more like all the people wanting the beta are gonna crash the server on the first night of downloading

Well, I'll just be happy if it does come out this month.



The Supreme Commander beta ran usually fine on my current gaming rig, which is in no way a supercomputer with a Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.00GHz, 1024MB PC3200 DDR, and NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS AGP. I played with upwards of four-to-six players with unit counts easily going into the thousands, and the only observable lag or performance problems at the time was from debugging lines, sound rendering issues, and poor player latency. In addition, they just released a public demo, and you could check that out to see if it runs fine on your current rig.

The DEV's said the beta WILL come out this month. I just can't remember where I saw it...

Must scavage for cash!!


Now where did i put that beggars outfit...

I am very-well aware of those statements, but in my experience in this industry you grow accustomed to being told to tentatively-expect something at a target time and it not being met. I'll be happy if this is the month we get to start testing, because every delay means less time to provide feedback.



You must bust-a-nut with the games that have a thirty frames-per-second ceiling and-or having any monitor with a weak hertz rate. I only need that kind of higher frame rate when my G5 mouse is at top-settings (sensitivity) for a first-person-shooter, because of the response-time and high-precision necessary while on the move.

Most strategy games being slower-paced can be sufficently played at a stable and stutter-free thirty frames-per-second without the player ever noticing. My frame rate with Supreme Commander is between thirty to seventy frames-per-second at high settings, and only encountered worse performance when encountering a bug (one experienced occurrence of this happening in the first Cybran demo mission, thus far).

Multianna, they essentially had so much logging and debugging code that it was essentially slowing the beta builds to a crawl for some folks, especially me in some conditions -- though it was helping GPG. I haven't really evaluated how much of it was removed for the demo, but, it seems a few performance affecting bugs still weren't fully-solved. On the other hand, I easily hit the (1000?) unit ceiling for the skirmish map in the demo and only had a few stutters. I hope your problem(s) are resolved so you can enjoy the game.

I have been waiting for a game like SOASE for a long time, my question is do I need to pre-order before the BETA is released to get into it. And will my comp meet minimum specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (2.0Ghz)
1GB Ram
Nvidia Geforce 6800 AGP 128

Thanks for the info Multianna, is their a definite date that the beta is being released this month? I would like to know if I should preorder today or if I can wait a bit.

Just Pre-ordered, received an email with a pre-order reference number. Is this all we receive as of yet? The Email was a little vague, am I supposed to do something with the number?

I've tried the Supcom demo (which I assume is representative of the final code),
and I can't see any significant improvement in preformance. The reason why changing graphical settings don't change your preformance is because your CPU is the bottleneck. The problem sits in Supcom AI, maps are huge and any unit in the game can take any position on the map. It takes an insane amount of computing power to generate a competent AI with so many options. AI for chess is easy because there's always a small amount of available moves. Even when you think 20 moves ahead.
Total Anihilation was also a resource hog when it was first released. Pentium pro era. It took more than two years before the masses where able to play it on any acceptable level of detail. I strugled immensly to get the game running on my pentium90 and intergrated video card.

This is also a potential hurdle to overcome for SOASE. Space is big, there's a staggering amount of units and moves available. Lets hope the Sins team is better able to write Ai scripts. Luckly for us they're being assited by the Galciv team and galciv has a very competent AI.

Good point, turn bases Ai should indeed be a lot easier than real-time.

I also think supcom AI is pretty decent, the ai is capable of using all it's units to maximize effect. I just fought off a combined land, air and sea attack.

I just realized, i've played the supcom beta in winxp and the supcomdemo in Vista. Maybe that's the reason I havn't seen much preformance gain.

Multianna, I practically ran every command in the game for various things, but surprisingly never ran the "/map perftest" command in later versions since build 20. In addition, I tended to use FRAPS to monitor my frames-per-second and taking automated screen shots, which I'm sure was slowing my system down a touch.

Just, you ran Total Annihilation on a Pentium Pro 90? Wow, you must have been going nuts, because even my Pentium II 300 MHz at the time was running sluggish in larger games.

In any case, there is mixed performance reports for the demo and beta, and there is obviously something hindering performance on specific systems. I also got hit by another performance bug at the end of my third-run (just fooling around) through Cybran Demo Mission 2, which I cannot tie to anything, yet.

Please release the beta before the 20th, because once that date arives its Crackdown.