So I used to play Total Annihilation all the time. I'm dying for some of the stupid simple features that it had. For example, my game doesn't track units. I've read here on the forums that "T" will track the currently selected unit.. but it doesn't work. There isn't a key to cycle through units (next unit, previous unit, etc) There is no map, so what good do radar towers do other than illuminate dark areas? How do i leave the planet? How do I get onto this moon? Where are the enemies? (I just did a skirmish or quick match or whatever with one enemy... I've filled this planet with vehicles and bots and what not.. and still no enemies.. no way to leave the planet...) the control key + a number doesn't assign units to a group.. despite the forum saying it will. Shift + a number doesn't do anything either. There is no way to change keyboard shortcuts. No way to focus on the commander No way to make a factory stop building. No tutorial that i found (which would be GREAT). The list could go on and on and on and on and on... Is there a way to do any of these things? Is there a patch I need? How do I leave the planet? How do I destroy factories / units? I really want to love this game I just dropped $90 on but so far its been nothing but aggravating. Like it looks like it could someday be good.. but right now I just want to smash it with a hammer and read a book.
Read the forums in more depth before posting. Many of the things you've mentioned have been discussed frequently. Some are coming soon, some are already there. Also, this is an alpha; your job is to test, find bugs, and report them. Fun isn't part of the job description, so if you're having it; please fill out another bug report for that too. ;P
It's very early alpha still. Most of the features you're looking for simply aren't implemented yet. Some features you mention are in though. -C focuses on commander. -ctrl + num does assign command groups, I'm not sure why you're having trouble here. -Del key to blow up a selected unit/building -There is no AI yet. You have to play against live players if you want anything resembling a match. If you dropped $90 expecting to get into something resembling a finished game you've been misinformed. That is the minimum price to get into the kickstarter phase of the game. This is so you can have access at the ground level, discuss ideas and features, help track down bugs, etc. Basically help shape the game.
I disagree with this. Many people bought it to have fun. I backed it to help and have fun and I am definitely having tons of fun. I report bugs when I find them, but most the time I find it is a duplicate. Not everyone who does this needs to treat it like a job and solely find bugs, they can play for fun if they want. A little off topic, but I really dislike people who try to push the "can't have fun, test for bugs, alpha = job" mentality a lot of people who do just search for bugs have onto others. Now OP, Ctrl+num assigns to the group and then the num selects it. It just doesn't have double tap camera focus. T also works to focus on a selected group so 1 then T does focus on that group. There isn't a map because you have strategic zoom. Mouse wheel out, see that noone is within your radars, zoom in on what you want and manage that, rinse and repeat. They may eventually add some form of mini map indicator in one form or another since so many people are asking for it, but I don't think it is necessary. Leaving the planets isn't in yet either, or tutorials, and to make a factory stop building you have to clear the queue, but eventually you will be able to pause production and start it, just later. With how many units there are a next and previous button doesn't seem that useful at all. And yeah you can't rebind keys yet ( but really you can if you go find the file that defines them and change it ), that will be in the options menu eventually. Early alpha = not done at all. When they hit beta it will be a bit closer to complete so you could wait till then to play. I personally like playing each build to see how the game grows. So far it has been awesome as new features get added in and each patch brings it that much closer to the initial (AWESOME!) kickstarter video/vision.
The no fun comment may have been sarcasm, worth given the benefit of the doubt. It's defintly possible to have fun playing that game in the current state, but the learning curve is a bit high due to the lack of some/lots of UI niceities.
Fun or no fun aside, its hard to 'test' the alpha when I'm not even sure how to play the game because I can't see the unit I'm controlling. Its hard to 'report a bug' when I'm not sure whats bug and what is just unfinished game. Is it a bug that I can't assign group numbers? Or is that just faulty information / bad programming / to be don later? How am I supposed to know any of that? I mean.. even just a brief introductory FAQ or something on start up would have been nice. Or even something like "Check patch notes and this forum page prior to play" to get me somewhat informed of whats what. I did get the "t" key thing to work.. but it only works sometimes. I still can't assign units to a group. and the Del key business is good to know.
Now you are just overreacting, the game plays fine a lot better than I thought it would when I got into the alpha. If you feel like actually help tracking bugs I would advise you to keep an eye on the bug tracker. It's linked on the very top of this forum, otherwise just play and have fun. I don't know why you can't assign groups, it worked fine last patch but I haven't tried the latest one. dunno about the focus group button though, I've never used it.
My closing remarks were an attempt at humour. I don't seriously expect people to fill bug reports if they're having fun. But I have said that alpha is for testing, and not playing multiple times already. I think trying to set the bar low is a wise idea, because it'll help limit the number of people that got less than they expected. And if I'm wrong, and the alpha is to a higher standard than I get people to expect; everyone gets a happy surprise. I see it as a win-win, and that's why I've said it. PA's alpha isn't like alphas from Call of Doody or other AAA titles. Those games don't have alphas that customers use. What they've labelled as alpha most certainly aren't ones, and are just called that to sucker-in the ill-informed. Spending $90 dollars to play the alpha and expecting a finished product is most certainly a mistake. If you want a complete, polished, always-fun game then wait until the release and purchase then - you'll save a pretty penny that way too. Now, there's a documented list of keyboard shortcuts, and a guide on using the bug tracker stickied in the forum. These are useful threads, but everything in them is subject to change at a moment's notice.
The topic of a minimap is one that's been discussed frequently on both the forums and internally. Ultimately the problem is lack of useful messaging to the player in the current version of the game. It's going to be a problem for a while longer as we have a lot of work to do on the game mechanics before we can focus on the UI. We certainly realize it's going to be one of the biggest concerns for many early players. We're just now starting on implementing the systems required to travel between planets. I'm not sure if it'll be in the next build or not, but it might be if depending on how long we hold on to this one. There should be at least one other "AI" army, though there was a bug that servers with only one army (you) was being allowed. I've experienced oddities with the game losing some keyboard commands that I haven't tracked down the cause of. They tend to be non-obvious as we don't have much feedback with many keyboard commands and the shift and ctrl modifiers seem to keep working even if other commands fail. Press Stop on the command side bar. It also clears the factory's build queue, so it's less than optimal... Apart from the videos our community has been kind enough to do don't expect a good tutorial until very late beta or perhaps release.
I know there's no easy solution to this but it's obvious to me that 1) lots of potential alpha players are expecting to have core features allready implemented in the current game (Broken or not). 2) lots of alpha players are not used to this development approach which prevent from giving any visibility about which and when a feature is planned to be implemented 3) lots of alpha players wonder how it's possible to have all planed features in place and fully working when the game is released in December : You obviously need at least 1 or 2 weeks to provide such a feature, which is to me quite short, but at the same time, you only have 5 months remaining : 5*4 = 20 weeks until final expected release date. Ok you said game development will continue after release, which is ok to me, but I'm not sure that people who have donated during kickstarter have also understood that all stretch goal will not be reached for the final release. And this leads me to another concern : The final release will be attractive if there are enough expectable core features available. Can we expect an attractive final release within 20 weeks when 1) most of core features are not in place (I'm not blaming at all) 2) all the debugging stuff is not done and there are tons of bug reported 3) There's optimization to be done (and optimization is just not magic) The big question is the following : How to ensure that pre-orders will increase at beta stage (This is where everyone is expecting to have all announced core features implemented) if there's not a clear picture about what will be in final december release ? People pre-ordering for beta will spread the word, this is for sure, but which word ? That they have bought a game missing features that were promised to be in ? What about impact on potential customers ? I know it's obviously not possible, but at some point you will have to be clear about what will be in final release (in december, unless to decide to extend alpha). And again, 20 weeks seems so short. I personaly do not care about having to wait one year to have all features in place, otherwise i would not have put 250$ in this game. But being able to move forward on developement during a whole year is also not magic : You need cash, and cash only comes in if there are enough people planning to buy the final release.
There's a lot of things that can happen behind the scenes (especially in the server codebase) that we would not get any visibility of, but would greatly speed up the inclusion of currently missing features. Every build so far has had more units defined in the client files than have actually been usable in game; I've taken this to mean that development is going at a good pace, but they are self-censoring the really broken stuff (e.g. has a model but no control code) so that we don't get the wrong idea and file a million bug reports of "unit X is broken" when it is known to be not fully implemented yet. I may have unreasonable expectations, however I was expecting all of the base game listed in the Kickstarter, plus the stretch goals (naval / gas giants / orchestral score etc.) to be at least in a working state for release. It is entirely possible that to do so, a few troublesome units may end up being in a post-release update, but the base mechanics of multiple planets, asteroids, orbital units, unit cannons, ramming asteroids into planets, gas giants and enormous metal galactic PacMac planets :mrgreen: should be in a working state. TBH given the progress so far, and the recent comments from garat and neutrino regarding moving to a multiple-body engine I'd say we are mostly on-track to having enough of the skeleton in during alpha, to get the polish on during beta. If we have a usable moon in the next couple of weeks, including at least one method of getting to and from it, a multi-planet system is a simple (for a given value of simple) extension. If we get a working orbital layer 4 weeks from now, gas giants are just a set of orbital units and a planet skin away. I make it at least another 7 weeks of alpha (given the stated beta window of "September"), and I'm confident that Uber can get orbital units and inter-body gameplay implemented (in a basic state) during that timescale. Not fully implemented and polished, but working with a few base units so that the mechanics can be tested and issues found (and resolved). The polish can then be studiously applied during beta to get any extra units implemented and everything looking pretty, and running smoothly (engine optimisations, render optimisations). Optimising doesn't happen by magic, but you do want the code in a (relatively) stable state before you look for any performance wins; that to me says it is a priority for beta, not alpha, where the priority is actually getting stuff to work.
To be as clear as possible, i'm not complaining at all about what has been achieved so far. I'm not claiming for anything but Uber providing better visibility and possibly a clear commitment about what is really expected to be achieved when beta starts. This only because it's much more than obvious that so far, Alpha being visible to anyone around the world through videos, One, without knowning what's happening behind the scene and possibly considering to buy the game, will not buy it and will spread the wrong word if there's not enough stuff in late alpha/early beta. So it's not about complaining about what's not currently in the game. It's all about having Uber using its own blog to officially communicate about what's happening behind the scene if they just don't want current alpha to be representative of what Beta players will get when beta stage starts. This is because i have allready read articles (not on the web) stating that in it's current state, there's no much more than a pale copy of Supreme commander on a single very small planet with a few units fighting against each other and nothing more - With of course performance issues and obviously very unlikely to provide promised features within a so short delay. How do you think people only watching alpha videos because they do not have alpha, will make their decision when it's about buying the game in order to join beta ? spreading the word and convincing people to buy the game and join beta with just alpha video shootage is just impossible. So either Uber is confident enough that final release will be enough attractive to convince lots of players to buy the game. Or Uber is really looking for people to join beta and in that case alpha stuff without any official communication about how all this is moving forward will not help. The nature of this very specific development process requires much more communication about what's in progress, what will be for sure available in beta and final game, because the alpha is not so far as sexy as what most of potential buyers are expecting. This is based on the feedback i can read on the internet. Most of people strongly doubt all this nice stuff can be achieved within a so short delay. This might be because of ignorance about what can be really done, but it's a fact. There's a blog, the blog must be populated much more with regular updates and possibly stuff from behind the scene to make people feel confident and buy the game. I can read scathis tweeting about so many other things than PA. But hey, what the H... is the priority in terms of communication ? We don't need tweets suggesting that something is about to happen. We need clear communication about project advancement, and this on the official blog.
I'm only gonna reply to this small part, as replying to the thing as a whole is just a waste of my time. (no offense) The biggest problem is that 80 if not 90% of the people you are talking about, is comparing Uber with an EA or Activision. This assumption is the worst they could make... and they will be very suprised when this game comes out. While 20 weeks of game developing might sound very short, you have to keep in mind this is a group of highly committed developers. While I'm just an IT guy, and no programmer, I can at best only speculate how much they can do. And where I currently work, 20 weeks is a very long time... If the customers are there to buy the servers, we can grow with an additional 10.000 servers on a single location (out of over a dozen) in those 20 weeks... Some say its impossible, but we have proven it again and again to our customers that we can do this. So yea when a group of highly skilled and committed developers tell me that they will be at retail status in December, with everything working and all major bugs fixed, I believe them because I know that people who love their job, can produce 10x more than people who just come to the office for their paycheck. Looking where they were a month ago, and where they are now, keeps me having that belief. And up to this point they have not fallen short in my opinion. They clearly state that this is an ALPHA, and that NOT ALL FEATURES OF THE FINAL ARE INCLUDED yet. Its the best they can do, that people can't bother to read, and make their own assumptions without reading... thats their problem. Also I believe the reason they put the Alpha package on Steam, is because people begged them for it. Though I also believe they did it, to find out whether or not they needed to go look for a new job in December, or that they could continue to develop and expand this awesome game. You want more and bigger status updates, apply to them as Community Manager, they clearly stated in the last live-stream, that any communication currently done, is done by developers, hence it taking their time off what they should be doing, which is continue to develop the game. And that they are looking for Community Managers, so they can give you more updates. Put your mouth where your money is, you put in your sig that you bought the $250 version, which in my opinion says that you believe that they can do what they claim they can do. So stop bashing on everything and spreading FUD. I don't expect this game to get a high rating on gamestop or any of the other reviewing sites. Why because they still give any CoD version a 9+ which is clearly undeserved. I've learned years ago that I should stop listening to the masses and only care what the few percent say that actually know what they are talking about. Any of those blogs that are currently pissing all over this game, will have to lick all that up again when this awesome game comes out, because its my believe it will beat the new Command and Conquer coming out this year. (The C&C game will just crash like usual the moment you have to many units, this game is in early-alpha... and I'm already not able to do that... even when filling a full planet with units)
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: Where on earth did i state i do not believe they can do it ??????????? I'm afraid you got me wrong. I'm just saying that if Uber is intending to sell more beta access and have nice words spread around RTS fans, then alpha shooting is not enough. Not because i do believe they can do it means all people do. We're not in kickstarter anymore : it's not only about believe in it and support it. For sure you and i believe in it. Otherwise, do you really think i would be here ? I just realize that in the current state, lots of people i'm discussing with just tell me they will never buy the game before beta, and probably before final release because they just do not believe (like you and me) that all these great features will be in place for final release. I was thinking that officially providing a better vision of where they are (on their official blog) would help a lot.
Ok cool then just point them to the live-streams, and sorta "hold their hand" so they see the progress thats been made in such short time, it should open the eyes of most people (don't think you'll be able to open the eyes of all the idiots out there) Its that I know I would be a bad community manager, or I would've applied for the job. (I get rude to people that need extreme excess of patience and a thick skin) I have patience... just not as much as Gandi has, and no thick skin.
Let me tell you about how all this frustration started : In france, PC video game press is basically represented by a single publication. They usually tend to report great news in the PC video game industry. So when PA kickstarter started i was expecting them to report it and they did not. They all know about TA, Supcom/ FA, Supcom 2. But , nothing. So i was quite happy to learn that they were going to publish some kind of Alpha preview for PA. I read the preview which drove me crazy : 2 pages spent bashing the game, absolutly ignoring this is alpha stage. Nothing about the techs which have been developped, nothing about inovations, just bashing and bashing again. So i went on their official forums and found it quite difficult to convince many people that one could not rely on alpha stage. Spreading the idea that this way of developping can't be compared to traditional game development is simply impossible mission. I do not manage to answer all counter arguments. And this is driving me ******* crazy, because Uber is a great studio, taking risks, developping and innovating a lot in the RTS game field. So You do strongly believe in a great project and one of the single known as reliable source of information is just writting a ******* insane preview. How do you think i can feel ?
Short answer: I feel sorry for you for being French. (I'm Dutch, and feel sorry for myself for being Dutch too) Long answer: Stop, just stop putting any effort in it whatsoever, from everything I've been seeing in France, and I've been getting most of the IT related news, is that everything is owned by the big media cooperations. Of course they try to bash it into the ground, its new, innovative, and risk taking. Everything they do not want, because its exactly what they don't do all they care about is getting the next CoD ripoff every year, so they can sell millions of copies. The only way to fight people like that, is convince a lot of single individuals, and show them the path. (So they can do the same, and so on and so on) The only other option, is having millions of euros, and actually bash the current game video press, on national television, and show how wrong they have been. And I'm not sure if you'll manage that in France, as I'm pretty sure national television there is censored, and will not allow you to air something like that. (the three strikes download law is a very good example of how far on the wrong road France is, its almost becoming the new nazi-germany, once again, no offense) I've found Bitcoin, a couple months back, its a new form of digital cash, and its very innovative, and it will basically put banks back into the place where they belong when it completely succeeds. (reach critical mass) The amount of FUD I've been seeing since, from all over the place, though the US most primarily, gives me a pretty good picture of what your trying to fight against. While I truly support your fight, I have to say, pick your battles wisely, if you know you can't win them yet, don't attempt to fight them yet. Getting regular people to understand what Alpha game development means... is near impossible, people who know me, accept what I give them as concept of what an alpha is, but thats just because they know me. I wouldn't be able to explain an Alpha to a total stranger, or at least they just wouldn't accept it. This is human nature, that it is very hard for them to accept something that is new. The best tip I can give you, is get more people here, to join that forum, to spread the positive word. (really hope its not in French, as mine is terrible) And yes, I know how you feel, rowing against the masses, is one of the hardest things to do, and you need a very strong personality to not get crushed by it.
