Usual caveats: Pre-alpha here.
But you can see the individual gravity channelers on this unit, the Artemis, which allows it to hover. The Artemis is the mainline Post-Human missile unit.
This is at the start of the game so its secondary weapon, a long-range missile, isn't enabled (the black disabled piece in the middle). Players can upgrade their units via the tech tree (all this is subject to change based on play testing for fun and pacing).
Now, mind you, this is an extreme extreme close up. The artists are going to kill me for zooming this close as these are supposed to be small units (i.e. a big map might include thousands of these guys).
How you put your groups together matters though. It's not just about cranking out lots of units.
The other thing I wanted to convey here is how much attention we are giving to being true to the lore. We don't simply have units that float. There is a reason for them and a lot of background on the limitations of gravitational channeling.
I think there is a lot of misconception on what Supreme Commander did and didn't do. When I say a shot in Ashes is a real projectile I mean that literally, it might as well be a unit on its own. It has its own model, light source, physical behavior. It's not just about firing arcs. Units won't just shoot into the side of a hill because every single unit has multiple fire systems with their own firing solutions. So now, what we're doing isn't "old" news. It's never been done before in an RTS. Total Anniihiation actually was somewhat more advanced than Supreme Commander btw.
I am still skeptical what you mean by that. How is a projectile in ashes any different from a projectile in SupCom:FA or in PA? both sort of simulate projetiles in some way. The specific implementations might cheat a little here and there or ignore some laws of physics for gameplay reasons (shoot through your own units for example).
Do units in ashes not shoot through allied units? Will "my units can shooot at the enemy because my other units are in the way" be a thing? That certainly would be new, but not because of technical reasons, but rather because so far it was decided "this part of reality sucks, lets skip it".
Why is having multiple weapons on a unit any different? It just combines multiple units into one. I feel this is mostly marketing talk so far. Yes you are free to do that kind of talk. Every game dev does so, and it is normal and all. But every skeptical player than tries to get more info to decide how much there is behind it
When someone tries to focus fire on a unit in a battle group, the other units provide cover (abstractly) resulting in them being unable to focus fire on a particular unit. By contrast, an individual unit (i.e. if someone chooses to just form a blob of units and do a hot key) the enemy with a battle group will be able to annihilate them.On the mini map, that battle group is all you will need to deal with. Select it, and it wherever on the map and it does its thing. Individual units will show up still as little dots of course as a reminder that they're not assigned to anything.
So that cover is a magically hidden effect? Or some specific AI behavior that is only achived through how the AI controls what the single units does?
In the first case: ok. In the second case: If you pull that off to work correctly you have my deepest respect really. I've never seen a unit AI in any RTS that was even close to being intelligent enough to do what I want it to do apart from "go there".
Re meta units: it'll be abstracted via auto buffs to the battle group. We won't try to simulate a unit tryng to get in front of another.
re weaponry, the difference is a particle effect vs. an actual game object. A shot might as well be another unit (a tiny fast moving one). But this sort of thing matters because it allows for true LOs (which. Either SupCom or starcraft have).
re multiple weapons, because it allows us to design units that are more versatile, this will matter more in the future. But, for instance, in starcraft, units have 1 weapon and can only fire at what they're pointing at. In ashes, the better units have weapons with different firing angles (I.e. Turrets swiveling). It's not multiple of the same weapon. This opens the door for us to allow lots of unit upgrades.
now, to be candid, there's a difference between what we can do and what we wilp do to make sure the game' scum. But havng more tools at our disposal lets us have more options for responding to feedback.
re meta unit AI, it's not so much of having super unit AI that could control the unit better tha. A human, it is more about every unit knowing about every other unit in its battle group. So you would,t for I stance have marines being sniped while a bunch of others are standing around. You attack 1 unit in the meta you are attacking them all.
Re general feedback:
if I come across as resistant to suggestions it's not that I think we have a perfect ui. God no. we're going to need a lot of feedback on making it good. Rather, we just don't want people who have never played the game or who simply want a Supcom clone to be telling us what we have to do r especially treating the people who invented strategic zoom and have decade of experience making and playing these gams that we don't know what we're doing.
other thaN turning all the units into icons, pretty much any idea is on the table as long as it doesn't blow up scope/budget and remains within our vision of the game we want to make.
Sorry for typos, ipad sucks for this sort of thing.
Maybe I'm getting your meaning confused, but these (simulated projectiles and multiple weapon systems on units) are both things that existed in Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander (and others, such as Planetary Annihilation). The visual representation of projectiles may have sometimes been a particle effect, but they were entities ("actual game objects") in the game engine that were simulated just like units, and especially in Sup Com's case could be scripted via LUA for absolutely arbitrary behaviour. Both games could also support multiple independently targeting weapons. Sup Com even used this exact mechanism for it's commander upgrades, and there's numerous other examples.
There must be something you haven't told us yet about how they work, or not shown us yet, because so far everything we've seen in AotS can be demonstrated in TA or Sup Com, which I have to admit makes me cringe a little when I hear the claim that it's never been done before.
Your comment about shooting into the side of the hill hints that you are talking about units being a bit smarter in how effective their shots are (something I agree Total Annihilation was better at than Sup Com, because they tried to maneuver a bit if their shots were constantly being blocked), but Sup Com's ability to allow custom LUA scripting actually led to such behaviours being modded into it at one point, as were area commands - copying those found in Sup Com 2 after it's release.
I don't understand why their is so much hesitation and hate towards supreme commander like saying "its not sup com clone" thing is even if it was a sup com clone whats the issue if so many people are wanting a game like sup com remade i just don't see the issue at all
I am hoping we play the alpha and it plays well and sits well with the sup com playerbase and if it don't and people want things changed / added that make it similar to sup com i hope ego's and stubborness won't come into play in preventing the game going in that direction if need be i mean after Supreme Commander FA is greatest rts to be made and can only be improved on
Let's wait the first version that will not be long, to take more correct conclusions and give more accurate feedback.
By the way Frogboy has been quite informative and present in almost all ower concerns .
Not usual in other games has you all now,thats wy they are a quality and professional team.
Yeah, I'm here too. How much antagonizing can Frogboy take from self-proclaimed experts with no experience in THIS game before he just leaves us alone to our own speculation? I know I'd be close to my limit, and I hope he's not because I like reading his gameplay ideas. I would like to see how his meta-unit system works first, because maybe it will make the game more fun, rich, and accessible than the micro method.
When GalCiv II was being made, a lot of Master of Orion fans really wanted us to make GalCiv more like MOO.
Ashes isn't that much like Supreme Commander. It's a lot more like Total Annihilation than SupCom.
The problem with people being so insistent about how we do things in our game before they've even played it is that it makes it appear that they aren't interested in helping us with the game we want to make but rather want to turn our game into something else.
When the alpha comes out, and it's going to be super rough, buggy, with awful UI, terrible unit AI, etc, I worry that we're going to not get useful feedback but rather endless "See, you should just copy Supreme Commander".
I'd say the game is a mixture of Starcraft, TA, and Company of Heroes. There's really no Supreme Commander vibe to it other than it has lots of units (which so would TA in 2015).
Being an open game dev is hard for this reason. Though going "you all have no idea what you are talking about" isn't exactly the way to handle it if you want to have a discussion
And yeah so far very good responses from frogboy. Reminds me of the openes in the development of PA
You will likely get some good feedback, but yeah lots of "just copy" stuff too. In GC3 early access most of my feedback was UI related, because that is important to me. Unfortunately UI is, as I understand it, one of the later phases of development, so that doesn't make me a very good alpha tester. What if you put off founder access a month or two And did some UI/AI focus?
In this game, UI is going to be king. the reason I'm biased towards feedback on gameplay for high league SupCom and SC players isn't because they have mad apm skills. Rather, it is because they understand the root mechanics of the games. I got to diamond is starcraft just bc I'm really good at macro.
between the crappy founders alpha and early access we have to address all this stuff. I'll be making a video showing some of our problems already.
On the note about projectiles, I always assumed the SupCom player based knew they were fake. That is, it would calculate whether a shot would miss and then show a particle effect missing. It was theater. It's cool looking but the projectile behaviors were all scripted. there was no ballistics model behind them. I would write up something in Lua to make it look cool and realistic but that's not making it realistic. They were made to look cool. There is also no true LOS in SupCom. these are all bc of processing power limitations at the time. TA was actually more advanced than SupCom in this regard. In ashes, we could, for instance, have wind,or change gravity and all the projectiles would change based in their mass. Now, whether any of this makes for good gameplay or whether it will actually manifest itself as being different remains to be seen. It may not be worth pursuing if even SupCom experts thought sc already had all this.
yeah that is the thing. SupCom may have used some trickery to achive it, but it seemed pretty "real" within "reasonable gameplay" limits.
It may not have been achieved by a "clean" simulation code, but to the end user that actually does not matter at all. I dunno how exactly the scripting in SupCom worked, but if you can script the projectiles then you could for example script them to fly further depending on their "mass". Totally not a real simulation, but would look just as real and cool and that is all that matters in the end.
I always end up quoting myself instead of editing
While the Age and SupCom games are my primary RTS experiences, after watching some Kohan and Company of Heroes gameplay, I'm excited to see where AotS is headed with meta-units. I've never been a unit micro kind of guy, so hopefully this shallows the skill curve and clicks per second a little bit.
Of course, both games did use icons to help identify "squads" and squad leaders, so I'm curious how AotS will address this. Can't wait!
You can't pre-calculate shots while also allowing shots to hit things other than the intended target, like a cannon hitting a low flying plane that happens to fly past at the time - this very much happens in Sup Com. This is not something you can fake without simulating the projectile in-flight. You can even see this by turning on the debug overlays in-game, and watching the actual projectile entities as they travel; they aren't just particle effects. Each projectile has it's own physics attributes defined in the data files that specify how the projectile is simulated each tick, and this is after the unit has taken the projectile attributes into consideration to determine a firing solution for it's weapon to work out the correct heading and elevation for any barrels it has, and whether it should be looking at the low or high firing arc solution.
What you are saying far more closely resembles the starcraft model, which is indeed just fancy effects over a dice roll/insta-hit.
How did we go from strategic zoom to projectiles? lol.......round and round we go. The initial statement was a word of caution as much as trying to have a supcom clone. The truth is that just about any player whoever plays supcom/fa never wants to play without zoom (in and out) again. The reason why is because its that much better than any other design/platform. And I heard someone mention tragic flaws of supcom. The biggest flaw was poor support from the game maker as a result of supposed lack of funding. What is it that makes game makers think its best to sell an incomplete game as fa obviously was? The rts community has been burned many times over with several different games that looked promising at the start only to flop the same day it was released. I have high hopes for this game so im repeating my initial statement, without zoom this game will flop. I hope it does not. See we dont want a supcom clone becuase that would mean a game that is left to be finished by a community that never agrees on anything.
But how can a developer ever release a finished game if the community cannot agree on what finished means? Seems an impossible task. For example, I don't assume a game absolutely needs extreme zoom as long as battlefield context can be obtained some other way. Even more if no strategic zoom is a principle design decision.
From a technical standpoint, i was referring mainly to forged alliance which was clearly not a complete finished product when it was released. It even still has connection problems related to coding to this day. You can look on youtube and see review after review of players bashing the game due to connection issues alone. And that dosnt even count the countless bugs along the way that the maker never fixed due to supposed lack of funding. Im still saying the same thing, who is gonna pay you for an incomplete product? I personally will never, ever, ever buy a game made by Chris Taylor unless the entire world agrees that it is a great complete game first. The problem is that it gave credence to any fool who said this and that and this needed to be changed, which is why we now have to live with some attention starved kid in his bedroom deciding to make changes to the game left and right which actually has turned off alot of the community and sent them to play other games instead. Its simply very disappointing that a game with such tantalizing potential was left to be ruined this way. This is also the reason you have not sold a founders pack to me. There are literally hundreds of rts games of all shapes and sizes already on the market incorporating a million different ideas without zoom. The truth about strategic zoom is that no one has truly made a great complete game that actually maximizes its potential. Which is why i hope that somewhere, someday, a single great game will rise from the ashes left behind by money grab Taylor.
lol saying FA was an incomplete product. FA was a pretty polished game. It's not FAs fault that some ISPs provide cheap routers to their customers that have firewalls that screw up NAT so bad that no p2p game can handle it.
100 percent incorrect.
IF fa was such a polished game then why did the entire community pay to have it modded to the point that it is not even the same game anymore? The con issues were 100 percent the fault of the game maker who chose not to fix the problem. The entire world but you know this already.
I remember having trouble trying to connect, I'd show up and try and jump into a big setons crutch match but get kicked as I or someone else was nil ping, would take ages getting a game going. Ultimately though once the ports where all correctly forwarded it worked fine. Still though many would try to join and be nil ping.
no finer example than easy join multiplayer is paramount, I imagine many players gave up on fa multiplayer before even getting to have ago.
Yep, that's a fact. But the real subject of this thread is about strategic zoom so i wont harp over other subjects. I think its a very important item that an extreme zoom "out" be included. In reality, no game has truly maximized its potential and i think it would be totally amazing to have a game with ten thousand unit capability along with unit upgrade options similar to starcraft 2, which shows you what upgrades a particular unit has in the ui at the bottom of the screen when you take control of a unit/units. The idea that i would need to zoom in very close to see what upgrades a unit has seems silly when i have ten thousand units. You would spend all day trying to figure out what you have instead of fighting. The idea that i would need extreme zoom out to control that size of an army makes perfect sense. I think to say they don't want to clone other games is a wrong path to take. Take the best from previous experience with all rts games and combine them to make the ultimate game. And again i want to point out, that most people who play fa with zoom almost always say they don't want to play without it after the fact. So many times playing ta a person will lose a game simply because they were attacking and didn't realize they were being attacked in a different area at the same time due to not having a good view of both sides of the battlefield and a cumbersome UI to toggle back and forth. Zoom in and out at least alleviates some of this if not all of this by making it easy to move your view around the battlefield very quickly and easily. On the other hand, maybe im just alittle sore about how fast Etherium flopped when i bought it before its release date. lol!
As a veteran player of all series of TA SCFA , i give all the reason to my friend ColaColin.Only those who have not played for years FA, do not understand the great work was aim in this game, but to discuss FA takes this issue for faforever forums.I will not pronounce more about the Zoom but i ask Frogboy and the rest of the team, that not include icons for all units, let the visual flow in the game, in and out, and keep the full zoom out it's a winning strategy.I have seen the new video, the zoom out is great exactly what I like, in a rts and perfectly understand your concern. Let me tell you that AOTS got more Zoom out then FA,on FA there is a limited Zoom out try and you see its not that far.But trust in this team, there are much better solutions than just see icons all game. This is what i thin,k its time to let the games evolve .
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