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almost 7 years
ago -
Numantian Games
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I have problems running the game. Can you help me? Please visit the Troubleshooting guide here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/644930/discussions/0/1499000547495150286/
If I buy the game now during Early Access, will I have all the content when the game is finished? Yes, the campaign and all the new content added for the final release will be included for the Early Access buyers.
When will the game be translated into my native language? - The game is available now in English and Spanish.
- On the 26th of January, we will include:
Chinese (traditional and simplified), Korean, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Polish and Brazilian.
- Next languages TBA: Italian.
Will They Are Billions come to MAC OSX and Linux? As this game is heavily optimized and uses Microsoft .NET framework, it will be very difficult to achieve the same performance under MONO on Linux and OSX. We will try it when the game is finished, but we cannot promise anything. We are sorry!
What are those silent and frequent game updates? The mini-patches are just quick updates to fix very specific things in the current version branch. It could be some text spelling errors, crashes or new bugs introduced with the current version that were not present in the old one. They don't change anything and don't add anything new. For that reason, they are not posted or announced. We release those mini-patches so players don't have to wait so long for having known issues fixed. That way we can also avoid being notified about the same issue again and again if we just go ahead and fix it right away.
All new versions that have changes are posted here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/644930/discussions/0/1499000547495151383/
Furthermore, any new version with big changes is posted as a Steam Announcement and on our website and social media profiles.
What are you working it right now? What are the new game updates? Just check this post as we update periodically to talk about what we are doing and what you can expect in the next updates:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/644930/discussions/0/1499000547495148343/
Multiplayer? Right now, we are focusing on achieving the best single-player experience possible. Also, we have implemented the Community Challenge where you can compete with the game community playing the same Survival Map and sharing your score to the leaderboard.
What? Why no multiplayer? Just let it be two player co-op in the same colony. It is so easy! Sorry. It is not easy at all. The problem is nothing related to how several players can interact in the game (such as coop, competitive, zombie team....).
The BIG issue is that the game engine and architecture must be changed in a way that TAB won't be TAB anymore. Here is the technical explanation for those who are interested.
If two or more instances of a game can be played at once, then the state of the game must be shared between all players OR the game must be 100% deterministic and synchronized.
- Sharing the State: This method works with games with a small state, like FPSs, arcades, platforms, where the game state is just some hundreds of bytes... But in RTSs the game state is very big (megabytes), and in the case of TAB it is huge because the game manages up to 20K units in real times plus all the colony buildings, colonists... (dozens of megabytes per frame) So this option is just impossible to use for this kind of game.
- Game Synchronized: In this case, the game must be 100% deterministic, so if you play the same game with the same inputs at the same time, the game behaves exactly the same. So just the commands executed by the players are shared between instances. This is how works in Starcraft, Supreme Commander or Factorio. So, what is the issue here? The performance could be 4-6 times slower. TAB has a custom engine heavily multi-thread optimized, where AI, physics, drawing, and sound runs asynchronously so everything can be executed disordered which means no determinism. Making the game deterministic means that only one single thread for logic and physics is available. We would have to change the game drastically (much smaller maps with smaller zombie populations and small swarms). Instead of 20K units in real time, we would have to change the game to just 3-4k or less. So, one of the best features of TAB would be missing...
Just check this blog post of how the developers of Supreme Commander dealt it with the multiplayer challenge:
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/126022/Opinion_Synchronous_RTS_Engines_And_A_Tale_of_Desyncs.php
Mods, Editing Save Games, and Creating Game Maps They Are Billions now comes with a Custom Level editor. Players now can create and play custom levels and this is officially supported.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/644930/announcements/detail/1714079766526791246
Nevertheless, any alteration of game files, de-compiling the game or creating external applications to edit maps or save games are not allowed in any case . Any reference to those tools will be banned from the forum. Indeed, that's a copyright infringement.
For that reason, we modified a lot of the game code to prevent the hacking applications. A lot of development time wasted just to avoid those problems.
And When the game can be modded? When the game is released and finished, we will add the Workshop to mod the game in many ways and it will be officially supported.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/644930/discussions/0/1499000547495150286/
If I buy the game now during Early Access, will I have all the content when the game is finished? Yes, the campaign and all the new content added for the final release will be included for the Early Access buyers.
When will the game be translated into my native language? - The game is available now in English and Spanish.
- On the 26th of January, we will include:
Chinese (traditional and simplified), Korean, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Polish and Brazilian.
- Next languages TBA: Italian.
Will They Are Billions come to MAC OSX and Linux? As this game is heavily optimized and uses Microsoft .NET framework, it will be very difficult to achieve the same performance under MONO on Linux and OSX. We will try it when the game is finished, but we cannot promise anything. We are sorry!
What are those silent and frequent game updates? The mini-patches are just quick updates to fix very specific things in the current version branch. It could be some text spelling errors, crashes or new bugs introduced with the current version that were not present in the old one. They don't change anything and don't add anything new. For that reason, they are not posted or announced. We release those mini-patches so players don't have to wait so long for having known issues fixed. That way we can also avoid being notified about the same issue again and again if we just go ahead and fix it right away.
All new versions that have changes are posted here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/644930/discussions/0/1499000547495151383/
Furthermore, any new version with big changes is posted as a Steam Announcement and on our website and social media profiles.
What are you working it right now? What are the new game updates? Just check this post as we update periodically to talk about what we are doing and what you can expect in the next updates:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/644930/discussions/0/1499000547495148343/
Multiplayer? Right now, we are focusing on achieving the best single-player experience possible. Also, we have implemented the Community Challenge where you can compete with the game community playing the same Survival Map and sharing your score to the leaderboard.
What? Why no multiplayer? Just let it be two player co-op in the same colony. It is so easy! Sorry. It is not easy at all. The problem is nothing related to how several players can interact in the game (such as coop, competitive, zombie team....).
The BIG issue is that the game engine and architecture must be changed in a way that TAB won't be TAB anymore. Here is the technical explanation for those who are interested.
If two or more instances of a game can be played at once, then the state of the game must be shared between all players OR the game must be 100% deterministic and synchronized.
- Sharing the State: This method works with games with a small state, like FPSs, arcades, platforms, where the game state is just some hundreds of bytes... But in RTSs the game state is very big (megabytes), and in the case of TAB it is huge because the game manages up to 20K units in real times plus all the colony buildings, colonists... (dozens of megabytes per frame) So this option is just impossible to use for this kind of game.
- Game Synchronized: In this case, the game must be 100% deterministic, so if you play the same game with the same inputs at the same time, the game behaves exactly the same. So just the commands executed by the players are shared between instances. This is how works in Starcraft, Supreme Commander or Factorio. So, what is the issue here? The performance could be 4-6 times slower. TAB has a custom engine heavily multi-thread optimized, where AI, physics, drawing, and sound runs asynchronously so everything can be executed disordered which means no determinism. Making the game deterministic means that only one single thread for logic and physics is available. We would have to change the game drastically (much smaller maps with smaller zombie populations and small swarms). Instead of 20K units in real time, we would have to change the game to just 3-4k or less. So, one of the best features of TAB would be missing...
Just check this blog post of how the developers of Supreme Commander dealt it with the multiplayer challenge:
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/126022/Opinion_Synchronous_RTS_Engines_And_A_Tale_of_Desyncs.php
Mods, Editing Save Games, and Creating Game Maps They Are Billions now comes with a Custom Level editor. Players now can create and play custom levels and this is officially supported.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/644930/announcements/detail/1714079766526791246
Nevertheless, any alteration of game files, de-compiling the game or creating external applications to edit maps or save games are not allowed in any case . Any reference to those tools will be banned from the forum. Indeed, that's a copyright infringement.
For that reason, we modified a lot of the game code to prevent the hacking applications. A lot of development time wasted just to avoid those problems.
And When the game can be modded? When the game is released and finished, we will add the Workshop to mod the game in many ways and it will be officially supported.