Author Topic: Augmented Alpha feedback  (Read 96306 times)

Offline Logorouge

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #135 on: October 14, 2017, 07:12:15 pm »
Since I'll be mostly focusing on making rooms for a while, I thought I should post the expansion-specific lines I still had in my notes.

-Sentry Deathsphere Miniboss: Needs much more HP. Lasted mere seconds against a build that wasn't focused on damage. Too many glass breakables.

-Pinwheel enemy: Add visual cue before laser beam.

-Reanimator boss: Very unique boss, I like it a lot, but the few times when the boss goes transparent and rapidly flies around, I don't think it should do contact damage. And once the boss is dead, is it really necessary to make the player do the minions cleanup job?

Questions:
-If you use the time machine consumable, can you change a normal floor into a golden one and vice versa?

-Is it just me or does the sound overload where the game goes silent happens pretty often now?

-Is this the correct current boss distribution for the expansion? (Just making sure before I go into details)

Floor 1: Meridian, Rive
Floor 2: Circuit Rondure, Meridian, Rive
Floor 3: Circuit Rondure, Pandemonium
Floor 4: Circuit Rondure, Pandemonium, Reanimator*
Floor 5: Warden
Floor 6: Recast, Nova, Carrion Engine, Javelin*, Pandemonium, Reanimator*
Floor 7: Terminus

The rest of the feedback and suggestions were mostly about the base game, so I skipped those for now.

Edit:
-Proteus enemy: After being damaged, sometimes doesn't disappear (shrink?) and run around in a panic for a while. I don't think the panic part is supposed to be seen.

Edit2:
-Multitude enemy: Showed up on a non-golden floor 2. That was weird.
« Last Edit: October 15, 2017, 09:11:40 am by Logorouge »

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #136 on: October 15, 2017, 01:22:11 pm »
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-Sentry Deathsphere Miniboss: Needs much more HP. Lasted mere seconds against a build that wasn't focused on damage. Too many glass breakables.

I've more than doubled the HP on that, thanks. Hopefully that does the trick. I also reduced the amount of glass breakables in the room.

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Pinwheel enemy: Add visual cue before laser beam.

I've added one using cue_non_sim_patterns, which I should probably use more. The one flaw is that rarely, if you are on the edge of the enemy's range, the visual cue will appear but if you quickly push out of the enemy range then that attack gets stored up as a kind of surprise attack. It's kind of half bug, half feature. I'm not quite sure on that behaviour. If I can find a solution I will probably use it, but then again, maybe having a rare almost surprise attack works.

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-Reanimator boss: Very unique boss, I like it a lot, but the few times when the boss goes transparent and rapidly flies around, I don't think it should do contact damage. And once the boss is dead, is it really necessary to make the player do the minions cleanup job?

That's Ptarth work...hence the unique craziness, heh. For the contact damage, it's actually super tricky to have enemies with contact boxes that change size, or switch off and on since there's no Hitbox or Collision box modifier. I have set up things like this for the Proteus (Evaporater) enemy, but it involves creating fake contact damage systems and stuff and can get complicated. In this case, I'm not sure it's worth it to go that route. For the moment, I've reduced the size of the contact box on that phase significantly -- it was a bit big actually -- so that it is more comparable to the size of the trail that is being left behind. Given that the trail is there, having a bit of a contact box seems fine to me since you could just get damaged by the trail anyway. The other option is to remove the contact damage for that phase entirely, including when the enemy lands and stops doing its crazy flying behaviour.

As for the minion cleanup, there was a cleanup system in place, but it wasn't doing the job due to the multiple phases of the zombies. I had noticed this before, but I was thinking that if the Reanimator was the last floor boss it wouldn't matter since the game would end anyway; however, it is better to just address this so I've put in different cleanup system that seems to do the job. I'm not sure which floor the Reanimator is meant to spawn at.

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-If you use the time machine consumable, can you change a normal floor into a golden one and vice versa?

I just tested this and yep, you can go from normal to gold and vice versa.

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-Is it just me or does the sound overload where the game goes silent happens pretty often now?

That is mostly down to one specific enemy, the Wave Blaster, causing problems. I'm hoping for an engine tweak to help with this issue. Specifically, a version of min_ms_between_shot_fired_sounds for use with sounds_to_pick_from_when_action_starts. Additionally, the audio engine might also be getting an upgrade based on the new AI War sound system. Hopefully!

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-Proteus enemy: After being damaged, sometimes doesn't disappear (shrink?) and run around in a panic for a while. I don't think the panic part is supposed to be seen.

Yeah, the amount of little problems I've had with this enemy has been crazy. I've fixed most of them, but there's always something else. I'm kind of hoping that this behaviour is so rare that it is acceptable, and it just seems like an enemy quirk. If not, I can try to fix it, but I may just have to remove the enemy if that's not possible.

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #137 on: October 16, 2017, 09:20:31 pm »
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On a side note, anyone want to try their hand at making a sniper-type enemy?  Would like to get another one in there but I blanked out for ideas.  I've found it to be kinda a hard category to design for.

I've just done another sniper enemy, for the most part. Just needs a bit more testing and variants. If you blank out on any other enemy categories, just tell me and I'll see what I can do. Generally, I'm not looking at creating any more enemies, though. Oh, on that note, we'll forget about spawnee enemies. We need to half overhaul the whole spawner/spawnee gameplay at some stage, I think. We should just not be creating spawner rooms for the expansion, I think. We can take a look at the whole spawner situation at a later date.

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #138 on: October 21, 2017, 01:14:50 pm »
A few miscellaneous questions.

1) One thing I've noticed is that all the new mechs have exactly 100 energy which seems a bit boring. Any thoughts on tweaks for these numbers for each mech, to vary things up a bit.

2) Is it universally understood what a Gunge Gun is? Or is gunge more of a british term? Should that be renamed to Slime Pump?

3) This is for Logo and perhaps Keith if he's reading, but I've noticed that the Roulette has a problem. Due to the perks for that mech being completely randomized, each level the number of perks that the engine has to choose from is large which seems to be causing performance problems. For Keith, I wonder is there a way to improve the performance of that? For Logo, if not, then how are we going to fix that? The only non-engine solution I can see is perhaps removing all variant perks. So, by having only the medium health boost rather than small, medium, and large. This should reduce the amount of perks significantly, hopefully to a level which the engine doesn't struggle with. That's not ideal as I like the completely random approach with full perk lists, myself, though.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #139 on: October 21, 2017, 01:37:15 pm »
Due to the perks for that mech being completely randomized, each level the number of perks that the engine has to choose from is large which seems to be causing performance problems.
You mean it's slow right when the player gains enough xp for the level up? As in, in that moment? Or is it at the moment that the player opens the level-up screen? Or is ongoing from one point to another? Or what?
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Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #140 on: October 21, 2017, 01:46:09 pm »
Due to the perks for that mech being completely randomized, each level the number of perks that the engine has to choose from is large which seems to be causing performance problems.
You mean it's slow right when the player gains enough xp for the level up? As in, in that moment? Or is it at the moment that the player opens the level-up screen? Or is ongoing from one point to another? Or what?

The moment when you open the level-up screen. As soon as you open it up, moving the cursor around becomes laggy and stuttery and stays that way as long as the level up screen is open. I'm assuming that has something to do with the quantity of perks that are being processed as the performance hit only occurs with the Roulette mech.

Offline Logorouge

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #141 on: October 21, 2017, 02:50:49 pm »
The moment when you open the level-up screen. As soon as you open it up, moving the cursor around becomes laggy and stuttery and stays that way as long as the level up screen is open. I'm assuming that has something to do with the quantity of perks that are being processed as the performance hit only occurs with the Roulette mech.
I never noticed before, but there is definitely a significant fps hit while on the levelup screen for Roulette. For me it's about a 10fps loss, but it varies quite a bit. "Unstable prototype" was more fitting than I intended...

I took a little bit to think about it: Although I'm still pissed I never even noticed this problem all this time and it's certainly not ideal in principle, isn't it the most harmless performance problem possible? Considering it's limited to an out-of-combat only screen, while the game is reduced to clicking one of three big buttons, the gameplay impact of that issue is pretty close to non-existent. On the other hand, using your solution as an example (which is also the only one I could think of), diminishing the number of perks with variants would greatly reduce the probability of getting HP/Energy/Missiles at levelup and cause the increased probability of getting the other perks. I can guarantee the gameplay impact of that would be an overall more miserable experience for the player.

Of course, I'm looking at the problem from a strictly gameplay perspective while trying to protect the core of my mech, which might not be the proper way to do this. sigh

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #142 on: October 21, 2017, 03:28:25 pm »
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I never noticed before, but there is definitely a significant fps hit while on the levelup screen for Roulette. For me it's about a 10fps loss, but it varies quite a bit. "Unstable prototype" was more fitting than I intended...

Is mouse movement still smooth for you? For me things become super laggy, making perk selection a bit awkward.

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I took a little bit to think about it: Although I'm still pissed I never even noticed this problem all this time and it's certainly not ideal in principle, isn't it the most harmless performance problem possible? Considering it's limited to an out-of-combat only screen, while the game is reduced to clicking one of three big buttons, the gameplay impact of that issue is pretty close to non-existent. On the other hand, using your solution as an example (which is also the only one I could think of), diminishing the number of perks with variants would greatly reduce the probability of getting HP/Energy/Missiles at levelup and cause the increased probability of getting the other perks. I can guarantee the gameplay impact of that would be an overall more miserable experience for the player.

It is quite harmless but also very noticeable for me.  However, maybe that's just a quirk of my pc setup. If so, then maybe we can get away with the performance hit. More feedback from more users on how noticeable the issue is would be useful.

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Of course, I'm looking at the problem from a strictly gameplay perspective while trying to protect the core of my mech, which might not be the proper way to do this. sigh

Yeah, I'm thinking that reducing the amount of variants should be a last resort type solution.

Offline Logorouge

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #143 on: October 21, 2017, 03:43:25 pm »
Is mouse movement still smooth for you? For me things become super laggy, making perk selection a bit awkward.
It's still smooth for me, not perfectly so, but if you haven't mentioned it I doubt I would have noticed. I ended up using Fraps to be sure.

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #144 on: October 21, 2017, 04:02:43 pm »
Is mouse movement still smooth for you? For me things become super laggy, making perk selection a bit awkward.
It's still smooth for me, not perfectly so, but if you haven't mentioned it I doubt I would have noticed. I ended up using Fraps to be sure.

Hmmm, interesting. Then maybe it's not quite as severe a problem as I thought. For me it's very very noticeable. Maybe it's something that we just need to keep an eye on then.

Offline Logorouge

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #145 on: October 21, 2017, 04:52:57 pm »
1) One thing I've noticed is that all the new mechs have exactly 100 energy which seems a bit boring. Any thoughts on tweaks for these numbers for each mech, to vary things up a bit.
Here's my take on it:

In its current form, Roulette could start with less energy. Anything between 60 and 90 would be fine. Levelups are generous enough to compensate anyway.
Zephyr already has a strong start, so a slightly lower starting energy reserve shouldn't cause problem. 80 maybe?
For the Warhog, I think 50 and 100 would be the only values that wouldn't feel weird due to its secondary.
The Paladin's shield eats away energy so fast, I'm not sure it should have less than the standard value.
And finally, Penumbra kinda needs its full offensive potential to counter-balance the super harsh start (defense-wise).

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #146 on: October 22, 2017, 11:29:20 am »
1) One thing I've noticed is that all the new mechs have exactly 100 energy which seems a bit boring. Any thoughts on tweaks for these numbers for each mech, to vary things up a bit.
Here's my take on it:

In its current form, Roulette could start with less energy. Anything between 60 and 90 would be fine. Levelups are generous enough to compensate anyway.
Zephyr already has a strong start, so a slightly lower starting energy reserve shouldn't cause problem. 80 maybe?
For the Warhog, I think 50 and 100 would be the only values that wouldn't feel weird due to its secondary.
The Paladin's shield eats away energy so fast, I'm not sure it should have less than the standard value.
And finally, Penumbra kinda needs its full offensive potential to counter-balance the super harsh start (defense-wise).

Sounds good. Adjusted the Roulette to 60 and the Zephyr to 80. The others I've left at 100. We could boost the Penumbra to 120 or something, though, I guess. I'm also considering whether having the Zephyr's energy capacity also drain over time might work.

Offline Logorouge

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #147 on: October 22, 2017, 09:53:19 pm »
Hmmm, interesting. Then maybe it's not quite as severe a problem as I thought. For me it's very very noticeable. Maybe it's something that we just need to keep an eye on then.
It just occurred to me that I could check back on Ethervil's LP with Roulette for that levelup issue. Luckily he records at 60fps and has the habit of circling the perks as he chooses. No visible lag or stutter for him. His game seems to be smoother than mine actually. It's a good sign, but I'll be more reassured once I hear about the performances of a few more players.

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #148 on: October 24, 2017, 11:40:00 am »
Hmmm, interesting. Then maybe it's not quite as severe a problem as I thought. For me it's very very noticeable. Maybe it's something that we just need to keep an eye on then.
It just occurred to me that I could check back on Ethervil's LP with Roulette for that levelup issue. Luckily he records at 60fps and has the habit of circling the perks as he chooses. No visible lag or stutter for him. His game seems to be smoother than mine actually. It's a good sign, but I'll be more reassured once I hear about the performances of a few more players.

Yeah, we'll see if we get any reports back on this during the Beta. Hopefully not, and it's mostly just a problem with my current setup.

Offline Logorouge

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Re: Augmented Alpha feedback
« Reply #149 on: October 25, 2017, 06:21:14 pm »
2 quick things that stick out lately:

-Popcorn enemies giving no XP. That doesn't feel right. They're not infinitely spawning fodder, but you still have to kill a few dozen of them from time to time and now you get nothing for it. That's kinda frustrating. Maybe they should give less XP than other regular enemies, but I still think they're enough of a threat to be worth a reward.

-Spike Switch not working after victory. Is there a way that those could still be used after you won the room? It's a bit inconvenient to be stuck with lots of spikes because you were too efficient in your extermination.

And that's it.

 

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