Build 87

[rob]

Hello Brave Testers!

Tim and I just pushed build 87. Changes include:

* Add more zoom levels and remove the 100ms wait between zooms
* Make X35 exploder more visible
* Make Omicron Gunship faster and have it do AOE damage
* Add whisper command
* Give prizes when clearing forts near convoy routes, sometimes
* Give items when discovering routes and towns
* Add Oblivion-class Doom Fortress
* Add options screen

In the latest installment of the zoom saga, I re-added more zoom levels but removed the delay between zooms. The result of this is that you can zoom much faster and with more control using a mouse wheel on a Win 7 PC. But keyboard zoom, Mac zoom, and trackpad zoom are possibly made worse. Please post your opinions along with your setup.

You can now do private tells with "/w Rob you are the best!". It should also work if you give a unique prefix of the recipient's name. We didn't implement /ignore yet. I'm hoping that since this is an invite-only private alpha, it won't be needed for a while.

I wanted to explicitly reward the clearing of convoy routes, so there is now a reward you can get when you kill a fortress within one fort-space of a route. 10% of the time, you'll get an augment; 3% of the time you get a module.

The new Doom Fortress fills the middle of the maze regions and occasionally takes up wall space. It has an X35-like AoE attack which I'm hoping will somewhat mitigate the advantages of large groups.

Tim started on an options screen. Right now it replaces all the keyboard options. He's hoping to get key remapping in there soon. We can also potentially use it for zoom-control setup someday.

I made a behind-the-scenes change to how the server handles cross-domain policy files. This topic is incredibly boring, so I won't go into it. But if you have any new trouble connecting to the server, please let me know.

As always, thanks for playing! We really appreciate the help!

Rob & Tim
Jetbolt Games

[trapped]

"This topic is incredibly boring, so I won't go into it" - if you're worrying that it'd be boring for us, don't worry, I'm here to listen and learn as well.

[tarbomb]

The zoom feels rather strange on my mac trackpad. It's "sticky", so a small amount of zoom won't change the view, but larger motions will activate high-speed zooming. It requires a lot of finesse and precision to zoom slowly, which unfortunately makes that feature unusable in combat situations.

[Jufda]

Feb 19, 2014 15:16:03 GMT -5 rob said:

In the latest installment of the zoom saga, I re-added more zoom levels but removed the delay between zooms. The result of this is that you can zoom much faster and with more control using a mouse wheel on a Win 7 PC. But keyboard zoom, Mac zoom, and trackpad zoom are possibly made worse. Please post your opinions along with your setup.

You can now do private tells with "/w Rob you are the best!". It should also work if you give a unique prefix of the recipient's name. We didn't implement /ignore yet. I'm hoping that since this is an invite-only private alpha, it won't be needed for a while.

Tim started on an options screen. Right now it replaces all the keyboard options. He's hoping to get key remapping in there soon. We can also potentially use it for zoom-control setup someday.

The zoom is great with mouse. Feels smoother than before with keyboard too. I like it.

The whispers are good addition even though there aren't much use for them yet. I hope that the /ignore won't be necessary. Rather than using it, the people worth ignored should be banned if that's necessary.

The new options window is nice. Slides for the volumes would be nice. Please add keyboard shortcuts with toggles.

[Will]

In one of the future builds, please allow customization of the controls. I honestly believe that WASD for movement and JKL; for abilities would be amazing lol.

[pabu]

Played around a bit with the new Doom Fortresses. Now that middle part of mazes does not have towers that shoot lasers I was actually able to switch from Trailblazer to another tank safely and start regenerating shields. It should be very possible to kill the core with one or very few people without clearing anything.

Because shots travel further than the actual targeting range, the middle quickly becomes chaotic bullethell, if there are tanks in range of several different Doom Fortresses.
With coordinated group this might be different as towergroup only gets more dangerous if players split up.

Having the new zoomlevels makes scouting much more enjoyable.

[White]

With the new zoom feature (and possibly the old one too, i just might not have noticed it) I found out that if you zoom out and in really fast it messes up the camera:



I also tried out the new core/doom fortresses. The bullets were pretty easy to dodge, but when people tried to teleport to me they didn't have a chance to zoom in before they would die.

[Jufda]

Feb 19, 2014 20:25:59 GMT -5 White said:

With the new zoom feature (and possibly the old one too, i just might not have noticed it) I found out that if you zoom out and in really fast it messes up the camera:
youtu.be/J83uaRy1lK8

This video is private.
If the owner of this video has granted you access, please log in.

[White]

Feb 19, 2014 20:47:03 GMT -5 Jufda said:

Feb 19, 2014 20:25:59 GMT -5 White said:

With the new zoom feature (and possibly the old one too, i just might not have noticed it) I found out that if you zoom out and in really fast it messes up the camera:
youtu.be/J83uaRy1lK8

This video is private.
If the owner of this video has granted you access, please log in.

Sorry, the new youtube upload system makes you press a button that says publish after it's done uploading, so it was marked private.

[fire]

whisper command is a nice addition, and I really like that you are giving out prizes for clearing voy routes.

The only problem with the amount of doom fortresses in the center room of region maze is that only a single person is going to survive. you essentially have to be the one person that is willing to lead the bombs into everyone elses direction to survive yourself. Or at least thats how the only maze region that was cleared went down.

Bomb visibility on x35 is great now. I am glad I can see them easily now.

Omicron buff was needed, while it was quite effective we still managed to kill the main boss with only 7 or 8 people online and 2 minutes to spare. The truth is something has to be done about region bosses, because suiciding is still the only reliable method for small groups, and it should not be coming down to that.

zoom levels are good for me, I use q/e keys and like the transition speed myself. Some others might prefer it faster though.

As for the option screens, while it is nice, I believe some players would prefer if you would allow them to still toggle the options with the old keys.

[pabu]

I managed to essentially solo the core of wall region moment ago. Cruised through the maze with trailblazer and switched to fury once at the middle. Killing it took reasonable amount of time and David happened to log on to help halfway through.

After killing the core I took some time to toy with the Doom Fortresses to figure out if I could create safe spot in the middle. Their targeting range was bit longer than I had originally thought so just being in position where all towers were offscreen wasn't enough to make them stop firing.

In my opinion core is pretty good now if it is meant to be soloable. Having more people in does make it more dangerous even if the amount of shots is not as much greater as i originally thought. Patterns become more chaotic and so on.

I'm not sure how these wall regions will turn out in the long run. When more people will race for scouting them and killing the core it might bring some mild competition between players. Other people teleporting to you could be annoying but because everyone gets scouting rewards when they are nearby I don't think it will be much of a problem.

At the moment there is good incentive to scout the maze and team-clear the walls for leveling purposes.

[fire]

gyazo.com/efaad66cd5cf48ee04659306ef2d8948

I hope this is just a temporary state :s There are a few more people than there were before, but I really think that we need an increase in players somehow. Grid is just no longer a place you want to solo/duo in due to the fact that the difference between 1/2 people and 4/5 people is insane.

I feel the biggest reason that grid12 lacks a large amount of players is simply because most people who do get on do not want to wait on other players. If 5+ people do not show up simultaneously it seems like large groups just wont form at all. Perhaps a severe buff to those who are playing alone/duoing/even a minor buff for when there are just 3 people online to encourage them to stay on and wait for other players? I am not sure if soloing still gives the same buffed state it used to, but something does need to be done about this imo.

[tribow]

I just wondered something, is there a slight chance that that when the game is reset and we spawn in origin, that the origin region is a maze region?

[rob]

I just made another change to the policy file handling. Please let me know if you have any trouble getting in (lots of delays, or aborted connections, or you can't get in at all).

[rob]

The region around Origin cannot be a maze.