now that the game has officially launched to the public as 1.0, I'm curious what is in the pipeline for future releases? are there any plans for having different high terrain that is navigable? like ramps, hills, mountains, valleys, etc. you know, like total annihilation had, and tanks would drive slower uphill, certain kbots could walk over terrain that some vehicles couldn't. any plans for nukes in the ocean causing tidal waves that flood and destroy coastal bases? how about a mode that allows you to play on a flat map, rather than a sphere, so you can play on large flat maps. are there any modders out there that have stated any interest in making a mod for PA that has the Units from Total Annihilation and the Total Annihilation economy? Also the different types of view types from Total Annihilation. What about hover units, submarine units, naval transports, hover transports, armored vehicle transports, more orbital units, etc.
So I'm no dev, but I have been following PA from day one so I can answer some of your questions. As for the terrain stuff, the engine is already capible of ramps, bridges, hills and other hight variation goodness. Its just a matter of getting that on to a sphere that is legible and dosn't look strange. Although the devs have been quite on this front I am hoping for some cool stuff from them and/or the modding comminity soonish. nukes causeing tital waves is a no-go last time we brought it up due to engine limitations and coding time. flat maps have been an objective for the devs and modders but from what I understand the engine currently makes a lot of assumptions that the map is basicly a sphere. we do hope to see them eventualy though And for the TA stuff, ill direct you to the Work in Progress, Raven's Total (automated) Annihilation mod thread.
I do believe a flat map would be doable, if just rendered as a "sphere with very large radius, mostly missing". Because the face of a sphere can be practically flat. Just imagine a radius 1500, with all but a radius 200 planet's face missing, and that "surface area" carved down to a square.
Uber had this sort of detailed terrain before and found that it played havoc with the pathfinding system and generally got in the way of things. When the pathfinding improves i'd like to see them reimplement more detailed terrain features but we havent heard anything yet. No. There will be no fluid simulation in the game not to mention that this makes nukes both horribly OP and suicidal on maps with lots of water. Someone might want to mod in fluid simulation though such an endeavor is anything but easy. Mods will have to take care of that afaik. Uber likes their spheres and its the main pin they had with the game I guarantee there are people wanting to do this. There is already a thread with a guy modelling a TA ARM lookalike commander, at the moment we cannot mod in whole units, just alter the behavior and stats of existing ones. Submarines were already in the game but got removed (for reasons i dont quite remember). The other units could come from anywhere since I personally haven't heard any official confirmation that the unit roster is totally complete.
There were at least plans for a spider that could walk on mountains/rough terrain like that (there was some stuff in the game files long ago); it hasn't made it in-game yet and I don't know the status now.
Things I'd like to see: - A SupCom Style UI with adjustable and removable waypoints - Rock and debris when two equal sized planets collide with each other (rather than a puff of smoke) - Some reworked explosion effects (as they are the same as alpha (excluding commanders)) - Transports with larger capacities and ferry systems - The projected orbital paths of transiting landers etc. to be smoothed out, a lot of times there is a sharp discontinuity between different parts, both size wise and colour wise.
