Alpha Test Feedback Aug 8 2015

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

Scores

http://player.ageofascent.com/Home/Scores/2015-08-08/

Release Notes

  • In honour of New Horizons’ successful mission, Pluto & Charon adorn this test!
  • Faster end of match score collation
  • Free-for-All (FFA) - all ships are hostile
  • Complete overhaul of the webserver layer for speed (this is the new critical element that we’re all testing this time!)
  • Webserver IO is now (possibly) the fastest out there like-for-like, please see here for details
  • Everyone is on Dual Pulse Cannon weapon-type
  • Next playtest after this one will be in four weeks (September 5th)

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!

I ended up withdrawing from the test because my ping was terrible. My ISPs fault, I’m glad to say. But if you saw me jumping around the place, that’s very much my fault.

ofc, in the fuller game we have to reverse it so that people with terrible (localised) pings get affected by rubber-banding, rather than everyone around them!

Hope everyone else had fun - and don’t base your new webserver tech experience on what was happening to my ship!

Regards,

SC

From what I could tell, 15+ is around the right number until it start to get too chaotic to survive. Tests being, staying around the main group at the start, until that is, I had to flee, and shooting when there where 10 people around near the end of the match.

No lag.

No appearance of the mysterious FTL fighter.

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Absolutely gutted. Can’t believe that half an hour went so quickly and it’s a month before I can do that again. Great fun to play against the others.

I am a complete n00b at this. I’ve not played a space fighter game since Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64). I was intrigued after the post on HN a little while ago, went to the homepage, watched the video and have been itching to play this since.

I have been stranded away from home so I don’t have my usual desk with gaming mousepad and stuff. I also forgot to switch my VPN connection off (so probably +10ms latency), but I didn’t notice any latency at all anyway. Crappy UK ISP (Talktalk) and WiFi, but everything felt instant and smooth.

Surprised by how playable this is on a first gen i5 laptop. It wasn’t just playable, but it was additively playable. i5 520M (using HD Graphics), 8G, SSD, Chrome, 7x64.

I appreciate why it says desktop, keyboard and mouse. Rapidly discovered that I was not going to shoot anything or fly in any kind of willful direction with my touchpad or ThinkPad nipple thing. Probably a good mouse and a keyboard with NKRO would have been a better idea for me.

I think I need the reticle thing to auto-recenter. Either “moving the reticle by x changes my direction by x”, or lifting my finger from the touchpad resets the reticle position. Manually recentering was a nightmare while trying to dodge and fly and shoot. I was overcompensating and lose my bearings. It might be playable for someone that knows what they’re doing, but I was out of my depth.

With auto-recenter, I think it would be easy for me as a complete novice to pick up and play on a touchpad without any other changes. I’ll hopefully be jumping in with a mouse next time, but being playable with a touchpad eventually would make me far more likely to jump in more frequently.

I ended up switching off the mouse flying mode and just using the keyboard. It was much easier. I started killing more and sucking less. I couldn’t figure out how to strafe while in keyboard mode though.

I fear if there were more players, I’d get slaughtered too quickly. A lot of my kills had a large element of luck to them, so I think roughly the number of players we had was best for me to start off with. The buzz from first kill has me hooked.

Also I was very glad that you’d turned on “no clip” or whatever it’s called, because I’d rapidly have suicided more than I killed. Initially I was moving around in space like frog riding a bottle rocket. (I wasn’t a whole lot better by the end of the half hour, but I could follow and shoot.)

Overall: Excellent fun. When the NPCs all dropped in, it was how I imagine being in BSG must feel. And just dogfighting between a small group of other players was a blast.

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I agree; though we do have to bear in mind that this is with everyone in reasonably hard-hitting mid-end (speed-wise) ships, and all-vs-all… When people starting breaking into 2-way, 3-way squads, fleets etc it’ll probably all get thrown up in the air again.

Delighted to have you with us, Nexxxeh! Really glad you made it and enjoyed it.

Excellent to know you didn’t experience lag at all, even with VPN switched on (and you were actually going a two-way transatlantic for this test).

We definitely have to improve the navigational options (including target lock). We’re also considering having some element of gun auto-gimbal when close to on-center; this is to help cater for the gamepad and touch-API players who have significantly less control than mouse-players. There are a number of elements here that we need to consider, though (for example, is it penalising the more skilled mouse-sensitive players to do so - and should we introduce different gun mounts ie gimballed with some auto-track, but less ‘hitting power’ and non-gimballed that requires more accuracy but hits harder).

A and D

It will come back on :slight_smile: But without catastrophic damage; more bounce.

Really glad to get your feedback: many, many thanks!

Regards,

SC

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Thanks! Although is strafe still A and D when on keyboard mode? It felt more like it was the equivalent of moving the mouse left and right, rather than strafing. But I was struggling to fly, like a small baby bird suddenly finding it’s wings have rockets attached. I might have been wrong.

You are correct that with mouse flight off A and D become turn rather than strafe; however we are planning on having fully assignable keyboard/controller/joystick mappings; which will be associated with your account and nameable.

For example you could have a “combat mode”, “mining mode”, “escape mode”, “pursuit mode”, “trackpad mode” etc and switch between your chosen mappings while flying depending on how your circumstances change; which should help with this - even if you ever just use one mode and are just changing defaults.

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Oops. :blush: My bad.

Listen to Thundercat. Thundercat is good. Thundercat is wise.

He also codes all the flight controls, so he knows what he’s talking about.

SC

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Unfortunately i was not able to make this test! But i am very interested to hear it was about Pluto and Charon! So i was hoping someone had some screenshots? I would really love to see a few :smiley:

Anyway i will try to make the next one, also happy to hear you are aboard Nexxxeh!