SupCom 2

[Data4]

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/sup ... tle;e32009 (Gamespot's hub of the game)

The first one and the expansion were overall pretty good. There were faults here and there, but no real dealbreakers for me. Looking forward to this one.

 

[Destroid]

Having watched a video from E3, do want.

 

[Major_Boobage]

This is TA 3 right?

 

[catfood]

So is SupCom better than TA?

 

[Destroid]

It does sound like they are moving more toward a more regular RTS economy, which is unfortunate.

 

[entertainer]

There's a new video released. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

 

[Data4]

It does sound like they are moving more toward a more regular RTS economy, which is unfortunate.

Yeah, I caught that too. I wonder if there will be minable resources throughout the map, thus turning the Engineers into SC SCV's. Even still, if they keep the major gameplay elements from SC1, I'll be happy. That was the first RTS I've ever played where I really felt like I was managing and commanding a fighting force rather than just lobbing units across the map. From what little I've seen, it looks like this will be the case.

 

[Squirly]

It does sound like they are moving more toward a more regular RTS economy, which is unfortunate.

I really hope not. The economy was one of the best things and one of the ways in which SupCom stood out for me.

 

[Data4]

There's a new video released. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

Let me guess. I got you in the Arma2 thread, so you're trying to spread the love?

 

[TheWesDude]

1) economy

i liked the economy better in vanilla, but liked the build order in FA, if they would combine them it would be heaven. i liked mass manfs to be useful

2) experimentals

always seems like UEF got robbed. the fatboy was too slow for how little damage it took. aeon MIRV artillery would kill a fatboy before it got to your base. sattelite cant even destroy a T3 shield if you are repairing it. other factions got great experimentals.

3) AI

lets face it. base AI sucked ass. when you installed a custom AI package, you could really see the flaws in the engine. it would slow down to the point where it was 4-6 seconds IRL to 1 second in-game. better thread balancing would have helped tons or else run the AI proccessing seprate to not impact the engine would have helped tremendusly. this is my biggest complaint.

4) 64 bit/threading issues

there is no 64 bit version of the engine to utilize the performance increases for those using 64 bit OSes, and you really do need to make 64 bit version of the engine to make your game playable in 4-8 years still. without good threading support such as multiple proccesses handling different aspects is needed for todays RTSes. without it, your game wont have longevity. computers are not really increasing in speed per-se, we are adding more cores. multiple proccesses will help a lot for computers today, and even the future.

without multi-proccess support, your game lacks scalability.

 

[Raapys]

without multi-proccess support, your game lacks scalability.

Isn't Supreme Commander like one of the best multi-threaded games ever? One of the few that can actually use up to four cores?

 

[Destroid]

Yeah it's pretty funny that supcom still owns my computer (which is about 1 year old, but still, it's a 3ghz dual core core 2 duo). From the talk chris taylor did sounds like they have put a real focus on optimising performance.

 

[Ryuken]

"If you want to know more" I am maintaining a SupCom 2 info thread on the official forums. It's gonna be a different game with that economy change but we'll see.

EDIT: SupCom1 and FA mostly just use two cores, not a lot going on on third or four core if you have one. It was one of the first games to implement Dual-Core support yeah.

 

[Major_Boobage]

And then there were 3 Belgians.

 

[TheWesDude]

so you are saying that sup com FA supports dual-core? i have never seen more than 1 proccess for supcom.

if thats the case, then their threading sucks ass. there is no way that after 30 mins of game-time its more than 1/1 time ratio for in-game and RL. and i have had games with me and 3 AIs and i usually quit those games when it comes to 5 RL seconds per 1 in-game second.

and i have a 5.2 ghz cpu with 4 gigs of ram on xp64.

 

[Raapys]

Have a look here: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.h ... VzaWFzdA==

They're testing the Intel qx6700 cpu with Supreme Commander. When using one of the four cores, they get 6fps average, with two cores they get 19fps average, and with all four cores they get 32fps average. Like I said, it's probably *the* game for dual/quad cpus.

 

[TheWesDude]

i would like for them to use the same test with sorian AI playing against/with multiple AI opponents and see what it says then.


my problem with supcom is that 2 sorian AI vs me+sorian = shitty experience. 1 sorian vs me+sorian = shitty experience. the problem is that by the 30m mark in-game, you are having 3-6 RL seconds pass per in-game second.


with stock AI, it seems they did load balancing of some kind with threading but as a result the computer AI gets so few cycles as to be worthless, yet when you use a custom AI package to force the higher/deeper AI process, the engine cannot load balance properly.

for RTS's, the AIs should be complex, and run on their own proccess, even if need be 1 extra process per 1-2 AIs or more. no matter what, AI proccesses should not interfer with the gaming engine like they do in supcom. its a huge design flaw. thats my biggest problem. i cannot use the game to its fullest due to these glaring engine issues.