Planetary Annihilation
Beta Builds for the Holidays! Build 58772 & 58678
Happy holidays, everyone! This year, Santa is bringing you a big bag of new features. Enjoy, and no matter what you celebrate, have fun, stay safe, and fling asteroids at your closest friends and family.
Fix to OS/X client crashing as soon as you start the game (We think we got most / all occurences of the new crash that appeared last build)
More fixes to try and get nukes, asteroids and other "big splodey" events to show up more reliably for people. Still a WIP.
Area commands will now select the whole world if you drag past the edge. Useful for building up small (or large) planets.
We think most cases of not getting all your commanders spawning in team games has been fixed. Please report on the forums if you find a new 100% repro of this. Gotta squish em all!
Bombers and Advanced Bombers had some pretty big changes made to them. You should try em out. They're awesome.
Twitch.tv and OS/X - Make sure you install SoundFlower if you want audio on your streams! This is a Twitch API requirement, not ours!
Some pretty awesome new FX on the Umbrella and the SXX Orbital Laser.
Quite a few other small fixes since yesterday.
Build 58678 Notes:
Area Commands: This is a big one! Area Patrol will be coming soon, which (depending on the unit) combines Area Attack, Reclaim and Repair functionality, but persistently. Currently supported are the following:
- Area Attack: With unit(s) selected (bombers particularly are great), click and drag on an area you want to attack. All selected units will proceed to attack all available units in the area. If you don't have recon on it, it will simply act as an attack move until it gets vision and will start to area attack.
- Area Build: Currently two types of drag build commands exist. Circle for things like power, and line for things like defenses, factories, etc.
- Area Reclaim: Unit(s) will find all reclaimable wreckage in the area until all wreckage is gone.
- Area Repair: Unit(s) will find all repairable units in the area to repair until nothing needs repairing.
Notification System: This will notify you of important game events, such as structures being completed, incoming attacks, in particular commander under attack, and those other events you really want to know about when you're building up a high speed asteroid to destroy planets with and not paying attention to that planet you've taken over.
Lots of work done on in-game selection logic. It should overall be much easier to select things, and select the things you want now. It does change some behavior though, so play around with it before you go play your ladder games.
Overhaul to the rendering engine. This is a big change but won't be necessarily obvious to a lot of people. Read here for details: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/graphics-update.54840/#post-840016
Planet Smashing: The paths asteroids take now to smash a planet also looks a lot better. Try it out today! Smash your buddies and laugh!
Interplanetary Nukes: You can now nuke from one moon to another moon orbiting the same planet
Big art changes to Metal planets and new work on the desert biome. Metal planets now can support much smaller metal planets. Big ones remain their normal awesome selves, of course. You can also play on lava planets once again.
Twitch streaming fixes for AMD and for OS/X. There is no Twitch built in support for Linux, as the Twitch API does not support it.
Quite a few UI polish items. Better North / South icons, better looking start location tags, etc.
Factories support rally point assist now. Particularly useful for getting a ton of fabbers on a project.
Hotkeys that target and track a unit (commander, idle fabber, group), will now move to the correct planet.
Changing your settings should now only regenerate a planet if you change a setting that really needs to rebuild the planet.
Bot Factory has new art, deep space radar has art now, more units have their appropriate strategic icons now, a number of animation and model tweaks.
The commander has had his weapon changed a bit to allow more easily hitting small units such as the Dox.
Fixes to bombers so they have a better time hitting targets. Mind you, their main use is still against static defenses. If you're chasing bots with them, you may want to restrategize.
Anti-nukes now start with one missile in their bay. The launcher is now more expensive to compensate for this.
Beta Build: 58197
Orbital Camera Overhaul - We have a new integrated camera with more degrees of freedom and, more importantly, none of the crazy disorientation when zooming in from celestial view. Give it a shot and tell us what you think!
Kick / Kick-Ban - Now you can kick players from your matches. This is a pretty heavily requested feature, so we're stoked to introduce the concept with this update.
Twitch.TV Integration - Now you can stream your matches from in-game! Just sign in to Twitch from the settings menu and start streaming immediately.
Changes To Unit / Building Selection - Complete re-write of selection logic. This is mostly internal, but some behaviors have changed. Let us know which corners we forgot to round off.
Tech 1 Bot Factory Redesign - Bot factories have a newer, more distinct look.
New Mod Folder - Mods can now sit side by side with game files without replacing them. There will be a post in the mod forum about the details of this.
Collision Tweak - Added rectangular collision volumes for naval units, which should allow for more accurate targeting and movement.
Structure Build Atrophy - Incomplete structures will now degrade over time and vanish after a cooldown period. Walls have been given a cooldown too, which makes it harder to abuse them.
And most important tons of bugfixes and other little tweaks to make the game better. And lots more to come!
Beta Build: 57703
- Lobby Passwords: Long awaited, make sure you can lock down your games to your friends. You'll need to share the password with them of course.
- Major start spot and metal placement fixes. Please report if you're still finding significant unbuildable metal spots. Keep in mind, if you have very craggy planets, this can result in anemic start spots in terms of metal.
- Numerous Linux Fixes: We've implemented SDL on Linux, which should enable full screen, fix issues with backspace doubling up, and a number of other errant behaviors
- A number of server and client crash fixes
- Loading screen is back: Should help make it clear when there is loading going on
- Improved visualization of orbital paths/trajectory changes in Celestial view
- Improvements to metal planet pathing and moon pathing
- Support for audio on multiple planets now; Should make planet audio less confusing!
- Bombers now use a carpet bombing technique. This will change their overall bombing behavior. Play around with them a bit. This will still require additional tuning, but consider it the first pass. Their numbers have been adjusted quite a bit to take these changes into account.
- Hiding your commander underwater will be much less effective now.
- Unit guard layer consistency pass
Beta Build: 57449
- This is a stability build. We have a bigger feature build we're working hard on. Our plan is, in fact, is to release it next week before the US Thanksgiving holiday! What's better than too much food and large scale robot war? Nothing!
- Fixes a frequent client crash we've been seeing this week. If you're getting a crash on startup, this should help. Please make sure your drivers are up to date! If you're on a laptop, consider getting the latest beta drivers from AMD or NVidia for your device.
- A new tutorial video! Gives a little more detail on getting started. There's a known issue of it playing at 320p, rather than full resolution. We're looking into it.
Beta Build: 57164
- A number of server browser fixes; should see a lot fewer empty/abandoned lobbies. Please post on forums if you're still seeing lots of empty lobbies.
- Some fixes for planet smash failing to smash. There were a couple scenarios where you could engage an asteroid, but it would never do antyhing. Hopefully most of these are fixed now. FX playing is still hard on most systems and connections. We're working on it!
- Orbital units given appropriate vision in the orbital layer. Should result in smarter behavior where orbital units interact with each other.
- AIs now append (AI) to their name
Beta Build: 57047
Please verify your game files if you haven't for a while. There is an issue we're tracking down with some files not getting patched correctly.
Just a reminder: Currently, everyone has access to all commanders. You will not have permanent access to all of them once we have systems in place for that. Never fear, we will have quite a few commanders to select from, regardless!
There is a known issue while accessing settings during a live game. Depending on the solar system and your computer, and connection, this can result in a very long delay to rebuild the system before you can play again. We recommend not changing settings during a live game for now. We will be fixing this, but it is an easily avoidable problem, so in the interim, avoid doing this!
Windows Versions: Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 (64 & 32 bit)
Mac OS/X: 10.7, 10.8 & 10.9
Beta Build: 57047
- ATI 3X00 and 4X00 should be working again! Sorry about that, new impostor code uncovered a driver bug!
- Economic factors should be working again. Keep a sharp eye on your energy. It does matter!
- This also impacts how recon units use energy.
- Target leading should be fixed.
- Units will now automatically reclaim and build if you try and build over wreckage
- AIs have names now!
- Apparent "lock up" on the intro video playing should be fixed
- AI is starting to have actual threat response, instead of just economic threat.
Beta Build: 56516
- AI now has an economic scale; Once you host an AI game, you have a player and AI economic scale, so you can adjust difficulty for both yourself and for the AI. If you want to pure sandbox, you can set the AI to 0. This is a temporary way to provide an AI difficulty slider until we get more robust lobby options in place.
- Better information provided now in celestial view for current orbits and interception paths
- Laser towers should have an easier time hitting bots now
- Metal spots should no longer be destroyable except by asteroid impact.
- Quite a few simulation terminated fixes
- Units rolling off a factory can no longer be interrupted ; They will finish roll off before starting up their next task
- More user friendly errors if your client can't start for some reason, especially if it's related to Coherent (Our UI system)
- A number of AI improvements: Can now build storage, anti-nukes, mobile aa and mobile artillery; They will more aggressively defend their mexes (metal extractors) with static defenses, and they will be trying to expand more rapidly; In general, they should also get stuck on various tasks much less frequently
- Bombers should be able to hit more accurately again. They are not done, but they were a little over broken while we work on carpet bombing functionality.
- Orbital Laser now correctly requires energy to function, which means it will slow down the overall speed at which it can fire.
Beta Build: 56310
- A great many changes in this build are not necessarily obvious simply by looking at the build. A lot of plumbing work and behind the scenes to continue to improve the build, and to prepare for still to come changes. These patch notes do not include all of the many changes in this build.
- Fix for new Steam players needing to exit and re-enter the game before they can create or find a match.
- Improvements to building placement. More to come on this front.
- Significant changes to how information is sent to the client. This should result in significantly reduced network utilization. It has been tested pretty thoroughly by the team, but it's a big change. Please report to the forums if you find strange new behavior you've never seen before. Be as detailed as you can to help us better track down new issues.
- Lava planets are currently disabled for play, due to some known pathing / placement issues in relation to having actual lava on them now. You can still build them in the system editor.
- Additional client and server crash fixes.
- Number of Mac shader and render fixes.
- More HDR tuning.
- More graphics performance and compatibility work.
- AI Performance improvements
- AI continues to get smarter, and make better use of existing systems. We will have a way to handicap the AI very soon.
- The AI has also gone interplanetary.
- Rebalance of defense towers, single, double and triple barrel
- Wall health reduced and cost increased
Beta Build: 55430 & 55493
- A number of server and client crash fixes, including a number of ATI specific and Mac ATI specific issues.
- Allow for water start spots
- All basic factories can now be built by advanced fabbers
Beta Build: 55430
- Support for HDR, FXAA and resolution scaling. These are disabled by default. Turn them on if you wish to play with them!
- New Raptor Commander is now player selectable!
- To get orbital or deepspace radar, you need to build an orbital and deepspace radar (Advanced unit)
- Quite a few client and server crash fixes.
- Landing zone size fixed for real this time.
- There is a new tutorial video off the main menu now. This is WIP, and will be replaced/enhanced with a selection of tutorial videos/community how-to guides going into the future.
- Units should push more naturally out of an area that you're building in, without you having to manually move them.
- Orbit visualizations now exist in the celestial view.
- Another host of pathing updates, changes and fixes.
- Energy and metal can once again be built along the shoreline
- AI continues to get smarter and more dangerous.
- AI may now nuke you. You've been warned!
Balance Changes
- Battleship: HP increased, ROF increased very slightly, lifetime of the projectiles increased
- Orbital Fighter: More expensive, bit slower - This unit was supposed to have different move dynamics than an airplane; Also can now be targeted by ion defense and actually hit
- Delta V Engine build cost dropped by roughly a third
- Ion Defense build cost reduced, more inline with intended cost
- Tactical Missile projectile max lifetime reduced by 75% because too long!
- Ammo lifetime increased for pelter and explicit target layers created for Holkins
Beta Build: 54994
- A lot more back end work for stability, performance and overall game experience. There is at least one known server crash related to moving units through the celestial/deep space regions. We're still looking for a 100% repro, however. If you find something you're doing crashes your server every time, please let us know on the forums!
- We have changed how games load - as soon as a lobby is hosted, the game server starts preparing the planet, both on the server and locally. If you notice "Connect to server" taking a little while, be patient. When you get into the lobby, you should see a status light on the solar system info that changes from red to yellow to green. Once it's green, if everyone is ready, you should see the game start very quickly.
- Significant changes to building placement code ; you should see fewer false positives on placement, as well as more accurate information when getting invalid/red placement warnings
- Confirmation buttons exist now for: Leave a game lobby, leave a live game, quit the program
- Default game type switched back to FFA from Vs. AI
- Changes to lobby layout
- Max planet sizes are now clamped to 1200 for gameplay ; you can make bigger planets, but we need more work before we can unlock play on larger planets
- Start zone sizing should now be accurately represented
- Ongoing work on the pathing
- AIs build defenses more
- AIs now will update their rally points for units being generated
- AI should make better use of advanced fabbers again and also build many more advanced factories again
- AI can now build defenses in expansion bases
- AI can now build advanced mexes on existing basic mexes
Balance Changes:
- WIP: Fairly significant changes to naval; this is still very in progress, and only basic units have really been modified yet. Advanced will get a pass next.
- Too many changes to list individually.
- Radar and Advanced Radar can now be built on water
- Radar and Advanced Radar require your energy to be at least 90% efficient to operate (If you have 10k power and are using more than approximately 11,000 power, you will stall your radar)
- Missile ship's range has been decreased to be more inline with normal tactical missile launcher; Missile ship now also charges more slowly than before. Fire time is still 10 seconds, but if you're running a deficit energy economy, it will slow down your rate of fire.
- Tactical Missile Launcher has the same limits as the Missile Ship - stalled energy economy will have more of an impact on it's ability to fire
- Ion Defense Cannon: Changes to help make it more accurate (more work is still needed); This unit is NOT designed to take out orbital fighters.