Some complaints about playability

[slartibart]

Ok the game is free, and developed by people in their spare time etc etc, so critisims doesn't realy work. but here is my five pennies:

First of all mere playing the game requires a major degree in mind reading since the game launcher is a tad erm... user unfriendly. Even I could have written something better blindfolded with a carrot up my arse.

Also the key bindings are hidden deep down in one of the readmes, and no! It is NOT common sense!

The game concept needs LOTS of work, NOT the code. The gfx looks marvelous, but there is no fun with nice gfx when the game plays as £$&%#.

Trading SUCKS at the moment... the only thing I seem to be able to do that is mariganly fun is to take a ship cruise get attacked by everyone (who is really fighting who here? Everyone seems to be angry at me, and there's no indication on who's fighting for who, some more colours in the radar would seriously help) and get shot down eventually since it's an impossible task to outgun the entire galaxy with a single ship.

Stop defying physics in every consievable way! Space is EMPTY, and when space is empty THERE IS NO FRICTION. Therefore my ship should not stop when I release the throttle. Speed is relevant (as Einstein painfully tried to explain 100 years ago but obviously failed to get through), so there is no point in displaying "current speed 732" (and what unit is 732??). Something similar to the way it was done in Frontier Elite II (may it R.I.P.) with current speed in relation to current target and/or the nearest star/space station/planet would be much more sensible.

Earth DO NOT cover 10 degrees of your viewfield when you are at venus, it is a small dot like all other planets!! I havent been there, so I cannot verify thios, although a quick look at NASA's pages seems to confirm my suspicions.

Also, gravity sucks! (bot not in this game since I cant seem to find it.

Apart from that it is a very nice gfx engine with lots of details, nice ships, speedy, whatever.. just please start taking care of those boring little things instead of whining about getting 300 fps when displaying 10 explosions simultaneously.

And that.. was my five pennies.

- Marvin

[etheral walker]

http://www.joeredcloud.com/kandarwiki/i ... rikeManual

[slartibart]

And yes indeed I have RTFM. (maybe you havent?)

The manual is fairly minimal and contains mostly no explanation at all about my points above.. sorry, you have to do better than that

- Marvin

[pontiac]

Most of your complaints have been discussed in the forum (before it crashed ?).


Launcher:
We would love to have a cool lancher useable for every paltform.
If you know how to program we would appreciate a cool lancher.
The development staff is very busy with implementing great things into VS (like dynamic universe, 3d card ,...)

Key bindings:
http://www.joeredcloud.com/kandarwiki/i ... nualConfig
Yeah RTFM again, but it is there.
Most of it is unfinished though everybody complains and nobody is extending it

Planets stuck together:
I think it has been alterd in current cvs data (data4.x)

Trading:
Yeah, there are a few pinch and scrape in trading. Hope this will be better with dynamic universe.

Physics:
Another thing, endless sdiscussed in the forum. But just imagin little thrusters on the front of your ship
BTW speed is relative in VS, if you "home" to another ship and then reduce speed to zero you will stand still in relation to the other ship.
Try it out, it's cool

[etheral walker]

Excuse me but I got a little question: why are you so agressive?
This game is develloped by volonteers, everybody gave a little something: an idea, a model, some patchs, some concepts.
And please have a look at things like gun metal:
-environemental mapping
-specular map on each object
-t&l
-volumetric explosions
-and many other cool stuffs


but interest, for me: 5 minutes, uninstall, and stop wasting my time with this "game"

[pontiac]

If my post sounded aggresive i want to apologise for that.
I don't wanted it to sound aggresive.

And yes, we all are making VS better and better.


PS: is "gun metal" a sapce sim like game?

Pontiac

[Shrike]

Ok the game is free, and developed by people in their spare time etc etc, so critisims doesn't realy work. but here is my five pennies:

There is a difference between constructive criticism and just being a dick.

First of all mere playing the game requires a major degree in mind reading since the game launcher is a tad erm... user unfriendly. Even I could have written something better blindfolded with a carrot up my arse.

Then do it. Or come back when 1.0 comes out. In the meantime you are playing v0.*.

Also the key bindings are hidden deep down in one of the readmes, and no! It is NOT common sense!

Actually, the key bindings are hidden deep down in the config file...even you should have been able to find them with that carrot up your arse.

The game concept needs LOTS of work, NOT the code. The gfx looks marvelous, but there is no fun with nice gfx when the game plays as £$&%#.

Gee, no kidding? Man, it's a good thing you came along, or no one would have ever realized this!

Seriously, you should have taken at least a cursory look around the forums before you put that carrot up your arse and started spouting off. You would have seen that there is a lot of discussion of this very issue.

Trading SUCKS at the moment...

Huge amount of discussion about this in the forums. You're late again, as usual.

the only thing I seem to be able to do that is mariganly fun is to take a ship cruise get attacked by everyone (who is really fighting who here? Everyone seems to be angry at me, and there's no indication on who's fighting for who, some more colours in the radar would seriously help) and get shot down eventually since it's an impossible task to outgun the entire galaxy with a single ship.

Um, okay. So I assume that the engine ran adequately on your machine? If it did, then I'd say that v0.3 has accomplished it's mission.

Stop defying physics in every consievable way! Space is EMPTY, and when space is empty THERE IS NO FRICTION. Therefore my ship should not stop when I release the throttle.

This was discussed to death on the old sourceforge forums (which are still there, go take a look). The bottom line is that the VS engine can do real physics behaviour, but the popular vote for gameplay is to emulate a more "airplane" feel.

There are directions on the old sourceforge forums on how to alter your config to give you the realistic behaviour if you please.

[Perhaps this should be added to the wiki?]

Speed is relevant (as Einstein painfully tried to explain 100 years ago but obviously failed to get through)

Einstein proposed the theory of "Relativity", not the theory of "Relevance". I guess he failed to get that through...

so there is no point in displaying "current speed 732" (and what unit is 732??). Something similar to the way it was done in Frontier Elite II (may it R.I.P.) with current speed in relation to current target and/or the nearest star/space station/planet would be much more sensible.

True, the speed number should have some frame of reference. Maybe something like 732ca (carrots per arse).

Earth DO NOT cover 10 degrees of your viewfield when you are at venus, it is a small dot like all other planets!! I havent been there, so I cannot verify thios, although a quick look at NASA's pages seems to confirm my suspicions.

The distances are, again, set in config files. In the case of the 0.3 release series, they were smushed together to shorten the distances for testing. There was a poll taken on what distances felt most comfortable for gameplay. In the 0.4 series the distances have been changed. By 1.0 I'm sure the developers will have come up with something which feels good to most people.

Still, you are free to alter your config files to use realistic distances.

Also, gravity sucks! (bot not in this game since I cant seem to find it.

From what I understand, t's there, just disabled, again, for gameplay reasons. I'm pretty sure you can turn it on if you want.

Apart from that it is a very nice gfx engine with lots of details, nice ships, speedy, whatever.. just please start taking care of those boring little things instead of whining about getting 300 fps when displaying 10 explosions simultaneously.

Well, thanks ever so much for dropping by, taking a look at the front yard, seeing the string around it, the fresh seed and the fertilizer and then taking the time to tell us how it isn't green and velvety smooth. None of us would ever have guessed.

And that.. was my five pennies.

- Marvin

I wouldn't give you 2 cents for your 5 pennies.

[etheral walker]

just have a look on lea-linux.org, we have many of those personns, trying to generate a troll.
For me I don't care

[Guest]

blah blah blah

Stop defying physics in every consievable way! Space is EMPTY, and when space is empty THERE IS NO FRICTION. Therefore my ship should not stop when I release the throttle. Speed is relevant (as Einstein painfully tried to explain 100 years ago but obviously failed to get through), so there is no point in displaying "current speed 732" (and what unit is 732??). Something similar to the way it was done in Frontier Elite II (may it R.I.P.) with current speed in relation to current target and/or the nearest star/space station/planet would be much more sensible.

This is called arcade physics and reduces the learning curve of the game. People who play these games are not pilots. There are space "simulators" out there that simulate true physics if you would prefer.

I've played many games where they used "true" physics. They are awful because it requires two hands to run the ship's thrusters. Basically, I don't like them. I like the games like Wing Commander, Tachyon: The Fringe, Freespace, and so on. But that is just my opinion.

Also, gravity sucks! (bot not in this game since I cant seem to find it.

That would be an interesting effect to see all of those planets pulling you around. Come to think of it, there is no such thing as jump nodes so they should be taken out of the game

Well, thanks ever so much for dropping by, taking a look at the front yard, seeing the string around it, the fresh seed and the fertilizer and then taking the time to tell us how it isn't green and velvety smooth. None of us would ever have guessed.

Great metaphor; me likes

[scheherazade]

blah blah bash bash spam blog blah

whatever

he does have some points.
mainly:
we need sereous improvement to the combat.
is anyone working on AI?

*i would ideally like to replicate something like WC3 or WC4 flight+combat style.

and hopefully with the new 'window' ability we'll have better trading UI thats a little easier to use.

-scheherazade

[etheral walker]

working on ai for closed maps

[Guest]

hm... lots of interesting responses, most of them refering to the old forum (which I havent read, sorry) and possible config file tweaks.

Thanks pontiac, your respons was very helpfull and enlightening.

And erm... also thanks Shrike, I was a bit too big mouthed, 'ts just the way I am unfortunately, but an "go figure it out yourself, and if you dont like it go write your own space simulator" kinda answer don't exactly make me wanna put efforts in making VS any better.

What I wanted to point out is that the game certainly has all the effects, ships, code and all that to make a serious contender.

It is only that the first impression one gets when downloading VS and (in the beginning much trying, until one reads all the readmes) playing the game is that it's a large botch barely working and rushed out to make it look good. Which, again, it isn't. I hope

Gravity adds lots of realism to the handling of the ship near planets, and with an arcade style controlls it should not be that difficult to control the ship anyway.

I'll see if I can botch together some QT code for the config tool and mission launcher, It should work on pretty much anything that contains some memory and a CPU.


- Marvin

[scheherazade]

if i remember right, planet gravity is in there, but is off in the config?

-scheherazade

[hellcatv]

correct
your computer would cancel out the effects of gravity (wasting fuel in the meantime) until you either ran out of fuel, or the forces became too strong to counter--in which case you'd topple into the planet....

it's not really fun unless you don't allow the computer to try to match the desired speed (eg modern cruise control in cars)

[Guest]

Launcher:
We would love to have a cool lancher useable for every paltform.

Why have a launcher? Most games use the in-game UI to handle settings, and needing a launcher to run a program seems a bit strange on most platforms.

[Jeremiah Cooper]

first to the say: Vegastrike has many good ideas and a good concept of what a good space-sim in the tradition of Elite 1stencounters and Privateer 1 /Righteous Fire should have.

It is also remarkable, that the project of Vegastrike is alive 4 such a long time and is developing better step by step.
(Credits to all these ambitious people, creating the

Vegastrike-Universe in their spare freetime)
Thumbs up for the folks of VEGASTRIKE.

here are some suggestions of someone without any practice in progamming anything:

Graphics: In the upper right of the cockpit there are ingame-messages as plane text. What about a small background box for better reading comfort?

By the way: Speedcontrol with numbers seems ok to me (also some people argue >>so there is no point in displaying "current speed 732" << it does a lot to the "feeling" of the game, an THAT'S an major aspect for me

Some Options I missed hardly:
a menue of the ships configuration (e.g. what computersystems, weapons, shields and other upgrades are installed, how much cargo-room is left and so on)
Sometimes it is a little bit confusing, if you would upgrade at the "weapons room".
Btw: What about renaming "weapons room" to something like "ship equipment" or "equipment dealer" cause you can buy there more than weapons

Another problem I have with upgrading: I miss a list of available upgrades and their features:
for example radar systems: what about a firm description about the abilities / data of the different systems ingame?
It would be o.k for me of getting only information of features / upgrades/ weapons which data is already stored in your ship's data base or offered by a certain equipment-dealer, so you may scan "unknown" features
installed at other ships in space, but can't get further information until you get access to it.

(for the moment I would be much obliged if anybody could tell me, where i could find detailed information about the ship-upgrades. I remember some names from the old game "privateer" i've played several years ago but unfortunately I can't play it on my "Windoof XP"-machine, so I cant get a glance for getting information about the components ...)

Something about TRADE:
Well, you can make money by trading, so that's O.K. for now.
What about some advanced features like:
- Trade-tables with min/norm/max prices for goods
(you may buy them for special products / product-families like you can buy starmaps in privateer)
- a special "best-buy-or-sell-finder" like in X-tension (you got me, its not for free, but it is a really good space-game http://www.egosoft.com )


The launcher / save-menue:
it's a little bit "complicated" and needs some practice to handle it right.
A newbee/user-friendly version would be nice, but on a todo-list I would give this aspect a minor position

So, thats enough about "criticism" for now.

Last to say: Its nice to play Vegastrike anyway cause of the Wing Commander / Privateer nostalgic feelings (for me) and I think the engine has great potential. I like starting or landing from a carrier (most commercial spacesims out there have only auto-sequenzes )
and I like the freedom you have in the game.

Thanks to all the people working hard on the VEGASTRIKE-universe to make it what it is:
a great free space-sim

P.S. sorry for my bad english, it's not my native

language



Jeremiah Cooper

[FlyingAce]

I've noticed a lot of ppl say sorry for my bad english when they have perfect english. I would never have been able to tell u were not native if u hadn't told me.