The Tech of Planetary Annihilation: ChronoCam (2013)

Reminds me of Achron<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;109700&#x2F;Achron&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;109700&#x2F;Achron&#x2F;</a><p>It wasn&#x27;t a very good game, but it used a similar time-scrubbing mechanic to support time travel.<p>You could send your units back in time to harass the enemy before they built defences.<p>Time jumps cost energy, and paradoxes were resolved at wavefronts that moved forward in time faster than 1s per s.

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?

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

I believe the same devs behind this game are trying to now produce <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;industrialannihilation.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;industrialannihilation.com&#x2F;</a>

What was the fate of this game? I still play Supreme Commander: FA, but never heard of Planetary Annihilation.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chris_Taylor_(video_game_designer)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chris_Taylor_(video_game_des...</a><p>Supreme Commander 2 is just terrible, I wonder how it got screwed up with Chris still architecting it.

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.

Hey, just dropping in to say: the moment I saw the demo of the feature, I said to myself, &quot;that&#x27;s gonna be due to a good underlying data structure and this article is going to be about that data structure&quot;.<p>Was not disappoint.<p>This is a lesson I learned way too late in IT: Get the data structure right and interesting features come at reduced cost.

huh never heard of this one.. looks fun

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 &quot;rectangular table&quot; setup.<p>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&#x27;t manage an engaging game. I got the impression the engine was consuming too much of their attention.