Asteroid backer week-end and patch 0.5.0.0 - FEEDBACK

[Lomsor]

So here’s my feedback after some playing:

Music

Sounds quite good. I like it. Quite a bit chaotic with so many instrsuments but it might work in the whole picture. Rethinking this: Make Menu/Load/End Music stand out, make I:B more memorable I feel like you may have hit it somewhat. The main theme is a bit slow to get going but is alright. What is missing is loading music.
I thought about suggesting rather taking “Infinity_Battle_03_Demo_loop_V1” Starting at 1:10 as menu music over “Infinity_MainTheme_Mix_V2_loop”. It is much more powerful and has a memorable theme in there.
A bit of preference though. I know many action games nowadays go with more mellow music as their action kicks in rather late, Battle Royals or arena games with long set up times, the theme reminded me a lot of their menu musics. If the usual gameplay is the same it might fit. If you get into the game and 30 seconds later you are in a battle … then maybe the battle music would be better.
Loading music and winning and loosing scores, faction specific, would be cool … maybe you can nudge some of the existing music you have to have two themes … else it’s a shame that not more resources were available to give the factions their music. We have the colours, the logos, the name … music would have been also cool.

Effects

Definitely a big step up. I am really impressed. Still runs really well for me. Only had a few drops.
The impact effects are especially cool and how they are directional to the target. Looks much more immersive. Bounces are cool too.

Missiles are crazy. Smoke is crazy. How it is being lit up is really cool. The trails too. Definitely quite cool.

Explosion debris is cool too. Especially that it appears even if the ship isn’t destroyed. It seems a little bit too much during destruction though and maybe it could be a bit less spherical and more chaotic in its shape.

Not so sure about the colours of explosions. I like the variety but sometimes it feels a bit off … maybe I just need to get used to it … but maybe do a pallet check on all the colours?

Now, the warp effect. I have seen many dislike it, I like it quite a bit. A big thing I am missing though: Entry and exit visualisation. You can see the ship suddenly stop or accelerate, you can hear it, but not visual effect. It’s missing. There really should be one. Maybe a tight white ring arround the warp effect flashing for half a second as the warp kicks in. I like the fade in and fade out of the current warp effect. I also really like the “spikes” and the lights. The colour also is a bit weird … I think it doesn’t fit with the hud colours and that’s why I am confused by it. It could also use some heterogenity, the cockipt reflections are there and changing and good … but you can’t see these patterns when looking at the effect itself. Would be cool if it had some more structure visible when directly looking at it.
I also really like that it’s not just client side and how it bends.

Thruster effects look cool too. The interceptor one is a bit low poly though, visible in third person.

Shooting Turrets

I just did a test of that with RepK.
Shots go right trough turrets and that looks a bit weird when the hit effects happen below the turret. Smaller turrets are quite alright and easy to destroy … but mostly require you to suicide yourself anyway because you are so close up. It’s cool but not sure about the viability currently. Spamming torpedoes and just outright killind the cap ship seems much better when it comes to used time.
If they were easy to kill in a strafe run and only up close … that would be more attractive … would give smaller ships more options to combat the big ones.

Shots just go straight trough the turret. Hard to guess if you hit it. I may have destroyed a MK7 turret but it seems for that one the smoke wasn’t correct … maybe it wasn’t yet destroyed though. Smaller turrets were quite obvious. A longer fire would help to have a better confirmation.
The really small turrets that make it hard to stay close due to them murdering you are the hardest to see and kill. I wished for a lock on feature there.

Tested with Bomber. Weakend shealds to 60-40% and then shotgunned. Medium turrets took about 5-10 shots.

Misc

• Great. No more errors in the profile editor.
• Neutral station does not resupply. (Maybe conscious)
• Would be cool to have an indication to when Missiles are ready to fire again. Guessing is kind of super sub optimal. Nothing changes from the time the missiles are on cooldown to the time they are ready to fire again. We have the missiles launcher indicators on the HUD now and they work quite well. Add another colour to indicate reloading.

Bugs and Annoyances from earlier versions that are still in

• Floating turrets on ground installations.
• Jittering ships. (Discussion on discord) Examples: here, and here.
• Jittering input. Shots fired inconsistently.
• Manual override in warp is sometimes less effective then “letting go” (fixed acceleration has priority over dynamic acceleration of the automatic warp), quite annoying as player has to guess when to let go.
• Loading times for the ESC and TAB menu are a bit annoying. The tab menu is often used now and it obviously taking you out of the “game” is a bit jarring. The muffling of sound is ok but some of the game still should be visible in my opinion. Even if it’s … what’s it called, fogged, like trough a fogged glass … forgot the name of the effect.
• All NPCs leave when battle is over, and me as a bomber does not have any more corvettes nearby to finish the installation. (Debateable if that is wanted behaviour, understandable but weird when you are there and it happens)
• Torpedo Doppler sound is weird. At first it sounds right but just before the sounds disapears it does a weird pitch up and it sounds as if it was behind you.
• Profile conflict creates an error and stops the loading of the game even though clicking ok still goes forward with it.
• In capitals and warp the view shifts sideways a lot during a turn in warp. It can take more than a minute for the view to set back. This is not the case in capital control mode.

Players …

I wasn’t here during the weekend and only arrive on Monday morning. Joining in for the last bits. Fun seing new players and fighting them. It works quite well. The dynamic when two players meet in the mids of hundreds of NPCs is a bit weird, with them locking horns and duking it out, while everything else just stops, still it is fun.

What I want to talk about is this though: The hard problem of multiplayer indie games

I kind of jokingly said on discord that the patch would come an hour before the event and it seems to have been quite a technical problematic situation.

Still, even with all these problems a lot more people needed to show up. I think the peak I saw was 26. I don’t have the data (yet) but it doesn’t seem like the double or triple … I hoped for.

It’s one of the biggest concerns I have for Infinity: Battlescape and it still is there, strong as years ago.

[INovaeFlavien]

In capitals and warp the view shifts sideways a lot during a turn in warp. It can take more than a minute for the view to set back. This is not the case in capital control mode.

Can you elaborate on that one ? I’m not sure I understand it well. Which control scheme are you talking about ?

Other than that, good feedback. Yeah the game is still full of annoyances. Some of them are “low priority”, as in: well, they’re annoying ( they wouldn’t be annoyances otherwise ) but in the grand scheme of things, there are far more important features to focus on, like the missing starmap, the ship upgrades or cleaning up the HUD.

Usually, the way I work is that I focus most of my day on the high priority task(s), and do a pass over low-priority items / low-hanging fruits when I only have 30’ or 1 hour to work, or at night because I’m exhausted and I don’t want to start another 4-hours long intense coding session. So these “low priority” items are actually being worked on, just at a lower pace than the rest. They’ll get fixed, eventually… and before the Early access launch, I certainly hope.

About networking: as mentionned on Discord, I’ll be running some tests, but I do not think we have time in the short future to keep improving on the networking ( beyond obvious bugs ).

Menu loading times: I actually implemented an .SVG cache loader ( for icons ) in this patch, but it doesn’t look like it helped much with these loading times. I do not think it’s the menu system itself which is causing the slowdowns. I’m suspecting something related to the dynamic IBL, or something that got cached based on camera position ( which is changing when you enter the menus, since rendering the star map / ship hangar etc… requires rendering from another camera’s position ). But I’ll be investigating that issue soon.

Torpedo doppler: will have to investigate. It’s possible that it’s not a bug. When exceeding the speed of sound it might cause the sound source to “lag” behind the real source. I’m not sure if there’s a way in FMOD to keep the doppler pitch but drop that lag offset.

[Argopeilacos]

In athmosphere a pitch ladder would help finding the optimal ascent angle when leaving a planet (better than centering the planet in rear-facing radar), and a roll indicator would be nice too.

The capital control scheme needs some tweaking to be really usable. The auto-turn is not usefull in combat IMO, but still nice otherwise. The previous “set heading and forget” was very useful though.
What we sorely need is:

• A good indicator of current heading to change it with precision with WASD without impeding aiming, something like starshatter:
  
• Ideally a camera window showing what might be in the way of the current heading.
• No conflict between strafing and heading, i.e. strafing with CTRL-WASD doesn’t cancel the heading set with WASD.

[Lomsor]

In capitals and warp the view shifts sideways a lot during a turn in warp. It can take more than a minute for the view to set back. This is not the case in capital control mode.

Can you elaborate on that one ? I’m not sure I understand it well. Which control scheme are you talking about ?

In direct or target mode. External view. Here are some sceenshots.

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When exceeding the speed of sound it might cause the sound source to “lag” behind the real source

Oh … so depending how it accelerates the sound could arrive much later … huh.

I’m suspecting something related to the dynamic IBL, or something that got cached based on camera position ( which is changing when you enter the menus, since rendering the star map / ship hangar etc… requires rendering from another camera’s position ). But I’ll be investigating that issue soon.

Maybe it’s the ship selection and all of the types of ships having to be available … (shrug)

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Some more feedback:

New Station modules look good, I like the style. They have a bit fewer nooks and crannies but they are still there, which is nice to see.
Generally the style of the game has come a long way, I was a bit worried at some point but it looks quite good now.

Some smaller things:

• Destroyer Engines look a bit flat when ship is powered down.
• The effect of one of the back facing manoeuvring thrusters on the right side of the Destroyers is a bit offset from the geometry it should sit in.
• Odds and countdowns don’t update while Mission screen is open.
• One thing I forgot in my last post. The killcam still doesn’t rewind enough. You only get to see your explosion.

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One idea. I also dislike the blinking for showing that something is obstructed. I like that it is indicated though, it’s important.
So how about instead of changing colour or opacity or symbol … the Font style changes?
The font could change to italic/slanted … that would be pretty clear and obvious while not being too “I am important” like the blinking is right now and still visible as well as not difficult to do like new symbols or colours.

[Penderyn]

Hi all … bit of a lurker here…been following the evolution of this game since 2005/2006…I cant even recall what year it first started…thank god for early youtube and me searching about “infinity” back then haha

Heres a preview of it back in 2006 … they were so ahead of their time!

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OK serious Feedback Time! … Im Bryn-Daf in game and I had suffered a wee blue attack all the objects/planets etc in my game turned blue when I loaded it up twice **

Possible reasons? - further detective work needed
These issues both happened at high graphics setting, but first time playing on high was smooth and perfect

• It happened the first time exactly as I scrolled through spawn points to respawn my ship - I had always picked the first one until then. - could be unrelated

My graphics card is nvidia geforce gtx 970
(I think someone with a similar card had the blue bug!?)

further to this …the graphics driver was not fully updated as I hadnt used the computer for months (might be a factor)
Possible another factor was I have 8gb ram and the high setting was really taxing it for me. My hard drive only has 10gb spare drive so on the limit of being not bunged up.

Blue visuals are known to happen in some games due to the RAM maxing out

Any thoughts? Or more queries…the blue incident also happened after reboot after a failed attempt to use windowless fullscreen.
A blue incident also occurred after my computer had gone on standby sue to a USB surge problem with a mouse. - might be unrelated

Sorry for all these maybe irrelevant and random possible factors but if others have had similar causes for the blue effect on objects…it may help piece the puzzle together!

• the blue issue did not occur when I loaded it once with medium settings, but only once Ive done that!

Thank you! Diolch!

[Kreydis]

Everything is blue

Short answer: Comfirmed … Longer one: I switched everything to 3 on it’s own and left AntiAliasingQuality always on 1. TextureQuality > 3 ... OK LightingQuality > 3 ... BLUE ShadowQuality > 3 ... OK GeometryQuality > 3 ... OK TerrainQuality > 3 ... OK PlanetsQuality > 3 ... OK The last test was everything except LightingQuality on 3 … OK, no blue DreamKeys

I forgot what the trick was, but it’s setting something to 1 and everything else can be extreme still.

[Playbenni]

• Capital ships auto-turn is now a toggle ( default: space bar ). It’s disabled every time you respawn to avoid collisions with the docks

IMO the toggle is better than the version before, but I still much prefer the orginal version.
The problem right now is that we can’t just set a direction and then immediatly continue shooting etc. because we have to hold the desired direction until it is achieved. Another issue is that with the toggle enabled you have to keep in mind all the time if it is active, I rather have it like before when it was just intuitive and there was no reason to keep track of it.

[Sab1e]

• Capital ships auto-turn is now a toggle ( default: space bar ). It’s disabled every time you respawn to avoid collisions with the docks

So we are either turning, or aiming? I assume turning can still be done manually with keys while the toggle is off. I can see how this is a better solution than the previous version…

… but I still prefer the idea of a single button press to set a heading, which the ship automatically turns to. Capital ships would have a flight crew and you (the captain) say a bearing and they just get on with it. It means you can carry on with the important business of tactically demolishing things with minimal interruption.

Elsewhere, I really don’t like the spherical radar in the centre of the HUD. Is there a way to get rid of it? I don’t even look at it, as I find the front/rear displays much more useful for orientation - plus they are up high out of the way.

[Lomsor]

Elsewhere, I really don’t like the spherical radar in the centre of the HUD. Is there a way to get rid of it? I don’t even look at it, as I find the front/rear displays much more useful for orientation - plus they are up high out of the way.

There’s a dropdown menu specifically for that in the launcher. You can achieve exactly what you want.

[INovaeFlavien]

It should still be possible to manually turn the capital ship towards the camera with R, even when auto-turn is off. I forgot if it’s press-and-forget or if you need to hold it, but in the second case I could change it to work like the old behavior.

For the front / back radar: I’ve been considering moving them on the bottom center of the screen for a while now. They’d be located where the spherical radar is at the moment, if you do not use the spherical radar. If you do use the spherical radar, that’d be 3 radars at the bottom of the screen… not sure how people would like this idea.

Benefits:

• Front and back radars are much closer together, easier to look at a glance.
• This frees up the top-left and top-right corners for your ship or the target ship’s information

Issues:

• Will cover the bobblehead
• Will look quite heavy at the bottom of the screen if cumulated with the spherical radar

If you have better ideas in terms of layout, I’m all ears

[Kreydis]

They’d be located where the spherical radar is at the moment, if you do not use the spherical radar. If you do use the spherical radar

With the radars where they are. Top right and top left. I never get any use out of them. so moving them to the center might be a good idea. But even then, I’m questioning their use entirely at this point. They don’t provide any good information that pressing ctrl and looking wouldn’t do better.

[INovaeFlavien]

But even then, I’m questioning their use entirely at this point.

That’s fine, that’s why you don’t have to use them. But the opposite also applies: some people do not like or use the spherical radar at all. Case in point: Sab1e, just a few posts above.

[Argopeilacos]

Would it be possible to get rid of the multiple reticle with a gimbal that automatically aims i.e. if we take the machingun as the reticle reference and gimbal the blasters, we keep only the machinegun reticle and the gimbal tracks for the blasters?
It might fall apart at high transversal velocity/close range if the gimbal angle is too narrow.
For capitals, have the same mechanism with the turrets.
I hope it is somewhat understandable.

[INovaeFlavien]

Would it be possible to get rid of the multiple reticle with a gimbal that automatically aims i.e. if we take the machingun as the reticle reference and gimbal the blasters, we keep only the machinegun reticle and the gimbal tracks for the blasters?

It’d be possible for the “static” configuration we use now, but remember we’ll have upgrades soon, and nothing would prevent a player from installing non-gimbaled weapons. So it’s not really a solution in general.

[Sab1e]

An idea… Put the forward radar in bottom-middle, where the spherical currently is. Leave the back radar where it is like a rear view mirror in a car. Also, make them both a bit smaller so they are less intrusive - I think they need that anyway.

Then options to select either:

• Front/rear radar (as described)
• Spherical radar only
• Spherical + rear radar
• None

Also, possibly fade out the forward radar in combat HUD mode? It’s not useful in combat, but the rear one is.

In fact, I would be totally happy with ONLY the rear radar top left. It’s there if I need it, but declutters the rest of the screen to make way for more useful info… And beauty. Target info could go where the spherical radar is.

[INovaeFlavien]

Hmm no. Whatever we do, the layout needs to be compatible with whatever radar options are selected. If you decide to put the target info in the bottom center, where the spherical radar currently is, then where do you put the spherical radar ?

Note: spherical radar doesn’t work well at corners, I already tested, due to the helmet deformation.

[Sab1e]

Sab1e strolled into the bar and saw it there once again. The dreaded sphere. It haunted his nightmares. Now, it was sitting, sipping a strong whiskey and looking smug. Slowly, Sab1e reached behind the counter for the infinitely sharp cleaver he knew must be there. This could only end one way…

[MrAwesome]

Here is my (long) feedback from my weekend gameplay. I have experience with game engines and space simulation, so I’ll try to provide very specific feedback on positive and negative points. This has been the first time playing Infinity Battlescape for me.

Overall, I had a good experience playing Infinity Battlescape, and I wish I had had more time to play. Let me start with the good points. Once I had everything installed and was in, there were no major problems. I had a good framerate on the highest quality settings. I felt it was quick and easy to learn the basic ship controls, and it was definitely useful to be able to bring up the help menu. The environment, scale, and ship physics seemed very realistic, and is the best I’ve seen in a space game. The UI is well designed and does a good job of indicating ship status, threats, objectives, etc. I especially like the radar as it feels both useful and unobtrusive. The transition from slow combat speeds to fast travel between destinations (warp) is an excellent solution to the problem of scales.

I did have a few problems though. From the technical side, the first install went smoothly. Then there was an update on Sunday, and the update failed. I had to spend an hour deleting and reinstalling the game twice before I got it working again. I think these issues need to be worked out before the actual release date, though I’m sure it’s being worked on. That’s the point of this testing weekend.

I found it difficult to locate my objectives. There’s a battle going on at some station/factory, and I want to participate. But where exactly is that location? When I first started, I had no idea where anything was. You can click on a planet/moon and get it’s name, but only if there’s no station/factory near where you clicked. When you’re in warp, the white/purple warp effect makes it difficult to read names, and if you’re not careful the auto-accelerate will run you into the planet atmosphere while you try clicking around to find the right station. Most of the time I had to drop out of warp to get my bearings. Maybe some other indicator/mode can be added for locating battle locations? Maybe there’s something that I missed. I’m sure that after playing for long enough I would just remember where everything was.

At one point I couldn’t enter a planet’s atmosphere due to radiation damage. I couldn’t figure out what the solution was. Do I try to fly quickly through the radiation layer and get below it? Do I have to approach the planet from a different direction? Do I need to enable some sort of weapon/effect/widget that counters radiation? Do I need to select a different ship type? I never figured it out, so I went to a space station instead.

One time when I respawned I seemed to be stuck in the hangar bay. I’m not sure what I was stuck on, it looked like my ship was clear of obstacles. It took me a few minutes of mashing the movement keys to finally jitter my ship to freedom. This only happened once in the dozens of times I respawned - collision detection bug?

One time my ship was damaged and down to a tiny fraction of armor left, and I spun out of control for several minutes. It was at a factory on an asteroid, and I got stuck under the factory, bouncing back and force between the factory and the asteroid while spinning at a nauseating speed. I think I was occasionally taking collision damage, which is why it took so long for my ship to be repaired. Eventually I was able to recover and get out of there. Some amount of out-of-control spinning is fun and realistic, but this was too much. I’m not sure what in the physics system caused that. Doesn’t a real ship eventually lose its kinetic energy due to collisions and stop bouncing?

At one point I was repeatedly spawning at a station with no friendly ships around and about 5 different enemy ships, most of which were bigger than mine. I guess they were attacking the station. As soon as I came out of hangar I immediately had multiple missiles locked on me. I died about 5-6 times before I was able to warp out of range of the missiles. Even then, someone else followed me and I had to take some asteroid impact damage by flying too fast in the atmosphere to get away from them. This wasn’t very fun. How is the spawn point chosen? Is there some way to select a different one?

I don’t quite understand what causes ammo to refill. Sometimes I was out of missiles and projectiles, other times it kept getting refilled. Is it tied to battle kills, friendly ships/locations, etc?

Explosions look great, and feel big. This game has some of the best explosions I’ve seen. However, they don’t work so well when a dying capital ship (cruiser I think) collides with your interceptor and explodes against it. It looked like it started as a spherical ball of hull plates that expanded out from the center at a few frames per second. I guess I was inside the explosion volume and too close to the ball of parts for whatever LOD system there is to work properly. Maybe, at the very least, the hull plates should be arranged based on the shape/volume of the ship, and there should be some max number drawn at any time. Though I really have no idea how your explosion system works internally. Also, I seemed to take very little damage from that explosion, even though it threw me across the system. That was nice but … unexpected.

A few times I got in the path of two battling capital ships and I was hit by some shots that made a deafening roar and sent my ship flying. But I didn’t seem to take any damage? Was I hit by friendly fire that did no damage, are there some types of weapons that don’t damage smaller ships, was it some force/blast radius but non damaging effect, or is that a bug?

Overall though, these are minor issues. They wouldn’t stop me from playing (except for maybe the installer problem). 90% of the time the game played just fine and was fun. You have to expect a few issues like this in a game that’s so complex. So I’m just throwing all of these minor issues out there in case any of them are unknown and/or easy to fix. Thanks!

[Sab1e]

At one point I couldn’t enter a planet’s atmosphere due to radiation damage

Do you know which one? Radiation damage is a new thing for the sun and the gas giant if you get too close. But it shouldn’t happen with any of the other worlds.

[Argopeilacos]

there was an update on Sunday, and the update failed.

It happened to me too, for the first time since I first installed a couple years ago.

I’m sure that after playing for long enough I would just remember where everything was.

Bases, stations, and planets orbits are randomly re-located each match, so there is no way of remembering them.

I found it difficult to locate my objectives.

We have now have at least the possibility to select an objective in the mission tab of the ESC menu: select then click “set as target” or something similar.

Most of the time I had to drop out of warp to get my bearings.

You can set a “target speed” in warp like in normal travel (1-0 keys or mouse wheel. 1 will set target to 0 and eventually drop you out of warp though). I often do to look around without dropping out of warp.

At one point I couldn’t enter a planet’s atmosphere due to radiation damage.

I think you mean micrometeorite damage. It happens when you exceed safe speed, so just decelerate and it should disappear.

How is the spawn point chosen? Is there some way to select a different one?

Yes, left, right click to cycle available spawn location in the spawn screen.

I don’t quite understand what causes ammo to refill. Sometimes I was out of missiles and projectiles, other times it kept getting refilled. Is it tied to battle kills, friendly ships/locations, etc?

Ammo gets refilled when you approach a friendly corvette (<1km). Look for the wrench icon. See this post Tutorial for Beginners for more info on resupplying.

A few times I got in the path of two battling capital ships and I was hit by some shots that made a deafening roar and sent my ship flying. But I didn’t seem to take any damage?

Defeaning roar and, ship sent flying and little damage sounds like ship collision to me.