A few hours in, and a couple thoughts.

[Sherlock]

Hi.  Been watching this game for a while, and I gotta say, it's worth the wait!  Thanks for coming out with yet another surprisingly fresh game.

I've got a couple little issues, seemingly related to targeting/mouse.  I'm not sure if it's intentional, but when i'm running, my character seems obsessed with firing upwards.  Also, I've been having some odd behaviour in placing ledges.  I was fighting a boss ( flying frost ball thing) and i was trying to get up to it.  I placed about 15 ledges, and only a couple showed up remotely near my character.  The rest seemed to vanish.  A bit later, once i'd beaten the boss, i climbed up and found a huge swarm of placed ledges up where it was lurking.  Were my ledges auto-targeting the boss, maybe?

As a side note for targeting, i'm finding it hard to hit low background objects with fire touch, such as quartz.

Also, a small feature request:  could an empty consumable stack still retain its place on the button bar?  Every time i refill my warp scrolls i have to drag them back to slot 9.

BTW, the point at which my ghosts teamed up for an assault on my town was one of the coolest moments I've seen for a while in a game.

(running in OSX 10.6, usually windowed)

[BobTheJanitor]

The platforms will appear at your mouse cursor, and not next to you, unless your cursor is there. Was the mouse across the screen when you were placing the platforms?

[Sherlock]

The platforms were placed about 3 screens up.  I had to do a lot of climbing to find 'em.

EDIT:  Doing some testing now.  In some places in a room, they land at my cursor.  In other places, they place a screen higher than they should.   Havent seen an occurrence of them placing lower than intended.   This happens when standing still or moving.

Are you supposed to be able to fire horizontally while running, or just upwards?

Yet another edit:
If I run and fire, it goes upwards sharply ( 70+ degrees).  If run, jump, land and continue running, it lets me fire horizontally until I stop.  This seems like unintentional behaviour, so I'll keep fiddling with it, in the off chance I can help with a bug fix.

Edited again:
I think I've got it... there's 2 different behaviours going on here.

Spell/item is bound to a mouse click: Normal behaviour unless running.  If running, the target is nearly always a screen higher than intended.  Platforms end up placed a screen up, and projectiles fire up at a sharp angle.  If you jump, land then continue running, targeting is normal until you stop.

Spell/item is bound to a number:  Volatile behaviour.  Spell/item often targets a screen higher, but not consistently so.  Proper collision detection is made so that platforms aren't placed within a solid object, so it's most likely bad mouse coordinates instead of bad world coordinates.

[BobTheJanitor]

That does sound like a mess. You should be able to fire in any direction while running, jumping, or whatever. I believe I heard that they were having some issues on OSX, so this may be related to that. Hopefully one of the devs happens by soon and is able to address it more completely.

[Sherlock]

Thanks for your time.  One last note... it seems related to simply having a key held down.  This could explain both behaviours.  I tried shooting while holding a useless key like [ or \ and the upward-shift in targeting occurred.

[x4000]

Welcome to the forums, and thanks for the feedback!

We are aware of an OSX-specific issue with targeting while holding any key down, etc.  We're definitely looking into it -- thanks for your patience!

[OobleckTheGreen]

A few observations, as I believe I may have been the person who originally noted this bug in the Tracker:

- Platforms always appear near the very top of a map, when summoned. I recently had a big boss fight in a tower where the room was about 3-4 stories high with ladders on the sides and a big open space in the middle. I tried summoning a few platforms so I could stand and fight the boss without getting overrun by the SkeleDwarfs (Mini Me's), but the platforms never appeared. After the fight, I wandered to the top of the room and there, in the center and about two character-lengths down from the ceiling, were all my platforms. This caused HUGE problems last night, as I had also run out of Teleport scrolls. Had it not been for bat form, I would have been royally screwed!

- The same thing happens with the summunable (is that a word?) orbs of light, with the exception that the orbs are subject to gravity. Casting the orb will definitely cause the room to light up (mysteriously, in many cases), however I've had many occasions where I found either (a) the orb laying on the surface ground, and I had summoned it while in an underground cavern, or; (b) the orb will fall down on my head from way up high. In both cases, the orb is appearing about 3 stories above my head (as are the platforms). Whether it holds position or falls seems to depend on the layout of the "ground" at the coordinates of its summoning.

Hopefully that is somewhat clear.

I am on a Mac, and am using the smallish (no keypad) Apple wireless keyboard and a Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000.

[tigersfan]

That sounds like it's related to the Mac issues that are being worked on right now. Hopefully for the next update, which should be tonight at the latest. Let me know if this is still an issue after that.

[OobleckTheGreen]

That sounds like it's related to the Mac issues that are being worked on right now. Hopefully for the next update, which should be tonight at the latest. Let me know if this is still an issue after that.

Tonight! Dang! How is it that you guys, a small independent company, can be so responsive when big developers selling big titles like Fallout New Vegas take a month to address bug fixes? By the way, fun as the Fallout series was, NV was so bug-ridden I finally just put it away.

Thanks for being so responsive. It's little details like that that will earn you the kind of respect developers like Obsidian wish they had.

[BobTheJanitor]

Tonight! Dang! How is it that you guys, a small independent company, can be so responsive when big developers selling big titles like Fallout New Vegas take a month to address bug fixes? By the way, fun as the Fallout series was, NV was so bug-ridden I finally just put it away.

Thanks for being so responsive. It's little details like that that will earn you the kind of respect developers like Obsidian wish they had.

I'm betting that Chris just never sleeps. He probably has an IV drip of Jolt cola hooked up at all hours, or something. During the most recent round of AI War betas it wasn't uncommon to see an update every other day, and sometimes multiple updates in the same day. It never gets old, though, to see such responsive action.

[tigersfan]

That sounds like it's related to the Mac issues that are being worked on right now. Hopefully for the next update, which should be tonight at the latest. Let me know if this is still an issue after that.

Tonight! Dang! How is it that you guys, a small independent company, can be so responsive when big developers selling big titles like Fallout New Vegas take a month to address bug fixes? By the way, fun as the Fallout series was, NV was so bug-ridden I finally just put it away.

Thanks for being so responsive. It's little details like that that will earn you the kind of respect developers like Obsidian wish they had.

Honestly, I think the fact that we're small helps us with the speed. We only have two programmers, and they are working on separate parts of the game. So, when I hear of a bug like this one, which is in Chris' area, I just make sure he knows that this needs to be fixed, and he fixes it. We don't need 4 hour meetings and a committee to decide if/when to fix something, we just do it.

That said, thank you. We try pretty hard to be responsive to the customers that think enough of us to spend their hard earned cash on our games.

[zebramatt]

Well that, and you actually have a user group who're pretty willing to log things in your issues tracker.

I spend a third of my time logging things for people who "don't have time" to do so themselves; and who spend a similar amount of time bitching at me to get them fixed. Not that I'm bitter 

[Sherlock]

These guys are simply awesome.  The last bug i reported ( in an early mac build of AI war, iirc ) was fixed within a day too.  Sure, being a lean company helps, but i'm sure it's mostly the being-awesome part.

Thank you.

[x4000]

Thanks for the support, guys -- right now we feel like we're actually running really slow because of being overloaded from all the commentary and feedback and such.  But we're still trying to keep up our general pace overall!

[Sherlock]

If it helps track the bug down, pressing a key on the strategic map causes it to move upwards until the mouse is wiggled, so the OSX problem isn't just during the platforming segments.