Alpha Test Feedback Apr 4 2015

events
#1

Join us at www.ageofascent.com for a 30 min playtest Saturday, 4th of Apr, 2015 at 3pm Central US, 4pm East US, 8pm UTC/GMT, 9pm UK (Desktop browser, mouse and keyboard)

Please note time change for UK players due to daylight savings changes.

Scores

http://player.ageofascent.com/Home/Scores/2015-04-04/

Release Notes

  • Free-for-All (FFA) - All ships are hostile
  • New Ship lighting/shading (as shown in below video in split screen) with:
  • Environmental ambient lighting
  • Directional lighting
  • Specular highlights
  • Bump mapping
  • Rim Lighting

The video below has a split screen with the current lighting on the right, and the new lighting on the left.

The difference is quite noticable, though it does look better on screen than in the video!

If you want to know the bigger picture and where we are heading don’t forget to check out: About Age of Ascent

Thank you all for joining us on this journey!

Alpha Test Feedback Apr 18 2015
Alpha Test Feedback Mar 21 2015
#2

Well! That was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately this will officially be the last playtest I can make it to. Starting next week, I work all day Saturdays.

Ultimately, I didn’t notice the lighting change. Though I forgot to look at it. At the very least I didn’t notice a framerate drop, so that’s nice.

I saw a lot more evasive strafing maneuvers! Good job Plain King OG and GM Stormcrow!

And way to go Crimson Panda for top of the board today.

Not much more to say about today’s match. I will definitely keep up on the forums at the very least.

Video soon!

#3

My feedback:

  1. The music itself is absolutely excellent. It really adds to the atmosphere.
  2. The music transitions could be improved - in one case, the transition from (what I presume is) the ‘fight’ music to the ‘floating around’ music, happened during a particularly dubstep-drop-y part of the music, and it felt very abrupt. Perhaps some basic transition logic that works around the ‘peaks’ of tracks would help alleviate this problem.
  3. The visuals are nice overall, and the animation is very good - however, upon getting really close to the ‘space stations’, you could see very noticeable pixelation in the textures.
  4. The trails work well, but could perhaps be a little longer or more noticeable when close by an enemy - when an enemy ‘cuts past you’, it’s very easy to lose track of them. Visually, they look great.
  5. No collision checking on the ‘space stations’ :slight_smile: This was a little confusing at first.
  6. Was that a swarm of bots invading the game halfway through?
  7. The game ran smoothly on my system, using latest stable Chrome on openSUSE 13.1. Did not look for any particular FPS counter anywhere, was way too busy trying to shoot stuff!
  8. Due to an outstanding pointer lock bug in Chrome, I’ve played with keyboard - this took a little getting used to, and it was hard to do so with precision, but it was playable. I only found out about the non-pointer-lock mouse-drag mode (and the ‘Controls’ box on the left in general) after the game had already completed - this could perhaps be a point of improvement.

Overall, promising :slight_smile:

#4

Hi, this was my first playtest and I had fun. Will inverting the Y axis become available with mouse look?

#5

Think of the stations and asteroids like clouds in WWI or WWII dogfighting. Need to clear your tail? Enter a station and make an abrupt maneuver. I’ve had more targets slip away from me that way than I want to contemplate. When collisions get turned on a bunch of us are in for a big surprise.

#6

Hi joepie91,

  1. Thank you!
  2. Agreed - however when the game moves from being a full-on FFA PvP slugfest to a full-on MMO, this is when we’ll readdress the music transitions as well as the playlist (though all these tracks will def be making it in to the final game, I’ve become rather a glitch/IDM/dubstep afficionado over the last year!)
  3. Thanks again. On the close-ups… we’re very aware; but given that it’s an entirely web-distributed game with no actual download, install or plugin… one of the reasons it just “works pretty much immediately” in the browser is due to the tiny download - the full client, all models, all code etc is currently about 5MB I think - and that generally means pretty small textures. We might get fancy with LOD in the future for closeup usage, but it’s not a priority atm.
  4. Thanks again! I think targeting and target lock will help this immeasurably rather than looking at changing gfx.
  5. Heh no. Not yet. But very, very soon™.
  6. It was - we run bots from 20m through 25m during the playtest. They’re full network bots (with very basic behaviours loaded), sending the same updates etc that a player would. So it’s really a sanity-check that nothing we’ve done would break the player experience.
  7. FPS counter is bottom right of the screen; but if it felt smooth then that’s all we ask for really! It runs just fine on my $149 Acer Chromebox, and we’ve even had it running on mobile phones!
  8. Oh again, when we move to the full MMO, there’ll be tutorials etc to help you through. These FFA playtests are a bit of baptism of fire!

Many thanks for your feedback. Always appreciated!

Best,

James N

#7

That’s really sad for us, PR… do stay in touch; we’ll have test group special sessions in the next couple of months to test specific concepts, and perhaps you could join those?

Nice to have you with us! Inverting Y axis is actually there (the “Y” key does it) but will be moving to a control panel that’ll allow full key remapping to player preferences.

Soon! ™

Thanks,

James N

#8

For some reason, “N” didn’t work although the description for “Road Between the Lands” indicated that north was a valid direction in which to move. Also, although typing “get key” in the Dragon’s Cave did allow me to add the key to my inventory, all subsequent text output was then rendered in Mycenean Linear B. Although most playtesters are reasonably conversant in ancient near-East languages, I don’t believe this is a reasonable assumption to make for players in a broader release. Also the command “look E” caused my computer to explode, showering me with spiders.

Thanks for the invite to the playtest though! I really enjoyed it.

#9

I’d like to extend my brother a warm welcome to the forum.

James N

#10

Feedback thread for today’s playtest: Alpha Test Feedback Apr 18 2015