Feedback (2.2 trunk - rev 11999 - 2007-09-26)

[Kaerius]

Nice job on many of the new features. Some problems however:

Night missions: Simply too dark, unplayable unless you raise gamma to about 75%, I thought it was the old black-texture bug again at first. At about 75% gamma, it's about as dark as it should be imho. Also there are no flares, and your troops do not have the circle of light(tm) that they had in xcom. It's just pitch black at standard gamma. Oh and the game messed up my gamma/brightness windows settings too, argh, possibly while crashing.

Base attack mission: Had one of these, sent a team over there... hey no crash right away, making progress! However there weren't any actual aliens in the mission, so I was unable to complete it. Aborting makes the game crash. It still has the garbled filepath spam filling most of the loading screen.

I've also had some more or less random crashes at end of missions, some I think are caused by me giving orders in the small window between killing the last alien, and the mission ending. I've also crashed at the "The aliens start their invasion" screen(and why does clicking past those always bring me to the menu, so I have to press continue to keep playing?)

I have been unable to research any UFO(have gotten scout, fighter and harvester), alien propulsion, and "particle beam weapon"(though up to man-portable particle beams works). They all show up in research window but greyed out, and the text informing me why scrolls off-screen... The only UFO part I can research is alien astrogation.

I have researched everything else I believe, I made it to the next year and the UFOs and missions stoped coming completely, fast-forwarded to july without any of either showing up. The only new things from 2.1.1 I've seen here are alien astrogation, bloodspider autopsy and monomolecular knife.

Plasma weapon rebalance has made the game a little easier, they don't spray me down like crazy with anything except the plasma blaster now, and it hurts less. However the only alien weapons worth using is still particle weapons, that you can't manufacture ammo for... Lasers are also quite useless. If the laser pistol had the stats of the heavy laser, it would be useful, that's about it. I find myself using only sniper rifle, riot shotgun, and bolt rifle(replaces riot shotgun).

Oh and another thing: I have a swedish OS but prefer playing in english, so I pick english language when given the choice... but several texts are still in swedish, for example flashbangs are "lysgranat" in the equip soldiers screen, though they're correctly called flashbangs in buy/sell and produce menus. Lysgranat btw is REALLY badly translated, I actually thought these were supposed to be flares until now, the real word for it is Distraktionsgranat. Lysgranat is litterally "lightgrenade", and with no double meanings on light, nothing to do with weight, we have a separate word for that.

[BTAxis]

Unfortunately, we don't have support for flares in the engine. Hopefully that will change, because they're useful at low light settings like that. I don't want to make the maps any lighter, though. They used to be a lot lighter, but that just looked stupid. It's supposed to be a NIGHT map, not a cloudy day map.

[Kaerius]

Even so, the stars and moon at least give you enough light to see the shape of things near you... kinda hard navigating a map when you can't tell what's the ground or what's an obstacle, because they're all pitch black.

The only time I've ever been in a situation approaching this was in the middle of the night, in a dense forest, and cloudy weather, and I could still see quite far when I got out from between the trees and onto a 5m wide dirt "road". Could barely see when I was between the trees.

What we get on those maps is worse than that, and it doesn't change even when my whole team wears ir-goggles...

Basically we need enough light to distinguish shapes/edges, that's all I'm asking... until then I'll be playing at 75% gamma...

[BTAxis]

Hmm, at lighting 15, you should at least be able to see SOME stuff. Unless your monitor is really dark, I guess. But hey, that's what the gamma slider is for, isn't it? Enough for the fact that it's buggy...

[Kaerius]

Hmm, managed to research all those previously greyed out things, apparently the game likes storing captured UFOs at different bases than the one you sent the troops from. 

I've run into some more crash bugs as well, posted a log on one of them in a new thread.

Another one is that if you craft an interceptor and have no free hangars, you get an immidiate crash to desktop without any error messages or warnings.

[Kaerius]

Another bug: As long as you have a craft item, you can equip it unlimited times on crafts in that base(for example you can have one missile rack and equip it twice each on two fighters.

[Mattn]

these 'bug' (or better missing features) are currently implemented

[XaverXN]

Jesus, I just played the, um, third map I think (the industrial one) and MAN this is dark. I am totally with Kaerius on this: If your PC is in a darkened room and on a 21'' screen 10 cm before your eyes with 75% gamma you can't actually tell where the map stops or if there is a wall right before you, the fun is really over. One needs some ambient light, or at least some circle of light in front of the soldiers if that dark missions are really needed.

And BTAxis, no offense, but a black pixel stays a black pixel even at 100% gamma. Thats not what the slider is for... left aside that the geoscape and menu are so pale that they just look crappy at that setting and you'd have to switch gamma everytime you change from geo to battle.

Have either of you, BT or Mattn, actually played a mission with dark ground pattern at midnight?

[BTAxis]

Well, all I can say is, I can see stuff.

I personally think the maps should be that dark, or they won't really be "night" maps. However, I suppose that if the low lighting makes the maps unplayable then we'll just have to light them up some more.

I'm keeping the low-light versions myself, though. I don't like night maps looking like dawn maps. X-COM had pitch-black maps also, and that added atmosphere to the game. It's much more creepy if you don't know what's hiding in the dark corners.

[Agrajag]

The night maps are truly very dark, but I think its OK.  Anyway it would be nice if there was some light around the soldiers (perhaps some kind of flashlight?).
Effect: you can see where your soldiers are, but its still clear that it is not day.
If it is possible to have that kind of moving lights in maps...

[BTAxis]

Okay, here some stuff for comparison.

This is how the maps look now. I chose a map that doesn't have any bright textures; the snowy maps actually look much brighter than this. The light values for this setting are ambient 0 0 0, light 15.



This is the same map captured with more or less the same camera setting. I changed the ambient to be about the same as the sunlight intensity. Because the ambient lighting is a normalized RGB value this means I did 15/256, and I ended up with about 0.05. The result:

It's still okay, I guess. It's a subtle difference, but the areas that were black before shouldn't be now. This has the unfortunate consequence that there can be NO completely dark corners on the map anymore.

For some extra comparison, an even brighter version. Settings: ambient 0.07 0.07 0.07, light 25. So it's a bit less than twice as bright across the board:

As you can see this looks quite bad. Lots of color everywhere, and as everyone knows the human eye can't see color below a certain light intensity. That's the reason why I think the brighter the map, the worse it looks (as a night map).

[Kaerius]

The first pic you posted is what it looks like to me when I raise the gamma to 75-80%.

At default gamma, I can only see things surrounding a lightsource, everything else is pitch black.

It's kinda funny because I do not have my gamma raised that much in windows... so if it was the same in those screenshots as it is ingame to me, I wouldn't see much in the screenshots either.

EDIT: Hmm yeah, I took some screenshots ingame with default gamma, which looked pitch black ingame, and when I looked at them in windows, they were much brighter, again like at 75% gamma. Weird.

So basically default gamma ingame is darker than in windows.

[BTAxis]

Do you play windowed or fullscreen? If you play fullscreen, can you try windowed and see if that looks better?

[Kaerius]

Ok, changed from fullscreen to windowed mode, and the problem disappeared. So it's a problem that only exists in fullscreen.

[BTAxis]

I can't reproduce this myself (Windows XP, ATi Radeon X1900XT). Maybe it's something to do with your specific hardware.