Quick Comments

‘Del’ doesn’t work in text input boxes (very GSB… quite annoying if clicking in it to replace text - I always click one character before the end.)
“Sending to bletchley” locks up if you run comodo firewall (which requires an alt-tab to a dialog box to allow the connection)
For some reason, it sends to bletchley even if your profile isn’t defined.
“Sending to bletchley” seems … wrong when you click on online map description, and it gets stuff.
Zoom in/out doesn’t appear to have a keyboard equivalent for those people without scrollwheels.
There doesn’t seem to be a keyboard shortcut to scroll the unit menu left/right.
You can’t tab between text input boxes.
It took me a fair while to realise how to exit the options sub-menu (the huge ‘X’ box in the top right). I was looking for window decoration around the obvious options window. And then for the online map description, I was searching for how to close it … before finding the x-box in the window decoration! :stuck_out_tongue:

“Toggle damage indicators” doesn’t seem to visually toggle as a button.
Pause game => Alt-tab => Alt-tab back, and the game auto unpauses. This may be intentional, but it surprised me.

All fair criticisms, and now on my todo list :smiley:

Item unlocked window - there’s nothing apart from the name to guess which of the options to unlock.
Dogtags can exceed the supply cap, but from the way it flashes, I suspect that may be intentional :slight_smile:

Server comms are a problem. (Firewall is now fixed and allowing them)
After unlocking an item, it tried sending… but never got anywhere. So I alt-tabbed to wait. Got bored, and tabbed back. Black screen, so eventually I killed it. (plus point - it died quickly and cleanly without any messing)

On starting up, it started to communicate… so - being the impatient person that I am, I alt-tabbed again and was waiting for the beeps to stop. Of course, they don’t. The sound is in a loop until something wakes up and changes the loop… which it did when i tabbed back several minutes later wondering if it was stuck again. Is it possible to have those morse beeps stop when server communication is finished? And maybe a progress bar to indicate when it’ll give up.

I fought a battle (and won) as attacker. Got a unit, and unlocked an upgrade. Then decided to save the recording.
But I couldn’t find what to do with it - so I went to read the manual… which doesn’t seem to explain how to play a recording on a campaign map.
So I started the game back up (as it had committed suicide in favour of acroreader)… and my attacking score for that scenario (2nd) seems to have vanished. The unlocked weapon however seems to be available.

Tutorials:
No obvious way to quit them. ‘Escape’ works, but then I suspect one needs to reset all tutorials to see what you missed.
In the map editor tutorial, I clicked on ‘Clear everything on the map’ while a tutorial window had focus to try and get out of the tutorial… It didn’t stop the tutorial, but it did mess up the window it was talking about (I think it was explaining the tile picker at the time), so the object being described wasn’t highlighting.

I would suggest that instead of tutorials firing up the first time you enter a section, there be a dialog asking “Take Tutorial?” with answers being “Sure!”, “Ask Later” and “I’ll muddle through- leave me alone”

Unit design:
If you change hull, the default name remains what it was before… So I was designing some infantry… named “Elephant Heavy Tank”.
(Of course, it wasn’t instantly obvious that to get to infantry one needed to change to their ‘hull’)

Alt-tabbing:
I’m getting lockups when alt-tabbing from the main splash screen. Including GTB not responding and needing to be task-manager killed. Not sure how to replicate that yet as it doesn’t seem to be consistent. Of course, the music is quite happily playing the whole time :slight_smile:

Crash-to-desktop only about 30sec into a battle. I can’t find anything obvious in errors.txt (it’s just full of D3DEngine Restore Failed/INVALIDCALLs).
Unfortunately completely unreproducible… all I can think was that I aborted the battle and went straight back into the same one just beforehand.

I found the hull options a little bit strange. There’re three types of each hull. E.g. There’re small ballistic turrets, small beam turrets and small flame turrets. They seem to be mechanically identical and only look different from one another. But then each type of turret has three cosmetic changes under “unit variant”. If they all behave the same why not give me one turret type called Small Turret and give it nine cosmetic variants (or however many) and save the confusion?

The reason for this, I believe, Fenrir (and someone correct me if I’m wrong) is because of supplies when deploying units in battle. You can only deploy up to 3 or 4 of a particular type (e.g medium mech 1) before having to wait a certain amount of time for resupplies, even if you have enough credits. However, if you have some that are medium mech 1 and some that are medium mech 2 then you can place up to 6 or 8 without having to wait for the resupplies, even though they are mechanically the same. At the moment I have a medium mech varient with lasers and one with cannons, but once I unlock a second medium mech, I’ll move one of those onto the other mech varient, so I can have greater flexibility and numbers of units on the field at once.

Nope, I checked this. Among the default turrets are the MG 74 machine gun (which uses the small projectile turret hull) and the PAK light laser (which uses the small beam turret hull). Despite being on technically different hulls they share a supply line. Building four MG 74s quickly will render you unable to build a PAK til they resupply. The same applies to heavy mech 1 & 2. They share a cool down. You wont be able to build more heavy mechs by using different hulls. At least as far as I can tell.

due to annoying bugs, soon to be fixed…
The different hulls within each grup act identically, but soon they will vary in weight and cost. So there will be a cheap but heavy medium mech, a medium mech, and a light but expensive medium mech, and so on. So there will be some extra trade-off there…

I suspected that it would be something like that. Fair enough sez I.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification, Cliffski.

Scrolling is soooo slow! Can that have acceleration… or a speed configuration slider please?
Also, zooming by left+right buttons and mouse-move up/down would be nice.

I second the comment elsewhere about clouds - at lowest zoom, they’re very obscuring.

Hovering over locked augmentations reveals their name. Hovering over locked components reveals “weapon” or “defense”.

The order of units in the battle bar seems … random. Is there a way of setting the order, and also of only displaying certain ones?

And oops… having read the manual, I find that shift-Num+ and shift-Num- do the zooming… but that requires taking a hand off the trackball. Which is … not optimal. Page-up/down - while being nowhere near as fluid as double-button-hold-mousemove are at least one-handed actions.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to cancel a fire order.

Occasionally, supply drops seem to be disappearing. I’m pretty sure nothing reached them as I had no trucks.

Manual: when we get to section 10, the section numbers start to run into the titles.

Online: “add a friend”:
When clicked, the text input isn’t focused… you have to click in the box to enter text.
‘Enter’ doesn’t. You have to click the button.
When I tried to add a friend, the game crashed (while playing morse) with “SIM_SERVER: Failed to open script response:.\src\SIM_Server.cpp 27” and then went to the delightful windows " has stopped working"

Actually… “Online”? It’s very un-obvious that it’s the profile button which gets you to the friend/messaging screen. The profile stuff should be a sub-category of options - not something sat there every time you read a message.

I’m also not happy with the way the units are ordered at the bottom.

Selecting the unit you want when you made alot of custom units is a pain, especially in the heat of battle.
We should be able to order them in the way we like - and make the icons smaller, so we can have more at once.
It’s too bulky at the moment, the UI for the units.

And I’m not entirely satisfied with the way the unit designer works…
And the way you unlock stuff is WAY to random, in my opinion.
I was able to give one of my infantry blueprints a supercooled gatling gun by switching and deleting hulls for a bit. They rock, but it must be a bug, correct?

Another thing that bugs me: I can save several blueprints ALL called exactly the same.
So I had 3 “Gewalthaufen Heavy Infantry MKI” in my unit designer to load, each one had different equipment, but shared the same name. Confusing.
Maybe add a check so that you can’t have two blueprints with the same “save” name.

Also:

  • Are coloured guns supposed to look bloody bad?
  • Are you planning on adding multiple guns on tanks and mechs?
  • What if I DON’T want to give my units any armour, so they run/drive faster? Why can’t I do that?
  • How easy will it be for modders to ADD more armour slots for a hull, more weapon slots and turrets that aim and fire seperately? I would think that the UI would fill up very fast if one would put alot of new slots on a hull …

As you may have noticed, I would totally love a “behemoth” class tank hull that can mount machine gun turrets that aim and shoot seperately, in addition to the main cannon. Will people have to mod that, will they be able to, or is that on your checklist already?

Now to finish this first little report up, I have to say that I absolutely love the game!
You did a great job, and when I say “not happy” or “not satisfied”, and say what I would like to have ingame, then that’s only me trying to give you ideas for improving the game. It’s great as it is, that’s for certain! But there are always things that can make it even better …

[b]Anyways, great job! I believe all the work was worth it.

Cheers,
Elric
[/b]

So far so good i’d say. Except that if you actually just try to change a unit you made… It just makes a duplicate despite saying yes to overwriting.

Otherwise quite enjoying it, had a few crashes but that was about it.

… Also i don’t suppose there’s a way to change my forum username ? When i was signing up i think i mistyped and didn’t notice until it was too late :S Was rather looking for Imperial Dane, not Imperial Danw

One tip for people frustrated by scroll speed. Grab the ground and drag it. That’s hwo I do it when I play, and as a result, it’s probably currently set up the best. Obviously I’ll fix the scrolling, but in the meantime you might find that better. I find it much quicker in any case.

Is there a way to get to the options menu during battle? I wanted to invert zoom but couldn’t find a way to the options. Apologies if it’s just a button on the screen I was too blind to click. :slight_smile:

Currently not. Some of the options changes would require restarting the game, so it’s a bit problematic to allow you to change them mid-battle.

The battle browser always resets to battle-1 … is there any reason it doesn’t stay on the last one played, or the one just unlocked?

Options - just warn that if they pick one of the restart-only options, a popup appears that says something to that effect. There’re lots of visual options in there that people might want to fiddle with during battle… (well, maybe).

Hmm. A “Disable annoying beeping when taking forever to contact Bletchley Park” option would be appreciated.

I’ve encountered an odd bug where a turret I created was saved as an infantry hull - and I did create an infantry unit next - and when I switched hull and overwrote that turret name, the new config was saved but the icon for the turret remains the infantry one.

More infantry types would be nice. Low hp ones with extra config slots, or faster moving, or… well maybe one’s enough, it’s meant to be tanks after all.

Also, I’m sure I should hear some explosions even when above the clouds… that I find a little odd/annoying.