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Planetary Annihilation: TITANS to get more multithreading

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As you might have read in our previous article, Planetary Annihilation and TITANS are being revived by a new team made up of some of the original developers. One of their developers has given an update on adding more multithreading.

The post is written by Mike “Sorian” Robbins, who previously worked on the game (as well as the Supreme Commander series) and they go on to explain how they're back working from where they left off after the performance update back in 2016.

Two years ago I was given the opportunity to continue work on my baby, Planetary Annihilation, for the 99337 Performance Update. My primary focus was attempting to improve performance by multithreading parts of the simulation. My initial focus was on areas of the simulation where I thought it would be easiest to do things in parallel. The most natural separation was based around planets.

Since navigation and physics are typically the worst performance offenders, separating updates by planet seemed like a good plan. Their updates tend to only act on a single entity. Initial testing blew up spectacularly, as I expected it would. Fortunately, there were not many areas of contention between threads and a performance win was born.

So, now that I am back, you may be wondering what I am working on now. I’ll be continuing right where I left off! 

They're currently looking to expand the multithreading capabilities of PA, to hopefully improve the performance for everyone. They're working on quite a number of different systems for this like: a physics update, an AI update including a "much needed performance pass", the Coherent GT user interface system needs an update and plenty more. See the full post here.

I'm really happy PA is continuing to be developed and improved, there's hardly anything like this available on Linux (outside of Spring RTS games like Zero-K).

You can grab a copy from Humble Store and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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5 comments

SixPairsOfFeet Aug 27, 2018
I'm a little sad you'd just ignore Zero-K like that, as it is a game I personally adore :) There was also Evolution RTS on steam using the same engine, but I didn't particularly care as much for it, at least when I tried it when they had their steam release …
Liam Dawe Aug 27, 2018
Quoting: SixPairsOfFeetI'm a little sad you'd just ignore Zero-K like that, as it is a game I personally adore :) There was also Evolution RTS on steam using the same engine, but I didn't particularly care as much for it, at least when I tried it when they had their steam release …
You're right, I keep forgetting about it. Adjusted.
Naib Aug 27, 2018
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Good good. Love this game. My boy also loves this game and since he has improved to cope with 2planet systems this is a welcome improvement
M@GOid Aug 27, 2018
When Xbox One and PS4 were announce with 8 core CPUs, you would think that developers would think 4 cores or more is the future. But unfortunately Intel continued pumping out 2 core CPUs like there's no tomorrow, so you have a large consumer base with those and worse, 2 core, 2 thread Pentiums.

Only now Intel is making 4 core CPUs their baseline. And we have to thanks AMD for that.
rkfg Aug 27, 2018
This is a great game, I played it for a while with my friends. Really massive scale, spectacular battles and demanding for good APM. The performance issues are REAL, we had huge battles with hundreds of units moving altogether through a sneaky portal on the enemy planet and the simulation slowed to a literal crawl. It wasn't lagging or rubberbanding, it was in slow motion. Hope they'll fix that eventually. If you played the original PA and it was kinda meh, try TITANS. It's overhauled, it's the game we were promised years ago.
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