Alpha Test feedback Aug 29, 2020

events
#1

This thread is for the now-finished open Alpha playtest of Age of Ascent (AoA) that happened on Saturday the 29th of August at 1900 UTC.

Our next playtest will be on Saturday the 12th of September at 1900 UTC (1400 US Central, 2000 UK).

To reserve your place for our next playtest, sign your pilot up at https://portal.ageofascent.com

Please return to https://portal.ageofascent.com at this time, and you will be admitted to the playtest.

We’re testing the PvP combat module again - but with the new technology base and our awesome new visual style! Everyone will be in the same ship loadout, and it’s everyone for themselves!

Other modules of the game such as trade and industry, mining and mission running will be in other playtests later this year.

After the playtest has finished, please do come back to this thread to give us your feedback and comments!

  • We are only testing the PvP experience in this playtest, not the full game!
  • You’ll get the best experience if you have equipment suitable for piloting (eg mouse and keyboard, or a gamepad controller)
  • You’ll need to be in Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge web browsers on any OS of your choice
  • Players from the last playtests will notice that the radar is currently turned off - this is because it is being substantially enhanced at present
  • For this test we’ve got the music soundtrack turned off by default
  • We’re not showing pilot names under the ships for this test - instead we’re showing distance-to-target as this helps us test the telemetry feeds. Ship/pilot ID will be back!
  • Shield capacity has been bumped up, but shield recharge is disabled

– NOTES FOR THIS PLAYTEST FOLLOW

Flight Controls

  • Mouse Wheel - you can now use your mouse wheel to change thrust (as well as the ‘R’ and ‘F’ keys)
  • Gamepad - please note that you can use a gamepad to control flight, if you wish. AoA currently supports gamepads, and we’re looking into joystick support as well.
  • Control label graphic - The ‘flight control’ graphic had an incorrect label on it - identifying WASD as Pitch/Yaw, whereas WASD are actually vertical and horizontal strafe controls. This labelling has been fixed, and in addition, the flight controls now also appear on the ‘pre-launch’ waiting screen to refresh your memory.
  • Flight mode - when you press ‘Launch’ you are now automatically dropped into flight mode, and do not have to press tab to engage flight mode.

Creative & visuals

  • Audio - some of the voice warnings (eg “Structural Failure Imminent”) were running over each other; these have been spread out a bit
  • New visual backdrop - this playtest is set in a visually different part of the galaxy
  • Motion ‘dust’ - We’ve added some small particle effect “space dust” in to help impart the sense and direction of motion
  • Camera Shake - when you got hit by incoming fire, we (and others) felt the camera shake was a bit too much; this has been dialled back - but please do let us know how it feels now!

Network & Gameplay

  • Pilots in game before launch - Players who were on the ‘Waiting to launch’ screen before launch were actually visible in the game, and could be shot at before they’d even joined the battle, which seems a bit unfair :wink: This has been rectified.
  • Location jumping - when players rejoined the battle after death, they’d join with a huge fiery engine trail that streaked from their ‘death location’ to the their ‘respawn location’; we’ve now cleared out these location buffers
  • Player stats - We now have some pilot stat collection, which will be made available after the match on this forum post

We look forward to seeing you there!

Top 25 player results from playtest

Pos Player Name Shots Fired Shots Hit Accuracy Kills
1 Psycho Romeo 155,552 88,407 56.8% 103
2 Awesome 118,176 71,725 60.7% 70
3 Pazzo 106,528 31,087 29.2% 37
4 Jago 119,136 41,804 35.1% 32
5 GM Cerberus 59,360 32,950 55.5% 29
6 Sylvis 165,120 33,412 20.2% 26
7 Moskauzer 139,200 30,813 22.1% 22
8 Zoomey Guy 108,032 22,228 20.6% 16
9 Nogrod 147,968 17,194 11.6% 15
10 GM Thundercat 75,616 17,467 23.1% 11
11 Broseph Stalin 107,264 13,177 12.3% 10
12 Regnadp 108,736 13,212 12.2% 9
13 Zangorian 25,152 8,589 34.1% 7
14 GM Stormcrow 21,088 3,930 18.6% 4
15 DJ Josh in da house 56,736 4,081 7.2% 3
16 Eowan 184,000 5,522 3.0% 2
17 Asvenger3 94,432 5,119 5.4% 2
18 Simonascent 141,280 4,315 3.1% 2
19 DaKeyster 64,160 1,404 2.2% 2
20 oreo 28,416 2,279 8.0% 1
21 kraik 18,880 2,094 11.1% 1
22 ubluntu 78,272 3,188 4.1% 0
23 CLI 107,712 2,637 2.4% 0
24 Jejune 32,704 463 1.4% 0
25 King 83,008 448 0.5% 0
1 Like
Alpha Test feedback Sep 12th, 2020
#2

I joined the play test, but was unable do anything other than watch myself get blown up. I tried with both Chrome and Edge. No keys or mouse buttons worked at all.

On the technical side, as an Azure-focused developer myself, I’d love to see more about how Azure is used to scale. I’m also very happy to hear this project isn’t dead, as I previously wrote it off as Microsoft losing interest and moving on to the next big thing.

Thanks!

#3

When I first joined, I couldn’t control anything. After a few minutes I realized I needed to unplug both my joystick and my foot pedals, then after a refresh everything worked like a charm.

I also noticed that you could remove the HUD with H. However when I died, I wasn’t able to respawn from this state. Had to refresh the page.

Did we get stats? :grin:

1 Like
#4

Hi everyone,

That was great fun! We’ll be posting some stats later on, but please feel free to let us know how it was for you - what you liked, and what we could do differently.

Thanks very much for participating!

Best wishes,

SC

2 Likes
#5

Everything was smooth, technically I had no problem at all. I would have loved to know how many of my friends I actually managed to kill.

#6

Everything seemed to run smooth. My only complaint would be that the red planet was unreachable :stuck_out_tongue:

#7

REDPLANETFLATIST! Die heretic! :grinning:

1 Like
#8

Had a trouble logging in - AoA didn’t recognize my password and didn’t send password reset. Used another email and got in. Play was lively and graphics incredible. Hard to tell who actually got a kill. Would hate to see my stats - had a lot of restarts!

#9

The test felt pretty good this week, but I can’t say I noticed much difference from the last test two weeks ago. Everything was smooth and responsive. Pretty much just a free for all hair ball. I couldn’t tell if there was any collision damage involved; it would be nice to know if we could ram someone else, even if it was mutually destructive. No way to lock on and stay with a target, but I guess that’s just a feature of this being an alpha. Very interested to see where this is going.

#10

Blockquote

Quoting! First!

Sorry I forgot the first link!

#11

I even killed my wife to be able to proof that that red planet was flat. Proof shall be delivered!!! :smiley: :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
#12

The improved controls are great.

It seemed like I was getting a really low framerate when there were explosions or a lot of ships on screen.

Had a great time and looking forward to more.

#13

I’d like to point out that he killed me IN GAME, not in real life…
Anyway, the game was very nice, no glitches, very enjoyable.

3 Likes
#14

A way to respawn could be cool. Or set map boundaries. After flying towards the sun for a few minutes, and then realizing I wasn’t getting any closer, it took me a while to get back to the action.

1 Like
#15

Ugh, I just realized I should have named my username Icarus. What a waste of an opportunity.

2 Likes
#16
  • Game was fun!
  • Am I supposed to be able to fly into the giant world mother ships, rocks, and other obstacles to dodge bullets?
  • Am I supposed to be able to fly through other people’s ships?
  • The WASD controls did so little. Should I be able to strafe more?
  • Liked the H to turn of the HUD!
  • It would be nice to know the scrollbar did the same Forward and Reverse as F and R in the HUD. Scrollbar was way easier to use.
  • B button was a little far from the WASD controls to be comfortable.
  • It would be nice to have the rolling get faster the more you hold down Q or E (for future versions)
  • The visual representation of your movement at the bottom is awesome!
  • Overall fun experience. Thanks for the open play test!
1 Like
#17

Managed to get into the play test fine, albeit a bit late, no hitches, pilot created easily enough:

  • flight movement and handling was smooth enough, managed to keep track of other ships ok and no real problems with firing and movement although it was difficult working out if your evading someone or getting hit by a spray of fire.
  • using a fairly non-recent pc (older core 2 duo and a older Radeon R7 260X, chrome on ubuntu 20.04) mainly to try and target a bottom end spec’d machine as I do a bit of webgl too, and things felt not too bad; given the framerate would have been than the average gaming pc spec, thought I’d mention whether its useful or not.
  • no issues with sound
#18

Super easy to get my pilot signed up and into the game play, that was great. I agree with some comments above that the WASD keys did not seem to do much at all. I did have some frame rate lag especially towards the middle when there were a lot of people playing. My biggest grievance was my dpi on my mouse was pretty high and I was jumping all over the screen at first, I think some warning of that could be helpful before game play. Ultimately really enjoyed it. Thanks!!

#19

Top 25 player results from playtest

Pos Player Name Shots Fired Shots Hit Accuracy Kills
1 @PsychoRomeo 155,552 88,407 56.8% 103
2 @Awesome 118,176 71,725 60.7% 70
3 @pazzo 106,528 31,087 29.2% 37
4 Jago 119,136 41,804 35.1% 32
5 @GM_Cerberus 59,360 32,950 55.5% 29
6 Sylvis 165,120 33,412 20.2% 26
7 @Moskauzer 139,200 30,813 22.1% 22
8 Zoomey Guy 108,032 22,228 20.6% 16
9 Nogrod 147,968 17,194 11.6% 15
10 @GM_thundercat 75,616 17,467 23.1% 11
11 Broseph Stalin 107,264 13,177 12.3% 10
12 @Regnadp 108,736 13,212 12.2% 9
13 Zangorian 25,152 8,589 34.1% 7
14 @GM_stormcrow 21,088 3,930 18.6% 4
15 DJ Josh in da house 56,736 4,081 7.2% 3
16 Eowan 184,000 5,522 3.0% 2
17 @Asvenger 94,432 5,119 5.4% 2
18 Simonascent 141,280 4,315 3.1% 2
19 DaKeyster 64,160 1,404 2.2% 2
20 oreo 28,416 2,279 8.0% 1
21 @kraik 18,880 2,094 11.1% 1
22 @ubluntu 78,272 3,188 4.1% 0
23 @CLI 107,712 2,637 2.4% 0
24 @Jejune 32,704 463 1.4% 0
25 King 83,008 448 0.5% 0
2 Likes
#20

Hey Garuluth,

Sorry to hear you had issues! TC will be in touch with you shortly to try and diagnose what that was about.

heh; we’re actually a tiny independent game company! We do, ofc, work closely with Microsoft on lots of things, from .NET to Service Fabric, but we’re not part of the MS group!

Hope we can sort out your control input issue, and hopefully see you next time.

Best,

SC