My gripe about the Pax system

Two latvian look at clouds. One see potato. Other see impossible dream. Is same cloud.
sorry not sorry

I have ubuntu installed in parallel on this machine - PA runs pretty good on it but I get other weird UI problems like build menus not opening fully that make the game unplayable.

Also, I am from Idaho - the Latvia of the USA. Potato is love, potato is life <3

Oh, wait. You use silicon?
I build my computer with strings and weights!



Just imagine how long it took to build that 1KB of RAM.

(Use --software-ui and also fix for that in PTE after next stable)

Dear UBER ; please add more stock multi-planet systems

As a survivor of my Linux addiction, I can only say to get out while it's still vaguely confusing. Though I have a hard time not relapsing. Imagining Kubuntu on a SSD raid 0 and overclocked i7 makes me drool.

@Greendolph since you use Linux, I'm sure every thing we said about your RAM was pretty redundant. But I'd still get yourself up to 8GB if you use that laptop for any gaming at all.

Whats this Linux addiction you speak of... I'm a survivor of a windows addiction.

OMG! x'D AHAHAHAHA!!! so true

What on earth is this post about? The fact the PA uses too much RAM? Well.. Yeah, it does. This is probably down to the fact that every texture is loaded into RAM at full resolution. I think ultimately more work needed to be done on this but they ran out of time.

It's a bit sad because they probably thought, **** it, in 2 years it won't matter so much.

Uber absolutely does not work like that. They do care about taking care of core issues and cleaning up old "quick code".
For example around the start of april I reported to jables that I had found a way to modify pa.exe such that having radar would equal having full knowledge of what unit it is you are looking at. This screen shows an AI base I have never had vision of. Only a t1 radar is close to it.

notice how the air factory and the radar have no radar dot. The radar dot bug that new things build within radar range do not get a radar dot did not apply to this kind of hack vision.

This was tracked back to a bad decision in the radar handling made years ago. It required a larger rework of the way the radar is handled.
The patch released yesterday fixed this issue in the correct and clean way. Map hacking is now truly impossible, as the client only has "this is a radar dot of army 123" for radar dots.

If Uber were not to care about technical underlying issues they could have simply ignored this issue, as nobody really knew about it apart from me and it is likely that not many people would have taken the time to find and abuse it. But they fixed it in a clean way.

Congratulations to them. They fixed something that they could fix.

However, I'm not sure they can fix the problem I mention. Considering how the gamespace is very much focused on individual planets, i.e. you can't fight out in the middle of space, the game is essentially several planets which you can fight on with the actual solar system nothing much than a visual effect. Considering this, you might as well keep the solar system as nothing more than a jpeg in the top right hand corner and just use buttons to flick between planets.

Now I'm sure a large proportion of people wouldn't want that. "Planet smashing".. i.e. 'clicking a button to win' was a big part of the sales pitch. Everyone was all like "wow, I want to smash a planet"... but what does this mean? you click a button and you see a video rendered in real time... only, on my PC and many others, all you see is your computer struggle to render it in real time. For my tastes, they might as well have just loaded a pre-rendered video... as there is no gameplay element to this.

So now we've understood that each planet is essentially just a different map with which to fight on, and the game allows you to flick between different maps, the whole thing seems a lot more simple.

When a game like GTA that had loading times between different parts of the map was introduced, they had to make a decision. Do they try and load every texture in the whole world into RAM and store it there, or does the rest of the world, the bits you can't see or interact with, simply not exist until you get there.

Because they released it on a fixed spec console, the decision was easy. They couldn't load everything into RAM, it would limit the size of the world.

What we have in PA is the devs chose to load everything in at once. They didn't start out wanting to do this, there are just technical challenges in doing anything but this. I would be willing to sacrifice large parts of inter-planetary warfare just to have the game run more smoothly and to allow for much larger worlds with many more planets and many more players.

Look at TA. If you played a game against the AI for an hour, the game would slow down. You would reach a point where it would slow to a crawl and was unplayable. Look at SupCom, same thing happened. Look at SupCom2, the game slowed down so much when you had a few hundred units that it ran at 1/5th the speed.

Now look at PA. It is much more polished. You can have swarms of armies patrolling around your base and the game for the most part holds up okay. The problem is though, that it's not infinitely scalable. Sure sure. Infinity is a large number. So lets set ourselves a target, how about a 50 player game.

The fact is, the game at the minute only supports a maximum of 10 players! That's barely anything. I can jump into a 10 player FFA, destroy everyone and get no satisfaction. What I really want is a properly epic game with 30, 40 or 50 players so that it truly is a war.

I don't think we'll ever get that with PA. I think I'm asking for too much. I'm asking for a way for the game to be designed which allows you to take part in a massive game but not need massive resources for it. I want the game to be intelligent enough to have a solar system with 50, or 100 or even 150 players at a time. I want the game to be EPIC.

Uber really has put in some good work with this game. They have still failed to deal with certain things so far, and it's all about priorities so I can respect that.

Maybe I'll never see what I'm after in my lifetime. Maybe computers will never become powerful enough, and coders will never figure out a way to achieve what I'm after.

Uber certainly haven't failed me. They never set the expectation that we'd be getting 50 player games. In 10 years, with the game as it is now but with technology improving, maybe we'll hit that.

Did anyone ever play Planetarion a good 15 years ago? Now that game was epic. 1000s of players all competing in the same arena. Yes, it was text based, so it had none of the same technical challenges, but it gave you a sense that it was truly epic and you really had a chance to stand out from the crowd and take over the universe. With a 10 player game, I'm just not feeling that.

It's likely because it's the one multiplayer system on the drop down.

Do you have any evidence or indication that there are massive textures stored in normal RAM during gameplay?

It was said that they load all textures at max resolution or something like that in a discussion about the low quality commander textures.

I don't believe that the texture stuff is a big issue for performance though. Really yeah they are not optimal, but tbh: Who cares about a few extra mb of ram in use. Getting a few extra GB is pretty cheap and by next year or soo 16GB will be more and more standard.
The client side performance of PA probably is not perfect, but imho it is pretty good. It multithreads pretty well, it has lots of optimizations (like it does not render or even consider what is outside of your view normally. Units you cant see don't even move).
The big ram usage on the client afaik btw is all the planet-geometry and all the voxels of the pathfinding (actually I wonder why does the voxel stuff exist in the client that should not care about pathfinding... hmmm. Well fact is it definitely massively starts to eat memory the moment you load a very big planets).
Also coherent UI is a sucker for ram, it's design is a horrible ram eater. It's worth the price though. Splitting different parts of the UI into different processes in fact means the UI of PA is multithreaded and it does profit from that (in fact only that makes all this "the UI is a webbrowser" possible at a decent responsibility).

The reason why 50 players are not possible is NOT within the client. It is caused by the poor thread on the server that handles the simulation of ALL units. ALONE. One thread. That is an issue even when running on a 128GB Ram server with 8 high end cpu cores.

Now ofc multithreading something as complex as this needs a research project and 5 years, so while I wish PA had it I do realize it would have been a miracle to have it, but that is the spot where in theory a lot better performance could be achieved. However priorities clearly dictate that probably won't happen anytime soon.

adorable is defined by not having a numpad, in my book