Star Command Build 12039

[stevetranby]

Mac - http://bit.ly/1Aot4qj
Win32 - http://bit.ly/1c8N84w
Android - http://bit.ly/1K813TU

For more details and info the usual link
http://starcommandgame.com/beta/

Known Issues:
- Just after uploaded we noticed our fixes/improvements for grenade or invisible(knockback) projectile system has caused the visual component of character weapons to not display (essentially it's instantly hitting, or missing, target)

Note:
We may open another sub-forum for these in an "announcements" sub forum or like prison architect name it "Blog". Also will make this sticky here for now until we decide we need to move it.

Please post any bugs as replies here specific to this build. For other issues you can make new posts if you feel the need. Or if there's a longer reply chain on a specific issue we can offload them onto other topics if necessary.

This will be a continual process creating and refining our workflow to make posting info require less effort

[Hardwater]

Had a quick blast, the right click moving of the view works a treat, much easier now!

Found a little issue where sometimes when you drag a selection box around afew people and let go, the box remains on screen until you move the cursor over it again.

Also there is a strange spinning cube just infront of my ship

Seems to be working nice though, I have been using Prologue mode, should I be on that or Free Roam ideally?

For some reason when there is a ship to ship battle and I have two weapon rooms and both fully staffed, only one weapon will charge, and also seems like only one of the blue rooms will charge aswell? - Just had this happen when I only had 1 weapon after several succesful battles the railgun wont charge even though fully staffed! (would this be because i am fighting admiral mical? are the weapons disabled on this mission?

It would be good to have the return to post command still available when multiple staff members are selected

Some fires seem impossible to put out even when 3 or 4 engineers are all working on it, it still shows the flashing wrench icon on the fire but never extiguishes (for now I have to save and then load the game and all fires are then gone - possible cheat to be nerfed when fire is working correctly again)

randomly crashed just after star command attack me in neptune

randomly crashed shortly after battle began on pip

in cut scenes it would be good if right mouse click skipped forward to your next possible dialog choice or end of cutscene if all dialog choices are finished, would also be good if right mouse click whilst in menus returned you to game

another random crash just after battle began on cranus, seems to do this each time but then is ok when i restart game

groups disappear after cutscenes and saving

a couple of cutscenes had the picture size as a small square in center of window with dialog in black box around it, whereas most of them the picture is full screen with dialog overlaid on the picture itself

[stevetranby]

We're obviously still focused toward mobile with this game (vs Galaxies), but how do you feel about the current UI in terms of playing on a desktop (or are you playing on a tablet?). I'm asking with the idea of selling in the Windows Universal store as well as Mac App store.

As far as the bugs, the spinning cube is a 3d model test, forgot to remove, but kinda enjoy having there as a mysterious artifact
The crashes are good to note, but hopefully they're all fixed by finding some related bug. Will be focused on prologue testing in the next few weeks, but you should feel free to test either build since they share a good amount of game logic and code.

The group/selection issues we will look to continually improve. I was thinking having a skip button in the dialog/hails similar to the new skip in mini games as well as skip cutscene. I will look to add right-click to perform this actions, and maybe SPACE bar key, as well? Remember mobile or touch first, haha.

Thanks!

[Hardwater]

I have got both the android and the pc version but I find it much easier to play on the pc due to being able to drag selection box around units and scroll around ship with right mouse button, the UI is nice.

Not quite sure how the railgun minigame works? it seems to just count down and then fire without any input from myself.

Also the mini game with the three circles that have a dot going around each one is particularly hard with the mouse, but the one with the three dots surrounding one circle works perfectly, as does the one with the lines that go up/down and left/right where you have to land in the circles

I think you should definately sell this on windows store / steam / gog for windows once its complete, its much easier to control with mouse, although the grouping feature has made it much better on android now, I havent tried the ios version as I only have a 3gs and the original star command used to chug on it so I imagine it wont be able to handle it, but runs nicely on android, noticed that it runs at 30fps on android and 60fps on windows if that is at all useful?

if theres any particular things you want me to try out in testing then let me know

[weegee]

12039-PC

I've also seen that weird cube on Venus. Tricorder scan dind't reveal anything about the nature of this device, and I've had three of best scientists with me.

The bug when walking animations sometimes don't work while units are moving diaginally is still there.

Healthbars above fallen enemies are still there.

Both left and righ clicks give orders to my team, it probably should be one or another. Usually not the one which creates selection square.

Once again my units were duplicated after I messed with main menu. Saved, changed resolution then either loaded the game or simply returned back and I have a bridge full of clones in white uniform next to my security team. Including my captain.

[Hardwater]

Its the custscenes with the Vocar race that has the picture incorrectly sized, ill take a screenshot next time if I remember

[weegee]

PC - Free Roam

Damage points are shown somewhere off the planet map. You can see them if you zoom-out to see the whole map at once.

Whever I use a right button scroll as soon as I release it it orders my crew members to move if they were selected.

It's hard to see anything when you have selected 6 red-shirts + 3 medics because of their overlapping range circles.

When you teleport back to the ship it asks Should we return to Ship? and then it asks for a confirmation. Would not it wiser to ask just once, with red cross/green check as yes/no variants?

It's probably obvious for tablet users to scroll with finger, but not so obvious for PC users how to scroll the tech tree.

Would be bprobably great if you could just fill an awawy team with your group members if it has less than 9 crew members.

Whenver I click the <-' button, all my crew members return to their stations (it was probably intended behavior, but who knows, maybe not).

Got a crash when I teleported to Venus with a single engineer and them immediately teleported back. Log - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/174 ... test_3.txt

I've selected a single engineer once again, and the game feeled glitchy. Sometimes it didn't respond to my orders, and then crashed when I walked I while, collected a token and tried to return.

No crash with a single redshirt. Crash with 6 engineers.

I've sent an away team of one redshirt and it also didin't respond to my right clicks when selected, and sometimes even left clicks.

[stevetranby]

Thanks!

We will try to fix some of them in the next build. Probably try to debug the crashes, and make a few improvements hopefully to the selection. We are looking to get out another build tonight though to add the iOS/WinPhone testers, so we'll see what we can get in there.

The <-' is programmer art and programmer UX for functionality of return all assigned to their stationed room, not sure it's best placed where it is. I'm thinking though that we could bring in our simplified red alert system instead. Then add the return to station to the command hud (cancel current command and go to idle state) when more than one crew is selected. We could have a battle stations button instead?

p.s. It looks like our release logs (even for testers) needs some TLC as well, some of those should be set for internal debug only, so thanks for the log as well.

[Tacitus]

I feel that for the Prologue mode simply having green/red alert being a toggle would be enough, although on free roam having the option for yellow alert (maybe on harder difficulties?) could be immersive. Red Alert would send them to their battlestations (who doesn't love saying that). I thought about having them auto-repair on yellow alert, but I'm afraid the npc will accidentally get too close to the fire/hull breach if left to their own devices. One button that just cycles through all three would minimize its UI footprint and work for both PC and touchscreen users .

I agree about the raging fires, just lost after the first battle with Micari because 5 engineers were unable to contain the blaze.

Sometimes the knockback on the grenades causes away team members to fly over 10-15 tiles.

Some general pathfinding issues on some of the away maps. On a related note, having to assign the captain to the bridge seems forced; why wouldn't the Captain already be assigned? Almost lost him on my first away mission because he wasn't firing a weapon (I hadn't assigned him yet).

Waaay too many tokens on away maps. One 5 minute jaunt gave me a full chest and I ubered out my ship...did I mention it was also on Earth?

UI bug in free mode with weapon icons; I'm assuming this is known. I'm just going to assume that you all are aware of the majority of the issues I've noticed in free mode, it just needs more TLC and polish.

Prologue mode is looking like a real winner...you guys have a great template in place and once it's filled in it will definitely shut everybody up until Galaxies comes out! I can't wait for sprites of the rail gun! It is crazy powerful, though...maybe turn it down a tad? I still can't think of a happy medium between minigames and...something else. A small note: from an immersion standpoint, maybe have weapons/engineering crew emote a sweat drop/exclamation point if they miss/are putting out fires? It's not much, but if we are considering moving away from minigames for PC then something along those lines might help fill the void.

Free mode looks like it will be a nice middle ground between the "classic" Star Command vibe and Galaxies, which I am convinced will be the FTL-crusher. Energy management in free mode seems like a good idea, but why only in free mode and not in vanilla as well?

Might I ask what it is that makes the "floating instead of walking" bug happen, if you guys know? It reminds of of bugs in my old NES cartridges...if anything add an ugly flicker effect at their feet when it happens and call it a "nostalgic artifact".

As always, outstanding work.

[stevetranby]

Appreciate both the issue feedback and ideas surrounding what things should go where and such. We may bring energy over into story mode, but only once we've nailed the new battle system (and we may need to scrap it and start again, keeping some of the ideas). We've also played around with testing performance/capabilities of allowing boarding enemy ship in battle and bringing in the ideas we've since implemented in galaxies with respect to a ship having only X characters/invaders and you can go attack them instead of only combat when they invade.

I'll reduce the tokens on away missions, I try to keep things at unusual levels in free roam in order to make sure they are found or seen, haha, but it's understandable. Also, I've never been a huge fan of the token chest, but it was meant to be a crafting system originally, so there may be future changes along those lines.

We obviously want to continue cutting features and not allow feature creep so we can push out both a regular "small" update with prologue-only (ie: the same original game) and then a month later try to release free roam. We make no promises, but the first update is now in internal testing (where we play through all missions without cheats at least once, then play through them over a few times with cheats hopefully adding skip dialog to the mix).

Anyway, thanks again and I'll comment more once we get this next build out tonight or tomorrow. It's ready, just going through internal testing.