Terrain Doodads need more role than being 'just' obstacles.

Well just think about it, if the models get smaller, planets get bigger, and features get bigger. This means you can play on smaller planets yet they seem larger. The only thing that would hurt performance is that now you can fit more units on a planet.

Well, except that if you want to zoom in on units, then it may require terrain textures to be much bigger if you want to preserve quality. smaller units => zooming in much more ...

Well i agree, but i wonder if all people are able to understand how much bigger is the required level of technicity and complexity for such RTS. Using flat maps would probably have been piece of cake. Making an RTS on sphere is obviously a big challenge.

no.. no.. you naive boy, having higher contrast in scale automatically eats up more ram and performance in genreal.

Size is irrelevant in the virtual worlds; is it a town? a city? a state? a planet?

you can have all of those with the same level of detail in the virtual world and they will eat the same resources.

So the key here is level of detail : and that's what' we're hacking at, by making the level of detail higher you're saying in a certain space must reside a unit that has this much detail, and I’ll have them interact with each other and the décor at that scale. the smaller they are the more can happen period, and first and foremost, the more can happen with their surroundings, not to mention that's a larger time period in which to keep the model's texture loaded as it will have more difficulty being off "screen" (screen, here being a planet's face you're looking at.)

the graphic card will also spend more time determining what half of a pixel it fills at the same distance (as unless Uber has some changes there soon, the whole model is still being rendered no matter the distance).

so even without supposed greater number of units, Bigger scale forcibly implies more resources.

It has always been this way. It will always be this way.

I've made my peace with that.

now the real question is : "are smaller scales correctly optimised?" because if they're not (and they are not if Uber have not spend time making smaller units and playtesting them, then trying to find fixes for them to tax the resources reasonably) then instead of the gradual performance real estate you would expect to loose, you'll get an irregular, completely erratic loss kind'of like what I experienced testing out gigantic planets, way beyond the "experimental" range, where all kinds of new bugs and erratic PA behaviour popped up you won't encounter in "reasonable" gameplay.

where you're going is the same thing.

Unless Uber optimizes the way for you it will in no way shape or form be on-par with the expected experience for that scale.

Okay.. Let's say I have a size 100 planet, yes? Well then let's say I shrunk every unit down to half the size. Now this size 100 seems two times bigger, without using up ANY more resources, because it did not change, the units changed. You must understand that.

The feature scope/technicality of what they are trying to pull off is just too big and thus we are going to end up with lots of half-cocked game mechanics. That being said I still think the game is awesome, and even in it's current state it's a lot of fun. I wonder if they will continue to develop the game after v1.0 has been released, like they have promised. Or will we have to wait for Planetary Annihilation 2.

I understand that you have not understood that it would not use the same resources.

please re-read my post.

you cannot magically have no toll for increasing graphic and physical depth.

That would imply you increased the quality of everything else, I'm saying simply shrink the units.

you REALLY aren't reading me.

make sure you aren't having difficulty with the terms I'm using.

I, in no way shape or form implied that. you misread me.

if you were to shrink the units (and yes I understood you meant just that) you would get a performance toll as a result.

It may not seem logical as it is the same model, same planet, same everything, just that the model is smaller.

I'm saying, yes, that alone is enough to weigh down the PC.

How so? Explain to me how that would hurt performance when you'd get less space between tris, smaller model means everything on that model is scaled down, you'd also get less surface area for textures, which means textures on units are also simplified. (As if they'd even need to be)

to boot : that the engine isn't expecting the model's tris to be able to break off into so many vertices at that scale.

if that worked fine then that the engine is applying shadows to a smaller area for that unit, smaller shadows representing more work on the shadowing engine that likes filling big surfaces rather than small ones (which equates to intricate detail for it). same for point-light part of the engine.

on the same camera motion of zooming-in to that unit than out and panning until the unit is off-screen for both scenes , having to store the rendered model for a longer period of time.

and I have no grasp of the lingo to go with all of this.

but without being optimized first, a much smaller size set of units will bear a much larger toll on the computer.

try to look at it this way:

I have under my microscope a flea :

I could have my max in zoom (and the metaphor here is not view distance, it's the unit's size, NOT THE ZOOM IN GAME, just and only the unit's size) at 4x, and I couldn't go any further.

say that's current PA.

now I unlock 400x zoom.

The field of depth, in terms of what the unit's size in relation to it's terrain is, has actually increased (remember, the metaphor here is that we made the unit smaller)

seemingly without adding any detail (as the textures were untouched (maybe shrunk) the trig and it's proportions, untouched, simply made smaller and the skeleton, the same), I added detail.

Here is what I believe in this would result in for viewing a unit so that it fills up the same amount of screen real estate in both case without proper optimizing :

i support the thread i want the terrain to be a weapon

Alas! Such is the corporate culture engendered by intellectual property law. They falsely believe that their success comes from a state-enforced monopoly on an idea, and will go to ridiculous lengths to protect it, often harming themselves and their community.

Agree with the sentiment of this thread. The concept of elevated land being a nice spot for some artillery is pretty central to RTS's, otherwise we've traded the interesting terrain strategic features with the 'spherical map' idea.

I still can't believe this isn't in rts games...as far and advanced as pcs are this should be the first thing in all maps for rts games..I mean come on it was in ta back in the 90s..I thought we would see real wars where someone with fewer forces wins bc they use the terrain strategically vs a much larger force..I really hope pa isn't going to be flat maps long term...

lava should be a hazard not glowy water…

Remember the old days of Supcom, where lava on maps would insta-kill units that walked on it?

I want something like that, plus a texture update.