that really makes me want to upgrade my 6600 (and get another 20"+ w/s monitor, and another gig of ram etc... etc... etc...).
I've started playing Warhammer 40K Dawn of War again (before I start on the Dark Crusade expansion) and the one thing I wish I could do is zoom out that little bit further to get a better view of the action (at max zoom I still feel that little bit too close)
It looks like I'd definitly be able to do that with this game.
I tried the demo of this on my 24" and 17" and with my 6800 GT the frame rate was pretty bad at native resoltions. I guess ill have to fiddle with the settings more if you all seem to think its such a good game tho.
Originally Posted by Blademrk I've started playing Warhammer 40K Dawn of War again (before I start on the Dark Crusade expansion) and the one thing I wish I could do is zoom out that little bit further to get a better view of the action (at max zoom I still feel that little bit too close)
Lol, after playing sup com I really hate the cameras of other games. Went from sup com to CoH and forgot I couldn't zoom out really far :p
Originally Posted by Veles Lol, after playing sup com I really hate the cameras of other games. Went from sup com to CoH and forgot I couldn't zoom out really far :p
yea seriously, although i felt the same thing when i first played DoW and CoH, just needed another 1 or 2 levels of zoom
wish you could remap the map moving keys in supcom tho, arrow keys is such a pain i dont understand why more RTSs dont let you remap them
wasd is a much more obvious set of keys to move the map around with as its right below all the number keys you use for controlling your groups :(
On a sub note: I would not say that Tim is a FPS whore for wanting rates between 20 and 40, this is on the limits of what is acceptable in my mind and most of my mates as well.
Originally Posted by Mother-Gooser On a sub note: I would not say that Tim is a FPS whore for wanting rates between 20 and 40, this is on the limits of what is acceptable in my mind and most of my mates as well.
got the retail, 2x7900GT but since iim on Vista, there's really no SLI at all, 2.9Ghz AMD X2, and 2Gb of RAM.
smooth sailing on high/medium mix @1680x1050.... :)
great freakin game! a mission on Easy takes about 1.5 ~ 2hr. sometimes hitting 2.5+. but it all feels like its 10min :) its that good.
having 500 units on ur command, attacking from different direction, plus some naval assaults backed up by torpedo launching bomber planes, its so freakin wicked when all hell's break loose and a huge giant spider came out of nowhere and freaked the **** out of u coz everythin u throw at him doesnt have any effect, but on the other side of the map u need to protect the tank convoy and...and.... ah i cant stop :)
I've been playing it since beta and got my retail copy yesterday, its very nice though my XP2800 struggles, but turning shadows off, and Fidelity to low I can run 1x 1280x1024 + 1x 1024x768 screen in dual. Any more units over 300 though and its starts to all go down the pan :(
A lot of people are claiming the game is unoptimized but imo its just people need to learn that you can't always run the game on high everything, even with a well specced system.
Originally Posted by Nictron Have any of you had the serious slowdowns in the Demo.
I have two friends that find the demo unplayable.
Their specs are VISTA 32 Bit, AMD 4000+, 2GB Ram and 7800 GTX 256 MB.
and WinXP, Intel 2.8 Ghz, 1.2 GB Ram and 7800 GTX 256MB.
Or do you think the demo was just not optimised that well.
I mean surely these pc's should handle a RTS quite well.
Thx.
I ran it on my PC perfectly fine at 1920x1080 on my 37" LCD. I had all of the settings set high except shadows and AA I think.
Im running it on this:
Athlon X2 4800
2Gb PC3200
X1900XTX
and some other stuff of course but you get the point.
My friend had a problem running the demo at low settings on his 7600gt, even though he could play the beta fine. I'm not sur ewhat they changed, but it runs a lot smoother on my system than the beta did, and from the beta to the demo runs worse for him.
Originally Posted by topher Where THE HELL DID MY POST GO ?
Downloading an ISO of the game is classed as piracy in my eyes and the discussion of piracy is against the forum rules; hence why your post was removed.
I find that the description of the hardware needed wasn't really accurate. I'm running a 7900GS and an E6300 and it supports 2 screens, one at 1440x900 (19" wide) and the other at 1024 x 768 (15", max res) with everything on full, except AA since I don't see a difference with or without it and I get between 30 to 50 fps, albeit it slows down a tad when 60 artillery guns fire off with the 20+ point defense batteries and the enemy start impacting the shield with some 50 laser units, it doesn't go under 25.
I'm finding the Easy and Normal AI to be relatively easy to bully and destroy
re. the dual screen modes i have two sceens that run in dual mode on my x1950pro however one monitor runs at 1680x1050 and the other at 1280x1024 im guessing this shouldnt cause me any difficulties however ive only seen dual screen running on two of the same monitor Any chance of testing this
I will go into detail with what I see as wrong
(please try to remember that I am not a journalist, English major etc, so my grammar may be off)
1) Hardware Specs
To the author of this article: did you NOT play the beta at all?
(Yes I know it was a beta, and they have extra dev code running along-side the normal code, but still)
This game is a CPU/RAM HOGGER... The game is ALL simulation, 100%... thus the CPU and RAM are getting taxed all the time... that shell your tank just fired, yeah its speed, direction, etc are all being computed as it was fired. Along with before it was being fired, the tank had to compensate for the enemies speed and direction to lead the shell.
the more units you have in the game the harder it hits your CPU. In a longer game, you could be sitting with a base that is protected with 15+ shields, have 20-50 PDs and AA, and a nice group of 200 units at the front door, along with the 60 or so level 1 Air fighters, 10 level 3 air fighters, 15 level 3 bombers and a navy of destroyers on the coast. Each Units movement, speed, direction, etc are all being calculated all the time. even if you are not looking at them on the screen, if they are doing anything, its taxing the CPU.
There is a reason this game is Threaded (Simulation thread, audio Thread, AI thread; from what one of the developers told me in beta)
Back in the beta, a E6600 with 2GB RAM would usually be at 100% and 30% in the later stages of the game. (of course its a bit high because of the dev code that was running in the beta)
This game is ALL CPU bottle-neck... Its The ONLY reason there is a unit cap. The more units a person has, the more the CPU has to calculate. If you think this is taxing a system already, wait until you have mods out, along with people who change the caps to 1000 units per player in a 8 player game.
2) Your "Description" of the sides
These were way off, Cybran being about Air, Aeon being about water, and UEF being about Land... Here is what it really is:
Cybran: Excellent Early game, the mantis may have been nerfed, but the cybran still have the best Tier 1 units IMO. They are NOT anything special air, except their Tier 3 bombers can shoot at planes. Their PDs are accurate, although a bit on the low range side, and their navy only has one cool factor, the destroyers that can walk on the ground.
Their Experimental units help them slightly in the late game, especially if you can get a spider bot up before an enemy UEF player has titans at your doorstep.
Aeon: You are semi right on Aeon being the Navy kings, they have a experimental destroyer that is pretty beefy (though you are actually better off building normal destroyers with all the mass and energy spent on it)
Aeons navy is supplemented by the fact that their tanks (some) can hover, and thus travel on the water.
Their PDs are somewhat weak, but have extremely long range, and I think they have a slight splash damage (will have to check the stats files for that)
Their shields absorb the most damage (highest tech shields that is)
The have, arguably the BEST Experimental unit out there.
they are your accel at nothing, bad at nothing group, with a slight advantage at sea
UEF: UEF is like the Core of SupCom. (where Cybran is like ARM)
Their Ground units are some of the better ones, though only at the higher tech levels. The Titan Tier 3 attack bot is THE best ground unit in the game (Non experimental)
Their Tier 1 units are below average, probably slightly on par with Aeon. Their Air units excel, especially when you take into account that they have a tier 3 Gunship, and this gunship currently needs balancing (or so the community feels) 10-15 of these suckers can tear through a Commander in just a few seconds)
Their boats (tier 1 only I think) have a spoofing ability, that creates many false blips on the enemies radar.
Their experimental support "tank" is beefy as all hell, and the Mavor is basically a rapid fire Nuke silo.
3) Comparing the sides to rock paper scissors
Personally from everything Chris has said about the game, even talking about rock paper sissors and supreme commander should just not be done.
No one side is the end all be all winner against its lesser side. This game is first and foremost about strategy, and playing to your advantages, and their weaknesses. (along with coming up with crazy strategies)
There is none of that garbage you see in C&C where a tank that has a cannon on it does little to no damage to a rocket infantry man, while the shells that are hitting right at the rocket mans feet do like no damage. This is what Taylor means by Rock paper scissors. His game is ALL simulation. If a huge tank shell lands at your feet, you are going to be dead. Tier 2 crushes Tier 1, and Tier 3 crushes Tier 1 & 2, hell the spiderbot that Cybran have can literally step on units and crush them.
One last thing that I feel I should add is that the UI is customizable (I didn't see any mention of this in the article)
I am not talking about oh lets change the location of things on the screen, I am talking, I can make it where I hit a button and it upgrades a mass extractor for me, or hell I hit a button and it will upgrade ALL my mass extractors one at a time, while I go do other things.
The Developers have given a lot of freedom in that aspect.
And now that I think about it, You didn't touch on Dynamic Waypoints, or Queues.
Waypoints, If i make a patrol path, or a attack path for my attacking army, you can dynamically change each point. just click and drag to where you want it. This is especially good for your Air patrolling your base boundaries, as you can expand their patrol route as your base grows. Queues, you can have a factory pump out 10 of this, 5 of that, and 7 of those, and when it finishes it will cycle around to the beginning and keep pumping that set of units for you (Allows for the creation of a good balanced attack force much easier)
Last but not least (I lied up there, all these things are coming to me as I write):
Ferry mode, gotta love the fact you can drop a beacon near a factory, and any unit that is selected when you click on the beacon, will get loaded up into the transport, and taken to whatever location you want it to.
You can have units that come out of the factory immediately get loaded into one, and you can have multiple transports help out on the same beacon.
Add to the fact that you have dynamic waypoints, and that "front line" drop off point for the transports can move with your front line attack force.
Originally Posted by yakyb re. the dual screen modes i have two sceens that run in dual mode on my x1950pro however one monitor runs at 1680x1050 and the other at 1280x1024 im guessing this shouldnt cause me any difficulties however ive only seen dual screen running on two of the same monitor Any chance of testing this
This is OK, they support different sizes on each monitor.
Think of the second monitor as mobile mini-map (thats not that mini though)
It's there so you can control your army with monitor 1, but see the whole theater of war with monitor 2. (the information overlays are really helpful, especially the Economic one, where it allows you to see how efficient you are)
I have a feeling though, that someone will come out with a UI where monitor one is just the battlefield, and monitor two has the map + all the UI stuff you need to build units etc
Originally Posted by Jokkocze The game's running quite slow on my computer.. (see specs below)
Could anyone perhaps help me optimize it a bit? I get like, 5-25 fps :/
Just turn the details down a bit, run it at 1280x1024 and stick your fidelity on medium or low. Also turn AA off and shadows off.
It really will help, the major contributor though is the fidelity setting.
It may not look as good but the whole point is game play not graphics imo anyway.
Comments 1 to 25 of 66
I've started playing Warhammer 40K Dawn of War again (before I start on the Dark Crusade expansion) and the one thing I wish I could do is zoom out that little bit further to get a better view of the action (at max zoom I still feel that little bit too close)
It looks like I'd definitly be able to do that with this game.
Lol, after playing sup com I really hate the cameras of other games. Went from sup com to CoH and forgot I couldn't zoom out really far :p
<EDIT>
looking on amazon and play it seems there's special edition packs (Supreme Commander (Limited Edition Cybran Faction Pack) is one).
What's the difference between these and the normal game?
wish you could remap the map moving keys in supcom tho, arrow keys is such a pain i dont understand why more RTSs dont let you remap them
wasd is a much more obvious set of keys to move the map around with as its right below all the number keys you use for controlling your groups :(
On a sub note: I would not say that Tim is a FPS whore for wanting rates between 20 and 40, this is on the limits of what is acceptable in my mind and most of my mates as well.
HAHAHA That's exactly what we said :D:D:D
I have two friends that find the demo unplayable.
Their specs are VISTA 32 Bit, AMD 4000+, 2GB Ram and 7800 GTX 256 MB.
and WinXP, Intel 2.8 Ghz, 1.2 GB Ram and 7800 GTX 256MB.
Or do you think the demo was just not optimised that well.
I mean surely these pc's should handle a RTS quite well.
Thx.
smooth sailing on high/medium mix @1680x1050.... :)
great freakin game! a mission on Easy takes about 1.5 ~ 2hr. sometimes hitting 2.5+. but it all feels like its 10min :) its that good.
having 500 units on ur command, attacking from different direction, plus some naval assaults backed up by torpedo launching bomber planes, its so freakin wicked when all hell's break loose and a huge giant spider came out of nowhere and freaked the **** out of u coz everythin u throw at him doesnt have any effect, but on the other side of the map u need to protect the tank convoy and...and.... ah i cant stop :)
its that good. THAT good.
A lot of people are claiming the game is unoptimized but imo its just people need to learn that you can't always run the game on high everything, even with a well specced system.
I ran it on my PC perfectly fine at 1920x1080 on my 37" LCD. I had all of the settings set high except shadows and AA I think.
Im running it on this:
Athlon X2 4800
2Gb PC3200
X1900XTX
and some other stuff of course but you get the point.
My friend had a problem running the demo at low settings on his 7600gt, even though he could play the beta fine. I'm not sur ewhat they changed, but it runs a lot smoother on my system than the beta did, and from the beta to the demo runs worse for him.
I'm finding the Easy and Normal AI to be relatively easy to bully and destroy
I will go into detail with what I see as wrong
(please try to remember that I am not a journalist, English major etc, so my grammar may be off)
1) Hardware Specs
To the author of this article: did you NOT play the beta at all?
(Yes I know it was a beta, and they have extra dev code running along-side the normal code, but still)
This game is a CPU/RAM HOGGER... The game is ALL simulation, 100%... thus the CPU and RAM are getting taxed all the time... that shell your tank just fired, yeah its speed, direction, etc are all being computed as it was fired. Along with before it was being fired, the tank had to compensate for the enemies speed and direction to lead the shell.
the more units you have in the game the harder it hits your CPU. In a longer game, you could be sitting with a base that is protected with 15+ shields, have 20-50 PDs and AA, and a nice group of 200 units at the front door, along with the 60 or so level 1 Air fighters, 10 level 3 air fighters, 15 level 3 bombers and a navy of destroyers on the coast. Each Units movement, speed, direction, etc are all being calculated all the time. even if you are not looking at them on the screen, if they are doing anything, its taxing the CPU.
There is a reason this game is Threaded (Simulation thread, audio Thread, AI thread; from what one of the developers told me in beta)
Back in the beta, a E6600 with 2GB RAM would usually be at 100% and 30% in the later stages of the game. (of course its a bit high because of the dev code that was running in the beta)
This game is ALL CPU bottle-neck... Its The ONLY reason there is a unit cap. The more units a person has, the more the CPU has to calculate. If you think this is taxing a system already, wait until you have mods out, along with people who change the caps to 1000 units per player in a 8 player game.
2) Your "Description" of the sides
These were way off, Cybran being about Air, Aeon being about water, and UEF being about Land... Here is what it really is:
Cybran: Excellent Early game, the mantis may have been nerfed, but the cybran still have the best Tier 1 units IMO. They are NOT anything special air, except their Tier 3 bombers can shoot at planes. Their PDs are accurate, although a bit on the low range side, and their navy only has one cool factor, the destroyers that can walk on the ground.
Their Experimental units help them slightly in the late game, especially if you can get a spider bot up before an enemy UEF player has titans at your doorstep.
Aeon: You are semi right on Aeon being the Navy kings, they have a experimental destroyer that is pretty beefy (though you are actually better off building normal destroyers with all the mass and energy spent on it)
Aeons navy is supplemented by the fact that their tanks (some) can hover, and thus travel on the water.
Their PDs are somewhat weak, but have extremely long range, and I think they have a slight splash damage (will have to check the stats files for that)
Their shields absorb the most damage (highest tech shields that is)
The have, arguably the BEST Experimental unit out there.
they are your accel at nothing, bad at nothing group, with a slight advantage at sea
UEF: UEF is like the Core of SupCom. (where Cybran is like ARM)
Their Ground units are some of the better ones, though only at the higher tech levels. The Titan Tier 3 attack bot is THE best ground unit in the game (Non experimental)
Their Tier 1 units are below average, probably slightly on par with Aeon. Their Air units excel, especially when you take into account that they have a tier 3 Gunship, and this gunship currently needs balancing (or so the community feels) 10-15 of these suckers can tear through a Commander in just a few seconds)
Their boats (tier 1 only I think) have a spoofing ability, that creates many false blips on the enemies radar.
Their experimental support "tank" is beefy as all hell, and the Mavor is basically a rapid fire Nuke silo.
3) Comparing the sides to rock paper scissors
Personally from everything Chris has said about the game, even talking about rock paper sissors and supreme commander should just not be done.
No one side is the end all be all winner against its lesser side. This game is first and foremost about strategy, and playing to your advantages, and their weaknesses. (along with coming up with crazy strategies)
There is none of that garbage you see in C&C where a tank that has a cannon on it does little to no damage to a rocket infantry man, while the shells that are hitting right at the rocket mans feet do like no damage. This is what Taylor means by Rock paper scissors. His game is ALL simulation. If a huge tank shell lands at your feet, you are going to be dead. Tier 2 crushes Tier 1, and Tier 3 crushes Tier 1 & 2, hell the spiderbot that Cybran have can literally step on units and crush them.
One last thing that I feel I should add is that the UI is customizable (I didn't see any mention of this in the article)
I am not talking about oh lets change the location of things on the screen, I am talking, I can make it where I hit a button and it upgrades a mass extractor for me, or hell I hit a button and it will upgrade ALL my mass extractors one at a time, while I go do other things.
The Developers have given a lot of freedom in that aspect.
And now that I think about it, You didn't touch on Dynamic Waypoints, or Queues.
Waypoints, If i make a patrol path, or a attack path for my attacking army, you can dynamically change each point. just click and drag to where you want it. This is especially good for your Air patrolling your base boundaries, as you can expand their patrol route as your base grows. Queues, you can have a factory pump out 10 of this, 5 of that, and 7 of those, and when it finishes it will cycle around to the beginning and keep pumping that set of units for you (Allows for the creation of a good balanced attack force much easier)
Last but not least (I lied up there, all these things are coming to me as I write):
Ferry mode, gotta love the fact you can drop a beacon near a factory, and any unit that is selected when you click on the beacon, will get loaded up into the transport, and taken to whatever location you want it to.
You can have units that come out of the factory immediately get loaded into one, and you can have multiple transports help out on the same beacon.
Add to the fact that you have dynamic waypoints, and that "front line" drop off point for the transports can move with your front line attack force.
Could anyone perhaps help me optimize it a bit? I get like, 5-25 fps :/
Honestly, the only thing holding you back seems to be the processor. This game is going to lag on anything but a dual core CPU later in the game.
(though 15-25FPS isn't bad, try playing with 4FPS)
Are you running Vista or XP? (though it doesn't really matter much until they release the first patch)
EDIT: I recall problems with SLI in the beta... do you have 2x 7800GTs? or just one?
This is OK, they support different sizes on each monitor.
Think of the second monitor as mobile mini-map (thats not that mini though)
It's there so you can control your army with monitor 1, but see the whole theater of war with monitor 2. (the information overlays are really helpful, especially the Economic one, where it allows you to see how efficient you are)
I have a feeling though, that someone will come out with a UI where monitor one is just the battlefield, and monitor two has the map + all the UI stuff you need to build units etc
Just turn the details down a bit, run it at 1280x1024 and stick your fidelity on medium or low. Also turn AA off and shadows off.
It really will help, the major contributor though is the fidelity setting.
It may not look as good but the whole point is game play not graphics imo anyway.