Okay, wall-o-text is really not my preferred feedback format, but hey. Some various responses, and also noted:
* Fixed an issue where we did not actually allow players to rebind the zoom keys or the first/third person toggle buttons, to our surprise. No wonder nobody knew it's the F key!
Responses:
1. Yes, lots of closed doors. Thanks for the kind words on teh graphics.
2. Smash doors rather than having them just open, heh. They do open, but why let them?
3. The turn rate on the raptor is for the sake of navigation in small places, not for the sake of realism. On WASD it's impossible to control her if the turn rate is too high, because then you can only go cardinal and ordinal directions without turning the mouse. If the option for a turn rate adjustment slider is something you want, that would be a good thing to throw in mantis.
4. The alleys and a few of the other places are sparsely decorated at the moment, yes, because we're still getting more objects set up for them. In the case of one of the really giant rooms, you're meant to be facing a miniboss there, hence the extra room.
5. The cicadabots way up out of reach are by design. You don't have to fight them to get through the level.
6. There are not many fracture algorithms out there that can be run in realtime in particular. We're using voroni fracturing, which has to be run on a secondary thread as it is. Potentially we could get into softbody deformations with some things instead of them fracturing, but that strikes me as a very ancillary nice-to-have thing versus core gameplay additions. It would be nice, but I think that it has to come far later in the process if there's a lot of pickup of the game, because otherwise we lose the audience in the meantime.
7. Robots that are alerted are going to be on the minimap. That will make it so that you can find them.
8. I'm not a fan of timed search periods and giving up except in games where the searchers are infinitely generated (police in GTA). It's too easy to just go hide and sit around, which is really annoying. The other thing that would be absolutely game-breaking with that if robots ever gave up is that you just run to the end of the level past all the robots, and if you're fast enough you outpace them and they all give up and you win without ever fighting them.
9. The dead ends and whatnot are for tactical situations with robots that don't yet exist, and for places where there will be goodies to find.
10. Robots do not roam between chunks, but they do roam within rooms. For performance reasons, their AI and so on is disabled when you are not in the same chunk as them anymore. We have complex waypointing capabilities and other tools that we are not making good use of yet but that I spent a lot of time on. Having the ability to hide from robots in nooks and crannies is very much a design goal of mine. I particularly want to have some enemies designed around that. We have a ton of enemy designs that are not implemented yet.
11. Glad performance was okay in general. If you have a chance to take a picture of the one room that is so problematic, that would be appreciated. I have a feeling I know which one you're referring to, but I'm not positive. If you look in your PlayerData folder in your game folder, there is an InfoLog.txt file that should have the seed you were playing on. I could duplicate the issue from that, as well. It may be that it was not a problem with the room, but rather was causing too many chunks to be active at once because of the way raycasting currently activates them. I have a less-naive approach to raycasting that will cut down a lot on raycasts (which are presently about 40% of the non-graphics load) as well as being more accurate.
Cheers!
Chris
