Build 88

[rob]

Salutations to all Brave Testers!

We pushed build 88 just now. Changes include:

* Eliminate item loot for mineral discovery
* Show store sales in red in price plots
* Fix paleobug #1: server-freezing socket descriptor leak
* Fix paleobug #2: city won't level up
* Nerf Exterminators
* Make Excluders physically block movement
* Reduce level of Isolator wall "big drops" from 12 to 11
* Reduce "convoy waypoint" module drop rate to 1%

Not much visible this week, due to illness and also the large amount of refactoring and prep work for new features. Tim spent almost the whole week building the underpinning for keyboard control remapping. I threw away a ton of old code relating to VPs and kill credits and gridshards. I also spent a lot of time hunting down ancient bugs.

Price plots now show "store" sales in red, and "liquidates" in black. I'm hoping this will help people understand pricing a little better.

I reduced some loot drops that were out of balance. I also made changes to maze regions to encourage people to fight their way to the middle, rather than cheese their way in. I am hoping to introduce some subcommander/supplycache style features in the maze region soon.

As always, thank you very much for playing Grid12 and helping us with make it better. We really appreciate it!

Rob & Tim
Jetbolt Games

[tarbomb]

I'm a little disappointed by the elimination of item loot for mineral discovery. The loot drops aren't particularly good (level 7s are common - I end up tossing at least 95% of them since melding augments takes up too much storage) but they do entice newbies to scout a bit and can provide unexpected, fun loot to groups clearing out in the frontier.

I doubt reducing isolator drops will do anything. People have mostly stopped farming walls since it's an enormous drag without at least ten people on (not only to kill the walls, but to spread the damage out so that it's easier to stay alive).

Thanks for fixing the paleobugs! I'll be extra-vigilant for signs of them from now on...

[Will]

Rob, could you increase the amount of Convoy Bosses needed to reset the Grid to 250 or something? It gets reset every night now and it's ridiculous. Haven't gotten to kill a region boss in a week or so now.

[Kelsoo]

I recently built a new PC and upgraded my monitor as well. I only bring this up because at my new resolution (1920 x 1080) the game window is rather small, in fact very much so that it can be hard to actually see anything. Now this would be fine as zooming in is something that exists, but doing so offcenters the entire screen and leaves black space behind while also having the game window stay small.

Are there any current plans to fix this and let players play in bigger windows so that I don't have to change my resolution every time I feel like playing?

[fire]

Feb 26, 2014 18:26:29 GMT -5 tarbomb said:

I'm a little disappointed by the elimination of item loot for mineral discovery. The loot drops aren't particularly good (level 7s are common - I end up tossing at least 95% of them since melding augments takes up too much storage) but they do entice newbies to scout a bit and can provide unexpected, fun loot to groups clearing out in the frontier.

I can 100% agree with this, the augment drops aren't that great for most of the older players, but they are good for new players to augment their tanks.

Would also like to suggest a slight nerf for the desolation tower. It is quite op because you can end up having over 15 missiles flying around, and since most of them are clustered, a slight mess up is instadeath. I would suggest either halving the rate of fire, or half the amount of missile tanks that it spawns, as its quite insane atm.

[wurm]

I would love to see a fullscreen feature or at least a bigger window. my 1920 x 1080 monitor is pretty much 75 percent black screen and 25 percent game when i play

[israphial]

I second Fire's suggestion to nerf the Desolators. Their missiles are rather overpowered and unbalanced. Either their rate of fire or their damage needs to be reduced - one or the other.

[Crunch]

I might have the unpopular opinion on the Desolator, but it really doesn't need a nerf. You may die a few times trying to figure out the missiles, but they're incredibly easy to dodge and juke. Even in wilderness, missiles are relatively slow and have horrible turning radii, totally avoidable. This game barely even punishes players for deaths, so I'm not sure why everyone is so insistent on dumbing down the few things which pose a real risk.

If I did have to pick something I dislike about the missiles, it would be that they have a tendency to hide under loot, chat, notifications, xp awards, etc. The missiles I never see are the only ones which personally rustle my jimmies.

[Ood]

After some time away from the game, here are some thoughts on... stuff (mostly graphics).

1) I like the new backgrounds for the most part.
2) The updated drawings of most towers also seem better
3) Somehow nice drawings on top of nice backgrounds look really terrible. Maybe if the enemy location background were very dark it would be a bit nicer.
4) Despite being in the middle of my screen... I sometimes 'lose' my tank, can he be made a bit bolder?
5) I also sometimes can't tell what the heck I'm shooting at without looking at what is losing HP. Bigger laser lines would also be nice.
6) I miss building things still.
7) Maze enemies are still a challenge to kill.
8) Where the heck am I supposed to get prisms now?
9) Lone-wolf bonus \o/
10) Some of those missiles are a bit evil... but I like them.
11) Yes.
12) I can still solo a Ladybug.
13) Will there ever be enemies that buff other enemies?
14) The game runs MUCH smoother, this computer used to lag like mad, you seem to have put lots of performance upgrades in, which is great.
15) Zoom is back!
16) I'm done now. (So much for twelve steps...)

[Will]

Excited for the next Build that's supposedly coming out tomorrow. I know there's no way you guys can get all the stuff on the roadmap done but it will be nice to see what the "playertank editor" is.

[rob]

We have an internal tool we use to draw tanks, turrets, guns, etc. We want to be able to add new player tanks with it too someday.