PTE build 75134-main (please post feedback and bugs here)

Hey all,

The new build 75134-main is now live on PTE. If interested, take a look! I have listed a few things below we are looking for testing on, as well as a list of changes made, and known issues (as this is test, there are plenty).

If you have map feedback, balance feedback, or just random bugs you find, please reply to this post.

Our designers will be reading it and watching replays. In the near future they may be doing custom games so they can spectate as well. The goal here is to get as much feedback as possible before going live with this new stuff, so leaderboards can be as fun as possible.

Things we want to test

• Ranked should have 3 new maps all 1v1 with symmetrical starting points and metal.
  • A lava planet, an ice planet, and a desert planet in current ranked queue
  • Please post feedback here as we will be making adjustment to these maps
  • They will replace old 2 systems
• Ranks should update right after matches now
  • No delay on your rank changes!
• You can no longer pause in a Ranked match
• If a player disconnects in a ranked match, the game will pause for 90 seconds to allow reconnect
  • This is a cumulative 90 seconds to avoid abusing it
• Player notified when match found if tabbed away
  • You’re a busy person. Tab away and check that twitter. PA has your back.
  • Not yet working on Linux
• Changing economy before game starts after everyone has clicked ready, will unready people
  • This is for non-ranked matches
• System editor is 1st pass way awesome now
  • Symmetrical planets now work
  • Custom metal placement is not in yet
  • Move and delete and copy and all that on your CSG’s
    • Find the key bindings for these in your setting page to learn how to use it
• Leaderboards are in place
  • Those ranked games you tested maps on should place you on this after 5 games
    • If you have played before, you may already be there
    • Take a look to see if that all works
  • Also watch your last replay on there (button on Leaderboards). Go ahead, you know you were awesome. Bask in your glory.
• Those annoying 5's have been replaced with a better font

Balance Changes

• Change to Dox vision range from 150 to 100.
• Commander torpedoes rate of fire reduced from 2.0 per second to 1.0 per second
• Commander torpedoes range reduced from 200 to 160
• Dox can now shoot factories
• Jigs now go off in nuke sized explosions.
  • Drag build should place them safely apart, but feel free to be greedy if you think no one will attack

AI tweaks!

• Now uses gas giants
• Neural net
• All known instances of AI getting stuck are fixed. If you see the AI doing nothing, please comment here.

Leaderboards note:

• We will be resetting leaderboards before this goes live

Known issues

• Custom metal placement is not yet in
• Custom start spot placement is not yet in
• Symmetrical CSG editing is buggy still (though still works, just not cleanly)
• You can close out of System Designer while planet is loading (not a bad bug, but will need to be fixed to feel polished)
• Jig explosion is placeholder
• Galactic War is broken and will crash when entering battle
• System Designer - Custom CSG broken on metal planets.
• The AI is too skittish with bots (fixed internally)
• AI will not build an advanced air factory due to being unable to expand (fixed internally)
• AI will ignore some usable units (when making new platoons) if they can be used in more than one squad (fixed internally)

When will the rankes be reset?

No changes to the armoury, and no new commanders to try out.... Booooo.

Alotta new Commander files are added in PTEs. This particular PTE doesnt.

I must say: I'm not convinced by the "symmetrical planets" feature yet, mostly since there is apparently no way of keeping large features (cracks!) away from the equator.

And a minor issue right away: Editing CSG on mirrored planets... The controls for CSG on one half of the planet are inverted, and CSG isn't updated symmetrically, say: Mirrored CSG is not linked.

And another CSG mod related control issue: You can move, raise/lower and resize CSG and rotate CSG around the Z axis, but not around X/Y. It appears though as if this was possible by editing the transformation matrix manually.

Also still missing point symmetry rather than planet mirrored on the equator, the symmetrical planets look somewhat weird...

Are you trying to make Skynet? lol

I absolutely love this right now. The dox balance is good actually

EDIT: just won my first tank only match.

@superouman
we need you now

Why are there more people ranked uber than bronze? That doesn't make sense to me ?? 230 players ranked uber and 180 bronze? Should atleast be the other way around.

Edit: Love the update btw This is just a small nitpicky thing

And what is the point of only seeing the "Top 10" players per "league"? I see no scroll bars, no "show all" button, and given that there is a smooth transition in between leagues, it just makes no gad damn sense to promote a more or less random selection of 40 players (except the actual Top 10 in the Uber rank) just because they happen to be ranked precisely on one of the border cases.

Besides: PRIVACY SETTINGS. You are basically showing a rather fine grained "last seen" information there. That goes for the regular replay browser as well...

We only count you as ranked after you play 5 matches, but you affect the rating of other players before you've played 5 matches (if you win / lose.) If you look at the tiers *without* the 5-match requirement, the distribution is more like you'd expect (~70 more people in Uber, ~200 more people in Platinum, ~200 more people in Gold, ~700 more people in Silver, ~400 more people in Bronze.)

The other thing that affects it is just the number of players that have played and how many matches have been played. Over time I expect it to be more reasonable spread.

Where is PA.app being installed now on OS X? Perhaps I should try downloading again.

Right, verify again fixed it. Failing on the last file or so, during the first attempt, is becoming a pattern. I used to get an error dialog though. I didn't this time and thought the first attempt worked.

Bugreport incoming!!
Will edit as I go

First thing today:

Nothing new, but it happened while rendering a metal planet, might help.

Second thing:

Inner metal beauty, after ctrl-e.

Third thing so far:

It says loading, but after it was finished the planet looked the same. This happened after I pressed ctrl-e again to return to normal view from the red stuff above

Notes:
- The leaderboards look awesome!! Too bad I am not placed yet.
- Love the small UI tweaks, it looks just a bit neater.
- Some UI elements for editing the planets would be nice, like a list for adding CSG and for moving them etc. But this is fine, for now
- Show text with 'no lobbies found' if there are no lobbies. I thought it was still loading in stead of just being empty.
- In chronocam, when the spawn animation starts, and you skip time forward. The lander will keep landing. So it seemed someone spawned at 10 minutes ingame The game sadly crashed after trying to view this for the third time.

Question:
- Are there going to be custom terrain edits for earth like planets? Like placing water, forests etc? Would be nice to have in the future. (I know it will probably take a long time, no worries)

Bonus:

Somehow I made this bum planet, brb, testing this vs AI

Final edit:

It works just fine, the 'crack' was even pathable ^^ <3 So, you guys wanted cliffs?

Given that these tiers are purely cosmetic anyway and you are most likely not going to be matched exclusively inside your own tier: What's the point of promoting more or less randomly picked "Top 10" in the lower ranks?

Ok I don't feel so bad for loosing to Yaegz twice the other day

Good find. Adding it to known issues.

I opened a game with cheats on, and put an avatar on a gas planet to check out the explosions. After that I turned my attention back to another windows, and a little later the game crashed while basically idle. I was scrolling rapidly in another app at the time, but that could have been chance.

Ok, just a quick question here- I'm ranked 23rd on the ladder in Uber apparently, however it's only possible to view the top 10... Is that as intended or will we be able to see further down the ladder ranks in a future update? Even if we can't scroll through everyone, it would be nice to see players near to me on the ladder.

Woo-hoo, I'm in the top 10 (of silver)!

Also, mini-bug: media/ui/main/game/gamestats/gamestats.js is missing the loadMods function and it therefore not moddable. Really tiny bug, but also incredibly easy to fix.

Code:

--- gamestats.js.bak  2014-11-17 17:28:29.436509434 -0500
+++ gamestats.js  2014-11-17 17:29:08.096510256 -0500
@@ -762,6 +762,10 @@
  return result;
  }
+  // inject per scene mods
+  if (scene_mod_list['gamestats'])
+  loadMods(scene_mod_list['gamestats']);
+
  // setup send/recv messages and signals
  app.registerWithCoherent(model, handlers);

My current balance suggestions:

• Air fighters should get an HP decrease so they don't shield bombers.
• There should be units to hard counter tanks and dox; a gatling tank to counter dox and a T1 sniper sort-of bot that deals high damage to other units. The benefit of this is that gatling tanks would be ineffective versus high HP and high damage units, and the t1 sniper bot would be ineffective vs low HP units.