Weekend 1: Feedback

US Central or EU WST region is the one people should be on as there are no servers elsewhere.

Unless you have a seriously beefy videocard you will be slow. It's pre-alpha and there is still a ton of optimization type work to do.

Try turning down the graphics settings in the in-game menu but nobody is going to maintain 60fps through a game.

The euro keyboard issue I suspect is because of our janky input system. We'll have to put some work into making that better asap.

<3!

The fun part is that all the menus have underscores in them, taunting me... :lol:

Another idea would be to create another ubernet account without underscore and use that for now. Any account should work right now since we are limiting it on the steam side.

Worked like a charm Jon, thanks bunches! I shall be known as 'jessep' for now.

Things of note:

Left shift in chat seems to be the only one working
Punctuation seems to be intermittent depending on your keyboard
Each player will see different completely different spawn points available to them than what the other players see
C will focus on your commander

I was running a bit over 40.

crash report incoming:
crashed after a match against 2 AIs. Clicked on 'Return to main menu' and the client.exe stopped working. dump in the zip.

What data do you guys need? Any place where I can look for debugging info and dumps?

Is Dmp files what you're after Uber?

What information would you like me to post. I have two .dmp files, and me and Ben just found a rather amusing bug when he cheated

Damn crazy fool spawned multiple of MY commander in his own base. And when both he, and my spawned commanders died it counted it as a game over... even though my original Commander was alive and well.

Also... am I supposed to heal my Commander in 1 second with a Kbot-Fab unit? :lol:

Yeah dmp files if they are there. However, we are setting up a system to auto upload those and steam already does it.

Sweet, in that case I'll stop littering the forum server with attachments.

My impression so far:
PA runs rather stable. It crashed every time when i finished a game and click on any button.
I successfully rejoined a game against the AI after a midgame crash.

I noticed that I wanted a 'reset my view to default' button. It should basically just re-orient your view so that your view is brought back to the plane of the solar system so to speak.

WE've got a few people talking about bad framerates. Ekanaut for example dropped to about 5 at one point in the game... and then stayed there.

However I'm running silky-smooth and staying above 40+ frames all the time, even during large engagements and explosionfests... I do have a beefy computer though.

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The only major Bug I'm encountering so far is one Neutrino does know about know about, but I'll restate it here for completeness sake:

1. Started game and played normally. Slowly over time I get horrible command lag that slowly becomes worse and worse
2. Checked ChronoCam for the first time; found I was 30 seconds behind the "real" game. Until that point I had not touched ChronoCam.
3. Pressed "Fast Forward" until I'd caught up. Closed ChronoCam
4. Fixed.

Just opening ChronoCam and closing it should force the client to resync to the current time. Pressing "End" on your keyboard also does this. If you feel like the game is getting laggy, try hitting End and see if your units skip ahead.

Hit N

Also lots more camera stuff coming. We barely just got the current on functioning in the last week....

My first impressions after playing for like 15 minutes.

Bugs:
- Oribital Launcher doesn't work, can't be placed it seems. When you do manage to place it, it can only blow up (nice effect though).
- Not yet constructed buildings can overlap (Oribital Launcher did this)
- Commander can't build anything on or partially in water, had to use an Aircraft to build the Naval construction site.
-When a Naval construction site is partially on land, a unit created by it can get stuck on land, making it unable to move.

Thoughts:
- Advanced units should differentiate between what they can build MORE than the Commander can.

Questions:
- Is it possible to destroy buildings at this point?

Crashes/Hangs:
- At some point I think the Replay system gets overloaded and starts looping through all frames in the console, causing the game to hang but the music remains playing. This goes on forever, I left it running for a good 10 minutes.

Notes:
- A list of shortcuts would be handy, like, what is ChronoCam and how do I open it?

Bug here is it shows up in the list at all.

You have to walk the commander in to the water before building anything. Not intended behavior, just a workaround. However sometimes the commander will get stuck in the water. However you can hide him in deep water and no one can hurt him...

Naval units don't yet know about land properly so they're often perfectly happy to go right up to the shore... where they fall off their pathable area. When moving naval units for now be liberal in your use of patrol points.

Units aren't balanced yet, but some units can cause serious damage already. Try the T1 bombers.

ChronoCam currently doesn't have a shortcut that I know of, it's the little icon in the bottom right. However Pause, Home, End, PageUp and PageDown are shortcuts for pause / play toggle, go to beginning of timeline, go to live, and going back and forward by one second.

For unit balance: Any feedback is moot as of right now.
I came over to the project on Monday and am in the middle of putting a foundation in for balance moving forward. I didn't quite get it there by this weekend. Hopefully before mid next week I'll have a balance we can start building on.

Speaking of balance:
A command that lets your units spread out would be pretty nice at some point.

I don't remember which game had it but it was really useful for fighting units/turrets with splash damage. The rocket artillery certainly has enough range to make good use of it.

It would take some power away from the big AoE damage units and give it to the small, fast bots.

Played for the first 5 minutes of a match: This is what jumped out at me:

Some Decals are not applied correctly.


Both Commanders and Units do not display their current energy or metal usage.



Units moving close to a structure currently being lathed are likely to get stuck in the wireframe. Only after the building was constructed was I able to free my Vehicle Fab... by giving him a lot of move orders which jiggled him free.


Groups of Fabs are loathe to actually complete their current task. They make it functional... but not full health.


Where is my Tank?


Oh... he's at the bottom of the Crevasse. This happens more often that I'd like to admit.

Simple move orders over large enough distances seem to set the Unit into what I like to call "Dukes of Hazzard" mode... they insist on trying to leap the cravasses.

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These are of course all bugs, not Alpha problems. Playing single player against the AI led to not even a single crash. It seems connectivity between players is the major stumbling block at the moment, combined with server crashes. But... you already knew that.

I'll be online later to test more stuff if anyone's online too. GMT (or UTC) about... 18:00

Feedback number 2 after completing a whole game (as in: destroying the enemy AI base and commander).

Also, when I asked for shortcuts/hotkeys, I meant general ones, like how N resets the view. I wonder if there are more useful keys to know about.

Bugs:
- When you move an aircraft over water, you can't send it back to land without using the menu on the right
- If the commander is not directly besides a building, he will not help speeding up constructing units unless you instruct to do so him every time. If he is touching the building, only one order is enough for him to keep repeating it.

Thoughts:
- Standard in most RTS: A waypoint for structures where new units should walk to when done constructing.

Performance:
- Performance gradually goes down, not unplayable, but noticeable FPS lag.
- I have to play the game on low right now, while I can play most modern games on Ultra.

Some vehicles are heavily overpowered (I'm aware the balance right now is close to zero), I made a series of screenshots of my base (see below). I went in with a full army of bots, tanks, airplanes, and only got to destroying about 1/3 of the base.

I decided to create 32 simple and cheap tanks which can fire rockets over long distances (can't recall the name). I went in and destroyed the base and its commander in less than a minute or 2 work.