Alpha Test feedback Aug 29, 2020

[ubluntu]

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.

[Simona]

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.

[pazzo]

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.

[pazzo]

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

[LimitToInfinity]

• 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!

[kraik]

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

[CLI]

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!!

[GM_thundercat]

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

[GM_stormcrow]

@Garuluth

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.

Hey Garuluth,

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

@Garuluth

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.

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

[GM_stormcrow]

Hey PR!

@PsychoRomeo

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.

Hmm, sounds maybe related to the issue Garuluth had. TC will be in touch to try and diagnose the control input issue.

@PsychoRomeo

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.

Yep, ‘H’ to remove the HUD has always been there, and we’re aware it doesn’t cope well with death (you have to press tab, then ‘H’ to get the respawn page atm). This will be fixed shortly!

@PsychoRomeo

Did we get stats?

Should be some stats in this post!

Best,

SC

[GM_stormcrow]

@Moskauzer

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.

Welcome, Moskauzer!

Delighted everything worked smoothly for you.

You killed 22 (or so the stats tell me!) - hope to see you on the next playtest.

Best,

SC

[GM_stormcrow]

@DeathOfLuggage

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

Welcome, DoL

heh; yep the planet is actually part of the skybox, and is unreachable…

@DeathOfLuggage

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

All planets are flat! Not just in AoA, but in actual RL! I thought everyone knew that.

See you in the next playtest.

SC

[GM_stormcrow]

@Asvenger

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!

Heyya Asv,

Obv q - did you check spam folder for password reset mail? If it’s not there, please do let us know, and we can look into it further.

Glad you enjoyed the play and the gfx, and see you next time!

Best,

SC

[GM_thundercat]

@Garuluth

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.

Did you have a joystick or gamepad attached; looks like we may have a conflict where that seizes control overriding keyboard+mouse so will have to allow more cooperative control.

[GM_stormcrow]

@Regnadp

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.

Hey Regnadp,

Glad it was all smooth for you. Collision damage isn’t currently a feature, and we’re still having an internal debate on whether it should be, or not.

Target selection / lock and radar should hopefully be in the next playtest.

See you next time!

SC

[GM_stormcrow]

@ubluntu

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.

Glad you liked the extra controls. On the framerate side, is there any chance you could run (if you haven’t already) a dxdiag or similar, if - perchance - you’re not a Windows user and also a https://webglreport.com/?v=2 and send me both outputs? Either PM here or email to stormcrow@illyriad.co.uk

Many, many thanks in advance.

SC

[GM_stormcrow]

@Simona

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

Hey Simona,

LOL. I’m very glad that’s the case!

Thrilled you enjoyed it, and hope to see you next time round!

Best,

SC

[GM_stormcrow]

@pazzo

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.

Heyya pazzo,

Sshhh, don’t tell anybody… but simply hitting refresh (F5) on your browser will respawn you back in the centre of the map. Obv this is temporary, otherwise anyone losing a battle could simply disappear into the ether

@pazzo

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

Yes, yes you should have

See you next time!

SC

[GM_stormcrow]

@LimitToInfinity

• Game was fun!

Glad you enjoyed it, LTI!

@LimitToInfinity

• 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?

heh, we haven’t turned LOCD (Large Object Collision Detection) on right now, as it’s easier to test without. However, you can tell we’re actually doing the detection by the bullet ricochets off the space stations etc. We’re just not bouncing you off them and/or inflicting collision damage - at the moment.

@LimitToInfinity

• The WASD controls did so little. Should I be able to strafe more?

WASD/strafe are dependent on the particular ship hull. Different ship hulls, and different modules applied to any particular ship loadout, will have different modifiers to elements such as spatial translations etc. So - in the future - if you want more strafe translation - there’ll be things to fit your ship with (at, ofc, the opportunity cost of other module slots).

@LimitToInfinity

• 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.

By scrollbar, I think you mean mousewheel?! If so, glad you liked it!

@LimitToInfinity

• B button was a little far from the WASD controls to be comfortable.

We’re certainly going to allow players their own keybindings in the future.

@LimitToInfinity

• It would be nice to have the rolling get faster the more you hold down Q or E (for future versions)

We don’t currently have inertia turned on; as things are right now, you can come to a full stop on a dime. This is actually a much better test of the systems in terms of interpolating positional data. Inertia can be used to hide a multitude of server-sync issues (much like wind-up animations in most other MMOs), and so we’re deliberately running without inertia atm. However, inertia is certainly going to be added to all ships in the future (eg a massive cargo carrier shouldn’t have the same 0-60km/h as an interceptor!).

@LimitToInfinity

• The visual representation of your movement at the bottom is awesome!
• Overall fun experience. Thanks for the open play test!

Really glad you enjoyed it, and really look forward to seeing you next time!

SC

[GM_stormcrow]

@kraik

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

Heyya kraik,

Thanks v much for playing, and for your feedback.

Delighted it ran smooth enough for you. We will be adding specific directional indicators for incoming fire, so you know from which direction you’re being hit.

Fab that it ran OK on a reasonably old-ish spec box. Any data you might have collected (or can in the future) on framerate etc would be super-useful.

See you next time!

SC