What does the finished PA look like?

I would love to hear what the devs think the finished PA will look like... Obviously the development of PA can't go on forever and I would love to know what they think the final game will look like.

I think you can't answer that as a developer. There will always be things you want to do or improve until the moment someone says the game is dead forget it we're start something new.

This is the kind of question "But you PROMISED THIS YEARS AGO"-claims are made from

No successful business can just fly by the seat of their pants. You need to have a plan in order to execute it successfully. It's like planning a car trip, you can either decide where you want to go before you leave or you can just jump in the car and start driving. The latter will just waste petrol and who knows where you'll end up.

My question still stands...

@cola_colin

No successful businesses is abandoned. No, a software project is not like a car trip, I've done plenty of both and they don't share a dam thing.
All my projects have ended when the client stopped paying.

They have a post about next steps and I'm sure a bigger list they are not showing. Many of the won't probably be delivered because they won't get the money for that. However, if people realize how good this game is and sales grow up they'll probably think of new improvements to add.

Instead of the car trip example why don't you use the game League of legends. They changed the map, added gameplay mods and lots of champs; and they will keep adding stuff they haven't planned yet as long as the money keeps rolling in.

Remember when they used to do livestreams and spoke about everything they were planning.

Yeah, those were the days.

Uber definitely have a plan in place, which they are following. @mkrater was kind enough to share the next few months with us. I highly doubt they will share any more of their plan, as Colin says it's a recipe for disaster as people take the information as gospel and then throw a fit if it doesn't pan out exactly as they expect.

The deciding factor to how far they get with said plan is going to be the finances (or lack thereof). If PA keeps selling, there's definitely lots of scope to push it further in all sorts of areas. If not then for the business to survive they have to move onto something new

Edit: I just hope for everyone's benefit that if they *do* decide to attempt another Kickstarter or similar campaign, that the antagonists will lay off them this time. They really have delivered what they set out to- that didn't cater to everyone's wants as we have quite a broad set of different players all wanting slightly different things....

Remember when people quoted them out of context, launched massive balance threads picking the developers' intentions apart and picked on a single frame out of a whole video to claim that they totally meant to base the game on SupCom 2?

Yeah, those were the days indeed

Are you talking about this? https://forums.uberent.com/threads/the-tanks-felt-slow-so-we-sped-them-up.59030/#post-918498

That was justified.

The only two thing I miss is a more interesting Galactic War, which is coming later this year. And more interesting terrain or a more interesting map generator since user made maps usually are way cooler than the random generated ones. But I bet the that last thing is never coming since Uber never responds to the many terrain complaint treads. (Not that I'm not happy with the current look, but everyone knows it could be better)

@remy561 As it turns out, doing "more interesting maps" by generator is harder than it sounds like. By no means impossible (I have to know, I tried), but still a lot harder than what Uber did with their simple noise function.

The problems is mostly that the map generator didn't evolve at all since the first initial prototype. Some enhancements to cater metal planets, and the symmetric planets patch, but that's it. By the way, rotational symmetry is still missing....

But it's not just maps which are "unfinished". About every single feature in the game still has rough edges where either controls are behaving not intuitive, or settings and informations are just omitted even though trivial to extrapolate.

And let's not even start with the flaws on the server end. Server side scripting, for use in conversion mods or even campaigns, is still nearly non-existent. The simulation is still mostly on lockdown, and Uber only partially added those interfaces they desperately needed themselves, not even a flinch more.

I know its harder than it seems, I'm not complaining. But adding some kind of models for city layouts or alien futuristic technologies etc would be nice. So that random maps also can have some lost cities or whatever. It's small things that need improvement, but it can take up a lot of work to get the random generator to do those things.

And you are totally right that everything ingame has rough edges, tutorial, no dedicated server, lobby isn't perfect, etc etc. Saving is almost completely done though, next to multiplayer saves I cannot think of anything else to add here (Yay to them completing a function before making a first version and shelving it for later)

I think this is great question. From A gameplay perspective all that mkrater mentioned were asteroids. I use gameplay loosely as in what will affect the more multiplayer focused gamer. The rest were fixes and galactic war improvements.

I know the list she gave that would be introduced over the next few months isn't complete but it worries me when we haven't gotten new units when you have people like @stuart98 and @reptarking making loads of units and mods alone in the same timeframes.

When i look at it, I see a game I love playing, losing most of it's players and nothing seems to be done about it.

After all this time I am still suprised to find that many ui items seem to be broken. Replays don't show units sometimes, lobby bugs (which I have carefully noted in the bug tracker) and end of game statistics are always absent.

What does the finished PA look like? It looks like it has Metrarch.



Uber plz.

The strength of the individual computers do not matter anymore because Uber is using a pure client-server interface as opposed to other RTSes. The server does all of the simulations stuff and only sends the new unit positions to the clients. The clients in turn only sent their commands to the server, which processes them. One player having a weak PC will not slow down the others.

It's actually the server load that slows down the game due to the sheer amount of units it needs to process. Even worse if a lot of land units are on area patrol.

More memory won't make the game go faster if you don't have fps issues. More memory will only help you on really large systems.

Actually end of game stats do work... There is just a delay (the length of which being proportional to the length and size of the game) before they appear. Try it next game you play, leave it on the stats screen for a while and eventually they'll show up....

That would indicate that the end of game stats are not actually aggregated while the game is running, but instead parsed from the replay. And if the replay becomes rather large, and swapped out to disk, querying the replay can become quite expensive....

They have to calculate the stats from the replay so that you cannot make and use mods which read what your opponent is doing during the game. Otherwise the client will have some counters running in the background which players can use to cheat