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Xenonauts 2 - Feedback & Priorities


Chris

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While I wait for a linux version, I wanted to suggest something while the game is still in its early stages: would it be possible to split the geoscape and battlescape difficulties? That way I could play on extra hard battlescape but with average geoscape difficulty.

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Getting used to things..Overall like the look; performance was working fine.  Not sure what key I hit, but I lost most of the Head's up display (things like the end turn key, soldiers list, etc..  Tried hitting keys to get things moving but ended up with a mess and had to Cntl-Alt-Del out. X2 test.png

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Playing a bit more but have to run.  Fairly smooth for me on 1280 x 800 resolution, beautiful setting. Higher resolution makes seeing things a bit hard. Haven't tried fantastic setting yet.

 - Shooting sniper rifle while adjacent to enemy seems to always miss and graphic of shot is way out of line. (Ignore - I just reread OP)

 - End Turn button not always showing up (possibly related to 1024x768 resolution).

 - target bulls-eye seems a bit touchy  (Ignore - I just reread OP - sorry)

Monitor 1920 x 1080
System (old, I know!) - I5-2400 CPU@3.10GHz;  8GB memory DDR3@ 664MHz; 
Nvidia GeForce GTS450 (1GB memory)
Windows 10 Pro

Edited by Russonc
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4 hours ago, Russonc said:

Getting used to things..Overall like the look; performance was working fine.  Not sure what key I hit, but I lost most of the Head's up display (things like the end turn key, soldiers list, etc..  Tried hitting keys to get things moving but ended up with a mess and had to Cntl-Alt-Del out. X2 test.png

What Russonc describes is exactly what hapend to me.

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7 hours ago, Russonc said:

Getting used to things..Overall like the look; performance was working fine.  Not sure what key I hit, but I lost most of the Head's up display (things like the end turn key, soldiers list, etc..  Tried hitting keys to get things moving but ended up with a mess and had to Cntl-Alt-Del out. X2 test.png

You discovered the debug AI visualization!
It's enabled/disabled through "O", scrolling through the layers using Page Up/Down, and a simulated trigger to an AI Character turn using "L".  (Which starts the computation of the values)

 

10 hours ago, Juan said:

Unfortunately I couldn't play because low performance on my computer (i7 with 6gb RAM but mediocre graphic card, a GeForce 610M). Will it be improved in a future? I really love this game and I want to play it :)

Definitely. There are some very clear things we can still do to up performance, and in the next build we'll add in options to turn of various effects.
The performance numbers I'm seeing seem all over the place, with seemingly comparable hardware having very different performance.
In the next build we'll introduce a crash & performance reporting service (opt-in) to help us pin point where things are going wrong.

I'm currently working on a playback functionality that players will be able to push along with bug reports to help us determine where things went wrong.
This is not planned as a feature, but intended to help us in getting to the root of issues more quickly. (I fondly remember the days trying to reproduce your issues for X1 :D)

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So, this'll be a good test for old hardware, as my PC is ancient. (Perhaps Father Christmas will bring me a new one). 

Intel Pentium G6950, Radeon HD 5770, 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM running Windows 7. Tested at "Good" setting, 1920x1080.

Run alright, actually (quite surprised at that). No super noticeable framerate slowdown, camera panning around the map is a bit slow and any animation which goes off-camera is also noticeably slow. The animations are responsive if a bit juddery.

 

Some comments. Constantly wanted to zoom in.  Seriously, I want to be able to pan in and out. Also, while it's nice to see that there's more scenery, the general wealth of background detail makes looking for pertinent information (such as the facing of walls) sometimes difficult. Perhaps some better way of keeping necessary information (wall facings) more obvious than background scenery is needed or just less background scenery. Soldiers are back their old X1 tricks of shooting the cover in front of them! The AP bar on the left-hand team UI disguises the currently selected soldiers AP bar, which is annoying. 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Max_Caine said:

The AP bar on the left-hand team UI disguises the currently selected soldiers AP bar, which is annoying. 

Out of interest, what do you mean by this? The current soldier has their TU bar displayed on the bottom of the screen, no?

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Played new version 0.05 one time until I ended with psions

CPU:Intel Core I3-4150 @ 3.50 GHz Windows10

GeForce GTX 750 RAM: 8 GB

I experience an improvement in the graphics. They are less confusing and movements of aliens/soldiers seem better.

- I haven't experienced game freezing during alien turn :D

- First time I loaded the mission, game freezed at 0% loading and I had to close and restart the game. After this, mission loaded quickly

- Aliens are now easier to see, except one who was close to the wall. My soldiers watched him (red alien icon) but the image of the alien didn´t appear

- I could shoot an alien who was watched directly by my soldier (red alien icon) but alien was in the grey area, just adjacent to seen squares. LOS was few realistic in this case.

- Crouched soldiers, anytime they fire, they standup and after shooting they return to crouching

- Crouched soldiers block with a percentaje the shots of adjacent soldiers. The machinegun man killed the adjacent crouched companion when shooting an alien.

- If you shoot having an adjacent soldier standing up, the percentaje of blocking doesn't appear.

- I experience the same problem of 0.04 version when trying to move a soldier to one square clicking on that square but I can't (the number of remaining action points doesn't appear in the square). I solve this clicking close to the corner of the square.

- I can't move to a square where fallen soldier is.

- I don't know how to skip a soldier reaction during alien turn. The only way to pass this is shooting the alien.

- I don't like yellow alien icons from X1. Please remove them :D 

Sorry for my bad english

Edited by juanval
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Hey Chris, I just played v0.0.5 and have a few pieces of feedback.

On a win7 64 system w/ i5-2500k, AMD R9 290 and 32 gb DDR3, I was getting a smooth 60 fps the entire time in 1920x1200 on fantastic.

FEEDBACK

I love the visual style, but there are problems with the visual clarity of items and actors.

1. Weapon icons should be rendered underneath the ammo counter. Right now the ballistic rifle (I believe) mostly obfuscates the maximum ammo number. Make the current/max ammo count render on top of the icon.

2. Selected soldier visibility. The character who is selected should have their selection circle rendered on TOP of foliage/env art. Right now it is hard to see which character is selected when they're standing in heavy foliage. I think the ideal solution would be a Fallout1/Diablo1 esque environment transparency bubble rendered around the selected soldier. Here's an example: http://i56.tinypic.com/f2ub9c.jpg

3. Team location and visibility. For non-selected soldiers, there isn't much contrast between the soldiers and map art. I love how the map art looks, and I think all that needs to be done is to give soldiers a thin selection circle underneath them. Based on the current system, I think thin yellow would be 'selectable solder' and the current thickness in green for selected soldier would visually distinguish them. These circles should be rendered over the environment art, but no transparency bubble for unselected soldiers.

4. Enemy visibility. I think you should place a thin red selection ring around all visible enemies, similar to the player selection ring. Right now it's hard to scan the terrain and distinguish an enemy, but that's not due to bad art or contrast but more the nature of the 3D map. A simple selection circle underneath all enemies would make getting an 'at-a-glance' sitrep much reasier.

5. Tree visibility. I love the tree art. They look great. If the cursor, when swept 'under' a tree caused the tree to dither / go transparent, similar to the player transparency bubble suggestion earlier but with a larger 'brush spot size', that would be an easy way to retain the great art but make enemy selection more functional. Same thing could apply for enemies behind the lower side (from the camera's perspective) of any elevated terrain. Toggle-able treetops is also an option, but a less elegant one IMO.

This coupled with the enemy/soldier selection rings would improve at-a-glance situational awareness across the board, which was my biggest complaint from the demo. Escape hiding the UI is also kinda annoying, but I understand it's pre-alpha.

 

Bonus feedback: don't neglect the multimonitor people, please enable borderless fullscreen windowed mode. Unity supports it natively by launching with the -popupwindow option, but it doesn't work with the default unity launcher. Right now we can't enable windowed at full desktop resolution, give us that option and native support for borderless fullscreen windowed mode please!

Edited by agris
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Ok, here is my experience from today's run test and it will consist of two points:

Performance: I don't know what you had done but game is considerably more smooth from initial build, even when I max details, I also played on a slightly weaker and an older laptop than last time.

Reaction shot mechanic: Last time, due to performance obstructing my play through, I couldn't really set a soldier in position to see how it works. Now that I had, it's interesting because when it triggers, soldier can shot at the target of choice, those that are visible to him, which is an interesting choice.

 

As a side note,when LMG is fired, it glitches camera and that's only notable issue I had, on other hand I didn't have AI hangs or any game breaking bugs, and I didn't have micro shutters when "event" actions (like firing LMG ) took place.

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4 minutes ago, Sentelin said:

Reaction shot mechanic: Last time, due to performance obstructing my play through, I couldn't really set a soldier in position to see how it works. Now that I had, it's interesting because when it triggers, soldier can shot at the target of choice, those that are visible to him, which is an interesting choice.

I think it's a wrong mechanic. Reaction fire means to react some movement. I can accept to choose "fire or not" option to wait the enemy come closer or maybe you need to react another alien. BUT at a reaction fire, choosing the enemy is not making sense. You react something but engage another one which deos not moved or done anything at all.

And how will AI use this? Your soldier will move and an alien will shoot another as a reaction fire.

It's just wrong, it's not "reaction"..

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Well, a properly implemented AI will use it much more efficiently than an average human,that's for sure. I didn't say it's a good mechanic, just an interesting idea that can be expand or it can be reverted, like auto-crouch for example. Let's wait for a product that has all core things functional and be judges and juries from that point on.

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1 hour ago, drages said:

I think it's a wrong mechanic. Reaction fire means to react some movement. I can accept to choose "fire or not" option to wait the enemy come closer or maybe you need to react another alien. BUT at a reaction fire, choosing the enemy is not making sense. You react something but engage another one which deos not moved or done anything at all.

And how will AI use this? Your soldier will move and an alien will shoot another as a reaction fire.

It's just wrong, it's not "reaction"..

+1, Looks like big troubles ahead. Hopefully its just a bug.

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4 hours ago, Chris said:

Chill out, guys - it's a bug :)

That said though, isn't this exactly how the old XCOM worked? You got a reaction interrupt and could basically do whatever you wanted, including moving? Not saying this is the way it should be (it shouldn't) just saying I remember it being this way in some of the earlier versions of XCOM.

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37 minutes ago, Moonshine Fox said:

That said though, isn't this exactly how the old XCOM worked? You got a reaction interrupt and could basically do whatever you wanted, including moving? Not saying this is the way it should be (it shouldn't) just saying I remember it being this way in some of the earlier versions of XCOM.

No, at every X-Com game, you only shoot the alien which moved. You never get a control to move or fire at alien turn.

Anyway it's a bug and we are safe.

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I have a fairly bush-league machine (only dual core, and a NVidia GForce X520 for gfx; 4 gigs RAM), and had no performance issues as far as I went. Which ended up not being very far, because when I get the message "Perform overwatch action or skip" there is no indication of how to skip. I also had to use the Task Manager to end the program after punching every key on the keyboard and not skipping overwatch.  A small Readme that gives a skeleton breakdown of how to conduct various actions would be nice. It is pleasant to see that the machine I have can run the program without any problems, although whether that will continue after several hours play is a question; IIRC Unity is pretty notorious for memory leaks. Xeno 1 is plagued with glitches, including delayed animations and out-of-synch sfx. So far, there has been none of that with the Unity engine, but as I say, I didn't get very far.

I thought scrolling was a bit sensitive. This might be changeable in the setup, although there was no options menu, so damnifino. 

It was generally quite hard to see the aliens due to their uncolored nature, which I expect will be remedied as and when.

  -- Mal

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So the plan is to release another update on Monday week (7th November) that fixes most of the remaining problems we can address without major system rewrites, and once that is out we'll start work on the major system rewrites (mouse input / line of sight / animation / serialization) that will take 2-3 weeks to complete. That should mark the end of the work required to fix up the basic mechanics and then we'll start work on adding new features like randomised maps and all that. So the release schedule is going to be a little slower over the next three or four weeks but it'd be best for us to get the boring part of development out of the way before we publicise these builds widely, so it'll pay off over the longer-term.

 

13 hours ago, Larry Burstyn said:

Is there someplace to download this so it does not interfere with Xenonauts 1?  Steam does not seem to have it yet.  And I don't want to join another website.

Afraid not, we can't really distribute via Steam until we launch on Early Access and the game is nowhere near ready for that at the moment.

 

13 hours ago, malthaussen said:

I have a fairly bush-league machine (only dual core, and a NVidia GForce X520 for gfx; 4 gigs RAM), and had no performance issues as far as I went. Which ended up not being very far, because when I get the message "Perform overwatch action or skip" there is no indication of how to skip.

Should be a red button in the bottom right of the screen, no? What screen resolution are you playing on?

 

18 hours ago, Moonshine Fox said:

That said though, isn't this exactly how the old XCOM worked? You got a reaction interrupt and could basically do whatever you wanted, including moving? Not saying this is the way it should be (it shouldn't) just saying I remember it being this way in some of the earlier versions of XCOM.

Jagged Alliance 2 had that, I believe, but X-Com did not (it has no manual control over reaction fire). We're going to simplify the system down to the reaction fire from X1, but with an optional toggle so you can choose whether your soldier takes the shot or skips it (and ignores that alien for the rest of the turn). There are times you don't want to reaction fire but I feel the current system is a bit too clumsy and time consuming to be an improvement at the moment.

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Had a chance to try it this morning, and I whacked the graphics quality up to Beautiful, see if that did anything. Well, if anything it ran smoother than last time! 

 

@Chris, when I was referring to the yellow in the last build I found that the left-hand team UI turned yellow for the selected trooper it masked the AP bar. Doesn't do that for this build. 

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As far as I'm aware (GJ might correct me here), those graphics quality settings don't do anything - the improvement was likely as a result of some code tweaks in the last build. The next build will have an in-game menu that lets you play with the post-processing effects and see how they affect performance.

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