0.6.X.X Feedback Thread

[Lomsor]

Patch and Updates Notes

Patch 0.6.5.0 ( Monday November 4 2019 ) This patch contains major architectural changes related to input events and key bindings. Control schemes can now be specified per ship, the Virtual Cursor navigation mode and Direct control schemes were unified, and new bindings were introduced for capital ships, allowing full rebinding of strafing keys. As a result, some of the bindings might be empty or no longer work properly. We implemented an automatic configuration upgrader so that players do not h…

Patch and Updates Notes

Patch 0.6.5.1 ( Thursday November 8 2019 ) A small patch with a bunch of HUD and star map fixes. HUD Updated font for monospaced numbers ( curtesy of Pendrokar ) Redesigned HUD central elements: removed text and icons; made the curved bars thinner and shorter Removed set throttle notifications If the selected target is behind a planet, an “Obstructed” notification will now appear on top of the target’s indicator name Starmap Trade routes now show up on the star map rather than in the 3D view…

Some controversial changes in these patches. No time to write up feedback myself right now but others should.

[Stroff]

Warp exit speed being the same as the enter speed feels like a mostly negative change, especially for interceptors.

In an interceptor, you’ll usually exit warp next to a small ship you want to attack, a friendly corvette, or a hangar bay. In all cases you need to exit warp at a relatively slow speed to stay close to your target. With the current warp model, if you entered warp too fast, you need to spend time and usually a lot of energy to slow down. If your target was an enemy ship, that means less energy for blasters and maneuvers.

The way I’ve been dealing with this is slowing down before entering warp, but it feels like an unnecessary slowing down of the gameplay’s pace. It’s also not always possible, for example, if you’re running away from player interceptors (it doesn’t make escaping harder, just more makes it annoying to get back in the fight, or to exit warp next to a corvette or hangar bay to get repairs).

There’s one case where it can be useful, chasing down enemy players in small ships, so it would be nice to have a (radial menu?) option to choose between exiting warp at entry speed or at the fixed, minimum warp speed like before this change.

[Grimleo]

• Direct mode and Capital Ship mode should be merged. Capital Ship Forward/Backward Axis doesn’t work in Capital Ship mode. The gunsight doesn’t track head movement in Direct mode for capital ships. Please change.
• Starmap still uses Forward/Backward Axis to move up and down. I have this axis mapped to my Throttle which is problematic. There should be dedicated Map axis binds.
• It is a pain that typing in a chat channel restricts you from seeing other channels unless you hit All channels again.

[Lomsor]

Here’s what I can scrape from the last few times I played…

The controversial warp change didn’t have much impact in the way I played really. It must be a quite personal thing though. I see its pros and cons. I like the things it does to the warp dynamic. We really didn’t need much change in that field though, so it makes it a bit controversial.
It setting the throttle is definetly a problem but Flavien mentioned that isn’t part of the disputed feature and he might switch the setting of the throttle back to the old behaviour.
The only weird thing about it is how it takes away from the thing we got accustomed to, dependable exit velocities.
Maybe disrupting the disconnect between in and out of warp could help by having manual override used inside of warp affect the dropout velocity. Might just complicate things without benefit …

This change also seems to have introduced a few small bugs. Mostly with drop out not seeming to trigger at the right time sometimes and thus bringing back the old friend “be catapulted to big speeds when exiting warp”

I was quite weary when the thinner and shorter bars got introduced. The bars don’t work well with the cockpit pillars of the Interceptor. HUD concept seems to have that fixed though.
What I noticed is that the difference between HUD on and HUD off has become significantly smaller. The effects of the game seem to really come trough better now. Nice.

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Bugs:

• Warp speed does not automatically change when in menues. This is super dangerous … Warping towards a planet and checking something in a menu kills you.

• Asteroids

  Capital ship can phase trough them. Pilot did see sparks but no course change.
  Not sure if the server even knows about these. shrug

  

  Interceptor collided with it (clientside) but then got error corrected inside the asteroid. I tried to find its
  “true” surface but didn’t seem to.

  Also, the asteroid rotation is not synchronized between clients. I think that is know though.

• The team stats list didn’t show all my teammates or enemies after reconnecting.

  
  

• This happens when not selecting a team and getting kicked of the server due to inactivity:

  

• Ever since the server screen was introduced I got this bug where all servers show the same ping:

  

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Awesome stuff:

[Playbenni]

Quick feedback to the latest changes, even if some or most of the improvements are planned probably anyway I still want to mention them:

• I think the weapons switching with right mouse button is a good step in the right direction, once weapons group management is in it will really be usefull I think
• the overheat bars next to the weapons are a nice addition
• please reattach the health stats to the selected target again, is tiresome to always glance to the side and look for the stat window
• I really dont like that missiles and torps are treated as a primary weapon, they should behave like grenades in FPS games and still have a special key available
• autofire in capitals is weird, I have not found out how to manually fire the weapons, but dropping next to your desired target and then having the guns fire at other stuff is frustrating, I am not saying you should change them to before, I actually like that the workload to command a cap ship is lightened, but this is an issue
• a big quality of life improvement would be if the game would remember the view settings between ship respawns, by that I mean that if I changed the cap ship view to external and zoomed out completely I’d like the game to remember this setting between respawns - ideally also permanently between sessions
• same goes for hud mode, its already between spawns, but between sessions would be even better
• a color change for the gas giant and some color tweaks on the moons would go a long way to make the game seem fresh
• the auto turn marker on the hud is super faint and a lot of times really hard to see, please also make the game remember the chosen setting for autoturn between respawns and sessions
• a enemy selected as the target is not really super obvious on the hud
• the auto fire * on the weapons isnt really self explainatory, adding a small label “autofire” and “autoaim” would make it more clear what is happening
• a small label “shield” and “hull” beneath the hud elements would be good to make it clear what is shown
• the thrusters using energy is much more annoying now that we have to cycle through weapons, it super sucks to choose blasters and then have them dribbling out because all the energy was used for thrusters
• please make the thruster boost just independent of energy management, and instead make them overheat like a kinetic gun instead of using up energy, I think it would be more plausible and not another frustrating issue, I think its also confusing for newcomers to suddenly have the blasters dribbled with no clear reason

Some suggestions for the upcoming squad implementation:

• please dont restrict squad size
• make it possible to enable a small window where the heath stats of squad members and the distance to yourself is displayed, including the wrench symbol for possible arkenvettes
• make it possible to mark enemies, to enable squad members to concentrate on the same targets

The game is amazing btw.

[Lomsor]

Big changes and big update indeed.
This felt a lot different and it took quite a time for me to switch to this different style of handling weapons.

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Some bugs first:
Was already in last patch: AMS keeps visuals on when warp is engaged while it is firing. (doesn’t seem to do damage)

Missile sound effects are kind of wonky, maybe it changed now and signifies if it is reloaded. If out of range it beeps. If not reloaded it beeps and sometimes it still does.

Cycle weapons in capital ships does behave a bit not so intuitive. Pressing the button repetitively it first goes onto all weapons and switches them to automatic. Then pressing the button again it keeps switching missiles on and of. I would prefer for it to behave similar to small ships. Cycle one weapon to manual.

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I didn’t use keyboard and as such was using the radial and the cycle. I heard that the number buttons work great in capital ships, which I can believe.
I think the change works best on the capital ships. Autofire is a big one of course, I like it. It seems appropriate and allows me to choose what thing to focus on. Not having to do gunner duty constantly.
I can Imagine the game now working much better with controllers … yet the game is very intense and fast paced. Having to cycle or go into a menu to switch weapons isn’t quick at all. Ships with limited amounts of weapons or automatic fire are best suited.
The bomber is as such the furthest from the optimal. Many weapons, none of them automatic. It’s slower kind of gameplay helps a bit still, switching to shotguns in a hit and run is quite hard to do when not using the number keys. I personally would reduce the number of weapon groups in my personal ship setup to allow me to have less downtime while cycling weapons.
The differentiation between automatic and manual is a bit too subtle shown on the hud in my opinion. There’s no indication on the radial menu too. An easy way to improve that is to only show the “brackets” for manual weapons. As weapons that are automatic are fully illuminated (plus *) and ones that are off are darker already anyway.

The instant lock for missiles is also a big change. Either it is me being used to the old way or sometimes it felt a bit wonky. The way the missiles behaved was good though, I understood their flight path and why they missed.
I really really like the way it removes the waiting time … this dead time just during the fight really didn’t feel satisfying. Me fighting to switch weapons was much more fun then just waiting for a tone to appear. Something in between would be cool too though. The thing in the HUD concept seemed to be the best thing though, with a dedicated readout of the missiles reload status.
I see playbennies suggestion to make them more like grenades … yet I don’t feel like that will be easy to solve with the bigger ships that carry two types.
Rather I would feel it would work better to bring them more in line like like usual weapons would behave. With repeating firing while holding down and consistent reload time that is visually signified. As there isn’t consistent fire like from a gun or blaster there needs to be a substitute like a number of dots around the targeting circle. Kind of a “one last torpedo before I switch to guns again” would feel much better and more consistent and less stressful that way. On the cruiser this already feels a bit like that. Missiles barrages are relentless.

The weapons radial menu being moved where it is now feels much more … familiar now. Console shooter style. The weapon settings being in some other menu was weird before. I like the radial menu redesign. A lot of space in them now.
I really struggle to keep track what weapon is selected. Looking at the HUD Mockups I see that there’s a readout of the current weapon near the centre though, so that won’t be a problem in the future.

I really like the AI changes. Feels great and a nice bump in difficulty. Still think there should be different regions or times of difficulty instead of in battle mix.

[INovaeFlavien]

I’ll comment more tomorrow, but keep in mind this patch is only half of the equation. The HUD update had a dependency on it, since the new HUD update only displays information related to the currently selected weapon ( at least on small ships ). It should start to make more sense / be more coherent once the new HUD is in.

More feedback on the balance is welcome too. This patch hasn’t directly changed the balance ( as in: the parameters for weapons and ships are identical, minus the AMS heat which is really a small thing ). What did change was the AI, which is smarter and fires missiles / torpedoes more often, and in batches. Watching Dan’s stream, it’s possible ( / probable ) that AMS is now under-powered. Capital ships might die too quickly to the missiles / torpedoes spam, the AMS being able to only kill 1, maybe 2, but not the whole batch.

I also need to rework a bit the priority system for automatic turrets. At the moment they ignore the primary selected target by the player; each of the turrets just choose their own targets. I think it might make more sense to focus on the player’s selected target if the turret can damage / fire at it, and fall back to other targets if it can’t.

[INovaeFlavien]

the overheat bars next to the weapons are a nice addition

They are ammo bars, not overheating

please reattach the health stats to the selected target again, is tiresome to always glance to the side and look for the stat window

It’ll sit on the right center of the HUD in the upcoming HUD update, see the draft screenshots.

I really dont like that missiles and torps are treated as a primary weapon, they should behave like grenades in FPS games and still have a special key available

We internally debated about that, but decided to treat them as any normal weapon, mostly for HUD reasons ( we want to get away with the main HUD showing multiple weapons status at the same time ).

autofire in capitals is weird, I have not found out how to manually fire the weapons,

There are 3 states to cycle with the hotkey: disabled -> automatic -> manual. When it’s on automatic you’ll see [ * ] appear in the weapons list. If not, then the weapons are on manual. But keep in mind they still won’t fire if they’re on cooldown or the turrets are not aligned to the target yet.

but dropping next to your desired target and then having the guns fire at other stuff is frustrating

Yep, as mentionned earlier we still need to rework the priority system.

a big quality of life improvement would be if the game would remember the view settings between ship respawns

Noted, good point. At some point, we decided it was reset every time because new players would get confused after randomly rotating their cameras.

a color change for the gas giant and some color tweaks on the moons would go a long way to make the game seem fresh

We need to do more work on planets / environments at some point. Color tweaks would be possible but I’m not sure they’d help that much.

the auto turn marker on the hud is super faint and a lot of times really hard to see, please also make the game remember the chosen setting for autoturn between respawns and sessions

The capship auto-turn ? IIRC it’s already 100% opaque, so I’m not sure what can be done other than using another color and/or making it bigger ( or glowing ? ). For the persistent state, noted.

the auto fire * on the weapons isnt really self explainatory, adding a small label “autofire” and “autoaim” would make it more clear what is happening

Room is limited, especially now that we display the weapon name, so I’m not sure there’s enough space to display more text.

please make the thruster boost just independent of energy management, and instead make them overheat like a kinetic gun instead of using up energy, I think it would be more plausible and not another frustrating issue, I think its also confusing for newcomers to suddenly have the blasters dribbled with no clear reason

We’ll discuss this internally, however one drawback would be the addition of yet another status bar, which isn’t helping beginners.

[Playbenni]

We need to do more work on planets / environments at some point. Color tweaks would be possible but I’m not sure they’d help that much.

If its only a few minutes of work to have the gas giant look different in the next patch I think it would help to have something fresh for the eyes A jupiter colored gas giant would be nice for some time.

We’ll discuss this internally, however one drawback would be the addition of yet another status bar, which isn’t helping beginners.

Just don’t have a status bar then, Elite doesn’t have one either for the boost I believe?!
I think its worth to try out once.

The capship auto-turn ? IIRC it’s already 100% opaque, so I’m not sure what can be done other than using another color and/or making it bigger ( or glowing ? ).

Weird, can you look at this screen capture from yesterdays events?:

The marker seems to fade in and out, during battles I usually keep the button pressed to follow the mouse direction.

[INovaeFlavien]

The marker seems to fade in and out, during battles I usually keep the button pressed to follow the mouse direction.

Yeah, it does fade off when your ship gets aligned to it. You’d want to keep it 100% opaque all the time ?

[Playbenni]

As long as I still hold the button atively pressed yes, that would be nicer.

[Argopeilacos]

I think it might make more sense to focus on the player’s selected target if the turret can damage / fire at it, and fall back to other targets if it can’t.

I don’t like it when turrets uselessly consume power or overheat by firing to random targets, preventing me from warping or reducing my DPS on the actual target. This should at least be configurable (without relying on manual mode).

[smamarsello]

Patch 0.6.7.0 ( Saturday February 8th 2020 )

• Weapon groups are now exclusive on small ships: for ex. selecting blasters will unselect guns

It’s not very handy for inty. For me it’s awful solution as inty pilot. I lost seconds in battle during change weapon groups and sometimes select wrong group and it confuse me. Previously method with different weapon groups binded to different keys was awsome. Do u have 2 pedals on your car or just one with select mode button? No need to invent bicycle.

[Playbenni]

Small feedback for current patch:

When cycling trough weapons it is not immediatly clear what weapon is selected, one way for me to see which weapon is active is that the missiles/torps change the crosshairs to a circle.
It would be nice if the crosshairs between energy and kinetic weapons were different, so that we can immediatly differentiate between them without having to glance away from the center.

[Playbenni]

Quick feedback for latest patch:
The arrows are super helpful, especially the target direction arrow in the middle, very nice.
The planetary hud mode is a very nice addition, finally I can see that my ship has 90° escape angle when leaving the planet.
Warp tunnel indicator is very cool, I can see it beeing super helpful when it bends around obstacles in the future, it is already very helpful in finding the station that I marked as the target when traveling.
The unification of the hud modes works very well.
Showing the names of the npcs around the crosshairs is a nice feature but I think it would work better if it only showed the 5 nearest names to the center, so that it doesnt get overwhelmed with name when looking at masses of ships from far away.
The firing system for cap ships that was introduced before works very well. It is much easier to play cap ships now, the target prioritisation works nicely.
It’s still annoying that the cap ships start in first person view though, I would like to have third person view as default, I think most people play with that anyway.
The changed hud for capitals is great, the hud changes overall are very positive.
It would be cool to display the capship weapons cooldowns and firing intervals the same way as Eve Online does. As circles near the middle.
It would also be nice to have an auto fire mode for missiles and torpedoes.
I think the bomber could use a bit more maneuverability, right now the fun factor compared to interceptor is pretty lackluster IMO.
The only big remaining issue in the hud IMO is that the currently selected enemy target is very hard to notice, it is sometimes really hard to see what the selected target is, the icon even looks faded.

[Sab1e]

• There is still a concept of combat versus navigation HUD. The simple difference between the two is whether you have a target selected or not. Without a target, you are in navigation mode and the HUD shows more target indicators
• The HUD switches to combat mode when you select a target. It then highlights only the highest priority targets
• Target selection (default key: G) is now taking into account priorities/threats as well as your ship type (ex.: a bomber will prioritize selecting capital ships, while an interceptor will prioritize enemy interceptors and bombers).

YES, YES and YES!

[Lomsor]

Following my feedback concerning Patch 0.6.9.0.

First off thanks for releasing the patch early.
Due to current events my internet is really bad and I get at most about 100kb/s. Despite this I was able to play the game decently! I wasn’t able to watch the stream but also was able to join voice chat. Great work on not having the game use up too much bandwith.

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The HUD changes are quite extensive.

First off, the biggest thing I noticed just before finishing my play session yesterday. The new setup does not allow to be used to decide where to land in a battle, arguably one of the most important tactical decision currently in the game. The way everything is set up now, it works quite well inside the battle but the limited range of displaying ships makes it imposible to see all the necesary information to see everything going on.
Additionally the hemispherical radar range is not large enough to do that either … additionally the hemispherical radar is now removed on capital ships …
BUT
The game already has what is supposed to be used in its place and patches from the past (like moving the hauler lines path lines) have already shown that such things should be done in the star map.

Aside from default view being too far away from the battle (so much so that new players probably don’t even know that it can show individual ships) and BIG visibility problems the starmap only really misses a waypoint feature and would already be suitable to be used to decide where to land. Additionally it allows that even before travelling to the destination.

Example of using the starmap to make tactical decisions during a Planetside battle. Also: Visibility problems with confusing lines in the background:

Default view problem. Had to set the Factory as “grid reference” and wait several seconds for the view to become above screenshot:

Example of using the starmap to make tactical decisions during a battle in Orbit. This angle is pretty much the only ones usable as the big colored orbs representing planets make it not readable if they are in the background:

Visibility Problems:

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All in all the HUD changes work well in a battle. I played a little with the sliders and it seems that the default settings are quite alright.
I like most additions. Especially the “where’s my current target” indicator.
Feels pretty jet fighter like.
The capital ship HUD tweak makes sense and I like that some care is taken to try to differentiate them in order to make them work better for capitals.

I like the “look somewhere to see what there is thing” (cursor hovering) but …

Honestly every time there is text overlaying on top of each-other this game looks just unprofessional … that was the case ever since the first time I saw it … this is the feeling I get every time stuff is cluttered on top of eachother. Like it has not been properly thought trough.
I know what actually is the case but that’s how it feels.
This has nothing to do with the cursor hovering though, it still happens in other situations in the game too.

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Smaller things:

• The “Overheated” display fades in and out from 0 to 100 opacity. This is not good. You already did it better with the overcharge display…

See screenshots

• Mines don’t have a “selected as target” symbol and if you select them you have no indications where they are anymore.
• It feels weird not seeing mines and missiles, especially your own ones. It’s cool to have to look at the little engine light of the missile to see it’s path but it seems a bit too hard to check if I screwed up my manoeuvring and timing when firing it … missiles in this game are nice that they require some skill to use them, without feedback that kind of makes it hard to learn that skill.
• I wanted to repair my cruiser and was unable to see a friendly station nearby (can’t remember if I was in warp), I spend several minutes in the starmap until I was able to find the closest station for repairs.
• Why is the second discance indicator so faint in this screenshot? Just a special condition (distance) or just because the background happens to be bright?
  
  
• Guess this circle doesn’t indicate the angle to keep the target in. It’s cool that it follows your view and nice to instantly see that you have a missile selected.
  
  
• Would be nice to have max weapons range on the capital ships too. Good to know information.

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DROP SHADOWS - - - USE | THEM OR SOMETHING … ANYTHING TO FIX THE PROBLEM

See these screenshots. The contrast often and suddenly can get really bad in I:B and the sudden bad readability induces stress.
Can you read the text above the pillars? Pretty hard …
Notable how in the one screenshot it is on the left and in the other on the right. It is really hard to read the text on a bright background like the lit pillars.

[INovaeFlavien]

Thanks for the feedback Lomsor, now that we’ve got the main new HUD features we can iterate on tweaks and polishing it, it’ll be useful.

About the starmap used as a tactical map: actually, we have plans to implement a new sensor feature which will work similarly to the starmap, but already set up for the current battlefield. It’ll replace the ‘quote’ key ( which currently opens and zooms into the large hemispherical radar at the screen center ). The idea is that it’ll automatically switch the view into third person mode, zoom out, and overlay the sensor information ( in a way similar to the star map, but limited to like 20-30 Km ) with a grid and target indicators. We’ll see if we can make it available in the next patch.

We are also considering offseting most of the text a bit further away from the screen center so that it’s less packed together ( cap ships HUD is already offset, so basically it’d be using the cap ship settings for the small ships HUD too ).

[cybercritic]

Regarding the visibility of text, you should do an outline, not a shadow and use contrast color of the text for the outline.