GLIDER TUNING BUILD phase 1 - feedback thread

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Mar 8, 2021
4
4
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#21
Further than I got.

1. Download demo.
2. Feel Excitement to playtest for the first time.
3. Open demo.
4. Put in password (sidenote, email login doesn't work, have to use username)
5. Connection timeout.
6. Connection timeout.
7. Connection timeout.
8. Connection timeout.
 

Pandagnome

Kaiju Slayer
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Jul 27, 2016
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#22
Further than I got.

1. Download demo.
2. Feel Excitement to playtest for the first time.
3. Open demo.
4. Put in password (sidenote, email login doesn't work, have to use username)
5. Connection timeout.
6. Connection timeout.
7. Connection timeout.
8. Connection timeout.
Have you checked if its your firewall blocking the connection, i did that and it was my firewall and when i gave it permission it was working ok
 

Thorp

Omni Ace
Jul 27, 2016
193
519
93
California, CA
#23
I believe the glider camera is good.

I will unfortunately express my dissatisfaction with the increased speed of the gliders. I've made the statement in the past how speed and player freedom affects the landscape. Gliders are now so fast the size of the landscape now feels small and the hills and trees have lost their verticality. The immense size of the geography is now puny. There's no longer any struggle to explore the vastness of the space. It's too much freedom. Obviously the landscape can be scaled up to have bigger trees, hills, and mountains however that would skew against the feeling of running/walking. I would also say that I feel gliders and running speeds are tethered in that if one speeds up it makes the other feel different (not necessarily slower).

With this increased glider speed mounts are going to either be pointless or made faster than gliders potentially making mounts difficult to drive except on flat roads.

I will concede that the glider speed increase ramps up the pacing of the game. Players will be able to quickly "launch" themselves into firefights. I can imagine the excitement of flying at a high speed and sliding into the front lines of combat or watching players fly in at high speeds rather then slowly and elegantly gliding in. But as I said, the struggles of traversing the geography is now converted to effortless...no longer an obstacle, no longer an adventure in the journey but a quick hop over puny things.

Lastly, I would imagine gliders are going to be the best "get out of jail" combat skill. The increased speed makes it even easier to just bug out at no consequence. Just do a quick hop and perform a 180 spin with the glider and you're free from combat; no way a tsi-hu grapple or sufficient bullet damage can catch you fast enough.
 
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liandri

Omni Ace
Omni Ace
Jul 29, 2016
448
1,108
93
Zone of Bones, Australia
#24
I didn't notice anything different about the camera personally. Seems the same. It feels like there was an increase in speed, but what I noticed more is that as long as you're gliding relatively close to horizontal, you can turn and glide for a very long time. In older builds, you could circle around the big shell a couple of times at most before losing speed and landing, but this build it seems like you can go forever. It's better in my opinion.

Reading Thorp's post, I wonder if it's too early to tune the glider. Is the New Copa map indicative of what environments we'll be seeing while on Em-8ER? Some environments will be more suited to gliding, those that are more mountainous or with a lot of normally impassable terrain. Skimming should work better across water and flatter surfaces than gliding, and mounts are just as fast as skimming except with an additional calldown time. Could we see skimming next instead of extra gliding tweaks?

As for engaging in combat with the glider, could we use the dash command to accelerate and go over the maximum glider speed? Dropping down from a height is very cruisy with the current setup.
 
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Maven

Kaiju Slayer
Max Kahuna
Philanthropist
Jul 26, 2016
262
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#25
Gliding:

1. The camera is a lot smoother now, and with the right sensitivity, navigating between hills and trees feels fun.

2. The transition between jetpack phase and gliding seems too quick, it's almost instantaneous and looks awkward on a mechanical frame. While it does not require an anime-esque transition montage, it does need a bit of delay while the gliders deploy.

3. The gliding lacks any feeling of momentum. The initial builds had a sense of gaining momentum especially when you did a nosedive. Starting a glide from the top of one mountain, nosediving and skimming across, and then pulling up could carry you a significant way up the next mountain.

4. Echoing @Thorp, gliding seems like it can go on forever, coupled with overthrust and the jetpack. Honestly this was always going to be a problem with the on-demand gliders. You can achieve extreme heights by combining overthrust and the jetpack, as is. At some point, you end up with too much mobility, leading to a need to nerf the jumpjets/abilities that grant mobility. Personally, I would rather not have that happen. Though, in the end, this is a test phase and numbers are not likely to stay the same going into a more 'live' build.

However, as unpopular as it may seem, I would rather have the in-built glider duration nerfed, so that the overall distance a frame can travel is limited.

I know this is the glider build, but I'll add an opinion on Overthrust. If the plan is indeed to mirror the afterburner ability, it needs some tweaking. With Overthrust the actual 'thrust' part seems to be somewhere in the middle of the animation. Additionally, the ability provides the thrust over a significantly larger period of time, almost as though the frame is being 'carried' over the distance.

Afterburner had a more 'thrown' feeling. The thrust was loaded into the first few frames, and the remainder of the movement came from the momentum gained from that initial thrust. There was a lot more thrill to using Afterburner, one could actually feel the burst of speed you gained from using the ability.
 
Mar 8, 2021
4
4
3
#26
Have you checked if its your firewall blocking the connection, i did that and it was my firewall and when i gave it permission it was working ok
I would have thought that, if the Glider Demo (Of which I am so turned on right now I grew a dick just to have an errection at how brilliant that demo was) didn't connect without issue.
 

Pandagnome

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#27
I would have thought that, if the Glider Demo (Of which I am so turned on right now I grew a dick just to have an errection at how brilliant that demo was) didn't connect without issue.
Have you tried deleting the demo and installing a fresh demo not sure if that could help?

It sure is a nice demo gliding does feel smooooth, i am looking forward to the future demo updates, there's always some interesting changes & sometimes they may be very subtle i'd guess.
 
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Jul 27, 2016
149
299
63
Massachusetts
#28
Just one point I'd like to make (will probably stick myself with it..) even if the glider allows you to reach great speeds and travel far distances... it won't make a difference because you still have to be in range of the enemy to fight them. So if you are in the middle of a battle and you decide to run away, it makes no difference if you run to the other end of the island or just out of range, because you're running away anyways. So if you want to get back to the fight, you still have to travel all that distance again anyways. On the other hand, soon there will be enemies all over the map with grappling hooks to pull you down, so someday even if you fly to the other end of the island, you'll have to fly over dangerous terrain. The world only feels small now because it's a demo, but it's not like the same distance from thump Dump to sunken harbor. Plus your jets don't regen while gliding so eventually you will come down. I think the best thing to do would be to cap the height you can travel, I mean at some point the air will get too thin and cold to support your frame and life. On a side note, I'm wondering if technology has come so far and storage space/memory is so cheap now that maybe they can make a map much larger than the old FF map, so being able to glide long distances maybe the only way to get from here to there in a finished Em-8ER game. ✌

Gliding:
Afterburner had a more 'thrown' feeling. The thrust was loaded into the first few frames, and the remainder of the movement came from the momentum gained from that initial thrust. There was a lot more thrill to using Afterburner, one could actually feel the burst of speed you gained from using the ability.
I agree that Afterburner was awesome. But there's something about Overthrust that makes it feel like I'm riding a rocket. A 3 second burn in the direction you are facing, throwing all caution to the wind that you don't blow up or land in an enemy's face. :D and shooting straight up is just a glorious feeling. ;-)

On (another) side note, I'm thinking that using Overthrust should be using up a good chunk of your energy, that might put a natural cap on height. ✌
 
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Mar 8, 2021
4
4
3
#29
Have you tried deleting the demo and installing a fresh demo not sure if that could help?

It sure is a nice demo gliding does feel smooooth, i am looking forward to the future demo updates, there's always some interesting changes & sometimes they may be very subtle i'd guess.
Just to be sure I am downloading the right one, the one I can't connect to is;
"AI Demo - The Tsi-Hu finally fight back! Our first build with the start of functioning AI!"

And yea, the gliding and vertical ascension was great. So long as it doesn't become some deranged battle royale bandwagon, You Have My Hype.
 
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Maven

Kaiju Slayer
Max Kahuna
Philanthropist
Jul 26, 2016
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#30
Just to be sure I am downloading the right one, the one I can't connect to is;
"AI Demo - The Tsi-Hu finally fight back! Our first build with the start of functioning AI!"

And yea, the gliding and vertical ascension was great. So long as it doesn't become some deranged battle royale bandwagon, You Have My Hype.
@lilyanakabal#7134 Seeing as you are a Forerunner, you could simply download the latest available demo for backers:

`[LATEST] Glider Tuning Build - Glider tuning phase 1! Making it better. Give us feedback!`

All demos are iterative, meaning every subsequent demo will have all the features of the previous ones, plus additional features and tuning. So, you are not missing any content by playing the latest ones. I would suggest playing the latest ones, as they would be more stable, and receive better support from the team in case of issues, since there would be little point in spending time on older builds.
 

Pandagnome

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#31
All demos are iterative, meaning every subsequent demo will have all the features of the previous ones, plus additional features and tuning. So, you are not missing any content by playing the latest ones. I would suggest playing the latest ones, as they would be more stable, and receive better support from the team in case of issues, since there would be little point in spending time on older builds.
Perhaps the previous version could be removed just to make it less confusing once the latest version is up
 
Jul 4, 2017
21
55
13
#32
First of all as much as I like a wall of text use some damn spaces between your paragraphs.:)

On a side note, I'm wondering if technology has come so far and storage space/memory is so cheap now that maybe they can make a map much larger than the old FF map, so being able to glide long distances maybe the only way to get from here to there in a finished Em-8ER game.
Don't think that map size is the problem,look at NMS,Elite Dangerous,Star Citizen,last one has planets 1/4 the size of the moon and they said they could have been bigger but travel distances would have taken to long.

FIrefall was conceptualized on a 1/10 the size of Earth and would have been cool if it was just 1 uninterrupted map but I think the problem is number of players per instance.

To use Star Citizen they are caped at 50 players per instance,but I think their huge ass ships don't make things easier.There is a limited amount of "stuff" you can put on an instance before everything laggs.
 
Nov 2, 2019
7
14
3
32
Hungary
twitch.tv
#33
Found a bug in the Glider demo as of today. Sometimes I got a fatal error while using "Q" mid-air while aiming my camera upwards. First I thought it was going too high, but right after it happened when I tried to raise from a mountain using Q. Sadly I dont think there is logging so I cannot upload. I tried to reproduce but i couldn't so far
 
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Pandagnome

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#34
Don't think that map size is the problem,look at NMS,Elite Dangerous,Star Citizen,last one has planets 1/4 the size of the moon and they said they could have been bigger but travel distances would have taken to long.

FIrefall was conceptualized on a 1/10 the size of Earth and would have been cool if it was just 1 uninterrupted map but I think the problem is number of players per instance.

To use Star Citizen they are caped at 50 players per instance,but I think their huge ass ships don't make things easier.There is a limited amount of "stuff" you can put on an instance before everything laggs.

Its got to be a decent map size though nothing extreme or then the players could be scattered way too far to actually help and team up i'd guess.

Not too small either because that could be boring to cater for 100 players.

I am also wondering if maps may be varying size, to be easier to congregate in places and good for starter points and those with bigger maps could be in other biomes as it gets more dangerous & even nearer to regions of storms and other disasters/threats.


Since Em8er is beyond firefall i am guessing the maps could be bigger hmm
 
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Pandagnome

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#35
Nothing to do with the glider, wondered if this was done on purpose some tsihu do not shoot back when they are at low health

tsihunoshoot.jpg
This tsihu kept going backwards just like the grappler who go backwards when you get close to them!
 

ScorpyX

Deepstriker
Jul 29, 2016
34
83
18
#36
- Speed is better now

- Turning also feels better with camera lag (damping)
it also make turns Less sharp - but feeling of smoothness is more important here i think
its good balance right now

- Where is no acceleration feeling
For example glide from hight altitude nose down
instantly gives feeling of "Limited speed"
and it feels even worse when you align along the ground
because you still feel a "speed wall" (limitation of max speed)
(just falling right now literally x2-x4 times faster of max glide speed)

im not saying we need speed of sound
i mean "feeling of acceleration and changing speed"

- Player cant use skill while use another in 1 click
which mean another skill is not cancel active skill automatically
which leads to awkward pauses at moments of
switching between Gliding, Overthrust,Hovering states etc
For now player forced to press "jump button" each time to cancel skills
For example i want: if press Overthrust skill at gliding - cancel gliding and Overthust in 1 click
and reverse Press Gliding to cancel Overthurst and enter glide state in 1 click
When amount of Skill and Abilities will rise
absence of auto-canceling skills will become a real pain and big problem

- For people who are discusses size of terrain and traverse speed:
*
All of this is not even important if Size of Art is wrong
main size standard here is "character height"
the entire game world must support this for a better sense of space
(and movement through this space!)

* Overall Size of game world important for Environment Art created by Artist Hands
(when more compact place feels better - instead of wast barren space)
But does not directly affect game mechanics
it would be a big mistake to put a direct correlation!
For example you can have entire UNIVERSE between you and your destination
but if you can teleport in 1 second to in - space means nothing
This is why Speed it not a giant problem to anything
(speed is problem for technical limitations..)

and the phrase "players will not find each other in a large space" also False
For example if player have Interface which show other players location in world
and player also can fast travel to them - again

Size of world not this important. For travers and gameplay Important > TIME <
For example Star Citizen is game about humans in Space with planets and space ships
to traverse from planet to planet player use game mechanic called "Quantum travel"
which basically "super speed" which reduce the time from real to player acceptable
At start players waste 5-10 minutes just to travel from planet to planet
but it become a gameplay problem - and by players demand
developers cut it to 1-5 minutes and create additional game mecanics to it
After this change game become much more fun. But same space - same size
Point is - not space size important - but time of travel from one game moment to another
In this sense High Speed of Gliding only a Good thing (and fun)

- Also sound of unstable angle of gliding is good touch
just feels little bit short - you kind of do not have time to react - but its ok
 
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ScorpyX

Deepstriker
Jul 29, 2016
34
83
18
#38
- Plasma Cannon
*
Recoil camera punch feels good but too much
and its not only jumps vertically Up but also goes horizontally
which give disorientated feeling
it can be good at stand still position
but in fast past fight in game about fluid movement
it can be crucial problem which prevents aiming and hitting

* Energy consumption feels like a joke
With very small AOE damage zone i can hit 1-2 enemy maximum
i do 4-5 shots with 1 second between each
and after i get 6 SECONDS OF RELOAD PAUSE
AND ITS NOT EVEN FULL ENERGY BUT ONLY FOR 1 NEW SHOT?
means - weapon istuntly garbage and will be not touch ever again (by any standards)
because any other weapon in game will be MUCH more effective AND fun

* Weapon energy UI bar is too similar and to close to jetpack energy
its confusing - which leads to not even look at this UI bar

* Crosshair is suited for this weapon
it needs to be vertical line or few markers vertically like ladder
(each one show different distance of hit prediction)
OR AT LEAST dot at certer of screen - 3 lines around should be removed

- Rifle
*
New dynamic Crosshair feature a welcome one
if feel good and interesting - but with it

* Crosshair become obsolete
Crosshair follows hit prediction point and also Lies about spread of fire
(spread of fire is much smaller - it suppose to show actual angle of "maximum" spread)
but main probleme is Whole crosshair fly away
and leaves no indication for "Center of Screen"
which leads to disorientation and even motion sickness
So Crosshair need additional element which will stay still after recoild
it will be supporting point for eyes (as horizon point) and will show distance of recoil
you can check how this is done in other shooter games

After long shooting testing - crosshair feels good even without proper elements
Rifle feels very good

- Falloff
maximum distance of damage feel TOO Small
after something like 60-70 meters - weapon projectiles do no damage
i hope its temprorary feature because enemy cant do anything on this distance
- i can hit enemy with plasma cannon from 200-300+ meters
but will means nothing because of maximum damage distance limitation
i also potentially means "no long distance weapons - or optics"

- Crosshairs
they are GIANT
i hope in future will be some options make it smaller
or at least ability to replace it with just one small dot!
Big crosshair can atract player focus from environment
like some moving UI which disturb
PS. also i player which love compact auto-hiding HUD and UI
for me big crosshairs is disgusting... but oh well what i can do...

- Rockets
so.. when we will get holding button mode?
i mean its kind of obvious for players but i will explane
Right now Rockets sill Lock required 2 button presses
1 to start lock phase - and 2 to shoot rockets
but usually Locking required 1-3 second max
and can be done with Holding skill button
and shoot rockets after releasing skill button
* it also can have additional mode with short skill button press
which will automatically lock closest random enemies
Both modes can be usefull at different situations

- Zoom
is Left Alt button - but all it does just move camera at shoulder
there is no FOV (Camera Field of View) change - which shoul be actual zoom
you can press alt on and off and lock at sides of screen
it have zero or almost zero view angle change
* also in shooter game - Zoom usually is right mouse button
commonly on Hold button mode - and switch on Toggle mode in game settings
 
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ScorpyX

Deepstriker
Jul 29, 2016
34
83
18
#39
[Enemy Lock] UI Warning can stuck if locking Tsi-Hu will be killed before attack
This warning with stuck state will reset only after player respawn
 
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ScorpyX

Deepstriker
Jul 29, 2016
34
83
18
#40
i realize in Glide Turning Demo we have Medium size of Omni-frame
and maybe it limited on purpose

but to prevent any comparison with FireFall
lets check what not "hard limited" inertia of movement can do
on amazing video of Dam13n ( aka Sn0wflak3 )


my point is: In any game hardcode limit of maximum speed
will limin ability of player to rise Skill (experience) of using movement mechanics itself
with same hard restrictions - all players will move in same way
Things like Quake acrobatics (trick movement) or CS_Surfing
would not exist at all with a maximum speed limit

inertia is very important part of fluid movement mechanics

PS. i understand it very niche thing in game development
( there is very small amount of games which support inertia movement philosophy )
but any developers features in this direction will make game movement more enjoyable
 
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