[Beta Feedback]

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
1

Hi,

Beta feedback was requested to this forum, so here’s some UI feedback for you. This is using build 1.05 (it doesn’t seem to have patched itself yet).

Deployment grid placement
The mouse interaction with the grid is not quite right. If you press the mouse button over a ship, anywhere over a ship, it shouldn’t move until you move the mouse. Related to this, when you move the mouse, the ship should be snapping to the grid so that the point on it where the mouse went down remains as close as possible to the mouse pointer.

Undo
Perhaps not so vital if the grid thing is fixed, but it’s all too easy to drop a cruiser off the left hand edge of the deployment area when just clicking on it to select it, thus deleting the ship and causing intense frustration as all the orders are lost, as are orders of other ships which had it as a target.

Undo would be the ideal solution to this, but failing that, a confirmation that you really wanted to delete the ship would be an improvement. Confirmation not needed if the Delete key is pressed, though, I’d say.

Rubber-band selection bug
Using the rubber band selection doesn’t update the Orders area. To reproduce, have at least two ships deployed. Give them different orders. Click on one, then rubber band select empty space. Now no ships are selected, but the orders area still has orders in it. Click on the other ship, then rubber band select the first ship. Note that the orders area still shows the orders for the unselected ship, not the selected one.

Multi-select behaviour
The windows standard shortcut keys are to hold down Shift and click to add to the selection, and Ctrl and click to toggle selection of the clicked item. Is there any reason not to use those for ship selection? Currently, you have Ctrl to add to the selection, and Shift, as far as I can tell, does nothing. There is no way to remove from the selection. These keys should also apply to rubber-band selection, which they currently don’t.

Mass Deploy UI feedback
While in Mass Deploy mode, a ghost of the ship you are inserting should track the mouse cursor, as it does for normal insert. That way you can see what you’re deploying, and where it’s going to go.

Click to deploy
I know the intended way to add ships is to drag and drop them. For some reason I always find myself trying to click on the ship button, then click where I want it to go, though. Is there any reason to disallow this behaviour? Clicking on the ship button doesn’t seem to do anything at present, so it doesn’t look like it would interfere with other functionality. Why not have a click on the ship icon automatically initiate an deploy drag?

Default orders
It should be possible to save the default orders with a ship design, as most designs are intended for specific uses, and deployment-time tweaks could be made from a more sensible base.

Copy and paste/duplicate
It would be nice to be able to duplicate a selection of ships, including orders. For example, have 4 frigates with orders to protect a cruiser, arranged around it. Select all 5 ships, and copy and past them to form another identical group, with the new 4 frigates arranged around the new cruiser, with orders to protect it.

Crashes
I also have some crashes logged for you, if that’s any help. No error message beyond the windows standard:
8/9/2009 - 16::52 - Assertion failure:filename:…\src\GUI_BehaviourEditor.cpp,linenum:170,build:Beta 1.05
8/9/2009 - 17::28 - Assertion failure:filename:…\src\SIM_TacticalModule.cpp,linenum:600,build:Beta 1.05
8/9/2009 - 18::10 - Assertion failure:filename:…\src\SIM_TacticalModule.cpp,linenum:294,build:Beta 1.05

I hope this feedback is of some use. If so, I’ll continue to provide it as I play more with the game.

Alex

2

I was also going to report on the rubber banding bug, but AlexV beat me to it.

My steps to reproduce are:
Have at least 3 different types of ships on the deployment area.
Select 1 ship via normal clicking
Select the other 2 ships via dragging the mouse to form a rectangle

Observed result:
The two ships selected via mouse drag are highlighted, but the ship schematic and order panel on the left indicate the ship selected via normal clicking. This ship in the order panel is currently not selected.

Expected result:
The ship schematic and orders in the left panel should correspond to one of the ships I just selected.

3

I quote these things for emphasis, I REALLY like this idea.

As to the rest of the feedback thread, I havent finished the SP portion of the game yet so I didn’t want to comment, but from my playing thus far, I have noticed/agree with pretty much everything stated here.

4

Hey. hope this isn’t hi-jacking a thread, but rather than create a new Beta feedback thread I thought I’d add my thoughts here. This is pretty much random stuff that occured to me at various points during the beta campaign. I haven’t finished the game yet, so I’m staying away from questions of balance. Most of the ideas are about the interface or more general GSB stuff. I should add that I can be pretty hopeless with PC games so please excuse me for any inaccuracies…

  1. HOTKEYS. Are there any? I use Escort all the time, and taking seven key clicks to assign each order is far too much. Something like Ctrl E on the escorter followed by a left click on the escortee would make things a lot quicker. The same principle could be applied to most orders I’d think.

  2. BATTLE EVENTS. I kept finding myself counting how many ships I had left in each of my groups to keep track of them. It’s especially easy to lose track of your fighters when you’ve got multiple groups of them swarming around. An on-screen message when one of your or your opponent’s ships is destroyed would help players keep track of what’s going on.

  3. DELETING DESIGNS. My ship design index is full of failed experiments. You can probably remove them by going into a folder, but there should be an option to delete them from the main design menu. EDIT: I just read how to do this in another thread.

  4. POST-BATTLE STATS. Again, a list of what ships were destroyed by each of your ships would be nice. You could get a better idea of their strengths and weaknesses through this. Would also be nice to know what kinds of shots were absorbed by shields, what kinds got through the armour, etc. Also, a list of which weapon took out each enemy module would be good, again to gauge effectiveness. Finally, placing the cursor over a module on the stats screen should tell you what it is.

  5. DEPLOYMENT. Does it need to be map-specific? It would be nice to save one deployment and then load it on a different map, even as a starting point for editing it. I found most of my tactics revolved around a core group of cruisers taking care of the centre of my line: the ability just to load up this group on any map would have saved me a lot of time.

  6. ESCORTING FIGHTERS. I couldn’t seem to do this. Which is annoying, I want to send my Y-Wings in with A-Wing support, you know? I just realised that Formation orders might be the way to do this, but I don’t have the game at work so I can’t test it out.

  7. SET WAYPOINTS. As set out in another thread, I think move / deploy orders would add a healthy dash of tactics and stop single-ship suicide attacks.

  8. EXPERIENCE. I’d love to be able to spend honour to promote individual captains, who could then receive bonuses to weapons range / speed / repair times, etc. A persistent universe would be needed here - once a ship was destroyed, the captain goes down with it. But I love the idea of creating elite units who improve steadily throughout the campaign. There would obviously be balancing issues with the challenges, but maybe this could be overcome by making experienced crews more expensive or something?

Anyway, minor issues aside I’m loving the game. Good work Cliff.

5

shift-E, shift-F

unfortunately, even if you use hotkeys, you still have to click okay in the order box over on the far right of the screen… this would be so very nice to not have to do!!

you can copy deployment files from one map to another - they’re in “My Games” or something equally cutesie in your windows user profile directory. however… do remember that the maps are wildly different sizes. so you can find yourself with a default deployment where all the ships are offscreen … and there’s no way to select/delete them (well, apart from deleting the copied file)

6

Cheers snowdrift. Those tips should remove a lot of repetition from my GSB experience.