HUGE UPDATE. HUGE NEWS.

Today's update adds the first iteration of Galactic War, Planetary Annihilation's single-player experience. Available now as a free update, Galactic War tasks you with taking over a dynamic galaxy by scouring the stars for tech and special perks.

In Galactic War, you'll be placed in control of a reawakened Commander with access to a limited tech tree. As you explore and battle across the galaxy's procedurally generated systems, you'll collect random technology and find perks that boost your manufacturing and fighting capabilities.

We designed Galactic War to be replayable, and for every playthrough to feel different. We also want you to decide the scale and intensity: each of Galactic War's sizes change how many systems are in the galaxy and introduce different loadouts.

And the pressure's on because annihilation is final.

Enjoy Galactic War over and over again, and give us your feedback on the forums or social media. Have fun!

Detailed Build Notes:

Build 66516 fixes some server crashes and other problems found today.

AI: Updated AI neural net data.
AI: Neural platoons wil now seek to attack things it can actually attack.
AI: Will build nukes and anti-nukes in response to system threat, instead of grav well threat.
AI: Will build nuke silos to attack other planets that do not share a grav well.
AI: Added some AI immediate threat response stuff. In the event you decide to keep a fighter or bomber over the AIs base forever.
AI: AI econ adjustments.
AI: Will spread out attacks a lot more.
AI: can use Grenadiers.
AI: platoons can have a min and/or max unit count.
AI: Improved AI attack location choice.
AI: Improved AI raiding ability and later game platoon sizes.
AI: Improved AI scouting.
AI: AI will no longer wig out when you take away its bot factory.
AI: Fix for when the AI believes a base is under attack.

Art: added a thruster effect to the orbital_fighter

Audio: html ui: fix for defeated music not playing.

Balance: Lower cost of T2 by 1/3
Balance: double laser turret fire rate 1.5->2.0 (reverting)

Chronocam: hooked up seek forward/back buttons.

Gameplay: Bombers don't slow down to a near hault near bomb targets anymore; When air units are running the 'line through goal' behavior it won't slow down more than 40% of their max speed to reduce their turn radius to reach the goal any more. Instead they will fly past the goal and make another attempt. In this way they will always be 60% of their max speed or higher near the enemy target. Which is prefered over slowing down (to a near hault) making the bomber vunerable to anti air etc.
Gameplay: Fixed units 'not assisting' or building a bit, then not, then building a bit, then not.
Gameplay: Removed the Attack command cap from the air scout.
Gameplay: Making Astreus go to air layer when it unloads also fixes a rare bug where commanders, when unloaded from a transport, would moonwalk across the planet. This was due to the attachable taking the transporter's velocity when it was unloaded and that affecting its interpretation of up which would cause the snapToGeom to continually move the unit.
Gameplay: fix for units not moving into range to assist large factories. They were using the focus entity as the target for the move task, whch would be unreachable for units on large factories. Now the move task targets the factory when it is a factory and the focus entity otherwise. The buildarm still targets the focus entity.
Gameplay: Advanced Fabbers build basic buildings
Gameplay: Advanced Factories build basic units within their class
Gameplay: Fixed commanders getting stuck when moving out of the way to build a structure.
Gameplay: Allies no longer trigger alerts for enemy units detected.
Gameplay: Updated visuals for landing zones. Now uses recon lights to highlight the landing zones instead of a particle. Landing zone labels now offset from the planet in screen space so they're easier to read at a distance.

Graphics: Fix a bug with SAO shader causing it to fail silently on some video cards. Was doing a float = vec4 which is undefined behavior.
Graphics: Refactor how unit ambient color is done. Had changed emissive glows from lighting or emissive to lighting and emissive for direct lighting, but hadn't made that change for ambient light. Also removes extra glow of team color ... which may or may not be a good thing.

Linux: [main] Integrate SDL updates for Linux from proto/sdl. This switches away from Xlib usage in the Linux platform backend, to make it (mostly?) pure SDL2.
Linux: [main] Check in GLSL shader validation script.
Linux: [main] Add official glslang binaries.
Linux: [main:Linux] Explictly request a 3.2 OpenGL context.
Linux: [main] Set the "don't minimize on focus loss" hint for SDL.
Linux: [main] Switch back to libboost-regex for Linux.

Network: Client/Server is more selective about the data it sends to clients. This should reduce bandwidth a lot for players, but should also help casters not get all the data all the time.

Observation: Math is hard.

UI: Support for launching YouTube in browser
UI: move pip to q key. Move select commander to b key. Both to avoid conflicts with build bar.
UI: Fixed bug where YouTube tutorial video wouldn't load
UI: html ui / server js: the game creator can now set the color for AIs.
UI: Turned off autoplay for YouTube videos from start page
UI: Updated UI on settings page.
UI: html ui: adding separate toggles for hiding ui (ctrl+u) and hiding ar (ctrl+y).
UI: Various changes to strategic icons and mouse hover feedback. * When the cursor is hovering over a unit, units now displays a white icon on the ground around them and their strategic icon is slightly larger. * Ghost units no longer show additional information in their hover pop up (like if they're building or not). * Radar blips with matched ghosts now do show their type and last seen health, just like a non-radar blip ghost unit would. * Selection now represented in unit icons. Unit icons now have a black border by default instead of white. White now denotes selected. * Change "black" team to less black, more charcoal to accomidate default black border.
UI: Improved area build for torpedos & anchors.
UI: Normalize spacing for laser and aa towers to 18 (adv was 17).
UI: Fix ambient occlusion settings to properly use OFF and ON;
UI: Changes to volume levels are changed immediately (though still on retain if users click Save);
UI: Changes to volume levels and resolution scaling now take effect when clicking Save, thus allowing them to be changed in-game (before only got applied when returning to start page);
UI: Added new game icon.

It's time for a new build, though if you've tried out our new PTE streams, you may have already played with some of these changes! We're working on some really cool additions to the game. As we move forward to some of those great new features, we continue to make the existing game more awesome, polishing whats there, fixing bugs as we find them, and continuing to improve the game.

The main things you'll find in this build are lots of bug fixes, a significant overhaul to the balance of the game - this is still a work in progress, and quite a few changes to how the orbital units are built and interact.

As always, there are lots of changes big and small, but more than anything, this build is helping to pave the way for things to come.

See you all in game, on the forums, and on Facebook!

(Whoops! We forgot to update our Steam announcement page about all our recent updates. Here's the latest BIG update notes. Check out Planetary Annihilation's build thread for the rest since this update!)

Update!

All of us at Uber Entertainment are always busy. It's a given. But, the last couple of weeks have been "turbo busy," as Brad would describe it. In-between polishing up a lot of incredible features, both the Planetary Annihilation and Toy Rush teams spent major swathes of time planning for their game's showings at PAX East 2014. All the hard work and brain-busting effort paid off, too -- oodles of folks dropped by, said hi, and had an awesome time playing Planetary Annihilation and Toy Rush.

With Planetary Annihilation, we set up two groups of four computers and had folks face off against each other in 2v2 matches. Meanwhile, Adam rocked the microphone and casted the matches for everyone observing the action to hear. Over the course of the three-day event, we saw planet smashes and tons of epic plays from rookies that turned pro before our sleep-deprived, but glistening eyes. It was cool, to say the least.

The rest of the team back at the office were also busy busting out all the new features you're seeing today in Planetary Annihilation's latest update. In addition to countless optimizations and tweaks, we've added some amazing Gamma-specific features: replays and videos, messaging, friends lists, and yet another advanced command and control feature.

Friends Lists, Instant Messaging, and Replays

Among other things, Gamma is all about you and your friends. Friends lists, messaging, and replays are a huge step in this direction. The friends list and instant messaging clients live on the right-hand side of your screen. When you're not in games, you can add friends, see if your pals are online, or message them.

Replays can be viewed in the new Replay menu available at the main menu screen. Right now, you can search for matches and view them at any time after they end. We've got a great plan to expand this feature by adding the ability to create highlights and user uploading to YouTube. We'll be talking about Replays again pretty soon.

Advanced Commander and Control: Line Drawing

Starting now, you can organize units in whatever formations that you desire with a couple clicks of the mouse and a quick drag. We've also added the ability for you to set the path your units walk with a shift-click. Fighting across entire worlds is easier with this simple, intuitive, and customizable new control.

The Rest

Of course, this update includes many other fixes, optimizations, and tweaks. The full patch notes are available, as always, on our forums.

Gamma is definitely here now, folks, and we're continuing to tune the experience to make it even better. This update focuses on performance and improvements to numerous areas of the game from lighting to art to the server browser. Also present in this build? A giant bedrock feature: multi-planet starting points.

Catch the patch notes for the full listings of tweaks, improvements and fixes. Also, hit up our localization project if you'd like to join in:

Multi-Planet Starting Spots!
- We've added them. To use them, make a new custom system in the System Editor and flip them on for whatever planet you desire. Then, commence annihilation.
- The AI can now use multi-planet starts, too.

New Commander!
- The Imperial Invictus is now available to all players! This robot is pretty serious, so go check him out in the Armory.

Art!
- Updated art for a number of units, including the nuke launcher and ammo, and the anti-nuke launcher and ammo

Lobby!
- Updates to the Server Browser. Players can see more information about games before joining a lobby now.

Localization!
- We have started our community localization project! If you want to participate, please check this thread out: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pa-the-official-localization-thread.58004/ and go here to contribute: http://www.getlocalization.com/PALocalization/!

Technical Stuff!
- Significant graphics change to lighting. This should help improve frame rates for a number of players.
- Improvements to the build bar. This provides more efficiency information while you're playing
- Improvements to spectating! We're working hard to make the job of casting easier, and the fun of simply watching more accessible!
- Ongoing improvements to game audio

Important Notes!
- Please disable all mods until you know which ones work! This build changes a lot of the underlying UI systems.
- Make sure your drivers are updated!

New art! More fixes! Smarter formations! New spectating options! We're in the process of tightening the Gamma experience across the board, and this week's huge update packs lots of incredible new additions and improvements.

For instance! We've taken spectator mode to 11 by allowing spectators to focus on teams and see their resources in real-time. Formations now understand position -- flame tanks will now prefer the front, while smaller non-knockout units will prefer the back. Also, we've re-added the ability for players to load systems in the background.

We've got lots more, too, so check out these notes:

Spectating!
- Added support for full summaries of teams playing.
- You can also focus on individual teams.
- Added a new panel on the side to facilitate this.

Lobby!
- Players will now receive even more information when joining and leaving.
- Improvements to joining.
- Improved planet generation while in lobby.

Art!
- Added a new skins for laser turret.

System Editor!
- Added new tag for starting planet. This is in preparation for multi-planet spawns!

AI!
- Added even more general improvements.

Formations!
- Units now have preferred positions.

Bug Fixes
- Planet smashing bug addressed.
- A couple of lobby bugs have been squashed.
- A number of memory leaks have been fixed.
- Addressed some UI crashes.

Update your video drivers please!

62110 adds AI difficulty scaling and a large number of bug fixes.

It's here! With today's update, we turned the page on beta. This is the first of several updates in Planetary Annihilation's new "gamma" phase of development. Gamma is all about you and your friends. During this phase, we'll unveil new social features and new ways to interact with Planetary Annihilation. We'll also roll out a dizzying amount of really cool new tech like linkable replays and more picture-in-picture functionality.

Today's update is a fantastic sneak peek at what the gamma phase is going to bring to the table -- and it has some awesome, brand new features:

User Experience Updates:

• Streamlined UI Elements! - We rebuilt our front-end menu and lobby menu. They look a lot cooler and sleeker, and are also more intuitive.
  
• In-Game UI Refresh! - We've created a new build bar and reimagined the system menu.
  
• Armory! - In the brand new armory (which is available in the main menu), you can view all the Commanders you own.
  
• Orchestral Score! - It's in! Prep your earholes for this: it's as stunning and epic as you imagined it would be.
  
• More Commanders! - We've added several new Commanders for you to enjoy. This list includes the awesome Theta Commander. You've got to see this guy.

AI:

• Ahoy! - AI can now use naval. Insert battleship and sinking reference here.

Features:

• Alliances! - In free-for-all games, you can now create alliances.
  
• Twitch.TV Improvements! - You can now view streams in the lobby.

Tech Stuff:

• Performance and Optimization Fixes! - As part of our ongoing process of making Planetary Annihilation more awesome, we've tweaked some elements to make it play better.

Balance:

• Uber Cannon! - The Uber Cannon is no longer so great at wrecking buildings -- or other Commanders.
  
• Armor System! - We've created an armor system to balance out a couple of edge balance issues.

Known Issues:

• Lobby Shenanigans! - Non-owning members in a new lobby have the appearance of adding/removing slots; it doesn't actually do anything, but it looks very confusing. Only the person who created the lobby can control it.

We're really proud of this update and can't wait to get even more gamma features out to you in the near future. We'll see you in the (newly redesigned) lobbies, Commanders.


Some of the Balance Details:

Land Mines:
- Improved size and placement
- Damage: 500 -> 1000
- Splash Radius: 5 -> 15
- Metal Cost: 150 -> 20
- No longer leaves wreckage.

Combat Fab:
- Health: 150 -> 50
- Metal Cost: 300 -> 540
- Guard Radius: 60 -> 50
- Energy Usage: 2500 -> 2000
- Metal Usage: 15 -> 20

Adv Combat Fab:
- Health: 250 -> 150
- Metal Cost: 1260 -> 1620
- Energy Usage: 5500 -> 6000
- Metal Usage: 45-> 60

Bomb Bot:
- Metal Cost: 135 -> 90
- Damage Radius: 10 -> 15

Assault Bot:
- Increased mesh size so it can be hit easier.

Air Balance:

Advanced Bomber:
- Metal Cost: 540 -> 810

Fighter:
- Guard Radius: 100 -> 200

Advanced Fighter:
- Metal Cost: 270 -> 540
- Guard Radius: 160 -> 200
- Damage Splash Radius: 10 -> 5

Gunship:
- Metal Cost: 270 -> 540
- Damage: 25 -> 20
- Improved movement

AA Vehicle:
- Damage: 10 -> 25
- Improved missile speed and tracking
- Missiles now spread fire around to targets more.

Missile Tower:
- Guard Radius: 120 -> 150
- Damage: 20 -> 25
- Rate of Fire: 2 -> 3
- Improved missile speed and tracking
- Missiles now spread fire around to targets more.

Flak Tower:
- Metal Cost: 300 -> 600
- Guard Radius: 120 -> 150

AA Bot:
- Damage: 20 -> 25
- Guard Radius: 100 -> 120
- Rate of Fire: 1 -> 2
- Improved missile speed and tracking
- Missiles now spread fire around to targets more.

Orbital Launcher:
- Roll off time: 4 -> 3

Defense Sat:
- Health: 10000 -> 5000

Vehicle Factory:
- Metal Cost: 5410 -> 5500

Advanced Air Factory:
- Build Metal Cost: 3300 -> 5670

Whoa! We just blasted out a massive update to Planetary Annihilation! We expanded the game's core feature set by improving our already fantastic in-game Twitch support, we added new area commands to make your interplanetary battles that much more incredible, and we added unit formations, pinging, and a whole lot more.

We have also been doing a lot of work to improve performance. Client performance is a lot more smooth on a number of fronts and the server has also been getting quite a bit love. Please make sure your graphics drivers and systems are up to date. OpenGL support on Mac has been limited to 3.2+. We no longer have 2.1 legacy Open GL support.

Here's a comprehensive list of all the new things we've added in this massive-huge-big update.

New Commands!

• Alternate Fire Button (Default map: u); This is your Uber Cannon button. You can much more easily use the uber cannon now
  
• Area load / unload: Works with terrestrial transports and the Astraeus.
  
• Area Patrol for ground units is working!

Graphics!

• Lots of particle system additions and changes
  
• Skins for all the new units we've been bringing in
  
• New Planet Template Type: Desert

AI Changes!

• Lots of changes to AI; Make use of the Economic Scale in the lobby in vs. AI games to tune their difficulty. They have gotten much smarter. And will continue to get smarter.

New features!

• Twitch support for in-game chat (ctrl-enter for Twitch chat)
  
• Units now have individual celestial travel speeds ; they are no longer all using the exact same numbers for travel speed
  
• Unit formation support: Still WIP, but units now form up ranks and attempt to maintain consistent speeds to approach targets as a group.
  
• Support for Map Ping

Other Technical Stuff!

• New Steam SDK includes 64 libraries for linux ; Hopefully this will help some Steam integration issues in 64-bit linux
  
• OpenGL 3.2 or newer is required on OS/X now. We no longer support legacy 2.1 Open GL, as it was hurting performance for almost all Mac users.
  
• Bug Fix: Assist tasks will now end if assist target moves to another celestial body
  
• Most instances of units bouncing at the bottom of a teleport gate should be fixed
  
• Beam Weapons/Instant Hit exists as a weapon type now. They are only used by a few units currently (orbital laser, flack cannon and sniper bot)
  
• Orbital pathing visualization can now be hidden in cinematic mode
  
• Attacking larger buildings should be more reliable now. Units can calculate a valid firing solution based off the entire unit (OBB), rather than just the center point.
  
• Weapon support for splash damage fall off - Which means point blank on a weapon can have one damage value, but the splash, as you get further away from ground zero, can start to fall off.
  
• Some fundamental UI changes. This MAY break mods.
  
• Lots of additions and changes to Unit JSON data ; Expect to have to update your spreadsheets and other stuff to account for this
  
• This build notes may continue to be updated actively for the next few days, but assume there are far more things NOT called out than are actually called out!

Boot up Planetary Annihilation and check out all these new, and fantastic, changes. And get ready for our next update, which will change the way you interact with the game.

It is 2014 now! Get ready to play a brand new game! Well, ok, not totally new, but between new units, new work in progress balance, things are already feeling a lot more polished and lot more fun!

Teleporters are in game now! Teleporters are point to point - build two, select one, then right-click on the other, and establish a gateway between them.

Major Balance Changes: This is a work in progress, but what's there is already quite a bit different! We'll need feedback and more time to fine tune it, but consider this the taste test of what's to come.

New Units: There are a number of new units in the game to start to flesh out the unit rosters. Many of these still use white box art, so they may look funny, but they should still work well.

Area Patrol: This is an incredibly useful persistent area command. When issued, depending on the units, it will stay until canceled. Fabbers will assist and repair, combat units will patrol, guard and attack, etc.

Big improvements to the look of lava planets, and ongoing iteration on the appearance of most biomes!

AI continues to get more and more evil. Make use of the economic scaling in the lobby if you're having a hard time playing. Setting the AI to 0.0 will allow you to sandbox to really learn the recent changes in the game!

Orbital fabber is now in game, and can build stuff in orbit. This is IMPORTANT! Some of the most important units in the orbital layer now must be built this way. The planet is important, but don't neglect your near planet orbits! It can also build the teleport gate on the ground. Very useful for planetary expansion!

Detailed:
- Area commands continue to get improved, bug fixed, and cleaned up
- Debug/Free cam is back
- We have the first bit of work to allow us to start to localize the game. Come to the forums in the coming weeks for more details on how to help get the game localized!
- Energy stance fixes, especially for units under construction
- More aggressive AI expansion, but also handles differing planet sizes better now
- AI should no longer get stuck trying to send units to a location they can't possibly reach.
- Area build of Adv. Metal Extractor over wreckage should now properly reclaim and build
- A large number of celestial movement fixes, prevention of "illegal" moves (no annihilation against an already moving target), and others.
- Number of naval pathing/coming out of factory fixes; Also fixes pathing cost stamp for naval units being way too big

Beta Build: 58772

Happy holidays, everyone! This year, Santa is bringing you a big bag of new features. Enjoy, and no matter what you celebrate, have fun, stay safe, and fling asteroids at your closest friends and family.

Fix to OS/X client crashing as soon as you start the game (We think we got most / all occurences of the new crash that appeared last build)

More fixes to try and get nukes, asteroids and other "big splodey" events to show up more reliably for people. Still a WIP.

Area commands will now select the whole world if you drag past the edge. Useful for building up small (or large) planets.

We think most cases of not getting all your commanders spawning in team games has been fixed. Please report on the forums if you find a new 100% repro of this. Gotta squish em all!

Bombers and Advanced Bombers had some pretty big changes made to them. You should try em out. They're awesome.

Twitch.tv and OS/X - Make sure you install SoundFlower if you want audio on your streams! This is a Twitch API requirement, not ours!

Some pretty awesome new FX on the Umbrella and the SXX Orbital Laser.

Quite a few other small fixes since yesterday.

Build 58678 Notes:

Area Commands: This is a big one! Area Patrol will be coming soon, which (depending on the unit) combines Area Attack, Reclaim and Repair functionality, but persistently. Currently supported are the following:
- Area Attack: With unit(s) selected (bombers particularly are great), click and drag on an area you want to attack. All selected units will proceed to attack all available units in the area. If you don't have recon on it, it will simply act as an attack move until it gets vision and will start to area attack.
- Area Build: Currently two types of drag build commands exist. Circle for things like power, and line for things like defenses, factories, etc.
- Area Reclaim: Unit(s) will find all reclaimable wreckage in the area until all wreckage is gone.
- Area Repair: Unit(s) will find all repairable units in the area to repair until nothing needs repairing.

Notification System: This will notify you of important game events, such as structures being completed, incoming attacks, in particular commander under attack, and those other events you really want to know about when you're building up a high speed asteroid to destroy planets with and not paying attention to that planet you've taken over.

Lots of work done on in-game selection logic. It should overall be much easier to select things, and select the things you want now. It does change some behavior though, so play around with it before you go play your ladder games.

Overhaul to the rendering engine. This is a big change but won't be necessarily obvious to a lot of people. Read here for details: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/graphics-update.54840/#post-840016

Planet Smashing: The paths asteroids take now to smash a planet also looks a lot better. Try it out today! Smash your buddies and laugh!

Interplanetary Nukes: You can now nuke from one moon to another moon orbiting the same planet

Big art changes to Metal planets and new work on the desert biome. Metal planets now can support much smaller metal planets. Big ones remain their normal awesome selves, of course. You can also play on lava planets once again.

Twitch streaming fixes for AMD and for OS/X. There is no Twitch built in support for Linux, as the Twitch API does not support it.

Quite a few UI polish items. Better North / South icons, better looking start location tags, etc.

Factories support rally point assist now. Particularly useful for getting a ton of fabbers on a project.

Hotkeys that target and track a unit (commander, idle fabber, group), will now move to the correct planet.

Changing your settings should now only regenerate a planet if you change a setting that really needs to rebuild the planet.

Bot Factory has new art, deep space radar has art now, more units have their appropriate strategic icons now, a number of animation and model tweaks.

The commander has had his weapon changed a bit to allow more easily hitting small units such as the Dox.

Fixes to bombers so they have a better time hitting targets. Mind you, their main use is still against static defenses. If you're chasing bots with them, you may want to restrategize.

Anti-nukes now start with one missile in their bay. The launcher is now more expensive to compensate for this.

Interplanetary Nukes - Bodies in orbit can now nuke each other. This is still a work in progress, but we think this feature nicely expands interplanetary warfare.

Orbital Camera Overhaul - We have a new integrated camera with more degrees of freedom and, more importantly, none of the crazy disorientation when zooming in from celestial view. Give it a shot and tell us what you think!

Kick / Kick-Ban - Now you can kick players from your matches. This is a pretty heavily requested feature, so we're stoked to introduce the concept with this update.

Twitch.TV Integration - Now you can stream your matches from in-game! Just sign in to Twitch from the settings menu and start streaming immediately.

Changes To Unit / Building Selection - Complete re-write of selection logic. This is mostly internal, but some behaviors have changed. Let us know which corners we forgot to round off.

Tech 1 Bot Factory Redesign - Bot factories have a newer, more distinct look.

New Mod Folder - Mods can now sit side by side with game files without replacing them. There will be a post in the mod forum about the details of this.

Collision Tweak - Added rectangular collision volumes for naval units, which should allow for more accurate targeting and movement.

Structure Build Atrophy - Incomplete structures will now degrade over time and vanish after a cooldown period. Walls have been given a cooldown too, which makes it harder to abuse them.

And most important tons of bugfixes and other little tweaks to make the game better. And lots more to come!