What's up this week? 11/1/12

Today we had two new engineers start on the project!

One of them was already announced. Sorian is going to be handling the AI (among other things including probably a lot of unit behavior stuff).

The other one was alluded to last week. Sometimes I can only give hints at good things happening because when it comes to personnel issues there are often timing complications. Anyway I'm proud to announce that Elijah Emerson also started today. He's one of the world experts on flow field pathfinding and unit movement. He's absolutely passionate about this stuff and is also writing a chapter about it in an upcoming book. You guys know his work from the SupCom2 unit motion.

Today was mainly filled with our engineering kickoff meeting. We did a broad overview of the technical design of the game and talked through a lot of specific issues. More of this kind of stuff tomorrow but hopefully coding will replace meetings soon.

Coming up to speed on this stuff takes quite a while. Every generation of RTS engine that I have worked on has had a very different technical design for the simulation. This game is no different and we have very lofty goals we are trying to achieve.

For example TA was peer-to-peer asynchronous. Very oddball design but it worked for the game.

SupCom was a more traditional peer-to-peer synchronous setup. This works ok but has some downsides to it. However, there was a lot more to the engine than just that (like the threading model and how the sim ticks moved into the user layer).

PA has a completely different client/server architecture that solves some problems but open up other issues. In our case the design of the dataflow from the sim to the client is probably the biggest deal part of this.

So in the meeting today we covered the tech design for the simulation, the renderer, the terrain, UI etc. It was a fairly comprehensive overview of the current tech design and where we are at with implementation. Oh, and we got it all on video/audio for the documentary.

Good stuff!

Solid foundational work, sounds like. Good unit flow to avoid drone jam, and some AI work- Two of those big ol' concerns.

Cheers.

sounds like its all starting to come together

WOohoo Elijah

cool stuff! Can't wait to hear more about unit movement and behavior, and see how the AI takes shape.

are you finding the constant documentation to be a distraction, or a focuser? I'd imagine everyone tries to stay on their game more with a camera pointed at them, unless you just start to forget they're there

Apologies if this is an obvious question, but what are you referring to by "documentary"? Is it free for all pledge's via kick starter, is it a separate product, a stream?

All pledgers will get it. It won't be finished until the game is released. We will continue to do live streams and other kinds of updates though.

Good stuff Looks like you're progressing nicely

congrats, enjoy the experience, sounds like fun

Neutrino & Sorian,

You mentioned in the Halloween live stream to expect new visuals and info from Sorian in the next live stream—any idea when the next live stream might be? I'm excited to tune in .

I’d love to hear both your thoughts about the interface, AI, and unit behavior—especially related to late game complexity/scale. The forums’ had passionate discussions on the topic (base template engine, contextual UI based on viewing scale, area commands, assistive AI, etc…). I'm wondering—have you formed an opinion on if/how late game complexity should be polished?

Best to take an extra day of meetings to fix problems before they occur than to lose a week fixing problems after. Take your time to set this up right

And welcome and best of luck to the new guys.

I'm really happy about my plege.
Lots of communication from Neutrino, most talented people have been hired.
I think PA is going to be what TA used to be : LEGENDARY !

So as sorian said, something very good has just happened

Isn't Elijah also from GPG?

Man, they lost two great devs there...

Already did some Internet stalking: he is (was).

Would that be before or after GPG took on "~Age of Empires: Online~"?
(Microsoft doing the EA games strategy game maneuver... -_-)

Will you guys send out emails regarding future livestreams, or are we required to check in on the forums?
Also, great news on the new guys starting work!!

I think after. Lots of Uber devs worked for GPG before they joined Uber.

Neutrino,
Is code optimization something more or less happening even from the very beginning of develoment ? Are you testing your code scalability from the very beginning ?
Can you provide a global overview of how code optimization process is performed during such an entire project ? In which degree of magnitude are you able to guess that some code architecture is likely to scale as expected ? Because as far as everyone got it, the objective is to be able to scale as much as expected.

I remember that when supcom went out, a patch had been quicly delievered in order to dramatically increase the performance. Was it just about running a profiler and quicly fixing parts of the code which where suboptimal ?

I hardly understand how it's possible to optimize the code without taking a risk of breaking it and introducing possible new bugs. Are there tools that can do this automatically ?

Is it possible to code in such a way, that if at some point you discover that you could dramatically improve the performance by doing drastic changes, then it's still possible to do these changes with a minimal impact on the rest of the code ?

thanks