Dienstag, 29. April 2014

Lost Alpha: some thoughts

I wanted to post this on the comment section of the mod but character limit won't let me.
So here goes!



This mod/standalone/game (whatever you want to call it) is great but still needs some serious work. For one, its the details that kind of spoiled the experience after a few hours of playing. This quite a pity because this game really nailed the atmosphere.
These details are for example:
- missing step sounds if in first person view
- variable names instead of quest descriptions in the PDA
- the quest description for Wolf's quest to find his key is too vague as there's no location mentioned. Try doing such a quest two days or more after you accepted it... "where do I have to look for his key again?" *looks into PDA* "blah blah find Wolf's key and I get his stash* - "...well, shit."
- main quest relevant persons vanishing (dying?) in the middle of a fight (this happened in the hangar of garbage; the only thing I found of the guy I need to talk to was a weapon, so I'm assuming he died).

The second aspect are the crashes. Apparently crashes appear when you're being attacked AND shoot at the very same time. That hurt screen overlay shows up and I almost simultaneously shot, but instead it lags at the animation for a second and just crashes. This happened twice to me already and the crash message implies it has something to do with the way the lense flare effect is rendered, as far as I can recall; this and something with "Assertion failed" (looks like something isnt rendered properly when I look down abruptly and fire, being engaged by a critter at the same time?). It's possible both crashes are caused by two different things, though, since I dont remember the message of the first time this happened.
Another time I managed to make the game crash was by either quickly double click or quickly mouse left click then right click on the description or item field in the inventory. Also, if you minimize the game then maximize, it causes an instant crash as well. During the ~3 hours I played it probably crashed about 6 or 7 times due to the mentioned reasons. This is a bit much and thus the game feels pretty unfinished. I am not too sure how profound the causes for these crashes are and whether they're too deep down in the engine than to be fixed.

Now that's crashes. Lets go over to the bugs.

What's buggy is the weapon repair screen. If I wanted Fox to repair my weapons I can't. Or to be correct, I can only repair the weapon/armor that's ontop of the list (which is the item the list is initialized with). The list that displays all weapons in the inventory doesn't seem to be responding to any mouse clicks at all. The same applies to the screen section where I can buy upgrades/extensions for my weapons. Nothing happens if I click anything there. This is at the beginning of the game so I'm not sure here whether that's intended or not.

My system is 64bit Windows with a Radeon 4500 HD graphics card, 3GHz AMD processor with 8GB RAM.

So why do I have crashes but didnt get the chance to submit them with the tool you provided? You know, each this thing opens up after a crash asking me to submit a crash report, I want to save the report instead (as I dont make use of mailing programs) which then, guess what, CRASHES as well. Seriously guys... what the heck is this? I don't even have the possibility to help you guys out with this buggyness and crashyness!

I don't mind bugs and unfinished-ness as I'm playing a lot of alphas myself. I realize this is a "mod" (or perhaps I should say lost alpha lol) but I think you could expect this to be a bit more stable than this; so it at least doesn't crash that often.

Last but not least I also want to say something more positive about this game. Looking at the map it seems there's TONS of places to go to which I'm really excited about. But please fix the issues first before adding anything new... All this stuff really adds up to a game that could be so much better.

Dienstag, 8. April 2014

New Blog

Still not entirely sure what I'm going to post here - maybe personal work like music or the occasional art, or just ramblings if I feel like it. Heh.