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[Netsu]

WHOA! I'm impressed with the amount of testing you put into this
Let's go:

Main menu/menus:
1. Have a bland feel to them feels like any type of car model or anything there would be great.
2. [music] lack of music, but obviously adding that in something you are already planning on doing as I did read =]
3. [sounds] The car repairing sounds on a quick loop felt annoying to listen to
4. I think car selection should be in match making or weapon selection, not tucked away in options.

All the menus (aside from the menus that show up during a match) are currently place-holders.
The repair sound is actually on a 10-seconds loop, are you sure you mean repair?
We plan to do a separate menu for choosing your ship, with a short description, artwork for the pilot etc. kinda like in fighting games, would that work?

Gameplay:[/b]
1. (HUD) pressing tab to check felt like a awkward solution... I would add a little bar showing mine vs enemies frags in the bottom somewhere. I think that'd be wonderful (such as...)

Sure, we'll add something you could see in Quake or Unreal games, displaying your points vs the best scoring enemy.

2. I felt like I was pressing the down button as if I was throttling the gas to make a turn in a racing game, though backwards because the car was already moving. maybe make your car by default not moving, and map the up button to the gas =] I'd feel much more in control then.

We played around with different control schemes and decided that this is the most interesting, although it might be a little confusing at first.

3.[/b] This may be on purpose, though I feel like I had no progression in combat. the enemy would spawn instantly and then have the clear advantage with weapons and health, in many car combat games there is a negative into positive advantage for the survivor, at first the victor would have less hp and weapons, but upon living longer and killing again with the disadvantage they would be able to roam the map while gathering bonus armor, weapons, kill streaks/money/exp etc etc. Although this game does have that slightly, the low max weapon storage and instant re-spawn time makes getting your health as well as just an even fight with special weapons very difficult.

Putting a cooldown on respawning is a good idea, although the way we played you already have an advantage as the scoring player because you get at least a few seconds of healing and you can pick up the ammo, while the enemy respawn without his secondary weapon.

Balance tier list (in order):
Turbo Good: Shotgun/rocket
Okay: Bolt Driver
Turbo bad: Mines

This is a surprise :D Everyone playing the game before was saying the shotgun is the weakest weapon so we kept on buffing it until it was really strong, but people still didn't like it because you deal little damage at middle/long range. I see you are the guy who finally noticed how devastating it is when used right :D
From my experience the bolt driver can be also very powerful, the secret is to keep on shooting. It has a very high fire-rate, almost like the lasers, and if you hit your opponent once he will loose some of his momentum due to knockback making it easier to hit him again and again. This way you can frag a healthy opponent in 2 seconds by slightly adjusting your aiming after each shot.
As for the mines, we plan on adding a tripwire capability to them, so when you place two mines close to each other they will connect and if someone flies between them they both will detonate.

Basic Weapons tier list:
Top: Laser
Mid: Plasma
Bad: Machine Gun

Yeah, that's true, I'm considering either shortening the overheat of lasers or making the machinegun more powerful. Which you thing would be better?

Please cut every corner in each map, it worked very well in hanger, and just feels less annoying, no more square edges in maps please! =]

Hanger: Favors shotgun over rocket, as you are likely in a small box and 1 dash from a big blast. I really wish there was a health station here, me and my friend aka my brother liked the map but the lack of health didn't match with how we were coming up with strategies against each other, Add health stations in every level with an option to turn on/off health satiation in each map please <3

Caves: Balanced for rocket/shotty, has caves for weapons, and an open zone for health. Bouncing off cave walls is really annoying though =]

Hives: same as hanger...but more map control*! Awesome...but more corners in the map make me sad. *by map control I mean you can actually just pick up most of the power ups and health stations if you get 2 kills up on someone giving you a decent advantage on thier spawn, but not enough to feel unfair.

Excavation: is just annoying with all it's edges, rounded edges would vastly improve this level, also there is a glitch with one of the powerups see in bugs

This is great feedback Hangar not having health stations is just a temporary thing. We probably won't cut EVERY corner but we'll definitely cut more of them, especially on Excavation Site. I think making moving through a map more difficult is not necessarily always a bad thing For example we made Caves as a more 'advanced' map with all those difficult narrow corridors.

AI:
1. Gets stuck on walls often in caves (easy/medium/sometimes  on hard)

Yep, this is well known and I will be working on it.

Bugs:
loading caves once produced this, was unplayable.
http://imgur.com/QfjQb

In excavation there is a floating powerup out of reach
http://imgur.com/8zfoV

changing resolution crashes the game, but on restart works fine.

1. What happened before loading the Caves map? Was it your first match after starting the game? Were you hosting a game or connecting to it?
2. I always forget to remove this powerup even though I know it's there and it has been there for a few releases now
3. This is a known bug, working on it.

Personal:
1. This is more preference, though I would love some customization points to put into things like weapons, armor, health and so on. Or a value to playing your game for a much more extended period of time by adding exp or money to killing cars online that I can bring home to a shop I could tweek my car a little with...even if it is just totally aesthetic only.

We are considering making every ship a little different, different speed, armor etc. Maybe we'll make some of them unlockable?

Thanks again for all this, best feedback I could wish for

[Pandara_RA!]

All the menus (aside from the menus that show up during a match) are currently place-holders.
The repair sound is actually on a 10-seconds loop, are you sure you mean repair?
We plan to do a separate menu for choosing your ship, with a short description, artwork for the pilot etc. kinda like in fighting games, would that work?

When you played the game for about 2-3 hours you notice, maybe I just have a trained ear for that kinda thing. =P

We played around with different control schemes and decided that this is the most interesting, although it might be a little confusing at first.

Thats actually interesting, as I played for a longer bit of time it felt less out of my control like what you say, although having the alternative option tucked in the menu somewhere might not hurt...but also may hurt! as it changes the experience depending on someones default etc. Not my call =]

Putting a cooldown on respawning is a good idea, although the way we played you already have an advantage as the scoring player because you get at least a few seconds of healing and you can pick up the ammo, while the enemy respawn without his secondary weapon.

Oh for sure there was an advantage, I may just be used to larger swings in momentum, respawn timer is a must, as I just finish someone off right as my primary goes on cool down, then they pop up and have that large advantage...happened with my friend about 20 or so times =], this will fix it.

and if you hit your opponent once he will loose some of his momentum due to knockback making it easier to hit him again and again. This way you can frag a healthy opponent in 2 seconds by slightly adjusting your aiming after each shot.

I knew I forgot to add a major point to that opinion! I found out that by issuing a strafe command on left and right quickly back and forth permanently acts as a boost when coupled with your forward dash timed correctly, making me and my friend become wiggling speed demons regardless of getting hit, the momentum shift has a much lesser effect.

It's not the worst weapon at all, in my head it's right below rocket etc.

As for the mines I don't think the hit box size is not the issue, though that sounds like a fun idea anyways. it either needs to arm itself instantly, or deal more damage and last on the field slightly longer. Though thats just my opinion.

As for why dont people like the shotty? I feel like it just doesn't have a good recoil to the action, like from sound and visuals alone I feel like there is no KA POW! to hitting someone up close I actually thought it was worthless too...then I made my friend take a hit at mid/close range and saw that wow, that does a ton of damage actually! I just didnt' "feel" it when I hit them with it, maybe add a tiny tiny bit of knockback and add a nice overlapping sizzle sound for each acid ball hitting?

Yeah, that's true, I'm considering either shortening the overheat of lasers or making the machinegun more powerful. Which you thing would be better?

I'd make the machine just stronger, I like how it feels as a surgical weapon rather than a dependable one, it feels like landing most of a full chip doesn't net a kill, and stuttering the fire to avoid cooldown is just poor on the Mgun as it is a rapid fire style weapon.

1. What happened before loading the Caves map? Was it your first match after starting the game? Were you hosting a game or connecting to it?

The most info I can provide is that it was after I had played on caves twice already, and then backed out into the menu and tried playing it again with defualt settings, was very odd, and was unable to reproduce after trying a good 10 times =]

We are considering making every ship a little different, different speed, armor etc. Maybe we'll make some of them unlockable?

Sounds fantastic, adding a handful of unlockable cars from match making sounds really cool actually. =]

PS: message me when you get to your next version point, as I will pop back in and give another go at it =]

[Netsu]

I knew I forgot to add a major point to that opinion! I found out that by issuing a strafe command on left and right quickly back and forth permanently acts as a boost when coupled with your forward dash timed correctly, making me and my friend become wiggling speed demons regardless of getting hit, the momentum shift has a much lesser effect.

Huh, I'm not sure if I know what you mean, could you explain it in other words or maybe record a video?

As for the mines I don't think the hit box size is not the issue, though that sounds like a fun idea anyways. it either needs to arm itself instantly, or deal more damage and last on the field slightly longer. Though thats just my opinion.

We now had this idea that instead of connecting you mines with tripwire you would be able to shoot your mines with your primary weapon making them instantly go off in a much more powerful explosion. Kinda like the shockrifle worked in Unreal Tournament.

As for why dont people like the shotty? I feel like it just doesn't have a good recoil to the action, like from sound and visuals alone I feel like there is no KA POW! to hitting someone up close I actually thought it was worthless too...then I made my friend take a hit at mid/close range and saw that wow, that does a ton of damage actually! I just didnt' "feel" it when I hit them with it, maybe add a tiny tiny bit of knockback and add a nice overlapping sizzle sound for each acid ball hitting?

Yeah, you're spot on. The shotgun need to feel much more powerful, I'll probably add knockback for both the shooter and the target.

PS: message me when you get to your next version point, as I will pop back in and give another go at it =]

I will surely do so

[Netsu]

In preparation for beta 0.3.0 (hopefully arriving tomorrow) I prepared a new batch of screenshots that can be seen on our site:

http://doubledude.com/hullfire/screenshots/

Here are some of them to make the thread prettier.

[Netsu]

The beta 0.3.0 version is ready to download on our site: http://doubledude.com

The most important new features are:

• A new weapon: Rebounder. The bullets bounce off walls (maximum of 2 bounces) and the damage triples with each rebound.
• Many changes in the maps, Hive now looks completely different, Hangar has been reskinned (now named Scrapyard), Caves and Excavation has been seriously overhauled.
• Chat commands, type ‘\help’ into the chat to see a list, most of those only work if you are the host.

Full changelog and links in the downloads section as usual:

Hullfire beta 0.3.0 download

All comments welcome

[5eph]

On Hive, if you change the screen resolution/screen settings mid-game, the little egg-looking things turn into white-squarish things. I've been able to reproduce this on every attempt, playing on a x64 Win7 machine.
Also, I'd love to give multiplayer a try wih a friend of mine and report back to you, would I just have to give him my computer's IP and any port, or is a specific one needed, or what?

I'm really liking Hullfire so far, I started following it maybe a month or so ago. Keep up the great work!

[Netsu]

Oh yeah, the game tries to connect on port 1234, so you should have this one open on the host side, we should have probably mentioned it somewhere. If you have the port open your friend just have to type you IP into the box and connect, It'd be great if you could try it
I'll look into the bug soon, I can reproduce it on my machine through Wine so it should be easy to fix, thanks!

[5eph]

My friend and I were able to play three games over twenty or so minutes after messing around with my router settings for a little bit, and it was great; there were no outstanding problems, no latency, nothing. We'll definitely play some more over the next week or so and I'll report back to you with anything that comes up, but we did notice a couple of things in this last session:

1. There seems to be some sort of issue with the plasma blaster at close range. When I was shooting the weapon while being shot by someone and both of us passed directly over one another, if I died I would end up killing myself instead of being killed by the opponent. I'm unsure if this is only in online multiplayer or something with the ship I was using or what (I think I was using the orange kind-of boxy one), but I'll try to reproduce it in single-player and online sessions in the future and record it with fraps so you can see what's going on.

2. There seems to be some sort of desynchronization under some set of specific circumstances when a match is won in online multiplayer. I won all three of our matches (mostly because I've been playing since last release), and every time this would happen to my friend, as described by him: he would still be able to move and shoot normally, but myself and all the bots would be spinning around in place with jets still on, as if only the left or right arrow key was being held. He didn't see any powerups, he said, he was able to shoot us but not damage us, and I'm not sure if he was able to interact with repair stations or not. When he held tab to open the scoreboard it still listed me as one kill under the score limit, and on my side I had the normal post match scoreboard screen. We went back in afterwards and tried to reproduce it, but weren't able to for whatever reason, so I can't say much more about it. We'll keep trying, and if it happens again I'll be sure to tell you about it and hopefully have some sort of video or image to help.

3. We liked the dual lasers and bolt driver the best. The bolt driver, we thought, had the best audio/visual effect to it, and the ability to stop an opponent almost dead in his/her tracks with one good hit is very, very useful in such a mobile game as Hullfire. The dual lasers are easier to hit with than the other primaries, and have a good audio/visual aesthetic. All the other weapons felt just about as effective, but didn't give as much feedback; we couldn't feel the impact of them. They all looked and sounded nice, though; it's mostly a nit-picky type of thing, like the game wouldn't really be any worse for it if everything stayed the same.

As a couple of final thoughts, the way the game looks and sounds is very, very awesome; the quality of all the menus and sound effects and fonts and graphics really, really show. Some things that would be cool to add in future releases would be a multiplayer lobby, so you can go straight into another match after one ends, medal or commendation-type notifications, like mulitkills and kill streaks and etc., and names for each of the ships as well as some type of visual to display how they are different (if the ships are different at all, I remember you talking about it a few posts up but I can't remember what was said as I type this). Anyways, I'm really enjoying what you guys are doing, keep up the great work!

[Netsu]

It's awesome to hear you guys liked it This is all great feedback, I'll respond to all issues:

1. There seems to be some sort of issue with the plasma blaster at close range. When I was shooting the weapon while being shot by someone and both of us passed directly over one another, if I died I would end up killing myself instead of being killed by the opponent. I'm unsure if this is only in online multiplayer or something with the ship I was using or what (I think I was using the orange kind-of boxy one), but I'll try to reproduce it in single-player and online sessions in the future and record it with fraps so you can see what's going on.

I don't know if you noticed, but it is possible to kill yourself with your own plasma shot. The plasma blasts explode upon impact and deal splash damage. Maybe you got hit by your own splash?

2. There seems to be some sort of desynchronization under some set of specific circumstances when a match is won in online multiplayer. I won all three of our matches (mostly because I've been playing since last release), and every time this would happen to my friend, as described by him: he would still be able to move and shoot normally, but myself and all the bots would be spinning around in place with jets still on, as if only the left or right arrow key was being held. He didn't see any powerups, he said, he was able to shoot us but not damage us, and I'm not sure if he was able to interact with repair stations or not. When he held tab to open the scoreboard it still listed me as one kill under the score limit, and on my side I had the normal post match scoreboard screen. We went back in afterwards and tried to reproduce it, but weren't able to for whatever reason, so I can't say much more about it. We'll keep trying, and if it happens again I'll be sure to tell you about it and hopefully have some sort of video or image to help.

I'll certainly investigate, we usually don't test the online part enough before a release, and bugs like that slip in. Maybe I will be able to figure this one out just by looking at the code, you gave a very detailed description so that should help

3. We liked the dual lasers and bolt driver the best. The bolt driver, we thought, had the best audio/visual effect to it, and the ability to stop an opponent almost dead in his/her tracks with one good hit is very, very useful in such a mobile game as Hullfire. The dual lasers are easier to hit with than the other primaries, and have a good audio/visual aesthetic. All the other weapons felt just about as effective, but didn't give as much feedback; we couldn't feel the impact of them. They all looked and sounded nice, though; it's mostly a nit-picky type of thing, like the game wouldn't really be any worse for it if everything stayed the same.

Thanks, I'm particularly proud of the bolt driver so I'm very glad you liked it One thing we'll be certainly improving upon in means of visual and audio feedback is the shotgun. I already added a recoil and a knockback so those should be in the next release. We also added some sparks flying out of explosions to make them more interesting.
If you have any ideas on how to improve the feedback of the weapons please share

As a couple of final thoughts, the way the game looks and sounds is very, very awesome; the quality of all the menus and sound effects and fonts and graphics really, really show. Some things that would be cool to add in future releases would be a multiplayer lobby, so you can go straight into another match after one ends, medal or commendation-type notifications, like mulitkills and kill streaks and etc., and names for each of the ships as well as some type of visual to display how they are different (if the ships are different at all, I remember you talking about it a few posts up but I can't remember what was said as I type this). Anyways, I'm really enjoying what you guys are doing, keep up the great work!

All the menus outside of the match itself (main menu, options etc) are actually still place holders, and we are currently working on them as they are our main goal for the next release.
The only difference between ships for now is their physical shape (but not hitbox against bullets, which is always circular), this might change in the future, but we'll probably keep it this way. Nonetheless one of the menus we'll be including in the next release is the character select menu, where each ship is given a name and a pilot and you can read the bio and see the artwork for each pilot as you choose your ship.
What exactly do you mean by a multiplayer lobby? Don't know if you know this, but after a match ends you should be able to restart the match or play again on a new map by issuing an appropriate chat command. You can see the list of chat commands by typing '\help' into the chat window.
We might add features like killstreaks, multikills and such as it's not much work, but we want to focus on more pressing matters first

Thanks for all the feedback! I hope you guys will enjoy the future releases and get some fun out of our game

[epcc]

It looks really pretty. Since I have no one to play with right now, I played against bots.
Even "easy" was hard, mostly because I found it hard to aim. Curiously, the more bots there was, the harder it got. Do they prefer to shoot the player?
Sometimes I got awful fps drops, mostly when there was a lot of bullets flying around and 3+ bots. I think it may be a bug, because my computer can't be that slow.

I also had it crash three times, randomly after getting killed.

[Netsu]

It looks really pretty. Since I have no one to play with right now, I played against bots.
Even "easy" was hard, mostly because I found it hard to aim. Curiously, the more bots there was, the harder it got. Do they prefer to shoot the player?
Sometimes I got awful fps drops, mostly when there was a lot of bullets flying around and 3+ bots. I think it may be a bug, because my computer can't be that slow.

I also had it crash three times, randomly after getting killed.

Thanks! What system do you run and what are your specs? What was the fps before the drop and after? The game will definitely go through some optimisation later as we want it to be viable to play on netbooks. Have you tried setting the gfx settings to LOW? Although if you say the bots and bullets slow down the game then it probably has nothing to do with graphics.
The bots always shoot the closest enemy (maybe hard and insane will shoot the weakest player later). I don't know why, but I somehow get the feeling that they got much harder recently. I made easy to be a good introduction into the game, medium I had no serious problems with and hard was a big challenge for me. But now I can rarely win with medium. The difficulty levels need to go through more balancing later. Easy will probably not even know how to heal.

[epcc]

I have windows xp running on pentium 4 3Ghz,2gb ram and radeon hd 6670. I didn't see any fps counters, so I can't tell the exact fps, but it dops from really smooth (60 frames/s) to maybe 10 sometimes even to 1-2 f/s. for a second. After more testing, I'm not really sure anymore what causes the lag. Some huge fights are relatively fast, sometimes fighting with only one opponent makes it slow.
Today it crashed >5 times, in less than an hour. No error messages, not even in stderr/stdout.txt. It turns out that they aren't even related to getting killed.

[Netsu]

You can see the FPS counter in the score table (default key is tab), on the right together with the clock and ping.
If you manage to come up with a pattern that those crashes or slowdowns might follow please tell. Does changing the gfx setting to LOW help with the framerate drops? Does any of your problems occur on a specific map? Maybe your system does something in the background for a moment? Do they seem to be related with the player or explosion debris colliding with something?

Anyway, the slowdown probably isn't a serious issue and will go away once I start profiling and optimising. The crashes on the other hand I can use all the info on, especially as I normally run the game on Linux and they can be system related.

[epcc]

what i noticed was that when playing with no bots, machinegun dropped the fps by 50%, from 84(my refresh rate) to 40, but only with high quality. With low quality it was always 85.
I still had lag spikes when playing against bots, however. This playing session I had no random crashes. You should really put some time into better error reporting and logging.

Oh and I finally won against the easy bots. I used small weapons to finish them off and never went into a fight without full big gun ammo. I found it impossible to kill them with only small guns.

[Netsu]

I'm only logging errors like texture load and read errors, sound load errors etc. but all the crashes are due to segfaults. Maybe you could download GDB, run the game through it, and when it crashes type 'bt' to see the backtrace after the segfault? That would help me a lot.
It's interesting and strange what you said about machinegun, I'll investigate that.

[epcc]

Code:

#0  0x00425d78 in program_logic () at Loops/logic.cpp:550
#1  0x004014a5 in SDL_main (argc=1, argv=0x13228d0) at Loops/main.cpp:30
#2  0x0046db1b in console_main (argc=1, argv=0x13228d0) at ./src/main/win32/SDL_win32_main.c:315
#3  0x0046dbd8 in WinMain (hInst=0x400000, hPrev=0x0, szCmdLine=0x24243f "", sw=1) at ./src/main/win32/SDL_win32_main.c:398
#4  0x0046d2c3 in main ()

[Netsu]

Thanks a lot! Can you also post the previous few lines? Or is there no further mention of the line that caused the segfault? Were you (or maybe the bot?) by any chance using the rebounder weapon when this crash occurred?

On a side note, I found a bug in the AI code, which caused the bots to react to players twice as fast as they should i.e. easy bots would notice you 0.5 seconds after you come in their range, instead of 1 second. I also reduced the accuracy of easy and medium bots, and easy bots no longer use the repair stations.
The difficulty should be much better balanced in the next release.

[epcc]

that's the full backtrace.
Previous lines were:

Code:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread 3708.0xc8c]
0x00425d78 in program_logic () at Loops/logic.cpp:550
550     Loops/logic.cpp: No such file or directory.
        in Loops/logic.cpp
(gdb) bt

I wasn't using rebounder, didn't see any bots using it either but they might have. This time the crash appeared exactly when I got killed.

[Netsu]

By 'exactly when I got killed' you mean exactly as you exploded or exactly as you started burning? I might have an idea why this happens, but without a way to reproduce it it would be hard to confirm.

[epcc]

i think that when it started burning, but I'm not too sure any more.