Planetary Annihilation LiveStream: May 3rd, 2013

It's looking fantastic! The real time lighting is looking really good and the explosions really add to the 'all out war' feel of the game.

Would be good if the planet rotated as you were playing so that the shadows started stretching further across the planet as you played.

I'm still slightly worried that when you introduce different planets into the mix, it's going to make following the action all over the system too much for a human to handle. If you introduced shared army support or something similar it would make games far more manageable. E.G. you play with two other friends, one person is assigned the roll of the primary commander and the other two are essentially support commanders. Later in the game they are assigned there own planet to fight on while the main commander continues the fight one the first.

I might be thinking a little too much into this, but I really can't help but think that multiple planet are going make this WAY too much to handle...

Great great !

I must buy a third key. ABSOLUTLY.
Got some good firends that will LOVE to have some great fun on this...

And i am the only one that found that the graphic stuff improved a lot from the last LiveStream ?
Seemed like better shadows, maybe a little better interaction among the biomes. Better water, seemed better integration (less ponds, more big "seas").
Loved the projected shadows due to sunset, and the unit turning on their light when arriving in the dark is nice !
But the dark is maybe not too dark enough (don't know if it will affect negatively gameplay though)...

And strategic icons are nice.
I particularly appreciate the ones made for the planes.
Really readable, and the plane actually felt like "in the air", not just in some intangible layer.

I'll do my best to help you to make the game you dream of Uber !
And that starts by spreading theses LivesStreams !

Ho, by the way, nicely done Garat ! You managed to keep your calm when your commander teleported faaaarr away ;-)

Great livestream! My only complaint is the projectiles are really fast, I remember dodging projectiles in TA was quite fun and slow projectiles make movements in battles a lot more important.

Mike and I have spent a LOT of time this week tweaking projectile velocities, ballistic curves, etc. I think Mike has the system where it's needed, now I need to spend a bunch of time getting it right at least for first pass. It will still take a metric ton of work to get it right, and that will be lots of alpha and beta balance work as well. But today's numbers were actually chosen because they work well in the system right now, and they look awesome. Dodging, and moving targets will still be a big deal!

http://youtu.be/bU9vVC_Hchs?t=8m42s
Look at the rockets and turrets. I think they are fairly easy to dodge with fast units. It might not look that way because it was a blob of slower units with rocket bots in the back.

It seems the units in the video are the equivalents of samson, stumpy, peewee etc, I doubt there will be a lot of land units faster than them except scouts.

Looks awesome! I'm really loving the explosion effects as well as the speed of the units.

I'm kind of curious about this. Are you saying the art of the icons needs to be worked on? Their size? When they are shown? For the 1st 2, I thought they looked pretty great and even polished.

One thing I noticed in the gameplay, which oddly didn't seem to be commented on at all, was that the defensive turret structures were aimed before building. Does that mean they won't rotate? Or at least, some turrets may not rotate?

Sounds like we need to do some testing in alpha. Soon™...

18:00 into the second video.

"How would you de-orbit a planet?"

Well I kind of always assumed that the only difference between "Planets", "Moons", and "Asteroids" was scale, and that really they'd all just be objects in space that all worked on the same game mechanics.

So you'd have a 4km diameter barren map orbiting a 20km diameter temperate map, that people would see as a moon orbiting a planet. Then if you want to hit it with an asteroid all you are really doing is building some rockets on a 1km barren map and steering it towards one of the other objects in space.

Now you can say that if the player is on an object in space (Planet, moon, asteroid, whatever) Then you have to build a number of rockets on the object relative to it's volume to get it moving. And it's travel speed is based on the size of the object vs. how many rockets it has.

And when two objects collide they do damage and have "health" based on their size. Small objects have low health and do a smaller amount of damage to things they hit. Larger objects have a lot of health and do a lot of damage to things they hit.

Now you can get these crazy scenarios where someone could build a ton of rockets on a planet the size of mars and take it on a moon and asteroid smashing road trip through the solar system. Or you could try and one shot a similarly sized planet.

Awesome stream, but please only two toughts:

- Limit the zoom out somewhat... this is foundamental for eSports... (once again look at sc2). No one wants to see blue and red dots all over the worlds (from my point of view of course).

- The graphic I would like it a bit more cartoonish (like the kickstarter trailer)

thanks again for the stream

What they look like, how large they are, when they appear, some kind of combining system, base icons, some experiments with rotation etc.

You can currently rotate all structures when you build them.

Seeing that many health bars was kind of jarring to me too, I want to see robots engaged in combat. Not obscured by UI. The artists spent a ton of time making these bots look sexy, and animated, but its hard to focus on it with these floating green bars everywhere.

I have a few ideas about how this might be improved.

#1 don't show bars at all, instead just colour shift your bots to show more red (or whatever colour you choose as a preference) as they take more damage, maybe even making them glow as they approach critical. This way your not obscuring anything.

#2 show the health bars only when a unit starts taking damage, if it stops taking damage for x amount of time fade out the bar again. Or until the bot is repaired to full health.

Apart from that the game looks awesome. Well done uber.

Btw. I love that the commander can tunnel through the world,that's an interesting game "feature". Lol

Then how do you propose players and casters keep track of all the action? The reason no strategic zoom worked in Starcraft was because there was rarely more than one battle going on at a time, since starcraft is more deathball oriented. Planetary annihilation will have multiple battles, on multiple planets, in multiple places. (or so i would assume).

How can a player or caster keep track when they are locked in a zoomed in position, especially since Uber has been leading toward no minimap?

:shock: what really? I hope not :shock:

Isn't asking for less strategic zoom kind of like asking Da Vinci to paint the Mona Lisa with less eyes?

My guess is that the health bars will be togglable.

Logically, HP bars should be off if HP = full.
I think that much, everybody can agree on?

After that, I'd say a toggle to shop HP bars or not.

Nah.. Always On. (sorry, bad joke)

Actually, I think they already were - it was put in last night, but we decided to leave em on for the demo.

Looking good, especially for such an early build!

Like the way the explosions are shaping up, I loved the explosions in the kickstarter: Big, cartoony, fluffy and powerful! Could use some lighter colors maybe?

Smokes could use some lighter colors too, I prefer the smokes in OTA than the ones in Balanced Annihilation.

Agree, it works well in Zero-K.