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Update 17/10/18: This patch is now live for everyone.

The newly formed studio, Planetary Annihilation Inc, has pushed out their first upgrade for the strategy game Planetary Annihilation: TITANS.

For those not clued up, Planetary Annihilation: TITANS is now being run by a dedicated studio that are going to give it a new life with continued support and plenty of updates. The original Planetary Annihilation is no longer available to buy, with a permanent discount to upgrade to TITANS.

This new "PTE" (public test environment) build is available to opt-in on Steam with no password required. Their aim is to focus on "speed and stability" before upgrading the main tech behind the game. With that in mind they've fixed some server-side crash issues, adjusted some balance issues along with some interesting AI changes. The AI, for example, will look to engage in more fights it thinks it can win as well as being better at gathering and using intel.

There's plenty more multi-threading for servers, improved crash reporting for all platforms, a number of adjustments to improve performance and so on. Overall, it might not sound like a big deal, but it's a good step forward. You can see the full changes here.

I've given the beta version a test for a few hours and it does seem to work fine. Really happy to see the game continue to live on, as it really is quite good. I actually forgot just how much I enjoy this game, watching hundreds on units travel across a world destroying everything in their path.

You can pick up Planetary Annihilation: TITANS on Humble Store and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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undu Oct 17, 2018
Quoting: MayeulC
Quoting: unduJust tried it, in-game UI is still garbled on Mesa's AMD drivers.

And all support tells me is to use the proprietary drivers. :/

I tried PA (non-titans) a few days back (with Mesa), everything was garbage in-game,but the UI was working fine in the main menu.

The old fix was adding --software-ui to the launch options. it might be worth it to try spoofing another GPU brand as well (maybe there are some unneeded workarounds for Mesa that cause issues, it wouldn't be the first time).
If I use that option I get an almost black screen: only the chat is visible.
MayeulC Oct 19, 2018
Quoting: GuestMan this update went live a bit too soon for me...Considering it introduced a very serious crash/bug that is so incredibly bad it freezes my entire system. EVERYTHING. Even my keyboard drivers freeze... I'm thinking it might be more of a driver issue than an issue with the game though, which is concerning.

https://forums.planetaryannihilation.com/threads/client-freeze-crash-after-few-minutes-of-gameplay-on-linux-manjaro.73180/

This is worrying, but I hope it can be fixed. It would be nice to provide a dmesg log after you alt-f4, and maybe provide a log after a complete crash. Can you still SSH in? If so, you can usually recover the system in such a state trough sysrq (sysrq + R, then switch to another TTY with alt+F? would be a good start, or sysrq+E (sysrq+K might be better) to go back to the login screen -- you might need to manually enable some of these before).

Note that the keyboard drivers are in-kernel, so if they crash/freeze, that means the kernel has crashed/frozen.
logge Oct 21, 2018
So. It is still a great game. I even"managed" to get legions working after actually reading the description to it.

The only thing I noticed was, that my troops did not get a symbolic icon when zooming out - my enemies' forces did, though.


Last edited by logge on 21 October 2018 at 8:01 pm UTC
MayeulC Oct 23, 2018
Yeah, that's what swap is for, but I agree it could be handled better. The OOM kill usually helps in that case (sysrq.

In my experience, it's worse if you don't have swap at all, as the heap of running programs will be flushed and need to be reloaded later from the disk.
Swap on compressed memory ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/zramswap/ ) helps me a bit with that issue. RAM is just damn too expensive right now :'(


Last edited by MayeulC on 23 October 2018 at 10:01 am UTC
Liam Dawe Oct 23, 2018
Quoting: loggeSo. It is still a great game. I even"managed" to get legions working after actually reading the description to it.

The only thing I noticed was, that my troops did not get a symbolic icon when zooming out - my enemies' forces did, though.
Pretty sure that was a bug they fixed in another update to this :)

Edit: Spelling


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 23 October 2018 at 10:18 am UTC
logge Oct 26, 2018
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: loggeThe only thing I noticed was, that my troops did not get a symbolic icon when zooming out - my enemies' forces did, though.
Pretty sure that was a bug they fixed in another update to this :)

You are right Liam! I tried it out yesterday, and it even seems they made the icons appearance fading in quite smooth! It feels the icons appear a bit earlier than the builds before, could be me, but I think it is way better now.
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