Planetary Annihilation LiveStream: May 3rd, 2013

No it's not. Ever heard of a projection? For that matter, ever read one of the numerous threads that have proposed working solutions to this problem?

...And your point is that neither should PA, despite 3d planets being THE main advertised feature of the game...? :shock: We should just accept the loss of the whole-map overview, a standard RTS feature since Dune 2, the evolution of which, Strategic Zoom, was THE main advertised feature of Supreme Commander, and is at the top of the feature list for PA? Color me surprised, I'd figure every backer would want a working strategic zoom, let alone just a way to see the whole map!

A working zoom has nothing to do with seeing the whole map.
Projections are not exactly without drawbacks. I dunno if they really would work that well. Discussions in other threads have lead me to the feeling that they would be rather hard to use.

Strategic zoom has everything to do with seeing the whole map. It's essentially a way to turn your whole screen into a minimap from which you can control units.

Would you be happy if Supcom's 'strategic zoom' meant that you could only see one part of the map at a time, and had to move around constantly to see everything? How would that be different from a slightly zoomed out normal RTS view?

No disagreement there. The question is, are those drawbacks worse than not having a full overview? I don't think so.

I have to say this attitude from backers is pretty bizarre. We all agree in theory that strategic zoom is essential. But this

http://youtu.be/bU9vVC_Hchs?t=7m30s

is not strategic zoom. It's not even a minimap. It's worse than a minimap! A Starcraft player would get pissed off by how hard it is to see what's happening here. At least they have a minimap that gives them the global overview. But with the system we see here, you can apparently zoom in like a Starcraft camera or you can zoom out like a... slightly zoomed out Starcraft camera. At no point do you get the overview afforded by the Starcraft minimap, let alone the Supcom stratzoom.

My definition of strategic zoom is different from yours though, to me it is just the possibility to zoom in and out and have strategic icons. I agree that more work has to be spent on this.
There are lots of ideas all over the forums. In my personal list half transparent symbols are on the top. Followed by a type of mini-map that shows you always the "other" side of the planet.
It's gonna need testing to see what works.

Agreed.

just a maybe:

maybe Uber could add some kind of mercator projection to the game. A hotkey or button, that if you hit it, will project the map in fullscreen.

Or like Colin said, a minimap in mercator projection. But this only solves the problem of playing on one planet^^

Sadly that's a just a big particle I used for size reference when making the effect that I forgot to remove. For some reason the game decided to sort the commander explosion particles in reverse so all the parts that should of been on top were shown under the stuff below.

Still great job at first pass. I am sure you will get it all worked out. Like Nuetrino said, the muzzle flashes are very impressive. I very much enjoyed watching the peewees blast things apart.

I'd like to see long range artillery in the next LiveStream. Especially artillery that fires bullets just below the escape velocity so that projectiles start orbiting the planet . It could potentially be used as a very interesting anti-air weapon.

I see a bunch of heretics in this thread that need some purging. :evil:

How could you not like the explosions? Fluffy explosions, mofu mofu. :mrgreen:

Seriously, I loved those explosions and I don't care that they make units hard to read. Strategic icons everywhere and its suddenly easy to see again. Else you'll end up with the white flashes from SupCom which make things easy to see but just look sooo underwhelming.

Anyway, it looks like you did some nice updates to the graphics, the different terrain blends in quite nicely now and the shadows of the mountains were just to die for. Also I have to say it again, you use a great colour palette, making the planet look alive and just nice overall.


The music in the beginning also did sound great, nice to hear more of it.


Also, nice shoutout to knight who is like an answering bot on these forums in the last few hours. :shock:

It's always tough in the days after a Livestream. Didn't help that yesterday I saw Ironman3, got a headache and went to bed as soon as I got home, a lot of catching up to do this morning! xD

Setting an example is fine, it's living up to it that's hard! xD

Mike

The only reason I can think of to de-orbit a planet would be to crash it into the sun. But if you wanted to destroy it why not just use asteroids?

This is absolutely something that needs to be adressed way more seriously than it appears to be. SupCom would not be such a great strategic game without its strategic zoom. Being able to see what´s going on on the whole map and give orders from the strategic zoom is not just a feature, it´s a key part of the gameplay. And I am sure that gameplay is the one thing that made a lot of us back PA.
If you have to constantly move the camera around the planet just to see what is going on, then move again to tell your units to go the other side or whatever, the game will soon be a pain to play. It will be an action game, not so much a strategic one.

As for the QA part about graphics, will you do anything about the smooth shading on hills and canyons? I know it would add significantly to the vertex count to make them flat, but the smooth shading just looks bad and not at all like the concepts.

Or I guess you could add hard or slightly beveled edges as a normal map. You already have virtual textured normal maps on the planets right? That would probably be ideal.

you sure thats not just the stream quality?

- They did say that post processing was not being rendered in-game yet

- This can be done through normal mapping, although they may not have that system in place yet (though I don't know what their plans are). Smoothing the normals would probably be the cheapest way (resource-wise) to do this - you don't have to add extra faces that way.

My guess is that they'd have a normal mapping system on top of the diffuse/color maps, but I'm not sure. I'm interested in the nerdy tech details myself, so I'd love to hear Uber chime in.

Just a question on the streaming process itself - I found the youtube video even in 720p to be very blurry and hard to see things - the units were extremely hard to distinguish, and so on.

Would it come out a lot clearer if the screen resolution of the game was the same as the video recording?

What if you could switch to "holographic mode" and view the planet like in sci-fi military briefing rooms. At least then you could see twice as much information at once. The detail close to the "equator" from your perspective would still not be great, but I think this would help the problem a lot. Then maybe to issue an order to the other side of the planet without rotating you could just hold "alt" or some other key so the front side of the planet fades and you issue your normal command.

I had a quick search through the forums and this has been discussed a bit. If the engine isn't capable of supporting the holographic idea then maybe just faded icons would do like suggested here: viewtopic.php?p=521999#p521999

Also, Mavor did mention the minimap in the April 19th stream: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugz7I8Z1bkI&t=14m48s So you can be sure they are considering this problem.

having a semi-transparent world would be a neat solution

Could not post earlier, i've just watched and re-watched, again and again and again just to ensure i was not dreaming :lol: This is just incredible. I did not expect pre-alpha to be that much polished. What can i say except that all people at Uber are doing an amazing stuff.
Thank you so much for respecting the kickstarter comitments. I love you UBER