Big bin of feedback

[Momaw]

I'll just glom a bunch of stuff together, shall I. I'm a new player just coming from a new player's perspective, and these are the things that jump out at me. This is all relative to 0.5b on Windows.

MAP

1. Text labels get in the way of actually seeing the systems. Text labels should disappear when the mouse is in the "active area", except for the selected system or ones immediately connected to it.

2. Trip planner is completely unintuitive. It should be, click Startpoint, click Endpoint, click Go.

3. The 3D mode of the map exhibits horrendous perspective/view portal stretching.

4. The colors of the different factions are not all different enough that you can tell at a glance who owns what. Add the faction's name after the system name when selected.

5. It would be nice if the map kept track of stations that you have found. This may be an upgrade that you have to buy. You should be able to perform map searches such as "Find: nearest Mining Base".

6. It would be nice if the map indicated where major fleet battles are occouring, so that you can go there and contribute or spectate.

FLIGHT

7. It's impossible to know how fast you're actually going and in what direction without some kind of visual reference point. This is not practical. There needs to be some kind of interactive HUD system that shows true direction of travel.

8. There should be an icon that indicates when you are flying without computer assistence. "Sliding". I use the feature heavily since it's useful in terms of both combat and travel.

9. There should be an icon that indicates when you are flying with your governor set to Combat or Navigation mode, since this has an impact on the ship's behaviour even if you don't exceed Combat velocities.

10. More advanced targeting systems should highlight ship contacts on your main view, so that you know where they are without having to try to coorelate your sensor display with your main view. It does not need to be a large indicator. Bonus points if the system shows (with a dot or stalks or something) which way the contact is moving relative to you and if the distance to target is opening or closing.

11. Missiles should display some kind of flight trail, or at a very minimum a "time to expected intercept" readout. I can't even begin to adjust my missile-launching tactic to ensure hits, because I can't see what's happening to them in flight.

WEAPONS

12. Firing groups would be nice. As it is, I find there's no point to carryig more than two types of cannons because you either fire all together or a single type. Starsiege has an excellent example of a practical firing system. It allowed 3 customizable firing chains, to which each weapon could belong or not. Each group could be set to fire as a group (more powerful) or fire sequentially (greater chance of a hit).

13. Auto tracking is much too good. I see this is already being discussed. A good human pilot with manual controls should be able to score more hits than the automatic system unless that weapon has been designed from the ground up to be under automatic control. So a Hephaestus should not be terribly acccurate under auto-track, but a Stormfire point defense weapon should.

14. Balance in general. Nuff said.

15. Add a "chemical explosives" line of weapons. Mass drivers are fun and all, but they ought to consume hellacious amounts of power. Chemically-fired weapons do less damage and have a slower muzzle velocity than mass drivers, but they consume basically no power and have an extreme cyclic rate. Ranging from a slug-spewing 20mm rotatary cannon up to a 200mm ship buster.

TRADING

There's already threads on this in progress, so I'll be brief:

16. Supply and demand. The profit margin on goods should fall as the location you're selling to gets more of it.

17. Allow profit margins to settle out. There's basically no point whatsoever to hauling metal once you can afford to fill up on Atmospheric Processors. This needs to change.

18. More factional or special goods, whose price increases the further you lug it. Confed Speciality Wines would fetch a hell of an amazing price fifteen systems away where they've never even heard of the stuff, while Confeds would pay mountains of cash to have that rare and beautiful wood from deep in Rlaan space.

19. Trying to maneuver a fully loaded freighter is an exercise in annoyance. Either give freight ships *massive* thrust so they can still remain useable when loaded, or allow the purchase of expensive freight-ship-only equipment that reduces the effective mass of your cargo. Another suggestion is to add a "cargo beam", basically a bidirectional tractor. You target a station and shoot it with your cargo beam, and the cargo trade interface pops up. Profit margins may be slightly lower than usual when using the cargo beam (handling fee).

20. Freight hauling in general is unrewarding and pointless in the long term. It feels like a way to make money to buy a combat ship. Improve the long-term viability of trading by: a.) planets should produce enough goods to fill even a fairly large ship with ease b.) almost all freight ships need turrets. They need not be capital-scale weapons to be effective. c.) there should be some system for the player to contribute to the war effort through commerce, either by hauling military cargo or simply by donating cash. d.) hauled fighters just need to be more elegantly handled and useful. Another use for the Cargo Beam.

FACTIONS

21. Add an in-game readout that shows the interrelation between factions, perhaps as simple as adding red or green tags to the other factions when you select one. Red means the factions dislike eachother, green means they are fond of eachother. So you click on the Confeds: Aerans turn red, the Merchant's Guild turns green.

22. Some non-combat way of adjusting your relationship with factions. Especially necessary for factions who are absolutely everywhere but don't like or dislike anybody else enough to improve your rating in a single lifetime.

PERFORMANCE

23. If there's an LOD system, it's not working. It doesn't take much to slow my framerate to single digits simply when a lot of ships, or a few ones of the wrong kind (Ox and Clydesdale are the biggest offenders it seems), even if those ships are only a few pixels across and should be using a model of only a few triangles.

24. Music loading is slow and buggy. The game stuttors noticably for a few seconds when loading a new track, and about 80% of the crashes I've experienced are during track changes.

[Xit]

For point 8 there is a flight computer indicator, it read FLTCMP or something similar, but I agree it could be clearer

As for point 7 I mostly use the trail of dust behind the ship as a reference but this is hardly convenient, Elite Frontier had a crosshair that did this, it literally just showed you which way the ship was actually moving.

As for the rest, most of them are on some vaguely to-do post 6.0 lists at the moment, but there's some good ideas there.

[Xit]

For map related discussion look here
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... hp?t=10732

but do read the whole thread before posting.

[Miramor]

Gameplay: the way that beams and exhaust cones are generated is often plainly visible. There needs to be some way of avoiding this; at the least, the player's beam weapons should always fire from points that are offscreen.

[Xit]

Basically all the points on trading will be dealt with post 0.6, a lot of these points are undergoing discussion right now... The cargo beam seems to actually be a good idea though... Maybe we should make it take up a fairly large amount of space, and cost lots to get in the first place, but then have it make things so much more convenient that it ends up being worthwhile...

While I much prefer the idea of docking normally, it seems perfectly plausible to me and would revolutionise ship to ship transfers.

@Miramor - I guess that comes down to the way that engine lights are added into meshes, do you think the exhaust flares should be more sunken into the body of the ship?

[bgaskey]

7 and 8 were added since the win beta was built so you wont see them, but they have been taken into consideration.

A lot of these are good points the mirror my own sentiments.

[loki1950]

7 and 8 were added since the win beta was built so you wont see them

If you want to see them checkout the data4.x module from svn with TortoiseSVN that will get you the latest data and windows exe detailed instruction can be found in the wiki.

Enjoy the Choice

[Miramor]

@Miramor - I guess that comes down to the way that engine lights are added into meshes, do you think the exhaust flares should be more sunken into the body of the ship?

That would probably help. Although the cross sectional part of the flare needs to be brighter and further out, so that it actually covers up the exhaust port when viewed from behind.

And beams... As I said before, making the player's beam weapons always fire from offscreen would help, but beam weapons from other ships will still show their lack of a cross section. Maybe beams could be given cross section graphics?

(Weird, I've played other games with beam-like weapons and never seen them look like that. Even BZFlag, which has pretty cheap graphics. Are there better methods for generating beam-like effects, that might be used once the switch to OGRE is completed?)

[Xit]

What does Vegatrek use for phasers? It claims to be near cinematic, so I'd be suprised if they're still using the same beam graphics...

As for the engines, we really need a new graphic or mesh (a different way of doing these things may be best in the long run IMO) which could replace the old one seamlessly, and be larger but without borking all the existing meshes... Tricky.