Videogame Art: Planetary Annihilation

Interesting (long) read and nice pictures by Alex Kierkegaard (culture/vg Insomnia) putting Planetary Annihilation in context: Videogame Art: Planetary Annihilation (2014)

Oh hey, @icycalm finally did his review?

AKA icycalm

EDIT: DAMMIT PONY

Ninja pony?.

We're the best of friends, aye? <3



Edit:

Oh! Didnt know that was you @icycalm. Nice reading!

tl,dr: pa is awesome cause engine
and scaleability
...

The sim thread does not scale with more than one cpu core... If you call that scalability...

That's only the first part of the review, merely an introduction. I am still working on the rest.

Also, I plan to put in references for all the screenshots, and links to the Steam profiles of all the people who provided them. If anyone sees their screenshot on that page and doesn't want me to use it, let me know and I'll remove it.

Note that the screenshots will only be featured on the web page. The book will not have screenshots.

Not *yet* Based on dev comments multi-threading the simulation is something that they're considering, however it's a big thing to do so the focus is to get the 'easier' optimisations for sim performance out of the way first. PA has been built to be well threaded from the start (e.g. the server uses quite a lot of threads, so does the client and UI, it's only really the sim left that they could thread further from what I can tell).

I think journalist reviews are better for most people. There are now 3/10, 6/10, and 10/10 ones, and everything in between, so people can pick and choose to read whatever 6-paragraph quasi-Wikipedia article with banal superficial opinions they want to read. I am not writing for this kind of person. I am writing for the future.

An interesting read, if slightly self-indulgent.

For as much scalability is unique to PA, I don't like it only because it divides the playerbase and there are many game-scales I don't like, and the game scales I do particularly like are, at times, lacking in players. This is a fairly nit-picky criticism, but all in all, it leads to an unreliable experience.

If a game had an infinite number of players and an infinite number of people who have support from an infinite number of infinitely powerful servers to play at any scale, then it would be totally fine. But as it stands....

Source ?

I thought you were going to name and shame everyone that you ever disagreed with.

I'm disappointed to have not found myself listed here. It looks like I'm still too subhuman for that. Time to go work on improving my DNA!

aye

just a comment : it's a darn good review.

I'm actually really pleasantly surprised.

did you carry though with this? because that's one hell of a good idea. (you don't seem to have an account on FAF)

...aww drats, guess not. that's a shame. you can still do it, though.

ugh, refrain from that, will ya?

as the review progresses you go back to your usual self.... which is not a good thing.

As I mentioned, that is merely the first part of the review. At most 1/3rd of what I have to say about the game. As for you, you will be the star of the following essay, by the time it is completed (it is also half-way done so far): http://culture.vg/features/art-theory/why-versus-multiplayer-games-are-worse-games-than-jrpgs.html

I can't. And more importantly I don't want to. I have to speak what's on my mind. I am not being allowed to do this on any other site on the internet, so I reserve at least the right to do on it my own site. No one is forcing you to read it. You can read IGN or "BrutalGamer" or TotalCookie, if you prefer.

As for this:

I believe that, by the time it's done, it will be the best game review ever written. Would you rather I lied and said that I believe it's merely a "darn good review", like tatsujb said? Maybe you would, but when I am writing essays I prefer to say what I really believe, and not to affect false modesty in order to please others.

The entire review is my usual self; you just haven't read enough of me to realize this. Same as with this forum. All I have is myself, and that's what I am putting into my writings. I don't have split-personality disorder.

This thread needs more icyquotes:
"Now, as regards the spherical maps, it may be a bit tricky to explain to you how scalability comes into it. After all, I am told that SupCom's largest maps featured more surface area than even some of the largest systems being played in PA today, so why couldn't map size be indefinitely increased while the maps remained flat?
Well, of course they could. But even the flat map in Civ1 FUNCTIONED, more or less, in a spherical manner, since if you sent some units to the far right of the map they'd disappear and reappear on the far left. So it's not so much that the map HAS to be spherical as in PA, or even be represented via three-dimensional graphics at all, it's more that, as human beings that grew up in the advanced Western culture of 20th-century Earth, we are accustomed to thinking in terms of spherical planets and stellar systems and galaxies when our minds reach for the concept of "spatial infinity", as opposed to a flat surface extending infinitely in all directions while supported on the backs of an infinity of turtles "all the way down", as the humorous popular anecdote that's used to explain to laymen the infinite regress problem in cosmology posed by the "unmoved mover" paradox puts it. So if ancient savages played real-time strategy games, they would undoubtedly have found a SupCom sequel with infinitely extending flat maps more immersive than we do, but since they don't, and since these games are made by us for us, it is only natural that, once we have finally decided to remove all spatial limits from our games, that we would reach for a planetary, a stellar, and finally even a galactic model to represent this (see PA's under-developed and much-maligned, but extremely promising Galactic War mode...)"​

"So multiple fronts/battlefields are definitely possible, as long as you pair them with multiple players per side (and ideally also with multiple monitors, which again SupCom pioneered, but which once more PA promises to take to an extreme level by allowing, not two of them as in SupCom, but an infinite number of them — an entire bank of monitors of various sizes and resolutions — monitoring different planets, or even merely different sides of a planet or even particular bases or battlefronts of your stellar empire, as long as your computer can handle them of course, in addition to as many picture-in-picture windows per monitor as, once again, your machine can handle); the question that remains is whether they are preferable. And to this I will offer as answer Uber's own attempt at a new RTS, beyond PA: Human Resources, which was set up to take place on multiple "floating fragments of Earth as they are ripped from the planet". So we see that, even though Human Resources would NOT have featured spherical maps, Uber still couldn't let go of the multiple battlefields feature, and tried to shoehorn it into HR merely because... both players and devs are in love with it and want it in every new RTS from now on, and would dearly miss if it were not there (something which goes for every other of PA's many innovations, as we'll be seeing at length)."