We hope to get through a lot more this weekend.
• We actually are doing a lot of research and development which is form of planning. The features that we are developing now are more the framework around which the rest of the game is built so we don't have to figure out every detail of what each piece of code looks like. Also remember that we've built some of these games before so we can draw on that experience to know where the oddball nooks and crannies are in our problem space. Of course we are making the problem space bigger here as well
The actual formulation we are using the terrain, the replication and the sim are all different from previous games but based on our experience. We have plausible fallsbacks for anything that's too wacky. (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 86#p596186)
• Specs: Yeah, basically there is always a server somewhere but it could just be hosted on your machine for single player.
Also everyone needs to keep in mind that we are aiming to make the game scaleable. This means that the minspec needs to take into account how large of a game and what configuration that game takes. What might be acceptable for a 4 player game might not cut it in a 40 player game.
Like I said, I'm not going to go too crazy on the graphics side. At the moment minspec is basically shader model 3 with decent vertex texture fetch (so we can instance stuff). (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 05#p593705)
• Sorian and Planets: I'm still mainly working on planet generation. The weekend was mostly spend getting the planet archttypes and terrain biome stuff setup and working. The next phase is more complex geometry generation using the art Steve is creating. I've already written most of the underlying stuff for that, it's more an issue of layout and generating cool stuff with it (although I still have some tech work do to). I've also done some setup and experimentation with features (trees etc). I can report that I'm happy with the results so far.
WJ continues to work on our UI solution. We think we have this kinda/mostly/sorta dialed in but it's just getting there and we could shift directions on it if something blows up. More on that later but it encapsulates scripting/ui and some other stuff.
William had to put a bunch of work into the build system to see if we could make the UI stuff work cross platform. Seems possible so he's moved back onto sim/replication. I've described the work elsewhere but it's slowly getting more solid as we move forward. One interesting aspect of this work is that the scalability is probably going to happen in a different place than I thought (multiple connection servers, not multiple separate sim servers).
Sorian is starting in 2 weeks. (http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 65#p594765)
• Multiple Windows, Redux: The clients workload is going to be quite small compared to the server. It will still be multi-threaded but not as much because it's mainly rendering and dealing with the UI. Since no simulation happens locally it's almost all going to be rendering load. In addition I'm working very hard to move as much rendering work to the GPU as possible.
…
The server code is where the heavy multithreading work is going to happen. The work is broken down across domains which can be run in parallel. For example units on different planets are completely separate so the first obvious thing is to run each planet on a thread. But we can go a lot further than that. …
SupCom only really took advantage of 2 threads. One for the sim, one for the rendering. In PA the sim lives inside the server and so the client has a lot less to do. The goal here being that you don't get slowdowns based on how slow other players machines are. …
(http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... 59#p592759)
Seriously, beta started at the same time as EVERYTHING off planet
