Game is out and the response from the
Factorio-type community has been extremely positive. It's even sold well. All of which is extremely promising for the prospects of the game serving as the base for PA2.
Btw, it's worth mentioning that a few years ago I emailed
Factorio's director to tell him to stop dicking around with little updates and make Factorio 2. And the formula for its design I gave him was Factorio 2 =
Factorio +
PA. He replied and we talked for a bit, but he basically ignored my idea and stuck with his pointless updates. And now five Chinamen have upstaged him and his team of like 20-30 people or whatever. He could have taken a mere FIVE of them out of
Factorio and put them to work on the sequel if he'd had his head screwed on right! I've been meaning to email him to gloat. I'll do it and then publish our entire correspondence.
Back to
DSP, the problem with the game of course remains the lack of multiplayer and war units. However, the devs have made it clear they are merely at the start of their Early Access journey, and they plan to address these concerns. Notable also is that many in the game's community are asking for these features, which is a relief because they could have easily been like the typical city-building and
Minecraft autists who DON'T want these things. It's also worth pointing out that the devs are poor. This can be seen by their KS which asked for something like a mere 100 dollars or some shit. So now that they've sold well on Steam and gotten a taste of money, it probably means that they're very motivated to keep building the game up. After all, the
Factorio devs have been raking in cash merely by updating the game for like a decade. The
DSP devs could probably do the same, and since the cost of life wherever the hell they are in China is nothing compared to Prague, it makes even more sense for them financially (though I doubt
DSP will ever have the same level of financial success as
Factorio, given how much more complex it is or can potentially get).
But there's more good news. Because there is already a working multiplayer mod for the game! Apparently they've run some co-op tests and it works fine! (though with lots of bugs). I've known about the MP mod for weeks, but I only just found that it now works.
The mod is called Nebula (nonsensical name given its content, but we'll roll with it):
https://github.com/hubastard/nebulaGet in the devs' Discord to show your support and get the latest updates:
https://discord.gg/UHeB2QvgDaKeep the game's reddit on your radar too, for all kind of official news and modding news:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/What's really encouraging to me is how fast these guys were able to get MP up and running. MP is a massive feature, and I doubt that a modder could have put it in PA if it wasn't there from the start, so this tells me that perhaps DSP is more moddable than PA (which was already very moddable). So this bodes very well for the possibility of adding war factories and war units in the game. And we can always just rip out PA's assets (or SupCom's for that matter) and have ready-made fantastic art: hundreds of units' worth of it. I am just a little apprehensive about whether
DSP's engine can handle scaling up to a lot of units. And are the projectiles in
DSP even simulated?
However that may be, it's understandable if
DSP, even fully modded, does not outperform PA in every metric. It wasn't intended to anyway (which is a bummer). But it brings so many new things to the table, and clearly btfo PA in so many ways, that accepting whatever its deficiencies end up being shouldn't be hard. Above all it has SPACE BATTLES! This was, as I think I've mentioned before, the number one feature that a PA2 would have to contain to really be a sequel. And we have that here out of the gate. You can apparently build in space too. And your mech can fly between planets as in a sort of Herzog Zwei 2! And there are black holes and shit. The game has even been getting rave responses also for its looks, just like PA. I've been meaning to finish my PA review and explain why that is so (if you want a preview, find Ebert's review of
2001).
I am contintually in awe of this game...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_P ... this_game/
So in view of all the above, I have taken the following steps:
- I have moved DSP's thread to the Cosmic War subforum
- I have renamed the #planetary-annihilation Discord channel to #cosmic-war
My project is called Cosmic War. The base game it runs on has been PA so far, but hopefully we'll soon be able to switch that out to a modded version of
DSP, and perhaps to other games in the future, if
DSP gets superseded like PA appears to be about to. And there won't be any petty tyrant to put an end to the events, as there was in PA, which means the events should be even greater rip-roaring successes than our PA events were!
So jump in the modders' Discord to show your support, and make sure you add the clan tag to your name so we can represent as The Cult too. We need to get the community thinking in that direction, and start forming their own clans.
This will be biblical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW4joxNf51gP.S. If
DSP delivers, expect PA to become a ghost town, mikey to stay all alone, and all our good friends to migrate over lol. Then mikey might start trying to mod
DSP lol, and the cycle of life will begin anew.
