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The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

forrestthewoods.com

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Re: The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

#11

Post by InDubioProRubio »

roenxi wrote: post #10

Opinion time! Planetary Annihilation was close to being a good game but was held back by its ambition to be a novel engine. The one that got my nerves on edge was they have a zoom mechanic where the strategic map was a weird shape - there were multiple worlds and each world was spherical rather than a 2d grid. It did terrible things to the gameplay because suddenly orienting the map was a challenge. It was really wel…

I can imagine the discussions to be had in the dev-kitchen - between we go natural on zoom out - or we start a projection war right there, right then..

MentalGen choose your weapon: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/977:_Map_Projecti...

Re: The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

#13

Post by SXX »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #9
endgame wrote: post #4

This idea of having idealised curves that get sampled at discrete points in time reminds me somewhat of Functional Reactive Programming and its predecessor, Functional Reactive Animation. Were any of the architects familiar with that world when they planned all of this out, or was it an independent discovery?

There was at least one FRP fan on the team, but it was not a meaningful source of inspiration. IIRC the motivating goals were: * Client-server architecture (not p2p) * gracefully degrade under constrained bandwidth * replay support The in-game replay was a by-product we simply thought was cool and novel. I’ve yet to see anything else like it! The system also served as the basis for save/load. I think if you had a ful…

Yeah you certainly shipped it. You can load into replay from any moment :-)

Re: The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

#14

Post by jeffrallen »

Hey, just dropping in to say: the moment I saw the demo of the feature, I said to myself, "that's gonna be due to a good underlying data structure and this article is going to be about that data structure".

Was not disappoint.

This is a lesson I learned way too late in IT: Get the data structure right and interesting features come at reduced cost.

Re: The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

#15

Post by willis936 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #2

Oh weird, this is my post from 2013. Surprised to see it here.

Thanks for your work! I played many a PA LAN party back in the day and SC was my favorite RTS during high school. PA is one of the few RTS where PVE could have fun scenarios.

I'm simply not smart enough to manage 8 frontlines. I'm excited for Industrial Annihilation and hope you're involved with it.

Re: The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

#17

Post by scotty79 »

InDubioProRubio wrote: post #11
roenxi wrote: post #10

Opinion time! Planetary Annihilation was close to being a good game but was held back by its ambition to be a novel engine. The one that got my nerves on edge was they have a zoom mechanic where the strategic map was a weird shape - there were multiple worlds and each world was spherical rather than a 2d grid. It did terrible things to the gameplay because suddenly orienting the map was a challenge. It was really wel…

I can imagine the discussions to be had in the dev-kitchen - between we go natural on zoom out - or we start a projection war right there, right then.. MentalGen choose your weapon: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/977:_Map_Projecti...

Dyson Sphere Program after Dark Fog Update is halfway there. It has only flying units and static defense.

Re: The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

#18

Post by [deleted] »

roenxi wrote: post #10

Opinion time! Planetary Annihilation was close to being a good game but was held back by its ambition to be a novel engine. The one that got my nerves on edge was they have a zoom mechanic where the strategic map was a weird shape - there were multiple worlds and each world was spherical rather than a 2d grid. It did terrible things to the gameplay because suddenly orienting the map was a challenge. It was really wel…

[deleted]

Re: The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

#19

Post by ffsm8 »

moritonal wrote: post #16

I believe the same devs behind this game are trying to now produce https://industrialannihilation.com/

I was expecting early access steam, not a literal preorder page with no release date set.

I feel like that's the wrong way to do this. You either use preorder with a scheduled full release window, or steam early access. Taking money as preorders for a steam early access with pretty much no release window... That feels more like vaporware to me.

At least add it to steam for people to wishlist.

Re: The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

#20

Post by sdwr »

Reminds me of Achron

https://store.steampowered.com/app/109700/Achron/

It wasn't a very good game, but it used a similar time-scrubbing mechanic to support time travel.

You could send your units back in time to harass the enemy before they built defences.

Time jumps cost energy, and paradoxes were resolved at wavefronts that moved forward in time faster than 1s per s.

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