5 ms·

The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

95 points by resatori 2y ago

forrestthewoods 2y ago
Oh weird, this is my post from 2013. Surprised to see it here.
- neerd 2y ago
  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?
  - forrestthewoods 2y ago
    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!
- bigiain 2y ago
  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...
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Just a curiosity: why did you call them curves?
  - pinbender 2y ago
    The interpolator for the current value is generic. It could represent any function, including curves like parabolas. I don't remember whether or not we actually used that capability though.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      Oh! Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks.
- willis936 2y ago
  Thanks for your work! I played many a PA LAN party back in the day and SC was my favorite RTS during high school. PA is one of the few RTS where PVE could have fun scenarios. I'm simply not smart enough to manage 8 frontlines. I'm excited for Industrial Annihilation and hope you're involved with it.
- wormlord 2y ago
  This is my favorite technical writeup. I think I asked you before on here if you still had info about how PA's pathfinding or csg geometry worked, those were two other cool things I remember from the OG tech demo.
  - forrestthewoods 2y ago
    I don't know anything about the CSG. I didn't start the pathfinding system,m but I did a lot of work on it. I could maybe someday turn that into a blog post. But I don't have source access anymore. The tldr of pathfinding is voxels and flow fields.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
endgame 2y ago
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?
- forrestthewoods 2y ago
  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!
  - SXX 2y ago
    Yeah you certainly shipped it. You can load into replay from any moment :-)
senectus1 2y ago
huh never heard of this one.. looks fun
roenxi 2y ago
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.
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  I can imagine the discussions to be had in the dev-kitchen - between we go natural on zoom out - or we start a projection war right there, right then.. MentalGen choose your weapon: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/977:_Map_Projections https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/977:_Map_Projecti...
  - scotty79 2y ago
    Dyson Sphere Program after Dark Fog Update is halfway there. It has only flying units and static defense.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- wormlord 2y ago
  It was definitely lacking in depth and strategy. Battles took so much effort to manage, that for normal skill level players the game was more about turtling up your planet and hitting an exponential growth curve so that you were basically invincible, then using a super weapon to end the stalemate. Either that or ending the game within the first few minutes with a well-optimized rush. However, I don't think I have seen a dev team flex their engine-developing muscles as much since in a game. It's clear that a team of Uber-talented (pun intended) people with a passion for their craft set out to use a lot of cool technologies, and I think that's worth something by itself.
jeffrallen 2y ago
Hey, just dropping in to say: the moment I saw the demo of the feature, I said to myself, "that's gonna be due to a good underlying data structure and this article is going to be about that data structure". Was not disappoint. This is a lesson I learned way too late in IT: Get the data structure right and interesting features come at reduced cost.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  Put an interface around it and you can change the underlying data structure.
  - NateEag 2y ago
    Except for when you can't, because all abstractions leak. https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ https://www.hyrumslaw.com/
    - ninetyninenine 2y ago
      Of course there are always times where you can't. But most of the times you can.
moritonal 2y ago
I believe the same devs behind this game are trying to now produce https://industrialannihilation.com/ https://industrialannihilation.com/
- ffsm8 2y ago
  I was expecting early access steam, not a literal preorder page with no release date set. I feel like that's the wrong way to do this. You either use preorder with a scheduled full release window, or steam early access. Taking money as preorders for a steam early access with pretty much no release window... That feels more like vaporware to me. At least add it to steam for people to wishlist.
  - DragonMaus 2y ago
    The initial roll out for Industrial Annihilation was really janky. With Planetary Annihilation, they did the Kickstarter thing and it worked pretty well (if I recall correctly, it was the highest grossing Kickstarter of all time at that point). With Industrial Annihilation, they revealed it as an investment platform for wealthy stockholders. Absolutely no options for people who wanted to support it but were either not ridiculously wealthy or just didn't want to own stock in the company.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  Interesting. I'm concerned that I'll have to try and play satisfactory while I'm under artillery fire, and their last foray into the genre had too much frustration compared to fun, but assuming that those systems stay relatively light this could be exactly what I'm craving. Annihilation and it's successors have always had a special place in the RTS genre.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    Well given the top-down point-click interface, I think you mean factorio, which already has near-constant enemy attacks, bases, etc but they are low-tech zergs. Factorio is a fantastic game, so I'm optimistic that copying that model might be good-ish.
sdwr 2y ago
Reminds me of Achron https://store.steampowered.com/app/109700/Achron/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/109700/Achron/ It wasn't a very good game, but it used a similar time-scrubbing mechanic to support time travel. You could send your units back in time to harass the enemy before they built defences. Time jumps cost energy, and paradoxes were resolved at wavefronts that moved forward in time faster than 1s per s.
pests 2y ago
I was addicted to following the dev updates when this was in original development. Was a huge fan of RTS at the time and found the space theme and the early concepts of slamming astroids into your enemies to be amazing.
metadat 2y ago
What was the fate of this game? I still play Supreme Commander: FA, but never heard of Planetary Annihilation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Taylor_(video_game_designer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Taylor_(video_game_des... Supreme Commander 2 is just terrible, I wonder how it got screwed up with Chris still architecting it.

95 points by resatori 2y ago

forrestthewoods 2y ago

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

neerd 2y ago
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?
- forrestthewoods 2y ago
  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!
bigiain 2y ago
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...
robertlagrant 2y ago
Just a curiosity: why did you call them curves?
- pinbender 2y ago
  The interpolator for the current value is generic. It could represent any function, including curves like parabolas. I don't remember whether or not we actually used that capability though.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    Oh! Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks.
willis936 2y ago
Thanks for your work! I played many a PA LAN party back in the day and SC was my favorite RTS during high school. PA is one of the few RTS where PVE could have fun scenarios. I'm simply not smart enough to manage 8 frontlines. I'm excited for Industrial Annihilation and hope you're involved with it.
wormlord 2y ago
This is my favorite technical writeup. I think I asked you before on here if you still had info about how PA's pathfinding or csg geometry worked, those were two other cool things I remember from the OG tech demo.
- forrestthewoods 2y ago
  I don't know anything about the CSG. I didn't start the pathfinding system,m but I did a lot of work on it. I could maybe someday turn that into a blog post. But I don't have source access anymore. The tldr of pathfinding is voxels and flow fields.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

endgame 2y ago

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?

forrestthewoods 2y ago
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!
- SXX 2y ago
  Yeah you certainly shipped it. You can load into replay from any moment :-)

senectus1 2y ago

huh never heard of this one.. looks fun

roenxi 2y ago

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.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago
I can imagine the discussions to be had in the dev-kitchen - between we go natural on zoom out - or we start a projection war right there, right then.. MentalGen choose your weapon: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/977:_Map_Projections https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/977:_Map_Projecti...
- scotty79 2y ago
  Dyson Sphere Program after Dark Fog Update is halfway there. It has only flying units and static defense.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wormlord 2y ago
It was definitely lacking in depth and strategy. Battles took so much effort to manage, that for normal skill level players the game was more about turtling up your planet and hitting an exponential growth curve so that you were basically invincible, then using a super weapon to end the stalemate. Either that or ending the game within the first few minutes with a well-optimized rush. However, I don't think I have seen a dev team flex their engine-developing muscles as much since in a game. It's clear that a team of Uber-talented (pun intended) people with a passion for their craft set out to use a lot of cool technologies, and I think that's worth something by itself.

jeffrallen 2y ago

Hey, just dropping in to say: the moment I saw the demo of the feature, I said to myself, "that's gonna be due to a good underlying data structure and this article is going to be about that data structure". Was not disappoint. This is a lesson I learned way too late in IT: Get the data structure right and interesting features come at reduced cost.

ninetyninenine 2y ago
Put an interface around it and you can change the underlying data structure.
- NateEag 2y ago
  Except for when you can't, because all abstractions leak. https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ https://www.hyrumslaw.com/
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    Of course there are always times where you can't. But most of the times you can.

moritonal 2y ago

I believe the same devs behind this game are trying to now produce https://industrialannihilation.com/ https://industrialannihilation.com/

ffsm8 2y ago
I was expecting early access steam, not a literal preorder page with no release date set. I feel like that's the wrong way to do this. You either use preorder with a scheduled full release window, or steam early access. Taking money as preorders for a steam early access with pretty much no release window... That feels more like vaporware to me. At least add it to steam for people to wishlist.
- DragonMaus 2y ago
  The initial roll out for Industrial Annihilation was really janky. With Planetary Annihilation, they did the Kickstarter thing and it worked pretty well (if I recall correctly, it was the highest grossing Kickstarter of all time at that point). With Industrial Annihilation, they revealed it as an investment platform for wealthy stockholders. Absolutely no options for people who wanted to support it but were either not ridiculously wealthy or just didn't want to own stock in the company.
SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
Interesting. I'm concerned that I'll have to try and play satisfactory while I'm under artillery fire, and their last foray into the genre had too much frustration compared to fun, but assuming that those systems stay relatively light this could be exactly what I'm craving. Annihilation and it's successors have always had a special place in the RTS genre.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Well given the top-down point-click interface, I think you mean factorio, which already has near-constant enemy attacks, bases, etc but they are low-tech zergs. Factorio is a fantastic game, so I'm optimistic that copying that model might be good-ish.

sdwr 2y ago

Reminds me of Achron https://store.steampowered.com/app/109700/Achron/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/109700/Achron/ It wasn't a very good game, but it used a similar time-scrubbing mechanic to support time travel. You could send your units back in time to harass the enemy before they built defences. Time jumps cost energy, and paradoxes were resolved at wavefronts that moved forward in time faster than 1s per s.

pests 2y ago

I was addicted to following the dev updates when this was in original development. Was a huge fan of RTS at the time and found the space theme and the early concepts of slamming astroids into your enemies to be amazing.

metadat 2y ago

What was the fate of this game? I still play Supreme Commander: FA, but never heard of Planetary Annihilation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Taylor_(video_game_designer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Taylor_(video_game_des... Supreme Commander 2 is just terrible, I wonder how it got screwed up with Chris still architecting it.