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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)

#4

Post by endgame »

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?

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

#6

Post by neerd »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #2

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

Hey! First I loved PA. It was such a great game. Second, I’m curious how you simulated combat. Was it simply every every server tick you updated all units or was it something smarter?

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

#7

Post by forrestthewoods »

neerd wrote: post #6
forrestthewoods wrote: post #2

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

Hey! First I loved PA. It was such a great game. Second, I’m curious how you simulated combat. Was it simply every every server tick you updated all units or was it something smarter?

IIRC the server simulation ran at 10Hz. I think the goal was to update every unit every tick. But there may have been some round robin style updates as you get to late game. Pathfinding may have had some limits and deferred requests.

Nothing particularly clever that I can recall. But it’s been quite a few years!

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

#8

Post by bigiain »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #2

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

Heh. I got to this bit:

" it’s an upcoming real-time strategy game that had a wildly successful kickstarter in August 2012 and just entered beta. "

And thought "WTF!!!", then scrolled up to see the date on the post...

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

#9

Post by forrestthewoods »

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 full replay you could resume from any point. Pretty sure we shipped that feature, although it’s been so long I forget what shipped and what was merely an idea!

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

#10

Post by roenxi »

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 well implemented and impressive visually; but unfortunately it made it remarkably easy to get lost. It was a great case study for why so many wargames go with the unimaginative "rectangular table" setup.

Things like that coloured my view of PA. They have an interesting engine but the consensus back when it was released seemed to be that they didn't manage an engaging game. I got the impression the engine was consuming too much of their attention.

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