When do we get to see some multi planet Warfare?

The title speaks for itself, but I have been watching the feeds and streams but i still really want to see some annihilation! I am wondering (because I dont have Alpha or Beta Access) can you send units to other planets, Blow other planets up, Steer asteroids? Is this stuff in the game now? Coming soon? Too complicated so it was scratched? The game looks great, seems to be very flexible and original, I just can't wait to see the ANNIHILATION that we saw in the proposal video!?

I think the only answer is when it's ready....

Yup, when it's ready. There are people currently working on removing the assumptions about a single planet for example.

The main things that need to happen are:
- proper support for playing the land/air/sea game on multiple planets
- orbital layer so we can launch stuff into orbit
- code to traverse between planets

Scheduling is hard to do because we are constantly balancing between immediate and long term needs. The last couple of weeks have been more about multi platform support than about working on the game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit

There is a simple formula for transferring between two different orbits and with a few hardcoded values will be really fast and simple to implement so that you don't have to have it be physics based. I used in in a really simple orbit simulation I did for a physics class back in college. There would probably need to be a few checks for other bodies in the flight path too.

This part is the easiest piece of the system. Most of the work is related to how the engine handles planets / things moving between them / units that have appropriate controls etc.

I am so psyched to see the game go inter-planetary. Every time I'm playing and the moon drifts past a little part of me goes "squee!"

Have you ever dealt with the concept of "spaces". This was a name coined by the people around me in college so I have no idea how widespread it is. A "space" for us was basically an empty game object that had all other game objects stored/referenced in it like say a level full of objects(trees,player,enemies). Then graphics would update a "space" and knew how to iterate through all those gameobjects and update them, physics would update a "space" and knew how to iterate through all those gameobjects.

The next step was that because of this you could have a space inside a space that would update relative to the parent space. For example you could have a "space" that was a room and it happened to have a TV who's screen was a view of a space. If you were to quickly knock the TV onto its side you would see all the objects inside that space move about due to the drop.

This could probably be used in one manner or another to help handling objects. You could have a "space" that is the solar system and each planet would be its own "space".

As I have no idea what you engine looks like this may or may not be useful. Also I may have not even remotely explained it in a way that makes any sense since I never did to much with "spaces" personally, but they were used in one of the engines I worked on.

Each planet is a space. The system is a space (we call that celestial space). So the code that moves units between spaces.

I know Gaff recently got orders running on different planets so things are progressing on this front.

Weren't orders running half-decently on the moon though? When we could build bugged engineers and build stuff on the moon, we could at least order stuff on the moon. Even if it floated off the moon instantly, it still tried to fufill the orders.

You know, it sounds almost like the space side of PA is roughly following a similar development path to the real life history of rocketry. First come simple satellites and orbital tests, then attempts to land a bot on the moon, and eventually, asteroid mining and orbital manipulation.

I salute the first Bot to go hurtling skyward on a pillar of unstable code, cannibalised from a primitive ICBM feature!

Awesome. Can't wait to start building moon bases!

+1

Good observation! SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER!

Godspeed.

One small step for kbot kind
One giant nanolath to reclaim

All this talk of 'spaces' sounds like object oriented programming.

Hahahaha YOU HAVE NO IDEA how much object-oriented programming is going on in this game. More object-oriented programming than you could dream.

I don't think any modern game could be made without OOP.

In theory it could. It would just be a nightmare to organise the development of it.

And patches / modding would be impossible! lol

In university (a few years ago) I heard Quake 3 was not object oriented - can anyone confirm this?

Google seems to agree with you.