Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Bigger planets?

Some players seem to really want big massive planets in the game.  I think they have their place but I think it's likely smaller planets will be more fun in most cases.  Regardless here is a screenshot I took out of the planet builder this morning.

This planet has a radius of 3000m or so which gives it a surface area of 113097000 m2.





Decent sized planet

36 comments:

  1. Looks like Earth on crack. I like it

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  2. Woo hoo planets! Looks fantastic. Plenty of space for blowing up robots, and building bases for them to SMASH AGAINST MY SHIELDS!

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  3. hope for massive experimental battles :D

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    1. I don't think there are going to be experimentals - maybe in a mod/later.

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  4. Will there be an atmospheric shield? Will it cost more power to cover larger planets?

    What are the black spots on this planet? Some kind of resource?

    What is the point of making larger planets? Is it to allow more player to inhabit the planet from the start? Is there a planet jumping system that lets players expand by going to another planet; and if that's the case, wouldn't larger planets be just an aesthetic choice, rather than a game changing choice?


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    1. I don't know if you're a backer or not, but you should check out the PA forums, there's a confirmed features list.

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  5. It's really small if you compare to the Earth (9 billion times smaller, volume wise) but as a surface on which you have to control units and fight, it's nothing to be ashamed of!

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  6. Why in meters? Shouldn't planets be measured in kilometers? A small gimmick, but I am curious nonetheless.

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  7. Still needs to be *much* bigger. That's only an asteroid, really.

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  8. The thing is: Do we want realism (As in "real" sized planets) or fun? Spending hours just to move units to an enemy base is no fun...

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  9. Go home, planet, you're drunk.

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  10. The live feed said they go to 4x that size so that should be interesting. Also remember we _CAN_ fight across multiple planets and asteroids at once.

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  11. I think the reason for larger planets is to make it harder to blow up planets in 1V1, like in the concept vid.

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  12. interesting you could have a planet battle skirmish mode on one huge planet like this and have a couple of orbiting moons to use orbital cannons obviously kinetic bombardment would be lock as it would just end in a draw.that could also be interesting.

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  13. Looks cool. I hope a Perlin Noise based height-map is just one of several ways landmass will be formed. Naval warfare will be a bit frustrating if instead of interconnected oceans, we have a whole bunch of isolated lakes.

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  14. pump up the radius 2000 times and you will have the real earth :D

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  15. Just as a piece of concept. I would agree to adding Earth to the game. But as an actual map? I think you would need one hell of a PC, just to run it pre-skirmish.

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  16. 113097000 m² = 113.1 km²

    Assuming we're going to be able to crank the radius of planets up to 12000 meters we get:
    1809560000 m² = 1809 km²

    The largest maps in Supreme Commander were 81*81 km.
    6561000000 m² = 6561 km²

    So the biggest sized planets (if r=12000 is the biggest possible) will have roughly a fourth of the area of the biggest possible maps of Supreme Commander. PA will however have the possibility of several planets, so there's that.

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    1. This math only works if you assume that the scale of PA and SupCom are the same. SupCom treated scale in a much more cavalier manner than we are treating it. There is about a 10x real difference in scale in comparison to SupCom based on unit sizes and movement speed which is what matters.

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  17. This seems big enough for me. don't forget that the goal is to have *several* planet. Personally, several small planetes seems more interesting to me that a big one.

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  18. it seems to me that the planet generation favours small lakes all around the planes....
    can this variable be changed.... big oceans is what you need if you want a useful navy and maybe some more creative strategies for attack

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  19. Now... if only it was made of metal....

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  20. I would say instead of being able to make a bigger planet that is 4x that size, we should be able to make it at least 8x bigger

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  21. I wish I was good at math like that.

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  22. Looks good enough to me! I really like the planet-hopping aspect, and would prefer to battle on multiple small worlds than on a single giant planet. However, just getting used to doing battle on a single sphere will be hard enough!

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  23. With that planet, I'm thinking about a faster transport of units, the named "Gravity Train" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_train ) inspired by the last movie "Total Recall".

    For bigger planets, this fast transport can be awesome, but consumes a lot of energy and metal for building.

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  24. SC has 81km*81km map size, which is 6561000000m2, still 58 times bigger than this. :)

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  25. I think this'd be neat if you could have a huge planet as a major battleground, with moons and asteroid battles happening around it. It'd be more surface area to annihilate >:D!

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    1. Also! If people don't want a really spacey battle, they should be able to scale up, and just have a huge world and maybe a moon.

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  26. You could hide easy on that planet if you get to pick your spawn area.

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  27. Recently I saw gameplay of maybe even dozens of players duking it out on a planet. This could be fun, but I hope that we can also have 4-10 of players on a big map with huge armies. I haven't played the alpha, so I can't get a real feeling of the map size, compared to f.i. SupCom (FA). What map size does this planet feel like? 20x20? What will be the sim speed if you have 2000 units on this map? Does it help the sim speed to stay fast if there is not one 3000-unit battle, but three 1000-unit battle on three planets?

    Thanks, M

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