I have recently become quite interested in Planetary Annihilation having been an avid Total Annihilation fan. looking at the results so far on the game I am impressed I just have a few things I would like to know before buying it. Having played TA quite a bit over the years I noticed it was never built to scale with evolving technology. So what will be the player and map size limit for PA upon release for example 40 players with a 4000 radius planet size, or will you be able to make the map and player size as big as you want with the map builder? I am using this as an example in the situation I simply want X amount of players with one giant planet.
How much RAM do you have in your box? That's the limit. The fact that PA will require a 64 bit OS to really live up to its full potential should tell you something about its scale. PA is being designed to take advantage of more RAM and CPU cores than are generally available in gaming PCs today. So it should scale pretty darn well over the next 5-10 years.
My question was more along the lines of if you could change the player and map size limit to anything you want not if you could support it.
I think that the in game map builder will have a maximum planet size, because you cannot have a slider into infinity. Getting larger planets may be something as simple as typing a larger number into a text field, or a config file for "Planet_size_max". If not someone will eventually build an third party map builder that can accommodate ridiculous sizes. The devs have said that the engine is built with scaling into feature in mind. So i imagine that any limit present will be a soft limit.
The idea is to not build scaling limitations into the game. In practice there are always upper limits due to different resources. Right now memory is a big one. As we improve that it will be something else. As computers get faster/larger/better you can make bigger games.
Alright so since their won't be any limitations on map and player size what about stability when exceeding a certain scale, game crashes etc?
Well, if you exceed the unit limit you are essentially exceeding what your CPU can put out. At that point your pc would probably give up and would crash the game. Same thing memory wise. Of course, you would notice when you got close- the game would start lagging long beforehand.
I think an answer to you question as far as the map/world size limit is, yes, there will be some limit to the size of planet you can create based on what the maximum value their slider is set to. There hasn't been any mention of limits to the number of those planets you can add to the system, however...
an interesting question in that context would be, how predictable/measurable the influence of certain parameters will be on any given machine, since you probably want to maximize the server without killing it later in the game. Aside from total unit count, units per player, total map size and player count, the usual suspects, questions like this might also be interesting: - with the same overall surface area, does number of planets or surface per planets matter? - do structures require the same resources as mobile units or a significant lower amount? Would lead to the question of different limits etc - how do AI players increase the used resources? in the context of save games: - would it make sense to offer an option to restart a server with different settings (continuing from a save game) either with lower values to increase stability or with higher values to increase expandability? You would have to define how to handle cutbacks if you reduce values, which might not be that easy. The obvious disadvantage of hard-coded limits is the limit in scalability and longevity, so I doubt there are too many people who miss them. But it had the advantage that you could say with hardware specs XYZ you can host any server a game supports. Without that fixed testing range and with a more complex game system some way of benchmarking your server would be nice, so you don't have to test it by play and crash.
The Xeon and its buddy the Intel C602 chipset would like to say hi and invite you to a massive interstellar war. Here's to hoping that a PA server will be able to fully utilize 16 CPU cores.
Changing the unit,player and map size are really the important parts because technology will evolve allowing more content.
