PTE Stream: 68331

Look at it from their perspective; if a user tells them

That's a huge issue that they will need to look into immediately if they're going to push the update anytime soon. Then much later on it's cleared up that the cause is actually a mod (though it was originally specified to disable all mods), after they potentially spent who knows how long trying to identify the problem, I don't think Sorian's reaction is completely uncalled for.

Heck, I posted a video to show the extent of my UI lag to make sure they knew what was really going on, since I was worried garat might have misinterpreted my description as worse than it really was (I said "very slow to respond", which is pretty ambiguous). Without clearing that up, he may have spent time looking for something that wasn't there.

A number of previously mentioned issues - have to toggle key after using hotkeys (which I have a patch mod for), build icons missing in hover panel, no "Return to War" if you review game.

Crash, GW Synchronous boss battle. I had just switched back to main planet (I was on two planets with orbital on third, subcom similar) I was just about select a bot factory looping bot fabbers into a teleporter, not sure if I actually selected it or not before the crash occurred. It's an incorrect checksum error message we've seen a lot before, but generic enough it's hard to say.

I did finish a few smaller games without error earlier

Ha. Giving Brian grief is almost a forum tradition

But of course we all love him for his playtest summaries and vids.

Works wonderfully on my computer. Although it has worked pretty good since day one.
Windows 7 Pro 64bit.
AMD HD 7750
16gb RAM

I have been having this also last few PTE builds. Also Win 8.1 gonna have to investigate better next time.

Ah thats good to know. My clean reinstall also meant not installing the rbm again. So maybe somewhere somehow that was breaking my game too.

Oh brian, don't be such a baby. He was clearly ribbing you.

It wasn't my intention to cause grief - it was only a humorous jab.

But given your experience and what was being said on the Realm teamspeak last night, I do feel a quick PSA is in order.

All mods means all mods, boys and girls. We all get a bit complacent from time and either forget or think 'this mod is too small to matter'. Last night we got a lot more reliability for staying connected when I got people to disable absolutely everything.

Thank you for the steam PTE. I'm not sure how much work it gives you to make it happen, but I really appreciate being able to use steam. Now the time spent in PTE counts towards my ridiculous hours in PA.

Oh wow, I didn't even notice this bit. Going to give this a try tonight. Steam version fires up about 10x faster than the Uber Launcher version on my machine.

My surprise level, on a scale of 1 to 10, is ZERO.

OSX 10.9.4 seems much more stable with no coherent crashes and only 4 client crashes (listed in my original post).

Edited to reflect crash #4 just after I posted.

Remembered that I have a PTE post in OSX Known Issues. Listed all the things I'm seeing that aren't in stable.

I've noticed during match replays that some of the tanks weren't animating properly while firing, they'd point their turrentsd and everything, but the barrels didn't recoil like they usually do, and no muzzle flash effect, it was like the rounds were just magically appearing in front of them. As a funny little aside, it seems all the muzzle flash effects were being assigned to one particular tank, which was rapidly firing off like 6 or 7 muzzle flash sounds and animations all at once.

I had several situations in which the commander got stuck in a single line of energy plants. This usually happens when several lines are being built too close to each other but this time it was sometimes just a single energy plant and he walked against it.
Also, his assisting engineers often blocked his movement and didn't move out ot the way.
Assisting itself often didn't work. Engineers which were told to assist another engineer were simply sitting there idle and didn't help their friends to get that factory up (even after repeatedly issuing the order).

Also, could we get some more consistent unit selection, please ?
I am kind of sick of sending all of my engineers instead of my combat units to "attack" that incoming army...

If selecting multiple units and any of these units are combat units, I would like the combat units to always be selected...even if more engineers were in my selection.
Having to hold ctrl while selecting to explicitly select engineers would be fine by me (if there are ONLY engineers, of course the engineers would be selected).

We need some ways to mitigate this. It used to be drag select would ONLY select combat units if there was any fabbers in the area. This caused all sorts of problems. Now it's depending on which is the larger group.

Ultimately, when dealing with a game of this scale, hotkeys are critical. However, we might want some optional UI elements for primarily mouse users for "Select all combat units in view", etc. Because changing the default click drag behavior has problems no matter what we choose. What we have currently appears to work better than "always combat all the time" - generally because most people build far few fabbers than combat units.

But ideas always welcome if there are thoughts on better defaults - the optional UI would be something we can consider regardless, though we're always cautious about adding additional UI.

Just leaving the current selection model as default and adding a single drop-down in the UI settings to switch to a second way would be great. I can see why people like it this way but I would like to be able to select combat with a normal drag box and fabbers with ctrl+drag or something.

Hmm.. I like the idea of a modifier for click drag. That could be powerful for a few different things. I'll ask how well our input model could handle something like that.

Unless I'm missing something, it already has a modifier. ctrl+drag select everything within an area, and deselects anything already selected in that area.