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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

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

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...

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

Just a curiosity: why did you call them curves?

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.

Oh! Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks.

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