Build 22

[rob]

Hi everyone! We really appreciate all the help you've been giving by testing the game. We just pushed build 22. Here are the changes:

* Add icons for players that have left your immediate area (names are broken, unfortunately)
* Add town name to closest town arrow
* Resize closest town arrow with distance
* Add 'b' key to toggle starfield background
* More closely tie pane cracks to badlands buff
* Double loot bag duration to 30 seconds
* Maybe fix scroll wheel in chatbox
* Fix spurious building levelup bursts
* Level up buildings at 1K, 2.5K, 4.5K, 7K, 10K, 13.5K, 17.5K etc
* Add Avenger class
* Hopefully fix some weird mouse wheel bugs on certain browsers on Mac (not Safari, still broken)
* Add range bonus for badlands

I think I was able to save all the player and game state. First time!

Please post below with comments, suggestions, bug reports, complaints, etc. We are really grateful for your help.

Rob

[stupidity]

Error: Old Build. Reload your browser to get build 22. I have cleared all cache, browser history, cookies but no love.

[remm]

I was driving around my Warpstation Valeria, and thought it was odd that the enemies had been cleared from it. So I went out a bit further and my screen went blank for a long time.
I didn't die, but I reappeared at the Origin. It's repeatable too. There aren't any enemies out there.

EDIT, oh, so the server was crashing? That makes sense.

[rob]

Server is crashing. Thanks for the report.

[hgking]

I'm currently looking at a black screen right now.

Good news: getting a solid 60 FPS on that black screen.

EDIT: Just connected--what timing.

[rob]

Things are back up. Let me know what additional problems come up.

[amitp]

Sept 27, 2012 15:53:47 GMT -5 rob said:

* Add icons for players that have left your immediate area (names are broken, unfortunately)
* Add town name to closest town arrow
* Resize closest town arrow with distance
* Add 'b' key to toggle starfield background
* Hopefully fix some weird mouse wheel bugs on certain browsers on Mac (not Safari, still broken)

Love it! I am playing with the starfield off and it looks better to me. And the scroll wheel works nicely now. I love seeing the town names and look forward to player names too. I'd like to see the arrows moved off to the edge of the screen so that they don't interfere with the main game play area.

[remm]

The range buff on the difficult enemies is great. Earlier, I had a *lot* of fun clearing my way to a town (Mount Kapteynia), and colonising it. The enemy buildings actually fought back, and I had to think about my strategy, and my shield strength. It was a refreshing change from the usual menial fights. Although, the range on the ground fortresses is a bit much, and their shots are unavoidable too.

As for what Rob was telling me in game about ideas for a transport system, what if certain towns had an innate property of being able to be connect to a transport network? (I think he was meaning it as a replacement for teleporting). It could be maybe 10% - 15% of towns with that property, and there would sockets (the number of which are proportional to town level) that allow you to travel to other 'connected' towns. The idea would be that your travel part of the way would be quick, with driving covering the rest of the journey.
I think you agree that teleporting doesn't give the player an appreciation for the map size, or the distances they can travel. Manually going the whole way will often take too long, but if you had transport nodes at specific towns, it would be in the middle-ground for travel times.

If certain towns could become transport towns, what if other towns could get special properties too? Like a small enemy debuff around them

I'm liking the Avenger too. Although, due to the short range of the main cannon, I find I'm sometimes picking up lenses that I don't want to pick up. I realise that's on your to-do list, so I think it works as a nicely balanced class.


EDIT: This was right after loading into the game. Things appeared that were out in the fog.

[hgking]

Disabling the background increases my FPS by about 10.

[frogboffin]

I'll take this moment while it seems the server has crashed to post a few more updated thoughts.


1. I like being able to see where other players are but the icons are a bit boring at the moment, they might look better if they represent the current tank they are using.
2. The town names to the closest town arrows are a nice touch, but a bit pointless when you are in that current town I find.
3. I didn't actually notice the resizing town arrows but then again I didn't travel too far from many towns as I haven't had much time to play yet.
4. Being able to toggle the background image is nice. It would also be cool if there were different backgrounds defining different areas. As apposed to the small sparkly particles.
5. I'm assuming this is to do with differentiating between the badlands and 'goodlands'(?) Which is similar to what I said in the previous part.
6. This is good as I did occasionally find bags disappearing in-front of me.
7. Not sure what change this is, as I didn't observe any difference. Though on a related manner, the chat log is lost upon death, which can be frustrating at times.
8. Good!
9. I find this much better, before hand I was only upgrading buildings to level 2 before finding another socket.
10. The Avenger tank is nice, having low range and lots of shields means for lots of rotation, which I find to be a good element of gameplay, but the Avenger also has a super slow turret rotation, which means your shield is down before your turret even starts to fire at the enemies.
11. Can't help with this.
12. The range bonus is good, it has hindered my super Frog line of towns which was quite broken. However the main problem with the range boost is the 100% accuracy shots that some enemies have, I haven't had too much time to test the increased accuracy, but from the small dollop that I saw, the super tanks were quite devastating.

Bugs:

Haven't noticed too much, but while testing the increased range I was insta-killed by an enemy in the second level badlands, (Not sure which one.) and my health went far below 0 and created a huge red bar, as observed before by other testers. However when I respawned, there was a green cluster bomb next to me, in the middle of Origin, it disappeared after about 10-20 seconds. Also while this happened HGKing had his flash crash, perhaps the two incidents are connected?

EDIT: Looks as if there was a roll back, did something bad happen?

EDIT2: Server looks like it's gone offline abruptly again. I was the only one on using a flash player .exe and had just killed a ground fortress and got hit by a green clusterbomb.
EDIT3: The game came back on in the time it took to write the last edit.

EDIT4: Bug - When an enemy is injured by your attacks, and you leave the area they're in and return (So that the enemy you shot at is offscreen) The enemy will show full health. However when you take another shot at them, the enemy will return to it's damaged state and continue from there.

[hgking]

Enemy cross buildings (the ones with Super Tanks) don't have that enemy terrain. Right now I think it looks cool that way, but that's most likely due to the regular grid pattern and spacing of the enemies currently.

Also, are there server troubles today, or just work being done on it? It's odd that sometimes when I load I'll see the resource strength indicator for Origin appear momentarily on my screen and then disappear, like I connect and then lose connection.

[elrondel]

I think Flash crashed on me; I force quit Mozilla, came back and saw this.

[linkshot]

Yeah Elrondel, you can totally multitab to multibox. It also carries current gridshards over to that instance.

[elrondel]

Game server down again for me. Just now


Back up in a few minutes, zz.

[zuboki]

>Achieve 50k gridshards
>Try to teleport to Origin
>Feel lazy, type "/tele Or"
>End up in the far out border town of Lucidor
>Killed instantly from the center of town thanks to enemy range boosts