3089 v0.96b: BETA is here & sale ending soon! Thread - 3089

Hey all,

Beta is finally here! Also, the 60% sale will be ending this week! This marks the focus of development shifting to multiplayer features. In this release, trading & location features have been added. You now should be able to perform "fair" trades between players is possible. The trades are "fair" because both players need to agree on the trade before it will happen, and if any changes are made, the trade must be confirmed again. It will also be easier to find the other player, since a waypoint is always placed on the other player & a "multiplayer teleport" option has been added to the pause menu.

Draw distance has been greatly increased:

Performance impact should be minimal, since I found a few areas to improve to offset the additional terrain. I think it looks much, much better :-) Other graphical improvements include fixing textures on "normal" robot torsos & new, sharp UI elements:

A handful of bugs have also been fixed & you can read all the changes @ 3089game.wordpress.com

What is next? I'd like to get multiplayer quest sharing & construction syncing working. There also is the "merge" multiplayer features that need to be implemented.

OK, back to work!

- Phr00t

Well, as I'd said over at the greenlight page, congrats on hitting the beta phase

And I'm curious: Does this mean you've gotten in all of the actual "content" stuff that you'd had planned? Or is there more of that to come later?

It means I'm focusing most of my attention to multiplayer development. I'm sure there is more content to come for single-player, but multiplayer content is the biggest "hole" that needs filling right now

Ok, bit of quick feedback on this version:

NPC aggro seems to have gone kinda wonky. I had more than a few times where I was practically (or even literally) just standing in front of a blue guy, and all he did was sit there and stare at me until I actually charged at him. The orange guys were doing things like this too, I had one battle against a group of blues that kept swarming around this one orange bot as the fight progressed, but he just didnt care one bit, kept lazily walking onward. This was going on pretty frequently.

The presence of status ailments in the game is pretty cool, I'm liking that bit. If I might make one suggestion, it'd be to have some sort of visual indicator on enemies that are capable of using different effects on you. I'm not sure just what to suggest for it; the best thing would be some sort of color applied to them, but obviously you wouldnt want to change the color of the entire bot.... I think it'd be a good idea, though. Jumping in to attack an enemy group and finding that they've got a bunch of stun capability the hard way could be pretty frustrating to players.

Also, how about a consumable that temporarily lessens the chances of those effects working on you? This might be another way to increase the usefulness of the consumable stat, as well.

And lastly, the "poison" type effect, a different sound effect for it doing damage to you would be helpful. It can be hard to tell, during a fight, if you're taking damage from an actual enemy attack hitting you, or if it's the poison effect, since they both make the exact same noise and red flash effect.

I think that's everything for now.... no other real problems that I can think of. Not much in the way of bugs this time around

I will look into the aggro problem. Do you remember if it was quest targets attacking the orange bot? Orange bots won't attack quest targets because they are your responsibility (e.g. I don't want AI completing your quests)

Thank you for the other suggestions. I like the idea of a different sound for corrosive damage -- keep in mind your health turns brown when you are taking corrosion damage, though.

Nah, the situation with the orange bot's AI didnt have anything to do with quest targets, at least I dont think so. This was during a protection mission, and the bots that were attacking me were just some random ones that had trailed me as I got closer to the quest area; they didnt actually go after the orange guy that was my protection target. The ones that spawn to come after him came a bit after that, and he didnt attack them either (and they didnt really attack him, just attacked me instantly).

I'd wondered if maybe the AI of protection targets were perhaps just not supposed to fight or something, but no, he ran off like a moron to attack some flying thing when I still had 20 seconds to go.

As best I could tell, there werent any special conditions to make the aggro problem happen. Kept happening regardless of the surrounding area, the situation, or my proximity to the NPCs in question.

Oh, and this reminds me of one other thing: Blue bots spawning pretty much on top of me. Granted, this was in a building occupied by them, but I dont think I'd ever seen them actually spawn inside there when I'm already IN it; I had cleared out the place to use it's stations, and one very abruptly popped into existence beside me while I was using one of the stations after that brief fight. Happened 2 or 3 times during that session.