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Unikraken

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  1. Those skyboxes are phenomenal. I love it!
  2. Thank you for your understanding. I've really enjoyed the mod. While I'm unsure of if I agree or disagree, can I ask which maps you're basing this comment off of? I've been playing exclusively on the smaller maps against a single AI opponent to try to reduce the odds of crashing. Only happens about every 30 minutes or 1 hour or so. Phase lanes take so long to travel I can often set ships to jump and then go microwave a burrito or use the bathroom and still have time to kill before they arrive at the next planet. Perhaps a compromise could be increasing jump speed or adding in research that does it in increments? Please understand this is purely my suggestion and I don't expect you to take it with any gravitas. Originally, research was much cheaper, and was raised due to complaints that it was extremely inexpensive. Though, thinking of it now and looking at what was done with costs, I agree with your sentiment, and when I get the time, will redo research costs again across the board. As for ship costs, the costs are high due to the amount of high income/resource planets around; get a High Terran and you will be swimming in cash, or get a few Crystal planets and you will have a nice ton of crystal to sell off. However, I believe there is room for a compromise. By screwing around with Gameplay.constant's incomeSpeedData settings, income should be much faster. I'd love for you to do a small test of this theory, if you're up for it. I've increased the "Faster" income option to heavily increase income flow; this should do the trick. I think there can be a good middle ground between cheap and expensive. Do you have any particular income speed in mind or just want me to tweak it until it seems more reasonable? I'm more than happy to help you find a good pace. This actually depends a lot on the map. Some maps, namely the entire "Enlarged" series of Random maps have made it so that there are higher odds for you to encounter planets with only ice colonization, and lower militias, as requirements. I've been avoiding the larger maps mainly due to the time they require to play, though I'll have to check these out when I get some time. I think it would be really interesting to see a divide between competitive MP maps and maps intended for single player. It's certainly a reasonable workaround. On the one hand, it's a sacrifice type decision, modules for the economy/research/culture, or ships for expansion. If you're playing Random maps, might I suggest looking at the "Extra Planets" maps? These have you start with 2 extra planets, which give you a little more income and give you more logistic slots. That being said, once again in reference to competitive and quick play, another thing I'll look into is having people start with better planets, either in new Random maps or in the Extra Planets ones, to allow for faster early game expansion, without the long-term massive boost of the Faster income speed option. I think this would be very gracious of you. Personally, I hate having to tweak mods by messing with the speed settings because it often has its own setbacks and distorts the original vision of the mod, also other humans may not want to use that setting and then I'm in a poor situation in MP if I'm used to "cheating" like that. I did end up turning off bloom, but as my partner in crime says, he may be able to help with that issue if you'd like. As for the planets, some of them look very good, I'm only suggesting finding an alternative for the ones where the seam is very blatant. I can't remember which one, but there was a seam on the side of the planet that was very obvious and it really broke the immersion. Some pinching at the poles isn't all that bad, but seams are the thing I was mainly pointing out. I feel like there may be some misunderstanding here, so I want to clarify my statement. I'm suggesting you return to the default skyboxes that are in Rebellion, as they have been dramatically improved since SoaSE: Trinity. I understand if that's not something you're willing to do, but I really think the skybox detracts from the parts of your mod that are visually impressive. I completely understand here about not having them be cruisers, as we have had to make some concessions in our own mod that we can't do much about. I humbly suggest that you at least add some minor abilities that those upgrade points can be spent on, even if they only do minor stat buffs, it would be much less harsh on my OCD to see so many ships with upgrade points just sitting around. I understand if this isn't something you're willing to consider, but my twitching eye begged me to suggest it. I'm sure that you know that these can be a drain on limited system memory. Might I suggest you at least consider using a less intensive effect? I'm going to mention in more detail below, but I can probably help with that new effect, if you come up with an idea for it. Awesome! I'm sure if you have more stuff causing trouble that Zombie can help with it. We brought him on personally for a few things and he's helped us out dramatically with SotP. I'm more than happy to help wherever you'll let me and have the expertise to do so. I spoke to our effects guy, Dhoulmegus, and he's onboard for doing some minor stuff when you come up with what you need. Very cool guy, he is. We've got plenty of bodies, especially for entity coding and the like, so I'm sure we can get you the help, but keep in mind we are working on our mod as well, so the time may come when we're pretty busy again. Might be best to strike when the iron is hot, so to speak. Again, thank you for hearing us out and I hope to keep in contact with you about this. Is there any particular IM service you use, because I'm sure we could discuss some of this in real time much easier. Also, sorry for the novel of a response.
  3. My name is Unikraken and I am the development lead for Sins of the Prophets, a Halo mod for the same game. I've played your mod and I would like to offer some feedback from a fellow SoaSE dev and sci-fi fan. Before I give my feedback, I first want to apologize, because I played your indev build before asking for playtester status. Both of our mods use Sloosecannon's SVN server and I came across SOGE accidentally. Then I purposefully played the shit out of it for several hours over the last few days. I hope that this doesn't sour your opinion of me. I'll be breaking my feedback into 3 sections: likes, dislikes, and bugs/errors I've come across. What I really liked: The ships are just beautiful. The art style seems to be pretty consistent across the factions that I've seen, which is a huge plus. We had to re-texture several of our own ships in order to keep the art style homogeneous when we got a more talented artist, so I can appreciate attention to detail like that. I liked how you spaced out the acquisition of new ships throughout the research. Many mods have you get everything pretty early on and then from that point on you're just dishing out cash for 5% upgrades to stats. The weapons are also pretty good. I really liked what you did with missiles and how often they fire, SotP is very spammy with missiles due to the canon, so I appreciate the direction you've gone having them be sparse, but powerful. The speed and flow of combat is very enjoyable. I have enough time to give orders or retreat if necessary, but I don't feel like I'm in any battle for too long. In the old BSG mod you could fight the same battle for several minutes, as an example of a poopy alternative. It could take forever to do anything without overwhelming numbers. Overall, I think this is a good mod, but there are some issues that I think hold it back from being an amazing one. What I didn't care for: First off, I am not a Star Wars fanatic in the same way that I am a Halo fanatic, so if there are canon reasons for things I'm about to disagree with please share them with me, because I don't want to come off as a jackass, just maybe ignorant of something important that I've missed. My biggest issue with SOGE is how slow the gameplay is outside of combat. The speed of combat is pretty perfect for a Star Wars game, imho. However, several factors come into play that together make general gameplay, maneuvering, and empire building a chore and a huge time consumer. For instance: *Phase lane travel is reallllllllly slow. *Everything is crazily expensive. I can either spend 1/4 of a capital ship on a 5% increase to a stat or wait another 10 minutes and buy a capital ship. *Rather than just up the rate of resource acquisition you've added a lot more asteroids, which adds additional stress on the system. *There is no such thing as early expansion in SOGE, because nearly every militia is a formidable fleet in early game. This makes economy building a much longer and tedious task. *I can never seem to get a good economy going with how expensive everything is collectively and the time it takes to expand. Buying nearly anything makes me feel like I'm giving up a arm or a leg. I'm a 27 year old man with a wife and kid. With the current speed of gameplay, I could never play this against a human opponent and hope to finish the match in one sitting. It takes hours to complete even a small map. I would encourage you to consider gamers outside of the more youthful demographic it appears to favor now. I'm sure all us "older" guys would really appreciate it. My second "major gripe" is mostly cosmetic. Many of the planet textures and skybox(es?) seem pretty outdated. On several of them you can see the line where it's stitched together, which doesn't look good. The glare on some of the objects/planets with bloom turned on is pretty heavy as well. Since this is a Rebellion release, I would strongly urge you to use the vanilla Rebellion textures for stuff where you're not able to hide the seam (especially those beautiful new skyboxes). Also, the HUD looks a little too darked out. The visual aesthetics can make or break a game (in terms of popularity) if the quality is not up to par, and in my personal opinion this kind of stuff keeps a good mod from being a great mod. I definitely think your mod can be a great one with some minor changes! Minor issues: *Some capital ships come with stock abilities that cannot be upgraded, leaving the little number hanging out there to grow as you level up. Feels like a waste. Why not just add some minor abilities that tier so those upgrade opportunities with each level don't get wasted? *Alternatively, those ships with stock abilities could just be made cruisers rather than capitals, since there are multiple versions of them anyway. Either option is good, imo. *Some passive abilities have particle effects that continue to be in effect non-stop throughout the game. This makes it hard to use those passive abilities if you also want to get pretty screenshots, they also use up system resources that could be better spent elsewhere, since there is the ever present 2 gb memory limit this is something to consider removing. Bugs: When you start a game, it will often take a lot of time before it starts loading the map. We had a similar issue with Sins of the Prophets, where the cause was a series of minor issues and mesh hiccups. Once we fixed those issues the game actually performed a lot better, because it doesn't just freak out at map load, it also does it during the game every time you come into contact with those assets, the game is just able to move past them with good error handling. How we ultimately fixed this was with the help of Zombiesru5 and his eclipse plugin that helps find errors. Our mod doesn't crash anymore, which is an problem you're still having issues with according to the recent posts on your ModDB page. If you don't know how to contact Zombie I'll leave my own contact info below and I'll be more than helpful connecting you two, as well as a few other people I'll list below. I know a few of my team members play your mod and have similar opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of the mod as well. If you're interested in some part-time help with this kind of stuff I can probably get it for you fairly easily (including our particle effects guy). If you'd like to talk about my comments in real time you can add me on Xfire or Steam with the username "Unikraken". I'd be more than happy to talk to any of the dev guys about this or anything else related to Sins modding. I'm also willing to talk in the forums here as well, just to be clear. I sincerely hope you take my feedback in its intended tone, which is friendly constructive criticism from a fellow dev. If anything I've said has rubbed you the wrong way because of my choice of words, I hope you can look past that and to the meat of the comments, since humor translates poorly over text. I look forward to the eventual public release of SOGE!

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