Build 23

[rob]

Brave Testers,

We have just pushed build 23. Changes include:

* Make town arrow disappear at the right time
* Make player icon names display properly
* Fix ground fortress box at (0, 0); this fixes server crash too
* Fix bug where super tanks could crash the server on spawning
* Add new lens combo award formula
* Require a one second pause before looting a lens
* Make tank rotate in place if the desired turn is sufficiently sharp
* Increase positional and rotational acceleration for all player tanks
* Add Wolverine class
* Actually award gridshards for useless prisms
* Remove all enemy AOEs and replace with lasers (they were very broken)
* New town icons
* Click towns/players to tele/goto
* Add flavortext tooltips to tank menu
* Escape key dismisses tank menu
* Tooltips now resize to fit the text
* Better position tanks in tank menu
* Rejigger shields on Corsair, Mustang and Hurricane
* Make Corsair small gun lasers grey
* Eliminate empty lootbag tooltips
* Fix bug that corrupted town level in a server crash
* Announce people leaving
* Fix negative healthbar display
* Fix bug where it appeared other players were firing wildly at invisible ghosts
* Announce discovery of new towns

As always, please post reactions good and bad. We really appreciate your feedback -- it is absolutely necessary to the success of this project. Thanks for playing!

Rob, Mike & Tim -- the Grid 12 team

[stupidity]

"Error: old build. Reload your browser to get build number 23"

Same error I had when build 22 rolled out. I have not deleted my cookies etc. this time in order to try to fix the problem (and lose my progress--booh). Should I expect it to self-correct?

[sven]

I was teleporting to fellow user and a town few so times through clicking while they're battling enemies instead of /goto & /tele.



After teleporting, probably at the time when I arrived with minimum damage dealt on the gfort, I couldn't pick up loot. Eh, maybe my eyes are playing tricks on me, I did get close but it stays at it's location.



As I zoom out, I still see gforts on the mini-map along with the loot.

[mike]

stupidity Don't clear your cookies! Just do a force refresh a couple times and it should update.

[linkshot]

Feedback!

- Cluster Bombs have a tooltip with HP on it yet can't be shot. What a tease!

- Really wishing that I could zoom the map faster based on how fast I scroll the wheel, not just amount of ticks.

- Not sure I like having to stop to pick up a Lens. Maybe put the downtime as a property of the lens that lasts for one second after it spawns. Also, allow clicking on one to override the downtime.

- Health and Shield resonators are a waste of space. They don't provide enough buff to survive the wilderness, and are worthless for farming, so they go ignored.

- Currently trying to buff range to the point that we kill things from too far to qualify for the loot

- Not sure what AoE you were talking about! Cluster Bombs are still explosions. Oh, wavy lines.

- Lasers don't center on Super Tanks properly. They aim for the edge but make contact with the center. Issue with the positioning of Mustang's lasers.

- Getting a bit of lag after teleporting. I have to wait for the buildings to load before I can change zoom level.

- Lenses and Prisms really need their names switched based on aesthetics.

- Lenses could do with tooltips that show their saturation level

- Combat in a town consists of just clicking your vehicle (in selection) over and over again for instant heals.

- Switching between Zooms 7 and 8 causes shields to fade out and back in.

- Pentagonal and Circular lenses are hard to distinguish before picking up.

[remm]

Because that looks fucking awesome.

[remm]

* Make player icon names display properly
* Fix ground fortress box at (0, 0); this fixes server crash too
* Fix bug where super tanks could crash the server on spawning
* Fix bug that corrupted town level in a server crash
* New town icons
* Click towns/players to tele/goto
* Actually award gridshards for useless prisms
* Add flavortext tooltips to tank menu
* Escape key dismisses tank menu
* Tooltips now resize to fit the text
* Better position tanks in tank menu
* Announce discovery of new towns
* Eliminate empty lootbag tooltips
All great.

* Add new lens combo award formula
Are colours still not important? I twice made a set of bright reds, and only got 8000. Later combos with a focus on shapes got me 30000-40000. Sven got a 50000 combo with all 5 being blue cubes.

* Require a one second pause before looting a lens
This is good. I still have accidentally picked up lens, but now I don't have to avoid looting an enemy area that dropped a bad lens. It also gets a bit sketchy in dangerous areas where you have to keep moving (double buff zone), and there is a lens you want. Good stuff.

* Increase positional and rotational acceleration for all player tanks
Are you able to heavily increase braking? The drift slow down is fine, but when I want to stop on a point, I often overshoot because the braking is too slow. I think you should be able to at least brake faster than you can accelerate.

* Add Wolverine class
Holy shit this tank is amazing. I love its turning and acceleration, ability to shoot in all directions, and ability to focus fire when you need it (by positioning the tank right). It really feels like you're giving a broadside when you have three lasers pumping out the sides.

* Remove all enemy AOEs and replace with lasers (they were very broken)
I hadn't noticed there were any AOE attacks in the first place.

* Rejigger shields on Corsair, Mustang and Hurricane
The mustang shields make a lot more sense now, and are more useful.

* Announce people leaving
Great for when they actually leave, but deaths always appear as a rapid leave/join.

* Fix negative healthbar display
I still managed to get zero health accidentally, but it didn't go negative!

* Fix bug where it appeared other players were firing wildly at invisible ghosts
Fantastic.

[elrondel]

* Add new lens combo award formula
* Require a one second pause before looting a lens
* Make tank rotate in place if the desired turn is sufficiently sharp
* Increase positional and rotational acceleration for all player tanks


Yessssssss

[rob]

The current lens combo award algorithm:

You get 1 point for each pair of matching shapes. So three-of-a-kind is 3 pairs (get it?) and four-of-a-kind is 6 pairs, and all 5 matching is ten pairs. You get an additional point for each of the pairs that matches color. So all 5 same shape and same color is 20 points. A special case is all five non-matching shapes -- this is worth 15 points, with another 10 if all 5 are color-matched

Multiply the total points by the square root of the average brightness; there are four brightness levels, 1 through 4. Then multiply by 2000 gridshards. The award for 5 same-shape, same-color full-brightness lenses is is (10 + 10) * 2 * 2000 = 80k gridshards. The award for 5 different-shape, same-color full-brightness lenses is (15 + 10) * 2 * 2000 = 100k gridshards.

[stupidity]

Thanks for the clarification on lenses. Linkshot, Sven and I were playing with the combinations earlier today and noticed the strong shape reward and low color reward. This plays with a poker players mind, though, since a flush is worth less than a single pair.

I suppose this is because there are 5 shapes but less colors.

I'd really dig a tooltip on hovering over a lense, though--to tell me color, shape, and intensity

Also, I agree with Linkshot's recommendation that the lenses should be appropriately called prisms, and the prisms could just as easily be called lenses. When naturally describing the "shapes" of the lenses, they're all prisms!

(pentagonal prism, trapezoidal prism, octagonal prism, etc.)

edit: elrondel proved to me that searching for the 5 unmatched shapes regardless of color is far superior to searching for matching shapes, based on the probability of finding either and the reward comparison. So now any straight is better than searching for 5 of a kind suited. pfft! (but this does feel like exactly the kind of math we all love to do and act on in video games, so kudos to you for making a fun conundrum)

[stupidity]

Oh, bug reports:

I am still experiencing mysterious flash crashes. I've had three.

On one, I was dumping shards into a level 0 town in the badlands and getting torn up at the same time
On another, I was just driving out of an established town and colliding with a building
On the last, I was stationary *probably not engaging anything* (I was looking at another window at the time, I had parked my tank)

The other buggy thing to note is that the game does some weird things to handle your gridshard depositing. I've noticed that if I try to teleport while investing shards, instead of the game interpreting my teleport as a movement and quitting the investment to make the teleport, it tries to make the teleport---but then immediately slingshots me back to the socket so I can keep investing shards.

Okay, I figure I'm just not allowed to teleport *while* investing shards.

However, earlier I had a goofy thing where I stood on a socket for a while where I wanted to invest, but it wouldn't invest them. I got sporadic popping investments instead of the steady stream of +100's or whatever. So I decided to go somewhere else. I started to drive off, and I actually got to encounter the enemy, but then I was slingshotted back to the socket. I tried to teleport, slingshot again. Finally, all my shards dropped into the socket in a big whoosh and I was free to do as I pleased.

I guess all this is to keep me from losing shards when I should be investing them?

I don't know. But it could be annoying.

FWIW, I would rather drive onto a socket and then have an invest button appear or something rather than having to just sit there. The detection feels awkward. Also, I keep wasting shards because I can't time my exit properly.

[stupidity]

one last thing:

I noticed that with the scorpion and a ton of range (around +150% global, plus whatever my prisms were giving) I wound up firing shots that hit nothing.

I can't tell if I am locking and firing on targets that are already out of my range (it feels like my range is firing into the fog of war) or the enemies move out of range before my shots land due to the slowness of the projectile. It feels really weird, though, when I am actually moving toward those enemies and so I am still within range, my shots are not landing because their point of origin is no longer in range of the enemy.

It's just weird to be still firing at an enemy that I am clearly in range to hit and the shots not doing any damage. At first I thought that my projectiles range (since they are missiles, maybe they only live so long before detonation?) was shorter than *my* range (what distance I will pick up a target and fire. That would have been a bug, but I came up with my first explanation as a possible theory as well. I don't suppose that's a bug, but it may or may not be desirable in the long run.

[tarbomb]

After a bit of derping around with the new build I have to second Linky's assertion that the new pause is a bit strange. Personally I think it breaks the flow of the game, and would propose either one of three things to be used instead:

• Old system (pick-up on move-over) with the ability to drop lenses
  
• Moving over a lens pops up a magnified image of the lens; pick-up would happen when the pop-up is clicked.
  
• Hotkey to pick up lens.
  

Also, there seems to be a bit of input lag when using a flash projector to play the game that doesn't occur in Chrome. I'm going to test this in a few other browsers (Safari, Firefox, IE on Windows) when I have time, but suffice it to say that the game experience suffers noticeably when running it standalone. (Chrome 22.0, Flash 11.4, running on OSX 10.8.2).

I'm still pretty new, so I can't comment yet on the other changes. More impressions coming once I level up a few times

[remm]

Come on guys, lets see what happens when buildings overlap each other.



Just a little edit. I saw someone playing today who I don't think had played before. They made two big mistakes which are important.
Firstly, they drove straight over lenses. I can't say for sure if it was intentional, but bright lenses are frequently picked up.
Secondly, they did not recognise the GroundFortress attacks as something that would kill them. They just sat one square away and got pummelled. Interestingly the green bombs may have kept them alive, at least until they were killed by a residual bomb after the Gfort was defeated.

[elrondel]

Remm doing my Five-Shapes strategy..
I think that needs to be nerfed. There's a ton more incentive to a fiver than anything less of a 5-of-a-kind, really.
Also, those level 7 towns That was my goal for this build.