Alpha test feedback Sept 6, 2014

events
#1

Continuing the discussion from Alpha test feedback August 23rd, 2014:

Join us at www.ageofascent.com for a 30 min playtest Saturday, Sept 6, 2014 at 8pm UTC, 3pm Central US, 4pm East US, 9pm UK

Scores

http://player.ageofascent.com/Home/Scores/2014-09-06/

Release Notes

  • Stripped down and rebuilt the game and forums from our dev environment to a more permanent production environment.
  • We’ve done a soak test of the new environment with NPCs of 46,996,068,196 ship messages and 128,306 kills and deaths
  • Today we want to know if it is set up right and this works with actual players
  • The game upgrade will allow us to begin building the wider persistent world of Age of Ascent
  • The forum upgrade will allow us to do more interesting and involving community participation in the near future - stay tuned!
  • Hopefully mouselock will be in the game later today, however we are still testing it.

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 August 23rd, 2014
Alpha test feedback Oct 4, 2014
#2

So excited for a persistent AoA world! See you all in three hours.

#3

Mouse/pointer lock is in for this week, when you are in mouseflight - however its still needs some refinement

#4

Wow, sorry if you were on the red team there! Seemed a little unbalanced!

#5

Yehaw! 67 kills, 0 deaths! Unfortunately this time odds were stacked against the red team, leaving poor GM Thundercat and ubuntu to take brunt of the blue team’s assault, and they both performed admirably with some pretty impressive evasive maneuvers. I noticed that stormcrow didn’t make an appearance this match.

As much as I like the mouse mode, it’s also kind of… cheater. Although turn speed isn’t different, the ship locking to the mouse enables far more precision than the mouse free method where the ship would turn to the mouse. Ultimately the latter requires more movement to get the kinds of maneuvering that the locked mouse gets. I feel that under most circumstances, any ship that doesn’t take advantage of precision like that will be at a serious disadvantage.

However that’s not to say I didn’t absolutely love the new mechanic. For the first time in a long time I got an accuracy accolade. GM Thundercat seemed to really know what’s going on, beating me in straightforward dogfights. My mouse situation is that I don’t have a ton of room for pitch controls, and I had to constantly roll to bring him into a yaw angle, while trying to manage my strafe direction and speed. Ultimately it was too much for me, and I had to boost out to break up the dogfight so I could get a firing solution. Note to self, buy a trackball.

As far as the infrastructure rework, I didn’t notice anything different, which I guess is a good thing right? There were some laggy ships here and there but nothing too far out of the ordinary.

While bot ships are shooting and doing some basic turns, I don’t think they’re doing much more than kind of wandering aimlessly yet.

So, with the mention of persistent world, what will be the development and testing plans for that? Can we expect to be logged into the world of AoA before the end of the year? Or will the 30 minute playtests continue for a while longer?

#6

Great test this week, the game felt very smooth and responsive. Beyond some disagreements I had with the controls it was a lot of fun.

I was very happy with how well the mouse lock worked, however disabling the keyboard buttons for up, down, left, & right made it difficult to use, but still preferable to mousing out of the window(dual screen) and loosing control entirely.

A few times while in mouse flight it stopped responding to mouse movements. Switching between control modes(pressing enter twice) seemed to restore mouse control most the time(the other times It worked after respawn).

Alpha test feedback Oct 4, 2014
#7

Video is rendering and I’ll try to have it up on youtube tonight. Kinda cool news, the capture software captured my mouse even though I didn’t see it on my screen.

#8

[quote=“PsychoRomeo, post:5, topic:213”]
leaving poor GM Thundercat and ubuntu to take brunt of the blue team’s assault, and they both performed admirably with some pretty impressive evasive maneuvers. I noticed that stormcrow didn’t make an appearance this match.
[/quote]I had to switch teams (via constant refreshing) to try to balance the teams; alas I’m not very good :slight_smile: Stormcrow was speaking at Cloud Gaming USA so couldn’t attend.

I think, and this is tentative, we are going to break the mouse lock from the ship control. This will mean the mouse will instantly move - look style, and the ship will drift to match as fast as it can. This is important for a couple reasons:

  • As the mouse is currently capped excessive movement is just absorbed and it doesn’t feel very responsive
  • Meaning in order to do turns with a slow turn speed you have to keep repositioning your mouse
  • This will only get worse with larger less manoeuvrable ships
  • Manning a captial ship turrent (way way in the future) would need this kind of mechanic anyway
  • Will also mean we can do things like camera shake and other effects

Do you feel this approach would work better, or was it mostly the mouse stopping responding to movement that was the issue?

[quote=“PsychoRomeo, post:5, topic:213”]
As far as the infrastructure rework, I didn’t notice anything different, which I guess is a good thing right?
[/quote]Hurrah, though a bit anti-climatic; we did hold back a some changes to make sure if something did go wrong it wasn’t ambiguous where the issue lay.

How did you know :wink:

#9

I’m having a dilemma with the audio. For whatever reason, the audio file is about a second shorter than the video file. This is fine at first, but by the end of the video, all the audio is playing a whole second early.

The logical solution is to speed up the video or slow down the audio clip. Unfortunately, a 1% change in either of these is about 20 seconds, and that’s the smallest denomination I have to work with with my software :\

So still working on it…

Edit: Found the culprit. About ten minutes in, it got really choppy for about two minutes and something somewhere got probably got lost, but there’s a very noticeable one second dissonance between the audio and video. Chopped out the choppy bit and nudged the audio back into alignment, and everything’s golden again. Re-rendering and will upload overnight.

#10

Very interested to see what that looks like from the other-side as I was doing some crazy stuff!

Didn’t seem to increase my survivability much though XD

#11

Yay.

#12

Wow, lots of concentrated fire going on, streams of bullets from 3 - 4 ships at times

#13

This weekends patch notes: Alpha test feedback Sept 20, 2014