Agreed, they are really cool.
Well done Flav!
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You know there already is one though. The capital ship control mode.
If you use a program that presses a key constantly and asign the “Turn to Camera (Hold)” event to that key you basically have point-to-turn control.
The only issue with that is that it slow down a bit before reaching the final center position.
There’s also the behavior of the cursor to return back at the screen center automatically, and I’m not sure how important it is to people used to this point-to-turn control scheme.
I just had an interesting experience: firing up the game again for a quick 20min blast after a long break (quite a few months if I’m honest). It gave me an opportunity to approach it with fresh eyes.
Firstly, a quick disclaimer. I did not spend that long in the game, as mentioned above, so there may be things I missed. However, I am posting this because I feel like I am in a good position to give a “new player” reaction, despite having been part of the community for many years!
I don’t want to swamp this post for loads of stuff, so I will limit it to a few hopefully constructive thoughts.
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My first reaction on seeing the new HUD was “Whoa!”. It felt a bit like being smacked in the face by neon. Perhaps I need to change the colour from green to something else.
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Once I got over that reaction, the left side of the reticle is nice and clear, especially the armour/shield numbers. I could do with my throttle setting being much clearer/larger.
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IMHO, I really disliked not having any central-HUD feedback on what I was doing to my target. The “Target Info” HUD element is nice, but I need something on the target ship’s icon. Even if it’s something simple like tiny little shield/hull bars, or more subtle like degrading the icon with damage.
Edit: just read this.
Hmmm, I did move the target info to one of the HUD slots. Perhaps I should try disabling that so it’s closer to the middle. I still think some on-target visual feedback for damage is needed though. Not numbers; some effect that is instantly understandable.
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The HUD customisation was nice and easy.
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I like the missile warning.
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Changing weapons was clunky as hell. I approve of the idea of holding right-mouse to bring up that radial menu, but I also wanted a quick switch option, where I could do a single click (to switch between blasters and guns only).
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Can we have an option where Ctrl (freelook) can return to centre view when released? Double-tap can remain as default, but I prefer an auto-centre. (Sorry if that’s already there, I didn’t check).
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Lastly, the travel vector icon looks like a target lead indicator. I kept trying to fire at it before remembering what it was. It might need to be changed, perhaps a chevron, or a cross?
3 Likes
You can do that with the number keys ( 1-9 ) already.
There’s already an option for that, and you can configure the delay after which it auto-recenters ( if you want it to recenter instantly after you stop looking around, set the delay to the minimum ).
3 Likes
Thanks for the response - I knew I’d probably missed stuff!
1 Like
Just went to investigate those settings. Couple more things:
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I immediately switched 1 & 2, so that 1 was blasters. As the first weapon I use, that felt more natural.
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I like blue HUD better than green HUD. Thanks for the choice!
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I found the view auto-recentre option and reduced the time. Is it intended that the view recentres even while Ctrl is still held down? Because that felt unnatural. Holding Ctrl should allow me to look around for as long as I want, then upon releasing it obeys the timer.
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You could definitely save hotkeys by having a right-mouse-button toggle for blasters and guns. Then weapons groups on the numbers for other stuff such as missiles. But I don’t know how easy it would be to implement a single click and holding the button (which I would keep as the radial menu) to have two different functions.
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An alert for a battle was displayed and stayed open when I went to the Missions tab. I feel like if you open the menus, the alerts should not be displayed over the top.
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There comes a point when joining a battle is no longer viable. E.g. I flew to Glimmerfall when its victory percentage was 45%. I arrived to find that actually there were mainly just some larger friendly ships left and the enemy interceptors were just mostly drifting. I arrived, killed an interceptor, then immediately was murdered by about 5 of his wingmen because there was noone else left for them to fight.
Perhaps battles need to have some indication on the mission board as to how many ships/what kinds would be needed to help the battle.
If you want to hear some happy stuff…! (Based on interceptor combat).
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I love how the interceptor feels atm, even the gimballed weapons aren’t bothering me. I forgot how nice it is to fly around.
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Pretty.
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The core combat is indeed fun (to the extent that it is implemented). It feels punchy, but like you have choice in how you fly and can attempt to escape.
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It’s definitely better keeping the target info off the MFDs. Having it a bit nearer the centre did help.
3 Likes
The blue reticles tend to get lost when it goes over a blue surface especially Sarake, so I tend to use the green one.
At the moment I believe the timer starts since the last mouse movement.
Absolutely not. It’s possible that the minimum is set to zero, which means that if you stop moving the camera even during a frame, it recenters… especially with the mouse, which tends to not necessarily output a pixel movement every frame ( it can skip frames, especially if you have a high framerate ! ). It’ll check that out tomorrow.
That sounds like a good suggestion. The input system does not support that atm, but I was thinking of adding something similar ( in a generic way ) for a while. It’s not super urgent so I’ll add it to the todo list at a low priority.
Sounds like a bug, I’ll also investigate, first time I heat about it.
At 45% the battle still has a long way to go. You probably arrived right before a reinforcement wave from the losing team. It probably needs some balancing and adjustments though. There must have been other allied ships in the battlefield though, otherwise a new wave would have been triggered. Maybe they were tens of Km away from you, and so the enemy interceptors prioritized you and ganged up.
Yep, a starmap revamp is coming soon.
One thing I personally dislike in battles is how you often die randomly without realizing where the fire is coming from. It too often happens that you’re dogfighting another ship, and suddenly you come close to an enemy capship and fire rains on you. It interrupts the “nice” dogfight you were having, and becomes quite frustrating when it’s against another player.
I’m considering reducing the priority of auto-turrets on enemy ships involved in dogfights. It’s a bit artificial but it’d definitely help to reduce the “death” randomness that often feels unfair. That, plus some more improvements to the HUD. I’m currently tinkering with the idea of making the target indicator arrows blink when a ship is firing at you.
3 Likes
Allright @Sab1e I want to come back on that quickly, as I’ve been investigating but could not find a bug. When you say it 'stayed open", do you mean that it never faded off ( / stayed alive forever ) ?
Because otherwise, the fact that battle popups appear on top of the tab menu isn’t a bug and is working properly. Of course it raises the question of whether it should appear in the tab menu at all in the first place. The problem is that battle notifications ( like when a battle started, or when a battle was won or lost ) is quite important in terms of match progression, so if we don’t display this popup on the tab menus, I’m not quite sure how the same information can be notified to the player.
Or maybe a similar, but smaller ( 1 line only ) popup should appear, maybe on top of the team score ?
Thanks for clarifying. Yes, it did still fade as normal. I feel that if I have opened the “Missions” tab, the notification should be part of that menu, not displayed over the top of it.
I think I’m trying to say, being able to see the notification AND the Missions menu was a bit redundant, even though it was only for a few seconds.
It’s just polish really, nothing major.
You can delay the popup until the player exits the tab menu.
Hmm good point Argo, that might work for now. I just hope nobody stays too long on the menu ( or what happens if in the future we add RTS / assigning orders to bots etc… so some players could stay many minutes on it… ).
Edit: implemented it, and it works quite well. I stop the rendering in menus, but the updates keep going on… at a 10% speed. So if you don’t take too long, and get back into the game, the popup will still be there. If you stay forever in the menus, the popups will have faded away ( although 10 times slower than normally ). Also, while on menus, you still get the popup notification sound, so you know something has happened.
3 Likes
Here’s my feedback about the last few patches:
There have been some big features introduced lately. I will share some stuff in the order of how it comes to mind, trying to always mind what the newest version of the games state is (for instance the “speed reading clipping” got fixed last patch:
TAA is impressive but personally it does not work out for me.
I tried it on 4k, on 2k, on low and high quality but the tradeoff doesn’t work for me.
It is the right AA solution for Space Games it seems. With there not being enough information in a frame to solve the “flickering”.
But it really feels like I am taking off my glasses with the big amount of blur I see when using it. In a way it makes the game more beautiful as it allows for much more immersion with the flickering gone …
but for hectic flight it is not that usable for me.
Maybe there’s a way to configure it as such that it works for me … I seem to have enough performance for it.
I tried low setting because I thought it would take less frames to compare between but instead it just got much more blurry. Maybe there’s a way for it to take less frames as reference but crank up the “classical” AA aspect of it? Will keep trying but I think I will prefer AA off.
SMAA doesn’t seem to work well with the Aliasing found in I:B.
The latest patch (0.7.2.0) added A LOT of polish to the UI. The changes to the glow really make the UI feel much more professional then it did before. It’s subtle but it looks much nicer!
The tactical view looks excellent with heatmap on. I think this is the aesthetic I:B needs.
Of course, adjusting all the colours for the different colour modes helped too.
The tactical view is cool and slick and quick to use. Took me a while to bind it to something that works but after that it was quite intuitive. I have to play with it more to give any more feedback on it.
AMS thickness change is nice. I like them being more visible. As for the balancing, kind of early to judge. I always felt like the Cap Ship missiles where a bit too strong and overshadowed the big guns the ships had but I guess that is more personal taste then anything else.
I suggest adding a “Custom” profile. There should be something for people which device or combination of devices is not in the list of complete layout. I once suggested different “Generic” profiles but I see how those can be problematic to maintain, let alone find configs that work alright with most devices.
As such I suggest a completely empty profile. Here:
http://lomsor.com/inovae/Profiles/Custom.xml
The bindings menu is almost perfect now, really much better then many other games. I see it has a “reset to defaults” button now and all other kinds of jazz. Nice.
Bugs and such:
Big bug I discovered last patch:
I think there is a limit missing somewhere in the code for as many “navigation help” rectagles are drawn on the UI … or maybe some other issue … see the Framerate (I usually have it fixed to 80 FPS) It only happens when target is selected and while in warp. Gets worse when being farther away from target.
The “cancel/exit” event doesn’t really work in most situations. I have it bound but it almost never does something. Same for the “next/previous” and such. Maybe they are placeholders for later and I am glad they are there for people not wanting to use joystick or other devices beside M and KB to navigate menues.
Still have this bug. Tried to launch from Steam Directly or otherwise but I always got it since the ping values got introduced:
The tooltip from “spawn” button stays there when closing the tab menu.
The tooltips for the two new added tick options in the keybindings screen are worded wrongly (Inverted). Probably a remnant from a previous version where they were inverted.
The default profile has some inconsistent dead zone values here, I suggest making them all the same:
Summary
<Joystick ID="0">
<Descr>-unused-</Descr>
<Identifier/>
<NameFilter/>
<ForceFeedback>false</ForceFeedback>
<Axis ID="0" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.07" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="1" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.07" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="2" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="3" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.07" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="4" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.07" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="5" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="6" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="7" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
</Joystick>
<Joystick ID="1">
<Descr>-unused-</Descr>
<Identifier/>
<NameFilter/>
<ForceFeedback>false</ForceFeedback>
<Axis ID="0" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.07" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="1" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.07" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="2" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="3" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.07" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="4" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.07" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="5" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="6" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="7" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
</Joystick>
<Joystick ID="2">
<Descr>-unused-</Descr>
<Identifier/>
<NameFilter/>
<ForceFeedback>false</ForceFeedback>
<Axis ID="0" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.075" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="1" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.075" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="2" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="3" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.075" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="4" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.075" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="5" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="6" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="7" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
</Joystick>
<Joystick ID="3">
<Descr>-unused-</Descr>
<Identifier/>
<NameFilter/>
<ForceFeedback>false</ForceFeedback>
<Axis ID="0" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.075" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="1" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.075" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="2" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="3" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.075" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="4" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.075" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="5" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="6" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
<Axis ID="7" Type="Auto" Deadzone="0.0" Power="1.0"/>
Bonus Shots:
2 Likes
I added debug info to the log file this patch to try to figure it out. Can you send me your log file ?
Reminded me - I’ve had that ping bug for quite a long time too. Except I didn’t know it was a bug - just assumed they were virtual servers all in the same location or something… 
Where are the logs?
Pah. @pictbrige quite bizarre as we are used to. Ha. Just look out a bit to not overdoo it. Maybe use this thread more: The Random Thread
Also… I am still not German.
The logs are under “Documents/I-Novae studios/ Infinity Battlescape/Logs”.
I sent mine trough discord because I could just upload them directly there.
1 Like
Some feedback for Patch 0.7.5.0.
Thanks for the update team. I jumped in and tried to check out most of the changes.
First thing that came to my attention is that the colours get a bit wonky now with every change to the UI system. That’s a thing for polish later for sure, I am no designer but I feel like there are too many different and not pallet matched colours on the UI.
The HUD doesn’t irk me as much as the UI as that primarily needs to be functional and more colour helps discerning things.
Just feel that the colours on the mission screen are clashing a bit too much.
Otherwise, it looks pretty rad. It’s cool to see HVK Adexandor before jumping into battle. Exciting.
I like the thread indicators. Wanted to do some light skirmish and found a lone destroyer near a factory when spawning at a yellow dot factory.
What annoyed me there was that I wanted to keep going after the destroyer but after I died the game jumped to select a station instead … hmm.
New warp counters are nice.
Another thing for polish here. It’s kind of nice that the “Stand By” Rectangle goes over the deploy selection rectangle, but it’s weird it doesn’t cover it completly.
I don’t like the deploy selection area at the bottom not so much anyway though. I repeadetly accidentaly pressed “instant action” because the buttons look the same and honestly after just dying the information in that area is a bit too dense.
Maybe if I played the game more tactically I would take the few seconds to really pause and use all the tools there to think about my next deployment but how I play the game currently I just want to be thrown into the battle again (as it doesn’t really matter where you fight the big blob … 
)
2 Likes
Thanks for the feedback. Yep, it still needs some polish. I notice that you’re playing with the orange color theme and I suspect some of the colors aren’t well suited to it. Give a try to the blue color theme for example and let us know if you still feel the colors are clashing.
I know Jan’s been working on some alternate “instant action” deploy buttons, to differenciate the two buttons a bit more. In theory, the idea is that you don’t have to spend too much time thinking, after dying in a battle, you just hit the instant action button and there you go. Unless there are no carriers and no AI bot available for your ship class, in which case it becomes more complicated, with the button getting disabled / re-enabled depending on the availability of the ship classes in battle.
We are having our own doubts about the visual complexity of the new deployment panel. I’ve been adamant at keeping it as simple as possible ( only the two deploy buttons ), while others in the dev team do like the shortcuts to select the ship class or the top 3 missions, without having to go to the dedicated screens. They’re just a click away anyways, so it’s possible that we’ll eventually decide to simplify that deployment panel. More feedback from players there is welcome.
2 Likes
Tug of war impressions
Definitely a step in the right direction!
I managed to play one match till the very end (although not from the very beginning). With the changes the match progression feels more engaging and ultimately more fun. Now there is a sense of achievement when a battle is won. It’s also clear what happens after a battle has been lost.
I have encountered one particular issue that may need rethinking. At the very end of the match, the score was about 150:2000 and our team was winning. However, the last few battles dragged on for very long. Specifically, because when our AI commander attacked an enemy facility, the attacking fleet was very small, despite the huge difference in the score. Clearly, there was no chance for the other team to have a comeback having such a 10 times disadvantage. I think, the attacking/defending fleets should be equal in strength only when the scores are approximately even and/or when the number of “alive” facilities is approx. equal. So basically in the scenario that I have experienced, the last few battles were supposed to be all-in on both sides, to have a spectacular final battle.
Another suggestion, comes from the following observation. After any battle, which I was able to survive in a capital ship, my vessel was always pretty damaged and low on ammunition. It’s not a problem for AI, which simply despawns and reappears fully loaded. However, for a player, there is a considerable downtime – having to fly back to a station, while “rich” players would simply self-destruct. It would be more logical, to spawn a repair platform/ship in the orbit close to the battlefield. Either have it spawned only after a successful battle or during the battle, so that the players could rearm/repair much quicker.
Looking forward to seeing improvements to the tug of war mechanics.
3 Likes