0.5.3.0 Feedback Thread

Battlescape
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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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.

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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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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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“de facto monopoly” LOL

22

Slow interceptor is really boring and cumbersome compared to before :neutral_face:

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23

They nerfed it.

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Warp effect suggestion:

If I’m not mistaken, the warp tunnel effect seems to scale in intensity with throttle %. However, throttle velocity scales logarithmically up to the speed of light.

If this is the case, I suggest having the tunnel effect intensity scale as a percentage of velocity with respect to the speed of light (v/c) instead.

25

I like the reticule change on the Capital control mode. Makes it much easier to aim. Would love to have a zoom in the external camera too. Thanks for having an event for “setheading” and not hardcoding it to the boost event. Thank you a lot. What is the point of being able to activate/deactivate auto heading again? I must have missed it. If I don’t want to use it I can just not press the “setheading” … right?
I could understand if it would be “setheading” works all the time and “auto heading” acts as if “setheading” is held down constantly, it does not work that way though … so …?

I felt small ship speed is alright. Was able to catch up to them and murder them. I find it a bit too easy to aim. Didn’t have to try at all. Just aim at the general direction and get below 2km. Still would prefer a flak type weapon with constant damage as a starter weapon instead of this that scales so strongly once closer or on bigger targets.

Does damage dealt to destroyed turrets bleed trough now? I like the specific sound effects and noticed of the “critical hit”. Yet fear that some of the damage is tanked by destroyed turrets … might even be wanted, who knows … could be even alright that one shouldn’t hit a destroyed turret, the enemy is at a disadvantage already anyway, not really that beneficial to make him even easier to kill. Time spent in a exciting “close” fight are more exciting that quick finishers.

It’s a bit hard to see destroyed turrets. I hope they get a “destroyed” texture in the future, make it emmisive for easier readability.

There’s one topic I would like to mention. That is gratification for achieved goals. It’s one thing Flavien would like to work on as he noted a couple of times, adding new missions and such, which would be cool, I just want to note something in the current loop.
Kills and assist feel good. The explosion make a good satisfying “I / We did it” effect. The red kill message is prominent enough.
End of match is alright. The music sells it pretty well and it is a slight achievement but mostly a relieve of finally having done it. Hard to guess with how seldom matches are ended, if the rest is fine it can work with the current balancing for a longer match … it does make you play longer as you might be able to influence the end outcome.
Lastly the one I have issues with. A specific battle. I super often miss when these are over. I think this is due to the game being too “verbose” with other battles and using the same style and sound effect even though you might not care.

I suggest only popping up critical battle notifications (start, win, loose (later two to show the consequence of your decision of not abandoning your current battle)) and installation lost notifications when already in a battle (the combat hud switch seems apropriate for that).
The battle you are currently in should have different style of popup and sound effect too. For added gratification.
With the tab menu we now have a way to check these battles and don’t need to look out for them to be announced, especially not when we are busy, fighting.
I remember now that there war a mention of I-Novae wanting to add an end screen with stats and such, which would work of course too to set the end of the battle apart.

Further the “status info area in the top middle” could be made less verbose.
The “player joined” on re-spawn is still a thing. I guess it slipped quite far down on the todo list. “Player killed” status info isn’t really needed for a game of this scale. It’s not really a tactical shooter where you need to know what the other few guys playing are doing. Could allow to switch it on in a “gameplay” setting if it is already in the game.
It’s not just “hud clutter” that is a problem, it is also notification noisiness that should be reduced a bit.
I think the removal of those two types I mentioned will do way with most filler notifications. The important stuff like “weapon destroyed” don’t get missed so much that way.
It is important to notice that we tend to slowly blur out Information that we can’t or don’t feel like processing, even if it is in your face and prominent. If these get changed it will take a while for people to adjust back to looking at them again, now that they aren’t as noisy. I guess at least.

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26

One thing of note concerning NPC corvettes: they are extremely vulnerable to torpedoes. I must have something close to a 95% success rate with one-shotting npc corvettes because they don’t use flares.

I think a slight buff to the corvette’s maneuvering thrusters could be considered. I noticed that when matching velocity with cruisers that it can sometimes be difficult to stay close to them without touching boost when they are executing a turn. The corvette tends to drift a little.

I would like some way to manually aim the corvette turrets. This is less to manually aim at target ships/stations than it is to target sub-targets. I missed being able to fly straight over a ground facility and manually shoot at stuff without having to turn the entire ship to face my target. Maybe a toggle in a menu, or simply have the turrets follow the cursor/view when nothing is targeted like the current cap ship system.

Is cap ship control “set heading” function supposed to always follow the cursor, or can you set heading with a single tap and look somewhere else without the ship trying to follow where you’re looking? I’m not sure how this function works, right now it seems like I have to hold the set heading button and look where I want to go, and only when the ship starts heading in that direction can I turn to look elsewhere.

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I had a good time Saturday.
We definitely need some tools for player organization. (Already mentioned) I was not on Discord and it was not hard to follow along on fleet movements. I heard the jump drive on the nearby ship spool up—neat! However, I played corvette and it was hard to tell who needed help. I.e. I can’t see anyone else’s health without individually targeting them and when Wargrim asked for assistance; it took time to figure out where he was. It was cumbersome to set the fleet destination—hit TAB, search for the system, mark on HUD. Please remove any instances of similar place names or give us the ability to sort and filter in the list.

Eve has some pretty good fleet management mechanics including fleet warp.

Other thoughts.
Bomber without bombs. (create bombs)

Interceptors are not that fast. (probably needs to be 750 m/s to match the name and make their ability to target missiles and torpedos better) I tried defending capitals against everything. It was slow and not effective.

I still feel most of the small models slide or skid when turning tightly. When I turn 180 degrees, I come to a stop, then accelerate in the opposite direction. Can we get a selectable contrail so I can see what the flight path is? It doesn’t have to be seen been anyone else.

You have a destroyer and cruiser, but no frigate or battleship. I think a lot more games that have capitals don’t have them fly as fighters. It’s visually appealing in this game but when you ignore the plane of the ecliptic, it invites a lot of control design issues and more importantly, gun placement. I like my powerful weapons on the spine for the best field of fire. I believe I would like ascend and descend better like Dreadnought. (what defines a cruiser or destroyer? Volume, energy production, length?) One solution could be to name the ship and let it go at that. That frees you from a well understood taxonomy.

I took a destroyer and cruiser for a spin yesterday. Full shields and I received multiple critical hits against my guns pretty fast. Not fun. Also, it was difficult to hit small stationary targets like those autoguns surrounding the station. Furthermore, those autoguns were not targetable. Furthermore, I also tend to lose awareness of what direction I’m travelling with capitals and have to look around to re-gain attitude awareness.

Match. Matches in other games have various limits (e.g. time, tickets, players) and I’m not seeing anything but a battle royale or king of the kill or death match with a station thrown in for good measure. I’m thinking the team (in relatively equal numbers) with the station will always lose as the attacker has an unlimited ability to bring in extra forces and the station can’t repair. The matches seem to have a time limit and a point bar up top, but I’m not seeing how it works. (please clarify details on webpage)

Distance.
We have the entirety of a solar system but the missile weapons are limited to around 10 km and kinetic weapons to a few km at best. If you’ve read David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, those missiles go millions of miles, accelerate at .83c and deliver death to anything around 25,000 km when detonated. That would be boring in this game but there are notions of capital ship warfare out there at great distances. World of Warships has greater ranges. (put up a weapons detail page—range, speed, damage, missile turning ability, how missiles work i.e. locking) Boxing matches and knife fights are great but please confirm this is the intended design, <20km? (put on webpage—"this game is about close range brawls at 10km” —expectation management)

HUD.
I re-loaded House of the Dying Sun. A recent and a darn good single player space shooter in under 500mb. It has an excellent HUD design philosophy—check it out. In combat mode, I’m not sure “T” working on friendly forces in close with hostiles is a good action. I flow between offensive and defensive actions and targeting isn’t there yet. My first improvement would be that I need “fast keys” for ship type and distance. “Inty close”, “new bomber”. I thought about a target list as in Eve, but that could get really long.

There is a really dark planet out there. Can you give it lighting storms on the dark side? I’m not saying I ran into it.

For ground facilities and navigation. How about the light of Luxor (Las Vegas hotel) as an option so I can tell where this ground point is? E.g. a visual ray of light emanating from the ground and beams into space. I still can’t tell if a point is in front or behind a planet.

To keep the pace of battle going; instead of re-spawning in station, can I take over like AI ship? And how about a check box that displays spawn stations that have a battle going on first? Or a de-select for ground stations as they take a few extra seconds longer to load?

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28

That’s indeed how it was last weekend when I last picked it up (unless it’s changed). Make sure the Ship Autoturn function is “On”, then tapping the “Set Heading” once should do exactly that. I used it exclusively last weekend - it’s by far the most effective way to control a capital ship 95% of the time.
I did like though that holding “Set Heading” while Autoturn is “On” kind of overrides it and it continuously follows the mouse. It was good for the other 5% where I wanted constant input.

As I put elsewhere, I rebound Autoturn toggle to an unused key, as I don’t think I’ll ever touch it. That meant Set Heading could be put on spacebar. Quick tap of spacebar = ship turns! Hold spacebar… = it keeps following the mouse!

Works very well.

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