0.5.3.0 Feedback Thread

#1

Here are the patchnotes: Patch and Updates Notes

Feedback thread for Patch 0.5.3.0.

First off a few things I immediately noticed:

This patch introduced an annoying bug for me. Joystick0axis2 and Joystick0axis5 are only registered by the game in the positive direction. The negative direction is not recognised! Neither in the keybindings menu nor in the game. If I try to bind them, they bind fine if I push them in the positive range. If I push them in the negative range nothing happens. Same with ingame controls. I have those bound to ShipY and Roll and now I can only Roll in one direction and can only strafe down.

Options menu looks great and seems to work. Thanks so much for keeping the custom keyboard profiles.
The thing I missed most was the ability to switch axis direction.
I also missed a way to unbind. I learned that starting the binding of a keybinding and letting it timeout clears it though.
The different tabs in the options are so convenient. Ordering seems to make sense.

Balance changes … need to look at that in detail later, not after a night of punkrock and pogo.

The decreased turn speed cap on the interceptor is very noticeable. It seems the difference betweend direct and target mode in FA on/off have exagerated, just a feeling though. I don’t know the state of that particular bug, if it was confirmed and/or fixed.

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#2

My 2 Cents on the changes.

  • interceptor beging slower and with less boost is less fun to play than before, especially the weak boost had me crashing into stations again last night, I could arrange with the accelerations being lower, but the weak boost really makes it hard not to slam into stuff ( maybe it’s all just relearning things, idk)
  • I was sceptical when the interceptor speed increase came, but now I like It much more
  • changes to the inti weapons feel better, but the weapon is really really powerful right now, making fights really freaking short (most of the time less than 5s inty vs inty last night)
  • due to the acceleration changes missiles are super hard to dodge again, and chaff kinda didn’t work at all last night for me at least (have to play more)
  • changes to cap ship controls: AHH YEAH BOI
  • overall 11/10 patch as usual
  • cant wait for the equipment menu, I think most our weapons balancing griefs will resolve itself then anyway
  • missile spam in carrier is really fun, playing carrier missile spamboat with a large fleet backing is fun (first real fun I had playing carrier) it would be awesome to equip all slots with missiles later and going full missile pig
  • lots of cool improvements overall
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#3

Only a couple of things to put here at the moment!

Posted some HUD feedback here.

  • LOVE LOVE LOVE the carrier turning changes. Note on the keybinds though: I rebound Ship Autoturn to F5 (thanks to someone in the event that had that idea, I forget who). I always left it on, so that freed up my spacebar to be bound to the Set Heading function. It will be worth clarifying these for new players, as it’s confusing to start with… also put them next to each other in the keybindings menu.

  • Also on keybinds, with Set Heading now available, please make WASDRF strafing controls by default and CTRL-WASD for rotation.

  • Didn’t spend any time fighting in the interceptor, so can’t comment on that, but it felt okay flying around with the other guys during the event.

  • Atmospheric flight. For the sake of aesthetics, I would prefer if the rear engines were contantly ‘on’ when in atmosphere. I know they’re hugely powerful and that’s why we slide around much like we do in space, but for the look of it, turn them on. It is weird that they flare as you increase speed, then seem to turn off but you keep going at the speed you set. It gives the illusion of there being no air resistance. Plus, as we discussed in the event, it would give us permanent contrails which would be awesome.

  • Perhaps they can be ‘off’ when actively decelerating, but not when moving at a constant speed.

Balancing.
This is quickly becoming tricky since it is clear that a well-organised team can demolish enemies fast. In the event we could show up at a station in a fleet of destroyers and wipe the place clean. I guess it wouldn’t be so bad if the other team had that too.

Giving us more coordination tools built in (that don’t rely on discord chat) will be essential, such as players being able to ping targets for friendly ships of certain types (e.g. ping a destroyer for friendly bombers to target). Reduce the coordination advantage by making it easy for all players to coordinate, even newbies.
(There could be some restrictions to prevent abuse, such as it being a piece of equipment you buy for your ship - a command console. Also, perhaps small ships can only ping other small ships, likewise for capital ships. E.g. destroyer pings enemy cruiser for friendly bombers, encouraging them to support him, but the bombers themselves can’t ping it, only acknowledge)

Also, the stations are going to need some love. I would beef up their weapons a bit more to make it an absolute priority to take them out. Perhaps some stations could also have strong shields until you take out a shield module. If you’re doing solo play, you can earn credits by chipping away at a station’s defences. Fleets would need to be more strategic about how they attack the station too, instead of being able to simply bombard it.

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#4

Oh and apologies for the double post, but wanted to separate a bug report:

  • The ?/ key on my keyboard (UK qwerty) is still active when typing in chat. So if I type something in the chat using either symbol, my ship starts rotationally drifting because it has turned off the Rotation Assist! For example, I asked some questions during the community event… put ? at the end… aaand started spinning wildly because assist was off and my mouse wasn’t centred. :smile:

Pretty sure that’s a Bad Thing™.

#5

In events we should have team leaders for both factions. Is this still not the case? Why join the other team if all the fun is with Hutch?

#6

Currently we don’t really have enough players online simultaneously to build 2 opposing fleets, so we all join in Hutch’s activities! (Which is fun, btw.) I’m just struggling to work out how more balanced battles will play out when considering each individual’s experience.

Basically, how can we reduce (or should we at all?) the frustration of being ganged up on by an organised fleet - even if you’re in a fleet yourself?

I dunno. Perhaps it’s just a consequence of the gameplay. And if there’s plenty of other missions to do, perhaps it won’t be an issue, because fleet engagements is only part of the gameplay.

#7

Allright, I just fixed it, will be available in next patch. Good catch. Interestingly, it only happens on individual axis ( as opposite to “paired” axis ike 0+1 or 3+4 ). Some sticks use two individual axis instead of the paired axes in Direct input, and that’s where the bug was.

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#8

There’s a certain opacity in terms of how much impact players have on battles. I’m hoping to fix that with battle reports / statistics soon.

A huge fleet is definitely super fun, as I found out ( for the first time ) yesterday. Too bad I was the only interceptor :slight_smile: We can only dream in what would happen later on with bigger fleets ( a mix of capships and smaller ships ) in squadrons, and both teams have one or MORE fleets.

This is the type of gameplay we envisonned early when we made Battlescape. Although we were worried ( and still are ! ) about players doing their own thing in small groups, in a disorganized way.

We definitely need to add more social / organization tools in game. We don’t even have team chat at the moment.

How effective fleet play is, is hard to say. It takes a while to set up the fleet and coordinate it. It was a bit slow yesterday, but I guess with more experience it’d be possible to organize a fleet in less than 5 minutes, and hit a battle before it’s ending :stuck_out_tongue:

And what will happen when two enemy fleets encounter each others… well… I hope we’ll find out soon :wink:

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#9

Flavien, one of the better design features you guys have done is have the system push out those fight notices. Those notices drive content and the fun factor went way up and boredom / stagnation factor went down.

Sable; one of the roles of a fleet commander is to not pick fair fights. You pick on the outlier, the weakest and if the fight is fair–you call a primary and burn it down. Groups want numbers if kill boards are a thing like Eve. It’s all about kills and credits destroyed. Your grief pads my stats.

I’m not sure what the final cost to buy a ship in this game will be. I like it as is so far and the low cost might minimize the salt that flows from dying.:cry: Both Eve and ED can have large time and high credit costs which is an advantage IB can advertise.

Speaking of griefing and toxic people; do we have chat filters yet? Is chat global? Some people have VITRIOL trained to maximum and aren’t shy. :astonished:

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#10

Well we were doing our best to make some epic shots, so that took some time. :wink:

Two bug reports, both of which were probably already mentioned.
1: Fixed Formation isn’t working. It does wonky stuff when the formation target starts to move.
2: Missiles/Torps have a tendency to autofire in some circumstances. I don’t know what causes it, but they fire as quickly as they can, assuming you have a lock on any target. Especially noticable on cap ships.

I think one of the easiest ways to enable large formation fights might be to implement some sort of warp-tether. A group of players get into formation, then tether to the leader. The leader then controls the warp engines for all tethered ships. When in warp, the formation doesn’t really matter, but it’ll try to maintain a Fixed Formation style of movement. It doesn’t really matter, because upon the leader exiting warp, the tethered ships exit warp in the same position relative to the leader as they were prior to warp. The movement can be fudged to maintain position upon warp exit.

When flying in formation yesterday, far too much time was spent trying to re-organize any sort of formation once we got somewhere else. It was literally “try to remember where you were”.

Which might be fine, swarm formations might be the most effective formation. But you can’t beat the classic delta.

Warp Tether can be expanded to have some sort of auto-formation assignment, where upon a player tethering to the leader, the player sees a box like the capital ship spawn bay box showing them where to go,

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#11

I think one of the current formation modes should do that … or maybe even all of them.

As far as I know the formation modes even do work in warp, but they get disabled when there is a transition to or from warp.
If the formation warp would automatically engage warp and stay enabled it could work.

Fixed formation would do exactly what you would like if it had these additional features of auto warp engage and disengage and if it stayed on in warp.
Mind that in warp ships can still strafe … so as loong as you are not aiming at a totally different direction you shouldn’t break formation too much.

One thing that could make this not work is if all the formation stuff is clientside. If it is serverside the warp charges and dropouts would be perfectly in sync.
Edit.: A workaround to the problem of latency if it is clientside is if the leader slows down to a slow warp speed right before the intended dropout destination and cruised for a few seconds before dropping out. Even at 2 to 5 km/s the formation shouldn’t spread out too much due to latency, mostly ahead of the leader. If fixed remembers its position the ships would automatically travel the few killometers back into their formation. Leader could speed up a little to catch up with the formation to make it even faster.

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The dreaded "Fixed Formation", Squads & Hutch2.0
#12

Yes actually, can’t believe I didn’t think of that.

Simply expand the Fixed Formation to work in and out of warp, and fudge the warp exit as necessary.

#13

I don’t think either are bugged.

  1. This is probably the case of nobody really understanding how the fixed mode works - we’ll probably have to cut it off, or rework it. Basically, it calculates your position relative to your target and tries to maintain it no matter what.

Two really important things cause the confusion:

  • It determines the relative “anchor point” based on the selected target at the moment you enable the fixed mode. Once fixed mode is active, it’ll try to keep to move your ship to the anchor point, even if you had selected fixed mode 10 minutes ago.

  • When the targetted ship rotates, the anchor point rotates as well ( hence the relative ). As ships turn around, the anchor point moves all the time and your own ship moves as well.

Imagine that when you enable fixed mode you were 25 meters behind an interceptor’s back thrusters. Now the target rotates 90° to the right; the new location is still 25 meters behind the target’s back thrusters, except it has moved by a quarter circle in world space, despite the interceptor not really moving ( just turning ).

  1. Missiles / torpedoes fire in bursts. That’s because capships have multiple launchers and you cannot hold down the fire missile key, you have to tap it down, which was very inconvenient. The launchers are also synchronized so that missiles launch at the same time ( that’s how you get the nice symmetrical smoke trails look ). So this was on purpose.
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Tutorial for Beginners
#14

1: I’ll have to do more testing with the fixed formation, then. When we were first doing formations in intys yesterday, we tried using fixed formation , but for some reason it didn’t work at all, and the moment hutch moved it sent us all flying into a little ball of confusion. But otherwise what you describe seems to be exactly what I expected it to be. I’ll try fixed formation again and see what happens.

2: They do fire in bursts, however the bursts keep on coming. I’ll launch one burst, but it’ll keep launching wave after wave after the initial intentional burst on any target that it has a lock on, including friendly targets, even though I didn’t hit the launch button. It doesn’t happen very often, but it’s happen to me at least three times now. I thought it was a sticky key, but I re-bound the launch key recently and the same behavior happens. I can switch from torps to missiles and have the same behavior. In fact, if I have have this bug on torps, and I switch to missiles, as long as I have a lock, it will immediately launch a burst of missiles.

I just now re-created the bug, to make sure I wasn’t crazy. I think it might have something to do with switching from missiles to torps right as the target dies, or switching targets during the explosion sequence.

I was taking on a group of five corvettes with my cruiser. I was using torps, but as soon as the target was dying, I switched targets. My cruiser now auto-fires torps at any target that I get a lock on. Just now, it didn’t happen to my missiles, but something was definitely wrong with my torps.

I was pretty far away, and I did get a lock onto another target before the second wave of torpedo hit the first target.

I’ll do more testing when I have time to try to hammer down what’s causing it.

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#15

Hello! I’m a diamond backer or something, can’t remember to be honest. I just don’t care all that much about alphas, betas and stuff, despite having access to it, so i just backed with more money to help infinity out a bit.

So. I’ve been reading emails from time to time and noticed something about steam early access. Is infinity going to be steam only? I mean, when i backed it up, it didn’t say so, and i seriously hope it’ll stay non-steam. I just hate de facto monopoly platform with intrusive third party drm and a social network with hat selling on top the steam is, and therefore don’t use it. Sooo… it’d be really nice if i could actually play infinity once it’s out.

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#16

Its available through the inovae website without steam, you don’t need steam to play it.
You can download and play it right now. Just Read the stickied faq on how to do that.

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#17

I have the same error Lomsor has with joysticks (effects Yaw and ShipZ for me). Game unplayable by joystick right now.

Keybind
Keybind.jpg1192×864 227 KB

Feedback on Keybind Tab:

  • Need to change color or border of the selected Tab.
  • Need way to create new input profiles. Shouldn’t have to add file manually.
  • Not sure what “unused” means. Confusing; get rid of it.
  • Direct Flight Mode group outdated. Move Pitch and Yaw to Generic Flight Controls.

Joystick
Joystick.png950×571 166 KB

Feedback on Joystick setup screen:

  • Highlighting mapped axis here would be helpful. For example, highlight axis 0 and axis 1 here.

Reference Point Problem


Had a problem with the reference moving in Starmap. In making this clip, I figure out what the problem is. ShipZ/ShipX/ShipY axis move the reference point. I have ShipZ mapped to my throttle which is not always centered.
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#19

It looks like your issue is most likely the infamous “reboot success” bug. Your vc2017 runtime was updated which probably required a reboot and the installer currently interprets that as an error even though it isn’t. This will be fixed soon.

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#20

OK, thanks! I hope it’ll stay that way! :slight_smile:

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#21

“de facto monopoly” LOL

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