Alpha test feedback Jan 24, 2015

Continuing the discussion from Alpha test feedback Jan 10, 2015:

Join us at www.ageofascent.com for a 30 min playtest Saturday, 24th January, 2015 at 2pm Central US, 3pm East US, 8pm UK/GMT

Scores

http://player.ageofascent.com/Home/Scores/2015-01-24/

Release Notes

  • Jupiter and Europa await
  • Resolved some total score glitches
  • Slight regression while investigating Chrome performance issues

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!

Awesome test today, the mouse lock flight mode seems to be working great now, no problems there. Chrome(40.0.2214.91) crashed about 3 times, but after reloading it worked fine.

Yeah, I had a Chrome crash too. Quick recovery, and I was glad to see it didn’t reset my stats for this session.

I like the control and sensitivity. This is my 3rd run and I seem to be good enough to make the score as follows. I’ll have to be sure to rejoin earlier next time.

I would like to see ships blow up faster. With all the complexity of a ship or fighter, you’d think they’d break apart pretty easily.

I ran this test on an ASUS Chromebox.

Weirdly, I didn’t get any crashes, and it was in the 45 to 60 fps range for the first 20 minutes. Then I’d hazard a guess it had a Garbage Collection blowout, and started stuttering (unplayably) badly. Closing and reopening the browser instantly fixed it all the way to the end of the test.

Details as follows:

Version 39.0.2171.85 (64-bit)
Platform 6310.48.0 (Official Build) stable-channel panther
Firmware Google_Panther.4920.24.25
WebKit 537.36 (@185325)
V8 3.29.88.17
User Agent - Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 6310.48.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.85 Safari/537.36

Holy cow… Red got slaughtered today. I think at one point we were fighting a 5v12.

I didn’t see Awesome on today so I tried to go for an immortal match. I was doing really well, and then, mid dogfight with GM Cerberus, the red numbers started to dwindle. Alas I succumbed. And again. And again.

The strategy I used was a selfish one, but it at least got some kills on the board. I would boost through the (blue with a splash of red) soup, pick up a tail or two, and lead them far away from the battle before turning to engage. I made sure to take a few hits every few seconds just so they’d keep interest. This strategy worked very well, I lead quite a few victims to their death this way.

I’m glad to see a new face - Fry - do really well. I hope he comes back for the next week so I can catch him on a more even playing field.

And jeez - 76 assists for Mellificient. I wonder if player count affects the number of assists. I assume that a team with more players would ultimately have more assists per player. Sorry for picking on you by the way. Mellificient, Fry, ubluntu, and taos3 account for two thirds of my kills.

Speaking of which, I seriously doubt I scored a 20x streak and a 10x streak with only 33 kills and 3 deaths. I’ll verify in the video, which will be up tomorrow sometime.

A lot of people mention issues with chrome, but I’ve not had any.

I noticed some new music, but not a lot else.

I kind of think that hitting the boost should light you up a little more. Kind of like how some people enter comet mode and streak across the field.

Aside: I keep forgetting to log in. It seems that you don’t advertise in Freenode’s #bbg as far as I can see. Is it possible to set up some sort of email alert system for those who are interested, for the alpha tests?

Video uploaded!

Ok looks like there is a performance issue in Chrome, so I’ll pull the “not my code” card for the moment on this one: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=451670 also https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=422000

I watched this vid. - Looks pretty good. The ships seemed easier to ID. - I do have 1 observation, tho’ - What’s with the red flashes in the space background? - It kind of distracts you from your target, and also makes the Red Text on-screen in the HUD disappear - or overwhelms it. I Dunno whether it’s supposed to be an explosion effect or reflection effect, but whatever your intention, it’s too distracting. It interferes with the pilot’s ability to see. A real engineer would have come up with a screen or glass/transparency filter to overcome such a distraction. - We already have such filters today. – Otherwise, it’s generally getting better.

I assume you’re talking about the flash of red when you take damage? I have to disagree, I don’t find it overly distracting at all.

It’s really important to nail down that color and sound association. Getting hit means bad. It’s an alert, it should be a little intrusive.

You might not need such an alert, but I bet a lot of less… attune players might need a little help when it comes to basic space combat…

This week’s test Alpha test feedback Feb 7, 2015