I feel like situational awareness is a huge bottleneck for combat effectiveness of the slow rotating ships at the moment and hinders any multitasking one could do.
Either if manual fire will be a thing or if not, I don’t see a good way to increase situational awareness of slow maneuvering ships without unchaining the mouse from the ship controlls.
I think the most effective compronise would be freelook on and buttonpress to have the ship allign to the current center of the screen heading. Just a suggestion.
Once that is done I think captial pilots won’t struggle anymore with all the tasks.
If that’s solved some weapon groups could be manually controlled. That would also decrease the need for targetabble station modules. (feedback about installation state could be given visually or in the map view)
If its easy then we dont need to worry about players being too busy right? so whats the point in making them automated, it just lowers the skill ceiling and makes them un-fun to play because the fun part of a PVP game is out thinking and out shooting an enemy but there isnt much of that with automated weaponry.
could just be the current interceptor mounted machine guns. I do think your idea to let players customize what they want to bring on their ship is a good idea like sacrificing main armament hard points for more AA guns, but I dont think any smart players will be loading up their cruisers with AA guns at the expense of ship-to-ship guns… lol. just depends on the meta i guess, but i feel like the speed of a destroyer would be more worth it. either way, you should be able to customize your ship into a “role” that isn’t exactly a straight upgrade. like the cruiser could be differentiated by having very slow turret rotation and slow ship rotation, while the destroyer would be weaker but could potentially stay in a cruisers blind spot while firing. thus equal but different if you see what i mean. obviously the bigger stronger ship would still be needed to take on stations though.
Couple of minor things I noticed today in a very quick session:
Bomber - It’s a bit disconcerting that, when locked onto a target, blasters will fire whenever you click the button, but guns will only fire when aimed at the target lead indicator. For quite a while, I couldn’t figure out why the projectile guns weren’t working. Maybe if both weapons only fired on lead indicator, it would be more intuitive and differentiate it a little more from the interceptor?
HUD - Flew the destroyer and realised I couldn’t see my credits anywhere on screen. Didn’t have time to test any further, so not sure which ships this is happening on. Unless I’m being a bit thick and it’s something to do with HUD level settings and I didn’t notice. If that’s the case though, I would suggest that the combat HUD still includes credits somewhere on it, as the whole point of combat (in the short-term) is to rack up credits and buy bigger ships.
I’ve been playing with TrackIR using vJoy and FreePIE.
It’s nice being able to look around but I have some feedback:
Using AddViewYaw (default head look with the mouse), the extent of free look yaw seems to be limited to about 115 degrees left and right of the forward direction.
Using SetViewYaw it is limited to 90 degrees.
These should be the same, and 2) the limit should be at least 160 degrees so you can actually look over your shoulder.
Here’s a terrible video just showing some looking around. At the end you can see me hitting the limit looking to the left.
Also, SetViewDist doesn’t seem to work. I have it mapped to a throttle axis but nothing happens when I change the axis value.
I’ll investigate, but quick question: why do you need 160° of view angle ? Looking over your shoulder, or even at ± 90°, means you’re not looking at the screen anymore. I’m not sure I understand why you need so extreme angles…
It’s not a 1:1 mapping… TrackIR and all the various home brew head tracking systems let you specify curves to map actual head position to in-game head position.
I can get 180° rotation from just a few degrees of actual head movement.
Have TrackIR running before you run the script in FreePIE.
In vJoy I have two devices. vJoy[1] is referring to device 2. To use vJoy device 1, change the code to vJoy[0].
You can add devices using the “Configure vJoy” application.
If you are not using vJoy for your physical joystick then you will probably only need the one virtual joystick.
To check its working run the Windows Game Controllers app. “Set up USB Game Controllers” in the start menu.
Select vJoy Device in the list and click Properties.
You should see the axes move in response to the TrackIR input.
Also, as per my comment above about the in-game head movement being limited, you should change the script from 16382 / 180 to 16382 / 90 to get the correct movement.
Once you’ve confirmed it’s working using the Windows Game Controllers UI, to setup Battlescape:
Launch DetectInput.exe from Program Files\I-Novae Studios\Battlescape\Dev\Profiles\Detect Input Tool as an Administrator and use it to detect what the game will detect the axes as. Then set them in your input profile XML.
Weirdly the game detects the x and y axis of my second vJoy device as button60 and button61 rather than axis0 and axis1 like my first vJoy device, but meh - I just map them like this:
I do now agree that the time-to-death is too quick, particularly in interceptors. In a large fight, interceptors currently feel next to useless because it is so hard to evade (which is the point of a light fighter) and also hard to score kills. I would like to see interceptors be more adept at killing other fighters - perhaps we need another test of gimballed weapons?
I have no awareness of who is locked onto me. Perhaps the enemy ship icons should flash while they are targeting me? Similar problem with incoming missiles - I have had no success yet with flares as I cannot tell where the missile is, I only have a bleeping sound. I would also like more awareness of the damage I am causing to my target - a small HUD diagram of my target displaying shield and hull status? I realise this all may come through HUD developments in future patches, but the first part about awareness is vital (though I hope it can be done in a minimalist way).
At some point, we will need to think about the impact of joining the game, only to find your team is losing badly, as I just did. It’s disheartening to log in only to find that you have one ground station left that is under attack, and one space station just waiting for it. Good objective-based design and rewards for players could help mitigate this, such as bonus points for defending a base that’s under attack, or side-objectives that can still be completed separately to the main battles.
The issues I have with killing interceptors when I’m in an interceptor is 1) I’m a terrible shot and 2) I lose the cross-hair often in combat. I’m pretty sure they are working on #2.
Something I would like to see is shorter bursts from weapons. I wouldn’t want them to slow down the rate of fire, just a more limited effective rate of fire (though keep the high cyclical RoF).
Hi, I am trying to install the alpha in a different drive than c: but cant see how, and there does not seem to be any info on this in the FAQ, any help?
Does it let you choose location and just places it in c instead or do you not even have the option?
I was under the impression that there was an option during installation to choose the directory, but I could remember it wrong.
Yes, there’s an option to choose the install directory ( however some temp files will remain on C: no matter what, but the game itself should be in the chosen target install directory ).
