Show me the Showstoppers

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, we're really trying to focus on the critical bugs and whatnot, and we think we've fixed most of these, but we need y'all to tell us if anything is really a "this game isn't ready for release" issue or a "I'd rather play the SlimDX version" issue (those are more subjective, of course).  Please also make sure we know about things that are somewhat less serious than that level but still really negative for your enjoyment of the game (in the sense of something that used to be there in the SlimDX-version but is no longer, or something that is broken about some new feature we've added in the Unity version).

Of course, the bug tracker is the main place for this info, and any issue should either already be there or logged there when you can, but I'm looking for a "bird's-eye-view" of the situation rather than one-issue-specific stuff.

Anyway, as far as really-bad-mojo-stuff, currently we're aware of the following:

1) Out of memory crashes (I'm working on preventing those right now).
2) "Lost cursor" Crash when pulling up the OS Ctrl+Alt+Delete menu and then switching back to the game (we can't actually fix this without either Unity fixing OnApplicationPause to tell us when we've lost focus without our having to set Application.runsInBackground to false, which would break tons of stuff including alt+tab = immediate-network-disconnect).  Edit: my understanding is that this only actually crashes on 64-bit OS's, has anyone had it crash this way on a 32-bit OS?
3) Major imbalances in the game due to recent changes (we're working on that in increments, please feel free to highlight the particularly silly cases).

There's also the unknown-window-id crashes but those should really be fixed now

I'm probably forgetting a bunch of other stuff.  Anyway, please let me know, we want to get this thing release-ready

Edit: there's also the entirely-missing High Scores and Achievements windows.

[Mánagarmr]

My only show stopper at the moment is the threat at game start, which prevents me from playing past the first 5-15 minutes. My friend Timmy had some serious issues with the lost cursor error, but it went away on its own after a couple of tries.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, Chris and I both put in hours on the threat-at-game-start thing this morning and we really think that it's fixed in 3.716.  I ran several tests and saw no unintended threat blossoms at all, even an hour into the game.

Edit: please do let us know if you experience differently

Edit2: 3.716 is actually already out, to be clear.

[Mánagarmr]

Right, I actually replied before I saw there was a new release. I'll go over the 3.716 release and give it a spin.

I was also going to mention the "Lobby settings giving you the finger" bug that seems so random I can't nail it. Most of the time it works, but then all of a sudden you get a base game without expansions and with astro trains active (I turned these off), and this without touching anything.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, the stuff with the lobby settings is really weird, I haven't been able to reproduce any of those for a while.

[Mánagarmr]

Not a show stopper, per se, but not one you want in release: "Normal" ship caps does not function.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, make sure we know about those too.  I'm pretty sure that one is due to my fix in 3.716 to the bug that was preventing High from working at all, for many people.

[Giegue]

ship caps for swarming ships are all screwed up. ships like the auto minipod have a shipcap of 100 when some non-swarming ships have higher, like 132 or something.

[keith.lamothe]

Wow, that's weird.  Which specific non-swarming type?

[TechSY730]

I for one am sort of annoyed by the left modifiers and the right modifiers (like left-shift and right-shift) being treated separately. Although for many functions I use either the left or the right consistently, for other uses (particularly with fancy queuing of orders) I may use one side or the other based on what else I am doing.

I noticed one "hack" for this type of situation (Ctrl+number for assigning units to a team, one binding for left, one for right) but most commands don't have this. Can it be made such that the user can chose whether to have a left-modifier, right-modifier, or both?

I know this is minor, but I really miss that about the SlimDX version.

[Giegue]

Wow, that's weird.  Which specific non-swarming type?

alot of them, actually. the Raptors for example. I can't come up with enough of them though because I was looking at it from the new game screen and could only see the bonus ship caps. there are probably more, though. Don't you use some sort of math equation to shorten the shipcaps?

[keith.lamothe]

I for one am sort of annoyed by the left modifiers and the right modifiers (like left-shift and right-shift) being treated separately. Although for many functions I use either the left or the right consistently, for other uses (particularly with fancy queuing of orders) I may use one side or the other based on what else I am doing.

I noticed one "hack" for this type of situation (Ctrl+number for assigning units to a team, one binding for left, one for right) but most commands don't have this. Can it be made such that the user can chose whether to have a left-modifier, right-modifier, or both?

I know this is minor, but I really miss that about the SlimDX version.

I'm planning to add an interface toggle for telling it to treat left and right the same globally   Just hunting memory right now.

[orzelek]

This one is annoying:

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=558

I just checked and there is no error log txt file created in RuntimeData folder.

[TheMachineIsSentient]

Defect numbers from my list I would consider showstoppers:
 605, 609, 616


For an overall review, I have played this for a couple hours now using cheat codes because I don't want to invest 20 hours into a minor release of a beta...

My initial impression was, wow this is really slow. And I realized, I have the profiler set to insane. I didn't notice anything cool about setting it to insane, and going on to the big battles with it on makes everything feel sluggish. I am running a i7-930, 8 gb RAM, but when I checked my performance meter, it doesn't look like the game is able to access the other cores.  The memory usage on a large fight is about 1 GB, for 2000 ships of mine and five golems invading a planet with less than a couple hundred enemies.

Briefly, the engine doesn't take advantage of a beefy machine. I think it would perform better on a core two duo with a higher clock speed than a nehalem. My clock speed is about 3 GHz with turbo boost on (automatic overclocking). I don't think the last one did either, but it's a little more noticeable with the performance requirements of unity.

From interface standpoint, the explosions are pretty, and the force fields look awesome. I enjoy the new menus, the opening screen, but, I have one other reaction, and that is things felt a little "thick." If you look on the ship sidebar of the main gameplay screens, each of the borders are now glowing halo instead of the thinner lines of the last engine. Planetary names now have a circular halo around them that makes them even bigger than the font, which is also really big. It is so big, in fact, that it covers the units that are designed to guard wormholes. I opened a defect on this, but I was told it is an engine limitation. The message advising that "you lost" is incredibly huge, large and flashing, fitting the overall theme of everything getting thick graphically.

I am a little sad to see that the game is moving away from large space battles. We now have guardians, which I think an open some AI game mechanics worth seeing, but I did like having a giant space battles. I'm going to keep my old version of this game probably just for that reason alone, because everything felt more epic in scale. This game was never about high-tech graphics, and it still isn't, but I feel like we are losing a lot of the abilities of the older engine in favor of multiplatform capability. I understand that's the way we are going, but I haven't seen anything so far that you couldn't do in the last engine, except put it on a Macintosh. Your existing players, I'm not sure that unity offers anything for them that you couldn't do with the old engine. I haven't seen anything that makes me think, "wow, I'm glad unity is here, because now I can do x,y and z." That's all I'll say on that, I know there's a lot of excitement, so on with that... I think what I'm most excited about, is that we are hopefully going to get back to the gameplay mechanics themselves, new AI, new actual ways of playing, and all of this engine and UI stuff will just be the way we interact and no longer the focus like it is right now.

My other feedback exists in all of the entries in the bug tracker, will be awaiting new releases. When you talk about showstoppers, what you need most of all are the basic mechanics working, such as being able to move ships around, travel through wormholes, and able to control battles. I haven't seen anything really game breaking about controlling battles, but the first two are not ready yet, and that's something that would stop a release.

[lanstro]

I'm afraid that this bug report is going to be of little practical use for you since it's going to contain not much detail.  Recording and reporting bugs in detail wasn't high on our priority list at the time!  Though I imagine this is going to be one of the few multiplayer-based reports you'll be getting.

Me and my usual crew tried to play 3.175 last night and failed pretty hard.  The game crashed fairly often for us and the best run we had was about 40 minutes without crash.   all 4 of us crashed at various times (and generally speaking only one of us crashed at a time).  We quit after the 4th crash or so.  Descriptions of the issues we encountered follows (only one 'showstopper', rest are annoying but you can release the game with them):

1. Crashes: definite showstopper

The crashes all had the same characteristics: the screen would go all black, and the only thing that could be seen is the cursor.  The cursor could still be moved around, and you could still alt tab out of the game and close it with ctrl-alt-delete.  The other players would simply get 'Waiting for players...' until the crashed player rejoined.  The final straw for us was when I (the host) crashed, and we couldn't be bothered loading from an autosave.

The crash occurred most often right at the start of a game:  it took us about 3 goes to even get a game started since one or more of the non-hosts would crash during the file transmission phase of starting the game.

I was running Windows XP, the others all had Vista (not sure whether 32 bit or 64, I'm guessing 2 had 32 bit and one 64).  For one of the Vista guys, whenever he crashed an error log would pop up.  I think there was a null pointer exception for one of the crashes, and for another one of them there was something about failing to find coordinates for cursor.

If it helps, I attach my own error logs from last night.

2. Galaxy map messiness

We all play with permanent planet name labels on the galaxy map.  I'm afraid all the text positions in the galaxy maps are a mess and it's a lot less clear from a glance what's going on than it was in SlimDX.  A few issues:

a) the planet name labels are opaque and appear over all priority labels: so we can't tell where all the planets we labelled P1, P2 etc are because the planet name label overlaps the top half of the P1, P2, etc.  So we had to squint whenever we had to find our old priority labels.
b) the font for showing the number of ships on a planet, or knowledge gathered, etc etc, is too small (ie the numbers that pop up if you press 'q' or 'k' on the galaxy map).  It took some major squinting to see those.
c) the location of the planetary summary info box was quite bugged for me (not sure how it was for the other guys).  I've reported this in Mantis a few days ago already (which Chris saw), but in essence the way it'd show up for me was: whenever I moused over a planet, the planetary info would appear on the bottom left of screen (I gather this is intended).  However, a grey box of the same size would also appear next to my cursor.  This box was generally empty although occcasionally it'd have coloured symbols of things like force field generators, adv research stations, in the box, while the real planetary info box at the bottom left would just have a grey version of that symbol.  So it seems like the grey box appearing next to the cursor is meant to overlap in a transparent manner over the box appearing at the bottom left, but is failing to position itself properly.
d) perhaps it's just the above 3 issues, or maybe there were other display issues that we didn't notice, but the overall impression was that the galaxy map was very very unfinished.

3. Unable to gift resources?

The give resource option has been removed from the standard context menu.  We saw a keybinding for the give resource context menu, but whatever key we assigned that to, it didn't seem to work.

4. Ship colours in planet view

It just seemed harder to see who the ships belonged to: I think the coloured portions of the buildings/ships seemed smaller so everything looked generically dark when zoomed in.  Case in point: I was red, and trying to gift a set of power stations to my blue, orange and black allies.  Was harder to tell which ones I'd gifted already and which ones I still needed to gift since all of them looked blackish.

5. Very minor gripe: gift unit confirmation

The confirmation for whether you want to gift an ally a ship or not now requires you to click 'ok' instead of just pressying 'y'.  Pressing 'y' is actually taken to be 'no, I don't want to gift this'.

I'll add more as I remember the other issues.  When the crashes stop we'll try get a longer session going and comment on more 'gameplay' and balance elements of multiplayer.