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I've been looking forward to this release! So far I've only played a couple of leagues, but I've got a couple of issues I want to tell you about. First of all the textures on some maps are flickering, for example on the tutorial track. I'm not sure if it could be caused by my graphics card though, I'm currently playing on my laptop with a nVidia Quadro FX 570M. I'm don't know very much about graphic programming, but I think it looks like z-fighting(?). Another graphic related thing is the information messages that pops up during races which tend to block my view. For me those are displayed on a solid black background and fades out very slowly, so sometimes when I get say three or four messages in a row, for example when breaking the lap record a few times in a race, I can't see my car because of the black boxes. Now on to the racing, this game is awesome! |
Submitted by indiecosmic
Fri, 05/02/2008 - 21:09
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Some feedback on version 0.9
hey thanks for your feedback and kind words!
when you say textures do you mean the ground textures like tarmac or does it happen with trees and such objects?
hmm okay I take it it happens on small tracks when you're going fast downwards, causing the camera to zoom out to try to show whats in front of you and the car?
Some feedback on version 0.9
Oh, yeah I mean objects. For example the garage and the trees in the tutorial track, and the fences at another track, can't remember which one now though. I noticed this is far more common when showing the pause menu.
Yeah, it's more common on the small tracks. Especially when going fast downwards and into a turn it's hard to know where your car actually is going.
Some feedback on version 0.9
ok I know what you mean then. its a tough problem. actually its more of a zone-fighting problem than z-fighting if you're interested in details. we'll put it on the list
ok we can try to make the camera keep the car closer to the center and move up the messages a bit. that should do it.
Some feedback on version 0.9
Sounds interesting! Is the zone-fighting somehow related to the graphics card or resolution, or perhaps because I'm using Vista? I haven't had those problems on my other computer as far as I can remember. I'll try it out later with an external monitor to see if there's any difference.
Perhaps you could fade out the messages a bit faster? I think that would be enough actually, at least fading the message background to the gray with a lower opacity. That shouldn't be too hard right?
Some feedback on version 0.9
no its not you, its us
The game divides all objects into zones so it won't render or take objects out-of-view into account when calculating collisions and physics. Problem is objects can be placed on the edges of the zones and the game can have trouble sorting them in the right order as they move out of view for the player. We've struggled with this in the past and we'll have to take another look at it. Hope I didn't bore you with details 
if thats enough its easy to do. we can start the background at a lower opacity and fade it out faster. no problemo!
Some feedback on version 0.9
I think it's interesting actually, not boring at all
I captured an example of the "black box problem" where my car is completely hidden behind the information text.
[img]http://i30.tinypic.com/os4z09.png[/img]
Some feedback on version 0.9
haha thats funny.
well its definitely a problem and we'll fix it as soon as possible (there's other things to correct too so we'll release an update when its all done). I hope it doesn't make it completely unplayable in the meantime. thanks again for taking the time to report this!
Some feedback on version 0.9
It's not a major issue, just a minor annoyance. I've really enjoyed the game so far, there's a lot of nice additions compared to the previous versions.
I'm still a bit confused about the car levels though, I remember we discussed it in an ealier thread. For example on my current career I started out with a used level 1 car, which only was upgradeable twice on each feature, which I btw think is an excellent idea. After that I bought a new level 2 car which apparenly could be upgraded a lot more. However after some upgrades I got the message it had reached its' maximum level (2 above original level). I never noticed it leveled up in the first place, and kept spending points, so I ended up with a slightly unbalanced upgrade with a lot of points in brakes and handling but very little engine power and no nitro. This leads to a thought that it would be nice to know how to weight the upgrade points and features towards each other, and what makes a car gain a level, to make it easier to plan your upgrades. Do you have any thoughts about this?
Some feedback on version 0.9
great to hear! it would be nice to hear which features in particular that you enjoy.
the level restriction is a bit more complex than just restricting the amount of upgrades per feature by a set amount. maybe it should be just that instead.
here's how it works now: the level is calculated from a weighting of the attributes base points + upgrade points and the cars weight.
engine power/weight ratio has the most impact and then nitro and handling and finally brakes and body factor in less and less respectively. at the moment there is no explicit amount of points or amount of upgrades that could tell you which level it is. since power and weight affect the cars performance the most thats what levels up the car the fastest.
what it comes down to is that this system is pretty good at balancing cars but its pretty hard to show to the player how much any upgrade affects its level several steps before you actually upgrade something. I think we either need a simpler system where we clearly can show how much you need to increase it or we find it sufficient that the player accepts that the game just controls the rules for you..
btw, thanks for the crash report. hope we can find the problem with it. judging from the two logs the same problem with a sound happened without a crash in your previous session so it may be something completely different. does it happen always with this profile. which kind of race do you start when it does?
Some feedback on version 0.9
About the upgrades:
Added some semi-transparent lines to the upgrade bars that shows how much you can upgrade each item. Also thinking about adding an "undo" button to remove all upgrades/refund money done. This will only be valid until one leaves the menu and accepts the changes ofc. That should give the visual help needed to plan upgrades and an opportunity to try different setups without wasting money
We are also discussing other changes to the upgrade menu. Nothing final yet.
Some feedback on version 0.9
[quote="indiecosmic"]Oh, yeah I mean objects. For example the garage and the trees in the tutorial track, and the fences at another track, can't remember which one now though. I noticed this is far more common when showing the pause menu.[/quote]
How often do they flicker ?
Due to the zone-fighting and that one object can overlap zones, a change of draw order will occur when one zone is leaving the draw area. Could perhaps be fixed by taking this into account when sorting objects. Anyhow, this should not happen if the car(camera) stands still. Is this the case for you that it happens even though you do not move ?
Some feedback on version 0.9
I don't care for this new upgrade cap much.
We spent a good bit of time balancing out the upgrade curves for 1-10. To arbitrarily restrict it seems a bit strange. In fact, the curves have serious diminishing returns, on top of exponential cost. So if the player reaaaaally wants to spend 500,000k to get that last 5 hp, shouldn't he be allowed to?
Some feedback on version 0.9
The problem with the upgrade curve is that it doesn't take the base level into consideration and in my opinion gives way to much power too fast to give a good balance between the cars. As it was, a not that much upgraded lvl1 car could take you 3/4 through the game and it could beat lvl4-5 cars on short tracks. The idea behinde the cap was to increase the difference between levels and force the player to buy new cars.
We have discussed about removing the cap and incorporate the base level into the curve so that a max upgraded lvl1 perhaps is just below or equal to a stock lvl3 car. This solves the original problem without the hassle of using various level restrictions. What do you think about this?
Some feedback on version 0.9
Sorry for the delay.
About the flickering:
The flickering is several times per second and shows up as thick horizontal lines, but as you say they're more common when the camera is moving. What I've noticed though is that it almost exclusively happens when the "Start your engines"-text is showing, as well as the start count-down and the in-game menu. When the race has started the flickering usually stops.
I tried to capture it using Fraps, but it never occured at that low frame rate.
Some comments on the upgrades:
An undo-button would be great I think, as well as the visual clues.
I like the idea of an upgrade cap. It gives you a reason to keep your old cars for challenge races, as well as an urge to keep earning money to buy better cars. But I like your idea with base levels as well, they're both good ideas.
Keep up the good work!
Some feedback on version 0.9
[quote="SolidRalf"]The problem with the upgrade curve is that it doesn't take the base level into consideration and in my opinion gives way to much power too fast to give a good balance between the cars. As it was, a not that much upgraded lvl1 car could take you 3/4 through the game and it could beat lvl4-5 cars on short tracks. The idea behinde the cap was to increase the difference between levels and force the player to buy new cars.
We have discussed about removing the cap and incorporate the base level into the curve so that a max upgraded lvl1 perhaps is just below or equal to a stock lvl3 car. This solves the original problem without the hassle of using various level restrictions. What do you think about this?[/quote]
If I understand what you are trying to get at, you want the early cars to do something like 100-300hp (base level -> lvl10 upgrade) while mid level cars would be 300-500 or something like that, and so on. This seems reasonable to me, and I believe your suggestion would do that. It would just be a matter of figuring the proper scaling to the upgrade curve. (I would help Benny with this this weekend if you guys want).
A few of the lvl1-2 cars are really a bit too good, which I think exaggerates the problem. The one that comes to mind the most is the NAJO MINI (mini cooper look-alike). I would suggest some alteration to its handling balance to make it harder to drive, since its power/weight is fairly good for such an early car. I have some other car-balance suggestions that I might like to pass onto you guys as I continue to play more.
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On a completely different note: Some things that I thought would be cool.
1) If you could implement the driver statistics with the HUB (or this forum) so that the player can put a cutdown statistics image in their forum signature.
2) Expand on the "Achievements" section you already implemented. Add things like "Complete a Lap of X course in under X.XX time". Look at the recent Valve games on Steam for inspiration. Players seem to really take to this sort of thing.
3) Display the miles (kilometerage?) put on your car soemwhere in its garage display. I wouldnt want it to physically alter anything about gameplay, but might be interesting to see what cars get the most use.
Some feedback on version 0.9
[quote="indiecosmic"]The flickering is several times per second and shows up as thick horizontal lines, but as you say they're more common when the camera is moving. What I've noticed though is that it almost exclusively happens when the "Start your engines"-text is showing, as well as the start count-down and the in-game menu. When the race has started the flickering usually stops.
I tried to capture it using Fraps, but it never occured at that low frame rate.
[/quote]
Hmm. Strange. This is not due to the zones. That issue only switches the draw-order on some objects that overlaps two or more zones when one zone is leaving the draw area and is not even something you usually notice when racing.
Seems like this happens when we draw something in orthogonal-space over a 3d-scene. But then the rest of the GUI should have similar problems. Would be great if you could post a screenshot of the issue.
Almost forgot to ask: Is this problem new for 0.9 or did it happen in previous versions as well ?
[quote="indiecosmic"]Keep up the good work![/quote]
Thanks
Some feedback on version 0.9
Great feedbackl guys! Keep it coming.
It seems we have the solution to the upgrade problem then. I'd really appreciate your help with the tweaks combat.
You're other ideas are great aswell. I've been wanting to expand on the online and achievements sections myself. These are very cool and desirable features (online highscore times have already been seriously considered since spellofplay already has a system for this). we do however feel kinda done with this project after working so many years on it and i don't know if it would be worth it at this point unless more people take interest and motivate us. I realize its kind of a catch 22 but we're tired and wanna make new stuff.
it depends on the complexity of the achievements i guess. but because of how the game works today any such additions would be hard to not make look like half-assed last minute additions and i don't know if we'd benefit from that. If enough people show up and want us to do it maybe
we could make a few polls when we start marketing the game a bit more to show that we're willing to add features if they're wanted.
milage shouldnt be too hard. thats a nice one.
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