Grow the **** up. He said building in oceans ends up feeling like they're tiny rivers, and rather than think about and discuss the aspect water and naval units can play on Terran planets, you instead dismissed his post with one line as 'LOL DON'T BUILD IN RIVERS'. And you have the balls to accuse me of focusing on the 'wrong aspect'? Do you want me to focus on the rest of your post? The rest of your post basically said "WE DON'T HAVE ALL THE FEATURES STOP COMPLAINING". Because you can see the future, right? As if your speculation on what the future of the game will be is somehow more legit than his observation of what the state of the game is right now? The entire point of an alpha is to address this kind of stuff NOW, so we don't have to LATER. I've never seen someone get butthurt because someone else's post didn't address the specific parts of a point THEY thought they should. Seriously, how huge is your ego? How much of the world do you think revolves around you? I think you need to take some medication for whatever crippling social disability you have.
two instances of relative scale came up here 1) planet size vs. general unit set size 2) relative sizes of unit groups (e.g. land vs naval) to a degree these are independent. since we have only a fairly limited set of planet types/sizes the first one is difficult to judge. In the final game these planet types might just not be suitable for large scale naval warfare and the naval part might just be limited to some coastal fortifications. In principle I think this is justified and desirable, as part of locality dependant strategies choosing the right subset of units for the tasks and having planets supporting inherently different kind of approaches is nice. It's true, that this might make testing naval warfare on the given maps a bit cumbersome, but probably somewhere on the road we will find a mostly oceanic planet to do this right. But changing size relations of unit sets in comparison to planet sizes doesn't make any sense at this point. For the second part, the size differences within unit sets are mostly cosmetic and a matter of taste. Ideally, the sizes also represent halfway the invested costs. For my taste, the ships are narrowly large enough, comparing biggest land vehicle and the biggest ship, I would prefer them to be a bit bigger, but rts games are traditionally a bit stingy with that (in visuals as well as in gameplay mechanics).
