Discussing the game behind the alpha glitches/hitches/lag
Mr. Epic
Join Date: 2003-08-01 Member: 18660Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2003-08-01 Member: 18660Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">thoughts on the new content</div>Had an interesting session playing around as both marines and aliens on a small server. The Marine side was pretty funny. We managed to get two commanders in the chair at the same time (not giggity), and we got some basic base construction going on. The little builder guy is sort of funny, he is annoying in a jar-jar binks sort of way, yet when he says "priority alpha" we all know what that meant internally for the devs.
The way that the marines are now able to do their own thing is sort of novel. The commander and the builder bots do the heavy lifting, while the marines can concentrate on other things. Having multiple commanders makes a ton of sense in this situation, where one can deal with the economy and or base maintenance and the other can deal with the micro/macro of leading the marines.
The alien team is obviously the most shockingly different, I think. An alien commander in my NS? Wtf? But it sort of works too, the commander gets to apparently upgrade individual hives a few times all the way to I think it was a hive colony. The upgrade process is cool, nice and easy. When DI gets implemented, I can see now that the gorge is going to do maintenance and pushes with the hydra while the commander does the chamber work. I'm not quite sure how that will work out, the gorge wasn't exactly an exciting unit outside of its multi-purpose role, so we'll just have to see how fun being a sideman can be.
The biggest problem I see with the entire alpha and everything so far is the game performance. It is pretty abysmal, sad to say. There is all sorts of hitching, where I gather it is simply loading and doing some cache processing, that just stops the entire game. That is really really bad. The fps are also really low for what seems to happen in the game, and because of it the movement is just killed. Right now the game doesn't feel half as solid in the movement/responsiveness department as hl1 engine. Hopefully we will see some improvement here, and fairly soon. There is a lot more to be done, surely, but decent performance is a MUST.
Other thoughts?
The way that the marines are now able to do their own thing is sort of novel. The commander and the builder bots do the heavy lifting, while the marines can concentrate on other things. Having multiple commanders makes a ton of sense in this situation, where one can deal with the economy and or base maintenance and the other can deal with the micro/macro of leading the marines.
The alien team is obviously the most shockingly different, I think. An alien commander in my NS? Wtf? But it sort of works too, the commander gets to apparently upgrade individual hives a few times all the way to I think it was a hive colony. The upgrade process is cool, nice and easy. When DI gets implemented, I can see now that the gorge is going to do maintenance and pushes with the hydra while the commander does the chamber work. I'm not quite sure how that will work out, the gorge wasn't exactly an exciting unit outside of its multi-purpose role, so we'll just have to see how fun being a sideman can be.
The biggest problem I see with the entire alpha and everything so far is the game performance. It is pretty abysmal, sad to say. There is all sorts of hitching, where I gather it is simply loading and doing some cache processing, that just stops the entire game. That is really really bad. The fps are also really low for what seems to happen in the game, and because of it the movement is just killed. Right now the game doesn't feel half as solid in the movement/responsiveness department as hl1 engine. Hopefully we will see some improvement here, and fairly soon. There is a lot more to be done, surely, but decent performance is a MUST.
Other thoughts?