List of Suggestions and bugs Thread - Gentrieve 2

**Copied from a string of PMs, if you guys find anything else, please add to the list.

Alright, here's a little list, bugs/problems begin with a "-", guggestions begin with a "*":

-Sometimes textures are extremely stretched

-Door texture not aligned with door frame (Minor gripe, but I do notice these things)

-Underwater areas can be EXTREMELY hard (also possible to get stuck underwater and be unable to escape)

-Some bosses are unreasonably hard for their arenas (Homing weapons with little cover, Teleportation with 3 missile launchers for first boss)

-Severe lack of save rooms (I feel it should be one every 1-2 "hub"s)

*Weapon bullets should be slightly closer together

*Hold Mouse button to fire fast would save my fingers a bit

*Spread Shot weapon too inaccurate to use effectively against anything but bosses

-Beam weapon can be used to locate cloaked enemies/bosses (The beam vanishes when it hits them)

*More suraces should be hookable, if possible hook should allow swinging as well as its current mode

*Bosses use the powerups they carry

*More powerup challenges, not just mandatory ones for progression

-Bosses sometimes spawn stuck in walls

*Acid and an acid suit would be cool

*Wall jumping powerup would also be cool

-Jumping off of slants is pretty damned hard

*More nonlinear level generation requiring backtracking

*Bullets coming from the center of the player instead of the sides, or alternating when fired

I'm not sure how many of those suggestions are planned features, but they'd all be pretty cool.

Also fraps lags the hell out of Gentrieve, so I'm going to get MSI Afterburner and see how that works out.

This is a great list of suggestions. I hope to have another release in about a week implementing many of these ideas!

Also, try disabling glow & anti-aliasing in the effects menu to improve fraps performance.

(or try a lower resolution in windowed mode)

I'm making another list, found a few minor things and have some more ideas. I have to say though, MUCH better mapgen this time around, and the enemies actually getting limbs blown off is really cool. Also my lighting is working properly.

I'll probably make another video too.

Thanks for the update -- looking forward to your suggestions and video

VIDEO OF SHOT BUGS: Youtube.com
(If it's in 240p it's still processing, I JUUUST uploaded it, also it's set to private, only phr00t should be able to see it)
Obviously not the video of gameplay, this just demonstrates what I was talking about with the shot gap and the bullets sometimes not registering.

Same format as last time, "-" is issue, "*" is suggestion.

-Basic enemies can be a bit too strong and there are too many of them in later areas. I mean 5 cloaking and teleporting enemies with super missiles, multiple lasers and plasma guns and enough health that I couldn't even kill one of them. Also rooms sometimes spawn upwards of 20 enemies. This seems to only happen in cold/hot areas (though I haven't ever seen a hot area yet).

-Shots still not tight enough for small ground enemies (see linked private video)

-Shots come from below, making shooting downwards difficult (this is pretty minor, just when firing off of a ledge downwards you REALLY need to be close to the edge)

-Grappling underwater turns the swim module off (pretty major, could possibly break some areas)

-Shots/missiles sometimes do not register hit at all and simply vanish. Happens on doors, enemies, walls. (same private video shows it happening a bit)

-Enemies exploding causes lighting lag up close, probably due to every part exploding at once instead of just the main body. Possible fix would be to not show explosions besides the main body one when an enemy is killed.

-Player hitbox feels too big, projectiles that should have missed (clearly going beside the camera) still hit sometimes.

-One time the game crashed with an uncaught render bug when I tried to use backspace. "Uncaught exception thrown in Thread[LWJGL Renderer Thread,5,main] NullPointerException"
God damn I hate nullpointers

*load save button is positioned JUST right on the menu for me to hit it when tabbing back in to a game, 3 times, in a row, argh.

*Charge Beam would be nice, probably help make hard enemies easier

*More health from pickups in later areas would also be nice

*More missile/bomb expansions and misc pickups

*Higher rooms-per-item limit (As high as possible, I mean it, I love the exploration)

*Ability to turn swim module on/off (honestly having it off helped me maneuver a LOT during the boss fight.)

*Alter Grapple to have a similar beam effect to the tether beam (alternatively some particles that bounce back and forth between the hook and player), I think it would look better, especially when it accidentally clips through walls.

*More shield powerups for extra shields would be nice. In later areas they go down in one shot so they become pretty useless

*MORE GRAPPLE ROOMS, my god the layouts of some of those rooms that assume you have grapple are some of the most fun I've had in a platformer ever. Perhaps rooms with spikeball floor and a few little grapple points to navigate to each door.

*More platform spacing in areas that assume you have double jump/dash/grapple would be cool. I think I have a vague idea of the algorithm you use for laying out the platforms, and if I'm right, cranking up the max vertical distance and horizontal distance would probably do the trick.

*In fact, "locking" certain doors by keeping them out of reach until grapple/doublejump is found would be neat too

*If possible, align doors so that the lines on the map connecting rooms don't go through the rooms themselves, and so that entering a wall door exits from a wall door, and going into a ceiling door exits from a floor door and vice-versa.

*Possibly, make save rooms heal to full, might be more balanced if full heal upgrades are removed/repurposed. Basically so you don't have to camp a save room grinding out health powerups.

Overall though, I'm having much more fun with this version, also the save rooms seem a LOT more common, which is good.

Edited by: Xangi

Woohoo! Another great list OK, I'm going to get started on this. Couple of things:

About the shots -- I don't want to make them any closer together. If I do, they might as well be a single shot. You will need to just shoot a bit to the side for small, up close targets. This same mechanic existed in Descent... However, I did notice some shots still not registering when they should have with the close up guy -- I will look into this. I think some shots are hitting the ground before checking for enemy collisions. The other shots, the cold shots "missing" the far target, are just not reaching the target (because it is so far away). I can make weapons shoot farther.

There *is* a charge beam, but I presume it isn't being generated in an easy location in most maps, so you are missing it. I'll see if I can normalize its location to an easier-to-find place...

OK, gotta get to work -- lots to do!

I understand about the shots, perhaps if the two >< shapes beside the main line were more emphasized it would indicate to use those for the left and right shots, which would aid new people with aiming.

Perhaps also adding a very small "explosion" radius onto the shots would help with them "missing". this could be combined with an equally small "detonation" radius where if a shot passes, say, within a quarter of a shot width of the enemy it detonates dealing the shot damage. With those two features added, aiming would probably feel a lot more natural and reward firing while moving instead of standing still and trying to precision aim.

Of course that goes under the assumption that you want the shooting while moving to be the main mode of combat, if not then the current one works pretty well. My new semester just started so I'm actually posting this from the computer lab, but I'll get that video out hopefully soon.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or what: the Ice Beam doesn't seem to work on most enemies. Just blows them up instead of freezing (even robot-looking ones).. Maybe it's only on the ones in the areas after you get it? Or in specific rooms? It's not very intuitive.

...Also, I just got the lockup again when I wasn't thinking Held left shift and mouse wheeled up once then down once. There goes that progress. Maybe it has to do with not having any secondary weapons? Also, it seems to be a memory or at least CPU leak of some kind (not very familiar with this) as if I leave it running like that it quickly starts slowing down my computer and taking up massive amounts of CPU.

Edited by: freeformschooler

"I'm not sure if this is a bug or what: the Ice Beam doesn't seem to work on most enemies. Just blows them up instead of freezing (even robot-looking ones).. Maybe it's only on the ones in the areas after you get it? Or in specific rooms? It's not very intuitive."
(quote BBCode is being a bit odd)

Also this yes, the ice beam doesn't seem to freeze things much, if at all. I'll try it out some more and pay more attention, but perhaps a more drastic effect and a color change would help to show it's working.

Edited by: Xangi

The ice beam only freezes enemies when the shots are fully charged using the charge beam. Otherwise, the shots will just slightly slow the enemies down. I think the solution is to make the charge beam more easily found in generated worlds, since it is so useful (and fun).

Perhaps the enemies could still be colored a little differently when slowed down? As it is there's not any good indicators as to when their slowness stops.

But yeah, that's a pretty cool mechanic, combining Ice and Charge like that.

Another crash, this time when loading a save.

"Uncaught Exception thrown in Thread[LWJGL Renderer Thread,5,main]
IllegalArgumentException: Pitch must be between 0.5 and 2.0"

Also I got the charge beam, it seems rather weak, to the point that just mashing is more effective. This is partly due to the projectiles moving quite slowly making it unfit for firing long distances and the low damage/small hitbox of the charged round. Haven't got the ice beam with it yet, I'll try it out when I get it.

Suggestion for atmosphere:

Have you considering adding some kind of plant life to the environments? I'm sometimes get a really cool cave vibe from the textures. What if there was occasionally some grass, or little clumps of plant life? Lightning bugs hovering around, or an occasional (holographic) fish in the water? It might be cool if it only happened in a few rare instances, like finding an oasis in the desert.

I think the idea of discovering organic life inside a robotic wasteland is pretty powerful...even if it is also created by the generators.

Edited by: tangoliber

tangoliber, yes, this is an awesome idea. I do plan on adding it! Likely in the version after this next one

I've played maybe 3-4 hours on 0.62a, and only have a couple of comments:

-Bosses are either way too easy or way too hard, and don't seem to require much strategy. It could be that I'm going about it wrong, but I can't hide from missiles for the life of me.

-On the same note as tangoliber, I think it would be really interesting to have randomly generated "biomes." Certain types of plants/fungii/etc could be randomly aligned with certain colors, so for one map red contains mushrooms, in one map red contains insects, etc. That could even go further -- in one game red has very tall rooms, yellow has very open rooms. Maybe there's higher gravity in certain colors. Any number of qualities.

-Is it possible to add a cancel button to the texture generating screen? I don't mind the load time, but sometimes I decide to try something else after starting a new game.

Overall, still loving the game. Still haven't hit any bugs. The physics and combat mechanics are excellent.

I'm going to experiment with some changes to the bosses... hopefully normalize their difficulty a bit.

I am planning on some type of foliage or mushrooms for the rooms, maybe make them wave a bit

Canceling world generation is a good idea!

A couple of new things I found/thought of:

-Some sounds seem to play twice/warble a lot occasionally, I suspect this has to do with pitch randomization.

-When missiles and Super missiles were disabled, I found missile ammo pickups, this was after a game where I had gotten missiles then quit.

*Longer hallways to the save/recharge rooms would be cool and probably help generate more paths for backtracking later, as it stands, when you reach a hub, it's always 1 door for save room, 1 for recharge of some kind, 1 for something else (maybe another recharge/energy expansion), and 1 to progress. If the distance between the hub and at least the powerups (missile/energy expansions) was a few rooms, it would make getting them feel more rewarding.

*Now that we have backtracking, can we also get variable sequences? Let me explain what I mean. Say you get to a hub with... 8 doors. 2 are locked, 1 missile, one scatter shot. 1 leads to a save room, and 1 to a recharge. Then, out of the 4 left, 1 leads to an energy expansion, and 3 lead to bosses, each having a different powerup. The bosses can be fought in any order, and their powerups can be used to find more hubs like this. This type of variable sequencing would add both a(n even greater) feeling of exploration and freedom, as well as the potential for multiple routes in speedruns/other contests. Combined with the above idea, this could lead to a "sector" (at least that's what I'm calling them) which feels much larger than before.

*More missile/bomb expansions in general would be nice, with the extra rooms that could be added with more hallways, there could be a lot of space for them (perhaps even lock them behind doors for later pickup)

*Making rooms connect across each other and having (potentially) more than one connection in between sectors would create more of a "webbed" map layout which could also factor into speedy route planning.

*"Secret" Doors that do not appear on the map screen would also be cool, perhaps leading to unmapped "secret" sectors with more items and powerups. These secret sectors could have a much more run down look, drawing from different, more ragged textures and perhaps a different platform/object shape set.

*Enemies with regenerating limbs could be a good way to both provide a challenge late game but not frustrate that player by making them feel they're doing no damage. The enemies could work like this: Say an enemy spawns with 500HP, that HP is completely inside its core and limbs. When a limb (which would have less health than the ones on enemies do now) gets blown off, the enemy uses some of its HP to regenerate the limb (perhaps 1/3 of the total health that the part had) over a few seconds. You can then try to do damage to the enemy by simply shooting its center (which is more damage per shot efficient), or attempt to disable it by keeping its limbs destroyed (which will save you health). This could also work for the bosses that generate with LOADS of guns, making the boss fight more about keeping the enemy's ability to do damage supressed while dealing damage rather than finding a spot the boss can shoot you in and hiding there the whole fight.

Still attempting to make that video, but all the footage I get is terrible, apparently I'm only good at this game when not recording .

Edited by: Xangi

Thanks for the next list of suggestions :-) I'm going to release another update *hopefully* today and get to more of these suggestions next week.

I suppose I overreached with the save rooms and need to tone them back down?

There are secret doors that are not on the map... you just haven't found them because they are hidden Getting the "Advanced Vision" upgrade will allow you to see the doors, however.

Phr00t wrote: I'm going to experiment with some changes to the bosses... hopefully normalize their difficulty a bit.

I am planning on some type of foliage or mushrooms for the rooms, maybe make them wave a bit

Canceling world generation is a good idea!

Sounds great!

Oh cool, I guess they're hidden really well then. The thing with the save rooms is not that they;re so common (that's good), but that it's EXTREMELY easy to predict exactly where they'll be. Adding a few rooms between the main hub and the save rooms/recharge rooms would help make it less predictable.

I guess I'm off to go find that "Advanced Vision" upgrade now.

Backspace still crashes the game sometimes.

Same error as before."Uncaught exception thrown in Thread[LWJGL Renderer Thread,5,main] NullPointerException"

Charge beam homing is really nice, when it works. As it stands I've had about as many shots miss due to homing as hit.

HUGE enemy spam in a lot of rooms now, half the time I open a door and there are at least 8 enemies that rush my position so I can't even move.

Edited by: Xangi

Hrm.. that means something else is causing the crash when hitting backspace... I need to update the crash exception message to include more information.

What part of homing is failing? Is it homing onto the wrong target? Is it not picking a target? Is it picking the right target, but then flying off in the wrong direction?

Also hrm.. I don't think I changed anything to mess with enemy spawn rates, but I will look into it...

Also -- I'm trying to add foliage, but grass and ferns don't really look right on metallic surfaces. I'm thinking on putting wires there instead... what else could be a small decoration coming off of metallic surfaces?

It seems that the homing sometimes just flies off in a random direction, or just simply avoids targets. Could it be perhaps that the velocity vector being added to its trajectory is being reversed?

I was thinking that the foliage would work better in rooms with a "run-down" theme, and would look partly biological and partly mechanical, with glowing "wires" running down it with pulses if light going through them. Something else that could just out of walls could be little signs, perhaps scaffolding of some kind, maybe little "cubes" that are in the process of being deconstructed by the mass generator. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm sure I'll come up with more. Actually, if you need ideas, look at "Coded Arms" for PSP, it's got a couple neat environment objects that might work in Gentrieve 2.

If you use the seed "Norfairdepths" With all items, random start item and 15 rooms per item, there are a couple of rooms that spawn TONS of enemies.

Other seeds for worlds I've played this version so far are azdu7CkD9F, cNMy1T2E0U, Hgq4jNusXG, and 2 of those have had rooms with MANYMANYMANY enemies, though I think 1 was set of 15 rooms per item.

Edited by: Xangi

Wires sound good. Maybe some little metallic robot bugs or crabs that just wander around?

tangoliber wrote: Wires sound good. Maybe some little metallic robot bugs or crabs that just wander around?

Actually, this would be cool too, perhaps some more passive enemy types, maybe with melee weapons for defense? Maintenance robots basically.

Ok, I finally managed to get some good raw video, and some action with the grapple and tether beams, including one of the funniest boss kills I've ever had. Hopefully I'll commentate it tonight or tomorrow. Of actual note is that I got a bit of the charge beam bug on camera as well, and I do suspect that the bug has to do with a misplaced negative sign on the velocity vector that helps the shots home in, as the curving behavior is exactly the same as when they're working properly, but in reverse (away from the enemy). I also got one of those rooms full of enemies (luckily they were mostly harmless ones), just imagine that room (when the vid is up) except they can fly and have super missiles. Also a few suggestions (1 bug) coming up:

-Some enemies seem to generate without any weapons at all, or maybe they destroy them the second they fire?

*Make the tethering beam projectile either instant hit (like the plasma beam) or a LOT faster, it's a very cool item but in combat it's a bit useless unless you're just screwing around, but if you could very quickly use it to drag an enemy or root it in place (or do what I do in the video ) it would be a lot more useful.

*Backtracking paths seem less common on maps with more rooms, not sure if that's intentional, but the map I did just now was 6 rooms, and I found a TON, whereas the one before it was 15 rooms, and I only found 2 or 3.

*Make explosive boxes have a larger radius/more damage, it would both make them more worth shooting (especially in boss fights) and better gravigun weapons, but also greater environmental hazards to be considered while fighting.

*Bombs may need a slight damage buff as well, considering how hard they are to get hits with.

*The charge beam for spread shot and plasma beam is a bit lackluster. I have a few possible things that could be done: For spread shot, also make the bullets home in (even the small ones), or perhaps make it launch 6 (total) larger bullets instead of the usual 4 small ones when fully charged. For plasma beam, make charge increase range and damage, or perhaps make the charge shot stay firing for a time when released in a constant beam that deals damage.

*For the homing on the Blaster as well, it seems to only home when completely charged, perhaps alter that a bit so you can get (max_homing_velocity * (charge_percent/100)) homing speed when it fires? That was using partially charged shots doesn't feel like a waste but you'll still get the best effect when they're fully charged. Maybe make it scale exponentially instead so that 10% charge equals less than 10% homing speed?

Edited by: Xangi

Thanks for the list again Xangi! I'll be working on Gentrieve 2 hopefully this weekend and lots during next week. I hope to bundle lots of your suggestions and a few of the new decorations in the next release. I hope to have the next release sometime next week.