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Welcome to the Planetary Annihilation live stream for April 19th, 2013.
I'm here with Steve Thompson. -Hey everybody!
And this is going to be the first time that we ever show in-game stuff!
It is a big day! Big day !
I'm excited.
The one thing I want to emphasize as usual, as I always
emphasize as, this is not done. You're seeing stuff in the middle of development.
You'll never,
I'm not gonna say never...
You're not often going to have seen this in the past.
The process that we use to build these games is very iterative so you're gonna see it in
the middle of iteration
but we felt like now was the time to reveal some of this stuff.
As we're building this game
using this kind of iterative process
We thought that...
At least I thought
it would be more difficult to show things off than it has been
but the reaction has been good.
So we're going to show you guys some more stuff!
What's cool about the community being involved they get to see the
process of...
how it comes together and...
So we have been talking about this a little bit earlier and and you were kind of saying
that you thought it was like putting up a painting together.
Yea that's the same thing, 'cause of course everything is temporary right now.
All the art you're about to see is temporary.
What we want to do is; I paint the canvas where you put down the broad strokes and you see
just the the base level what things are gonna look like and then over time we
develop and we refine, change things, ..so it is a very iterative process.
Like Jon said what you're about to see is all temporary, this all going to be..
So UI temp
planet temp
units temp, nothing's finished.
Okay now that we have that out of the way,
we're gonna basically show you guys a little bit of base building
some other stuff, probably not some combat.
We'll have Steve here to comment and answer some of our
questions as we go. -Absolutely.
and so
Let's move this along, I'm gonna wander over there and we'll get going
I'm still trying to get in... -Oh, I see.
[Background laughter]
So, Marc, you need a second here to.. - Yeah sorry, I'm still getting us into place here.
So...
We're gonna start off by showing a little bit of the commander
for the first time in the engine.
Walking around with some animation on him.
I think that we've done a pretty cool job on the planet here so far.
I think there's a lot of really cool
interesting procedural stuff that's happening but that's not what we're gonna
concentrate on.
We're gonna show you guys some stuff.
I think we're ready to go here. - Yeah we're ready to go.
So the first thing you see here obviously is the
commander.
Marc's gonna queue up a few things to get him going.
One of the things I was gonna mention is the egg concept
which some of you may or may not be familiar with
has not been implemented yet so...
Marc is just starting off here with a regular commander without
without any kind of like special egg or anything like that.
So we've got some power coming up
mass extractor coming up.
You can kinda see the wire frame of the stuff that he's got queued up here.
Zoom in real close for a second and just kinda show them around a little bit
while he builds a couple of these things.
Obviously with the build effects in there...
Now all this stuff this is not finished but
we like to get it in and do passes on it and iterate on it
so this is the first pass stuff that you're seeing.
You'll notice the cracks coming out of the ground and the jungle and the trees
and all that kinda stuff in here.
The water in particular hasn't really had that much work done on it yet
we'll be coming along.. soon.
So let's just watch...
Marc build a little base here for a second.
Building up the air factory right now
and as you can see it just started getting a good base.
Just start up a base a bit out of my area here.
So... fabber aircraft
coming up right here.
You can see we've done some work on animation, build animation effects
things like that.
One of the
challenges that we've run into with this game
is the architecture that we're using is radically different than any of the
other games that we've done.
So we've had a lot of new technical challenges which are kind of
fun to try and solve
but...
The way that it works is everything obviously happens on the
server and what you're seeing here in the client is a reflection of
what's going on on the server
so that opens up some kind of interesting possibilities of things that
you can do in the game. Another thing you'll notice is the building rotation stuff..
Keep in mind the UI is
is still
temporary but you kinda get the idea
kinda capabilities that you've got there.
You can see there's a lot of interesting kind of terrain up here with
with the plateaus and stuff.
We think that
as the game progresses you're gonna see much more of kind of a difference
from some of the other games in terms of what how much the height
differential matters and how much the terrain matters. It's
kind of interesting.
As everyone knows or should know this planet that you're looking at here
is
fully procedural.
We happen to just pick this one 'cause we liked it but there's a myriad
of different
planets that are that are possible.
This is the kind of Earth type planet. Obviously we're doing metal planets
and moons and that kinda stuff as well but
we thought that we would show this off cause it's kinda cool looking.
So..
The Alpha is basically what we're kind of working towards right now
and the general idea with the Alpha
is that, we're gonna build a lot of the game in front of you guys.
You're gonna be able to play the game in a fairly early stage during the
Alpha.
As you can see now, there's already a lot of stuff happening...
build effects, stuff building...
We do have some combat stuff in there but it's not quite ready to show
yet so we're going to hold off on showing you guys that
but it's not going to be too
far in the future that we start to
to get into that kind of stuff.
I'm actually pretty happy so far, I read a blog post a while ago
about the UI system
and how we're effectively using webkit or using coherent UI's
system to do this and I've been really happy at how quickly we've been able to
kinda try things and iterate on it.
Obviously this isn't anywhere near finished.
The camera is not finished, the UI system still has lots of work to go
but
it's functional! You can do stuff
you know, you can
queue up orders and you can build things and you can do all the
stuff that you'd expect and it's all set up in the data so...
So as you can see, lets see we've got
construction vehicles, we've got some tanks we've got some aircraft.
We've got some extractors, obviously there's more units than this in here.
We're just showing you a few
of the current ones.
So Steve, what do you think
do you want to point out some of the art changes that we've made recently
to kinda
pump it up a bit? -Yea, you bet.
Jon and I have been talking about this, this morning...
Just the way we're rendering all this stuff the new technology that's involved in here
is something that nobody's ever done before. I don't think, I mean correct me
if I'm wrong Jon but on a planetary scale having this level of density with
features and trees and all that kinda stuff. Pull out
pull off the whole planet. -Marc if you don't mind?
We're rendering an entire planet and it's the force, it's going to be dense.
The features you see in the desert..
There's so much going on..
on an entire planet.
The rendering is just amazing.
So what we wanted to accomplish is something we were trying to do in the pre-vis
is in the previous movie that we showed on the kickstarter video,
just tons and tons of trees just so when you drive tanks underneath trees you can
see
the levels of detail and the layers of foliage and
just immersed in this really super lush planet,
um, and then of course we destroy it.
So that's, that was the goal. -Yeah, that's the goal.
Yeah exactly. Just something totally beautiful,
and then we destroy it.
So, yeah I think Marc at some point's gonna drive some tanks around these trees so you can kind of understand the depth
that we can get it and just how lush this whole thing- -Yeah, zoom in a bit more.
The camera kinda tilts as you,
as you go down. (that way)
So- oh, go ahead. Yeah, so the art style I mean we wanted something really blocky
and stylized and-
No! NOOO! Don't drown yourselves! If they get too, too deep though, that's bad.
Yeah, so the blocky style kinda lends us to have you know and more
features because you know there's...
They're realitivly low poly, so we can just pack 'em in there, you know, and just have tonnes and
tonnes of
objects all over the place which, I think looks great. I do think actually, thee- the whole
strategic zoom thing and the ability to kinda
look at what's happening on the battlefield is kinda of a pretty huge
difference. You'll notice there's no strategic icons in here yet, we've actually been
working on that system but
it's not really necessary at this moment to play the game
there's, as I said before it's not finished; there's tons and tons
of stuff to do, but we kinda felt like we could show off
what we've got.
-What we've got here.
So um... you know
Marc go 'round maybe to your other base that you built over
there.
He's... making slow progress over here.
Get some bots going.
So I wanna talk a little bit about
the replay system,
because, I've commented about this in the forums a little bit-
we really haven't, I don't think, publicly
discussed it on camera or anything but the idea with this game, is because it's a
client server based game,
when we sat down and put a few stakes in the ground of things that I wanted
the game to be able to do and one of those was
robust replays, so that we could, basically have the game,
completely recorded and be able to play back these replays for e-sports
and things like that in the future
and have it work. In a traditional synchronous RTS if you change too
much, if you change balance, if you change
anything about how the game works your replays
break, and you have to come up with systems to run the replay on old versions
of the games all this kind of stuff.
With the client server style setup,
you can actually just kind of record all the data
and that's what we're doing here. If you look at this little control panel, that
Marc's playing around with,
he's actually able to scrub through all of the game that he's built so far.
Scrub right to the beginning, scrub right to the end and then you can also
do things like
fast-forward 'n rewind. The game is still live,
he's just looking at what was happening in the past.
So the example I always use is click on a dead unit, have a window pop up and show
you how that thing died, you can see some of this technology working here we're gonna-
we're basically rewinding everything that he did,
at a, at a faster speed.
I'm kinda blown away by this personally that
not only that it works, but that it actually is kinda cool
and we think for, instant replays, for e-sports and for
managing your base and figuring out what happened and all that kind of
stuff that this opens up,
crazy amount of possibilities.
So... -Ohh! More tanks!
More tanks. -Woohoo!
So, you know, in the coming weeks
we're gonna obviously be vectoring towards showing off some more combat,
I'm excited! I think the game's coming along pretty good. I mean...
What we're showing you right here is basically the work that we've done
since the kickstarter, to visualize the, the video that we created and the
kinda look and style of the game that we wanted to make and
I'm pretty happy with it so far, I think it's pretty cool.
So I wanted to move into some questions here and
me, Steve, and Marc
will do our best
to kind of
answer any questions that you have.
So...
Let's see
what we have in the way of
in the way of questions.
"Do you have any navy yet?" Yes, actually we do!
We haven't put a ton of work into the navy stuff but...
There is some naval stuff in there and you can build naval stuff.
Someone wanted to see the commander, so let me zoom in while we're talking.
"Any news for modders?"
That's actually a good question, so
I mentioned this in the last livestream, and we kind of-
I'm not gonna say we dropped the ball on it but we've changed the focus of
what we're spending time on.
But the idea with
with the mod stuff, is that we will be making some announcements soon.
I've been working on the post for that, Marc's been putting some work into it-
Got the application starting to be worked on, so there- There is some exciting news coming there,
I don't wanna blow it, but yes, there is going to be some modding news soon.
Lets...
Ha ha! Nothing cheese related, sorry.
Questions are funny.
"Thanks for showing the commander!" -Yeah, see? The commander's cool.
And of course this is the delta commander, he's only one of the...
one of the commanders.
So what size of planet are we showing here, how much-
"How much bigger or smaller can planets get?"
Planets can obviously get alot smaller than this, the size..
The size of an asteroid.
This is kind of
I don't know what I'd call this, it's a... What did you say, a 6 something? - This is,
650. Okay, so this planet has a radius of 650 meters.
So to give you some context for that:
That means that..
Oh, well you guys can calculate how much surface area there is
on that.
I'd say it's about a quarter of the way on the slider on the planet builder for
our standard thing.
Yeah, it's not a particularly large planet
and it's not particularly small. I mean,
you could probably have a four player game on this
but you might wanna go a little bit bigger. -Yeah I mean, I-
I've been doing a lot of base building on this particular planet the last couple days and
2 would be
awesome, 3 to 4...
A little crowded, if you want to have a really quick game- a 4 player one
that'd be awesome. -Yeah.
Let's see...
The real Sorian says pre-alpha UI. Yeah,
keep hammering on that. -Yeah.
Will..
"Will you think about some kind of orbital battles like spaceship battles?"
Orbital battles yes...
-Those are technically our spaceships, I guess... Heh!
But the game is not meant to be, Homeworld 3.
Regarding the economy...
The actual model that we're going with that Scathis kind of modeled
for us and that we've been building with, I don't think the overall direction of
that is likely to change but obviously everything we're doing in terms of
balance and what-not that's
completely wild *** guess right now so...
So um...
Let's take a couple more questions...
Floating structures, yes!
You know, the shipyards float for example.
Let's see... -Mini map? Have we talked about a Mini map? We haven't talked about a mini map
because i'm not a big believer in the mini map but people- [Sigh]
I mean, people like to get locked into these paradigms, where they're like, the mini map
works a certain way and every RTS game does it that way, so you have to do that,
and it's like, no I don't accept that,
that that's the way it is.
The functionality of a mini map, being able to quickly navigate, being able to tell
what's going on,
being able to basically manipulate the game is something that is
built into this, this game because of strategic zoom. So,
does that mean that, we won't have any kind of mini map thing, or whatever?
No, we're gonna have
methods and ways and things that I want to try,
for you to get the information that you need.
But it's not going to be in the form of, a little thing in the corner that has
your entire universe, I mean,
I just, I don't accept that that's the right
solution. -Kind of the model in on some of the prior games that we worked on
-Supreme Commander, where we had multiple windows, multiple views, it was a much more
practical- it seems like a better way to look at this kind of complex data. -Exactly! I
mean, if you need a mini map, if you can split your screen into multiple views and have
one zoomed out, that is, you can make your own mini map. Right?
I would argue there's some interaction stuff there you might want to have it in a
slightly different UI mode,
potentially that kind of thing, and we'll look at that.
But that's not the same thing as like, oh you always have this fixed
mini map that's a, kind of an iconic representation of the game, so...
"You said the UI is made with webkit, were you talking about in-game UI or pre-game UI?" -Both!
Every UI element that you see here is basically built on top of webkit. It's
all web stuff.
Using Coherent UI's, webkit port/their integration of stuff.
And the reason we went with that is because it runs on all the platforms and
of course we can get much better integration with
with the net by using this technology. It's really moddable, javascript...
It took us a long time honestly to get it, kind of to the point where...
I thought it would work, it was a little bit
risky, but other games have done it, and it seems like it's gonna work out
pretty well.
"Will it be possible to upgrade the commander?" -Currently commander upgrades are
not part of the
design, in general upgrades aren't really part of the design.
Um...
That's part of the philosophy to avoid micro in the game.
I have no issue with people
creating mods that have upgrades and things like that.
So...
You know.
Let's take maybe... -One more? -One more question. Let's try and find a good one.
"Can the game be played without internet connection?"
Absolutely! That's something we've said from day one, if you want to play
without an internet connection just start up a server yourself and go to town.
So...
The last thing I wanna talk about is
the timing of
the Alpha.
A lot of people been speculating about this, a lot of people been asking
questions.
If you want to get in on the Alpha,
get out there and pre-order
as soon as possible.
If you want your friends to be in the Alpha with you, get out
there in pre-order because
we're not going to guarantee that that is going to be available
the whole time and
you can do that at store.uberent.com and
we are basically going to be rolling out the Alpha in order of, the order that
people came in, highest backers first.
So the 10K backers et caetera, down the line. So if you've got
the higher level additions of the game, you're gonna get access first and
I'm not gonna guarantee that we're gonna keep that open, we may, at some point,
restrict that. -Close it off, yeah. -So...
I would highly recommend, if you wanna make sure that your, that you get an early,
that you get your pre-order in now.
Um, so the final kind of,
announcement here the we're all leading up to, is when is the Alpha gonna be?
And I --- The game is here, we have a lot of work to do, there's a ton of stuff that
needs to be, there's a ton of stuff we haven't shown you yet, but the bottom line is, we are
shooting to have the Alpha start ramping up at the end of May.
So this is just around the corner,
we're excited, we're gonna develop this game, and the rest of it with you
guys as partners, at the same time. The Alpha community is gonna have a
huge impact on what this game ends up being and
I'm excited to get in front of people, quite frankly because we've been
here for six months working on this and it's time to start letting people
play with it. So,
we wanted to try and keep this stream, short and sweet, and just kinda go
through what we had
and
I think we've done that, so...
Any other comments, Steve? Before we cut it off? -Well that's it, just really excited about it.
Alright! Let's rock and roll, we'll see you guys in-game. -See you guys on the forums! And in-game!
Yep!