Suggestions / change / fix requests

Gratuitous Forum Support
1

Sorry, I can’t help it but my beta-testing-bug-spotting-suggestion skills are kicking in.

Couldn’t you combine the Online and Challenges under the Online button? Like when you click the Online button, you get a new menu above the current menu which would have two buttons. Login button where you can type in your username and serial and next to that button would be the challenges. Would make it more understable that Challenges really are online things.

And shouldn’t the options be next to the exit button? In most games the menu button order goes like this: Single player related buttons | multiplayer related buttons | misc related buttons | options related buttons | exit related buttons.

(Of course we can argue about the misc and options button position because I have seen games where those places are swapped.)

Edit II: I just clicked the ship design button. It would be nice if the tutorial tooltips had a number how many more tooltips there are still going to come.

Also the help text next to the cursor picks the help text BEHIND the continue button when the continue button is on top some of the modules. It should say “Continue playing when you have finished reading.” Or something like that, but instead it says “Pulse laser.” Or something like that. :stuck_out_tongue:

Wouldn’t it be more simple to say “A ship design is only valid when all crew and power requirements are met.” Instead of the current one which is something along the lines: “…when all crew and power requirements are accounted for by power and crew modules.”

Edit III: Shouldn’t the “You can toggle from blueprint to physical view with the button in the top right corner.” be something like “The blueprint button at the top right corner of the window will toggle between physical view and schematical view so you can see how the turrets would look like when the ship is deployed to battle.” :slight_smile: Hey this is Mr. Weedy from Finland and I’m here to outrageously fix your grammar. (Don’t get offended. I mean no harm. ^^)

Ok this is really weird spelling: “You HAVE UNSAVED your design…” It really would make A LOT more sense if it was “You HAVEN’T SAVED your design…”

Edit IV: Could you move those help texts, which appear next to the mouse when you keep it still on something for a while, show up so that they don’t overlap with the mouse cursor. It would add more finished feel to the game.

Also I would like to have a setting in options where you could adjust the mouse screen scrolling speed and arrow keys screen scrolling speed. I like to be close to the ships and see all their details but I can’t move around fast when I’m zoomed in. :frowning: If I could adjust the scrolling speed, I wouldn’t have to all the time zoom out and zoom in to move my view.)

Edit V: Could it be possible to have some sort of “main menu button” during the battle scene? This button would open a new window on top of the game and it would pause the battle which is going on the background. This new window would have “Continue” “Options” “Exi (admit defeat)” and “Quit to desktop” buttons. This idea just popped in my mind because I’m getting 32 fps on 1280x1024 screen resolution and all settings maxed out even I have Q9550 processor, 4 Gigs of Corsair’s RAM, GTX 280 Graphic card and Sound Blaster Fatal1ty Titanium X-Fi sound card. :stuck_out_tongue: Unreal Tournament 3 plays nicely on 60-250 fps on max settings all the time. This game runs barely on 32 fps. :stuck_out_tongue: So I felt like tweaking the options during the fire fight and seeing which option gives me the greatest performance boost.

Maybe when you click the pause button it would replace the “Speed 1x” field with “Speed II”.

Edit VI: While I was deploying my fleet and had the tutorial going on, I noticed that the window could actually block my deployment settings. This could be prevented very easily by placing the tutorial window on top of the area where you can’t place your fleets and where it wouldn’t block anything else except the background. Then keeping it there so you could see the whole screen any time you want. Or just make that window movable.

Also I noticed that when I placed two ships too close to each other and one smaller one was between them, I couldn’t choose this smaller one at all. I had to move the biggers ones away so I could move the smaller one. This could grow up to real pain in the ass with massive tight fleets when you have to unpack the ships from outside so you can select the ship at the center.

(Also I so badly want to unselect my ships in deployment screen by clicking somewhere where there is nothing to select. :frowning: Edit: Oh, it works, for some reason it didn’t when the tutorial was on.)

And also when the tutorial told me to click the “Add order” button it didn’t highlight it as it did with previous buttons when it talked about them so it took me a bit time to notice where that button was. (And it looked more like a title than a button. :P)

When the tutorial talked about saving your fleet it said: “You should probably save out this fleet deployment before fighting, to save building it from scratch again.” But it would make more sense if it was this way (wouldn’t it?): “You should save out this fleet deployment before fighting, this way you don’t have to build it from scratch again after the battle.” Or something like that again.

Edit VII: And finally… (for now) It would help if the fleet deployment saves would have a time stamp on them. The time stamp could make it easier to remember which fleet deplayment was more succesful over the others if you have had tried multiple fleet deployments during one day. “Ok I fought that battle around 4:20pm so that fleet deployment must be near that time.”

Edit: IIX: I think it would decrease the feel of spam if the communication between ships wasn’t that rapid. For real the line has barely finished getting written and then there pops up tons of new lines. I have no chance to read most of those line before they get bumped out of the chat window because new chatter came in.

2

I think it’s time to make a new post. :stuck_out_tongue:

So yeah… About ship designs. You may call me biased but to me it feels more comfortable when you can place a module on your ship just by clicking on a free module slot. For example when you select fighter rocket launcher and click on the fighter’s empty turret slot, the game would place the turret there.

This very same method is used in Jets ‘n’ Guns game and it works really well and is very fast when you want to buy a big amount of same weapon to your ship fast.

And for the sake of clearness, I think the game should flash the free module slot red if the module doesn’t fit there. Like for example trying to mount a weapon module in a normal module slot. (That square one.)

Edit: I think it would improve the UI a lot if you could move the module selector with arrow keys and by pressing shift and then arrow keys you could also change the tab. This would remove completelly the mouse back and forth movement when you are applying different kind of modules on your ship and experimenting with them. (IF you agree to implement the left click - install module thing.)

It would also make more sense if the armors, engine and what not things were more ordered and not listed like this: “armor II, armor III, armor.” But they would be instead: “armor I, armor II, armor III.” Same thing when you click the All button. The weapons are scattered all over the place instead of neatly grouped together in improving order (or alphabetical.)

Would it make it more sensible if there was an additional line in the module’s detail window which would say, for example on engine, “thrust after stacking” or something like that and tell what it’s real value is after stacking instead of game forcing you to calculate that value separatelly with your calculator and thinking: “Ok the effectiveness is at 72% now so the REAL thrust for each engine is 14*0.72 = 10.08 and because I have two of these engines on the ship, that makes the overall thrust to 20.16.”

Fighter target painter, fighter laser cannon and fighter pulse laser have crew requirement of zero. In other words these lines are useless there. These could be removed like it is done with the Fighter torpedo launcher and fighter rocket launcher.

It would be very handy if the ships would have cost and pilot amounts when you deploying them. This way it would be easier to see which ships consume a lot of money or which ships consume a lot of pilots.

And again it would make it easier if the ship choosing list would support arrow keys so you could easily swap between two ship hulls and compare them fast instead that you choose each of them carefully with mouse. There’s nothing wrong with choosing them by mouse but… it’s slow when you try to compare two ship hulls.

It would be nice if you could type in the max range by hand into the number field instead of trying to adjust it by the slider. (Not that it really matters but it would give better feel again. [Me thinks.] :P)

On ship orders, Protector it says: “Concentrate fire on enemy ships that are attacking a specific named ship” but if I understood that sentence correctly, it would make more sense if it said: “Concentrate fire on enemy ships that are attacking a specific named ship of ours.”

To me it would feel better if the name tags on ships on the actual battle area would be different colored based on the fact are they friendly or hostile. Like now the background color of the name tags are the same for all ships which is like redish… brown or something. Instead the friendly ones could be this redish brown colored and the enemy ships could be like… Opposing color of that, or maybe even red. This way you wouldn’t all the time have to flick that O key on your keyboard just to make sure which ships in which area are your friends again and which aren’t.

Aaand I think that starts to be about it (for today) but there’s one more thing which I, notice I, keep important. I would prefer to have a some sort of overall “deployed ships statics” list or something. Which would list all the cruisers, all the frigates and all the fighters I have deployed to the field. It is a bit hard to keep track how many ships have been destroyed by just looking at the colored ships and the percentage numbers.

The list wouldn’t have to be anything else than just a few lines of text and same kind of cruisers would be listed together. Something like this:

Cruisers:
4/4
2/2
1/1

Frigates:
3/3

Fighters:
12/12
24/24

And maybe health bars at the end of those number lines. This would give INSTANT feedback which ship design is good and which isn’t agaisnt that kind of enemy deployment.

Aaand apparently if you alt+tab out of the game while a battle is going on (and without pausing the game), it makes the game end in some sort of frozen state. It does respond immediatelly but it doesn’t load back up when you try to alt tab in it again.

Where are ship’s overall hitpoints in the ship designer?

I think the sound volume scaling could be less steep when you zoom in and out your view. For example when you have totally maxed out your zoom the blast are so loud that the sound card has hard time playing them without cracking because the volume levels are exceeding the capabilities of my sound card. Then when I zoom out with my mouse wheel by one or two clicks the volume levels are all good now but when I zoom totally out the blasts are barely existing now. So you can’t enjoy the game that much. You either have a beautiful overview of the battle with quiet booms or nicely detailed view of one ship and massive blasting of weapons.

Maybe a slider for this in options where you could adjust it for your liking how much the sound volume scales based on your zoom level. (And naturally a default button for it.)

Another thing with sounds I noticed was that when you are totally zoomed in and for example and explosion goes off, the explosion sound may pan rapidly between your left and right speaker because of so dramatical contrast between the left and right sound channel on max zoom rate. This is a bit annoying when you try to watch a huge explosion on a small ship on max zoom rate and then then that explosion blast out only from your left or right speaker even you are almost directly on top of the ship.

When you are exactly directly on top of the ship, then the sound plays from both of your speakers but alas if you move just a tiny bit…

More smoothness to sound panning on maximum zoom rate too. Please.

I hope you have strength to read through all my suggestions, consider them and maybe even implement them. =)

My anti missile point defence thingy pew pews aren’t getting cloacked when my ship does:
i33.tinypic.com/a1r02v.png

Also how the heck this is possible?:
i34.tinypic.com/5pedmq.png

3

Time for a bump and new idea.

I doubt this would be easy and fast thing to do but…

Could it be made so that projectiles which are going to miss a ship could change their brightness based on the height they are flying. (Or simply size.)

Let’s take this plasma projectile as an example. It flies towards enemy’s ship. You never know will it hit or miss because there isn’t any kind of indication of the projectile’s current height in relation to the enemy ship it flies towards. When I started playing the game I was at first WTF? my missiles and shots penetrated the enemy’s shield but then they missed the ship? WTF is this?

After some time I understood that weapons and missiles had accuracy too (missiles vs. that scrambling unit) and understood that the projectiles and missiles actually flew under the ship instead of through it.

It would make it a lot more clear that projectiles are going to miss or hit if their size or/and brightness would change based on their height they are traveling atm. I think it could be calculated somehow from starting height, accuracy they have (a chance to fly higher/lower than their target is) and distance they travel.

Just another idea and some more eye candy and a thing which would make the visual feedback more exact so players could know a bit earlier is a shot going to hit or miss.

When you have chance to rate a battle the stars are colored same even the other stars should be red.

4

Interesting idea…

5

i’m sure i remember someone in the first day or so of beta requesting that shots which’re going to hit fly over the hull … rather than under it.

6

You mean AREN’T? :slight_smile:

Edit: Oh yeah.

Cliffski didn’t you somewhere say that you feel like there’s something wrong with the armor hits which bounce off? That you don’t feel like those redish “dust clouds” are good way to present projectiles bouncing off the armor?

I got an idea. (Surprise…) What if instead of that redish dust cloud the image would be something like:

Maybe not as that flamy, shorther, having sharper star like shape and having more white color than having yellow and red but the general idea is like that. This could give the bouncing off projectiles more a feel that they really bounce off instead of vaporizing into a red dust cloud. (Maybe you could use the laser reflection code’s visual results for this too?)

Could you add a small pop-up window warning you that IF you haven’t saved any kind of default fleet for a certain battle in ship deployment window, the game would warn you about this so you wouldn’t have to do all the ship placing and order giving things all over again when you wanted to just quickly test something.

7

For some reason getting out of the followcam mode is very troublesome. If I click the icon and then try detach the view from the ship by using arrow keys, it won’t work. Same happens if I try to move my view with mouse. The view bounces back to the selected ship. Clicking on the minimap works either.

I somehow get out of it by clicking multiple times on the followcam icon and clicking empty space after that.

It would help if the ship detail screen stayed on when you had clicked a ship once in the deployment view. This would make it a bit faster to check what kind of ship this and this was again. Now you have to drag the ship on the deployment area before the details window stays on and if it wasn’t the ship you wanted you have to throw it out of the deployment area and repeat this for next ship. (Or hold your mouse button but I like to move my mouse cursor there where I’m looking at or from where I’m reading text.)

I’m in a stalemate in the first survival map on the list. Halp? :frowning: My two Federation cruisers vs. 2 Empire cruisers + 4 Empire frigates aren’t having fun. (I had a third one but enemy cruiser and frigate flew right on top of it and jammed there so my none of that ship’s weapons could have fired on them but somehow their weapons managed to penetrate my armor when they were inside my shield bubble.)

I need “Agree on draw.” button. :frowning: I don’t want to admit defeat because neither of us isn’t losing.

Edit: Never mind. I got destroyed when more Cruisers, fighters and frigates spawned in. :smiley: Though, even they took quite long time to destroy me and again they cheated by flying on top of my ship and jamming there for some time…

8

I’m not sure is this already in the game or meantioned elsewhere on this forum but…

I heard about this Critical Chance which fighters have but there isn’t any kind of meantion of it the game. It would be nice if there was a small text somewhere in the ship design window which would say that “Fighters have 2% chance to deal critical damage which does significant amount more damage than the usual shots fired from fighters.”

This would really help to reduce WTF moments in fights where the armor is 100/100% and then within seconds it’s 0/100%.

9

I think the crit chance is just a ‘chance to ignore armour penetration check’ but it may be more. This definately wants to be documented. It should also cause a explosion, like when a normal hit happens. It’s a bit odd seeing damage to armour mounting up, but only the reflected damage graphic. Really I think the crit chance should be thrown away, anyway, and replaced by making armour penetration / reflection a curve rather than just a ‘yes or no’ proposition.

I very strongly feel that there should be an autosave for deployments.

10

I really wish deployments autosaved, and returning to deployment brought you back to what you just fought with, rather than the save of ‘deployed’.

But to be totally honest … i asked for that at the end of august, and several times since then… and it’s been mostly ignored[1]. whether that’s because it’s too hard to store the deployment when navigating the UI, or because it’s not how cliff sees the game working - i don’t know.

[1] mostly - returning to deployment screen loading the ‘deployed’ save was implemented. but i still have to remember to click “save deployment” “yes” “yes” “fight” - instead of clicking “fight!”

11

No its just been on the list for ages. It’s actually the next thing on my list. Maybe even today! :smiley:

12

Good to hear there will be an autosave feature. ^^

13

Thanks for the wipe effect toggle button. :slight_smile:

Ok here’s the deal. When the game installed 1.19 patch, I immediatelly turned the wipe effects off. Then I quit the game and restarted it. Then I started using alt+tab and window key and mouse to get out of the game and get back in the game. And no more black screen. :slight_smile:

But… There are two annoying things. After this alt+tabbing I enabled the wipe effects again and the game again crashed with c++ runtime error. There was no restart between the alt tabbing and enabling the wipe effects.

Another thing which I noticed is that if you press left alt key, it freezes your mouse and only the sound plays. Only way to get out of this freeze is to press tab (without need to hold alt to get out of the game.) So I would imaginate that game has some sort of hard coded sticky keys feature. This isn’t that bad thing because alt is usually used only with alt+tab combination but it really should freeze up your mouse until you press tab to unlock sticy keys.

I’ll try alt+tabbing with wipe effects now.

Edit: Yeah. No question about it the wipe effects cause the black screen semi-freeze up.

14

Frigate engine II and frigate engine pictures are wrong way around. (At least I think the one with red rear should be the second engine instead of being first.)

Awwww… My game crashed but this time without the c++ runtime error now. :frowning: I was in the Fleet HQ after beating The Emerald Nebula mission on all three difficulties (and I actually got more honor on expert when I did a tiny ship adjustment. :D)

After that I clicked deployment button, then main menu and from there I went to Fleet HQ. I unlocked all three ships for Federation and then went to races tab. There I just started clicking between rebels and alliance and when I did this for some time the game just spontaneously crashed. :stuck_out_tongue:

No error logs in the errors.txt file. :frowning:

Edit: I’m not sure did the game actually play the clicking sound or not… If it didn’t, that may have caused the crash but why it didn’t load the sound and play it?

15

This just crossed my mind…

Are there any plans for repaid modules which work between ships? Like, we have this one support cruiser and then it has these remote repair modules which repair other ships around it. This way not every cruiser needs their own repair module to surive under heavy fire and there could be even a ship totally without weapons. It could have only shields, armoring and these remote repair modules plus all the other necessary things.

Of course these kind of modules couldn’t repair the ship itself which sends them away to repair other ships, the repair drones would have short range, something like 200-300 and of course if this ship blows up all the other ships would lose their repair support too.

I’d say this makes them quite balanced already. Maybe make different versions for frigate and cruiser. Frigate version could repair faster but has less supplies and cruiser one would repair slower but would have a lot longer lasting supplies.

16

I like the idea of modules that act as support for other ships. In the long run, I’d like to get all sorts of stuff like this added, once I have a really stable and well defined basic game that is on sale.
I’m sure there is scope to do an add-on for people who want more complexity or options, whilst keeping the base game accessible for the casual player. Too many options can be overwhelming

17

do you mean a situation when a, say, cruiser’s under serious fire from fighters and suddenly a bunch of explosions erupt from it’s hull? that happens a lot. does it mark shields down, armor destroyed, and all modules dead?

18

Look at my survival video on this forum’s gratuitous general talk area, the latter part.

You’ll get the point.

The armor was fully intact, same with shields and hull. Fighters’ projectiles bounced off the armor and then BOOM within seconds I had zero armor and all my modules started to go red as my hull health went down.

I didn’t know there was this kind of chance to happen.