Not logged inOpenClonk Forum
Up Topic General / Feedback and Ideas / Feedback by the clonkspot crew :)
- - By Nachtschatten Date 2013-06-01 14:04 Edited 2013-06-01 14:11
This is a summary and translation from the feedback thread in the clonkspot forum. While the team agrees on most points, I explicitly say so where it's just my personal opinion.

The good:
- The controls are pretty okay (with some exceptions, see below).
- I, personally, like the style (visuals, sound, and so on).
- Easy to understand "Create new player" dialog on first start. Very user-friendly.

The so-so:
- Personal opinion: Don't like the Clonk face in the Windows installer, reminds me of the Pedobear. (Only concerns the stable release)
- On first start, my monitors went black. After that I was back on my desktop with OC's "fullscreen window" hidden behind other windows.
- Personal opinion: Ugly, confusing flying coloured dots in the ranged weapons tutorial. I didn't get what they do, so Zapper had to tell me.
- Personal opinion about the bow's controls. I strongly dislike the following mechanism: If you click (and release the mouse button right away), the Clonk does not aim in the current direction of the mouse pointer at the time of shooting. I discuss this in detail below.
- The controls feel laggy. Luchs thinks this is because animations are started/finished before the key press has an effect - which sounds plausible because the controls feel laggy even in single player.

The actually bad:
- This only concerns the stable release: The Windows installer doesn't ask for admin rights when it should (installation to general program directory). This annoyed me as I had to decide between "restart installer" or "install to user accessible directory".
- In the main menu, the sound for buttons fails to play after some clicks. Buttons are silent from then on. This happened to me, I don't know about the others.
- Bug: When holding the mouse button, the weapon charge status display (the green "pie chart") disappears after a short time. This is purely a graphical bug - the weapon technically stays charged.
- Generally, there should be more feedback about your weapon's status.
- Bug: Changing the resolution works on some computers but not on others. Luchs and me had a funny error message saying "Error switching resolution: The operation completed successfully." while in fact nothing had happened.
- Bug: The network management screen(?) broke for Luchs once (See his screenshot).
- While jumping, Clonks grab rope ladders without the player's consent. For example, this is extremely counter-productive in "The Cauldron", where you usually jump to either evade projectiles or to get into a better shooting position. Unexpectedly being stuck in mid-air is very irritating and annoying. We propose you have to hold down a button to grab the ladder, to make this an explicit decision by the player.
- Explosion effects of rockets are very overdone. Essentially, you're disoriented and blinded for some time from the smoke covering your view. This is especially noticeable in "The Guardians of Windmills" and "Kamikaze Cowboys".
- Poor performance: This might be caused by the overdone effects, but Nachtfalter also mentioned his game became laggy whenever someone climbed a rope ladder. In general, performance in OC is noticeably worse than it was in CR, even on powerful computers.
- General game speed: The game really felt "slow" somehow. This isn't a lag or performance issue. We noticed this a lot in the action-oriented arena "The Cauldron". Unfortunately, I can't put my finger on what causes this.
- Falling material pixels bug: This happened to me when checking out OC in single player. In the ranged weapons tutorial, one of the first balloons drops an explosive, which ought to blast away the sand beneath it. What instead happened was that the sand turned pink and remained solid. (Happened in the snapshot, I wanted to check out the new "falling single pixels" mechanism)

Details about the bow's controls:
The "proper use" of the bow is as follows: Click and hold the mouse button, aim with the mouse cursor, then release the button to fire in the cursor's direction when the bow is charged. What happens when you just click but not hold the button is that, after charging, the Clonk fires in the direction of where the cursor was when clicking. When I first used the bow, I didn't know I had to hold the button. So I clicked, corrected my aiming, expected the Clonk to fire in the cursor's direction, and got surprised as my aiming had no effect.

I don't really know why the bow works this way. Perhaps you can give me some insights and it makes sense then. At this point, I think: This would make some sense if you could control the firing range by holding down the mouse button for a desired time. You might also argue this is a case of "fire&forget", where you click in the right direction and then concentrate on other things (like evading projectiles). I'd argue this behaviour is more confusing than useful, as you have to correct your aiming in almost all cases anyway, and having to hold the button is unnecessarily uncomfortable.

I propose the following mechanism instead: Check the mouse button when the bow is finished charging. If it is pressed, keep aiming until it is released. Otherwise, fire the arrow in the current direction of the mouse cursor. This has an additional advantage: If you're quick enough, you can change your mind to hold the arrow after just clicking.

Final words:
Zapper already provided some quick feedback on these points in the clonkspot forum. Apparently, our thoughts have even been discussed on the OC meeting! So I want to thank you guys for replying so quickly and for the productive discussion so far. I hope we can continue this here with the rest of the OC team and community.
Reply
Parent - By Luchs [de] Date 2013-06-01 15:12

>- Bug: The network management screen(?) broke for Luchs once (See his screenshot).


Can't say much more there unfortunately. I think it happened when the host closed a lobby I was in or I exited from the lobby or something like that.
Parent - - By Isilkor Date 2013-06-01 23:22 Edited 2013-06-01 23:27

> - This only concerns the stable release: The Windows installer doesn't ask for admin rights when it should (installation to general program directory). This annoyed me as I had to decide between "restart installer" or "install to user accessible directory".


I'm somewhat unhappy with the NSIS installer too, but so far I haven't figured out a good way to make WiX (the toolkit that generates .msi installer files) run on our build slaves. Since Debian Wheezy was released recently (with a more recent toolchain), this may warrant re-examination.

> - Bug: Changing the resolution works on some computers but not on others. Luchs and me had a funny error message saying "Error switching resolution: The operation completed successfully." while in fact nothing had happened.


I've seen that too. I remember adding some more detailed logging to that piece of code, but I can't remember whether that made it to stable yet.
[Edit] Apparently it has. Luchs, are you using multiple monitors?
Reply
Parent - By Nachtfalter [de] Date 2013-06-02 17:16

>Luchs, are you using multiple monitors?


Not Luchs, but "Yes".
Reply
Parent - - By Luchs [de] Date 2013-06-06 18:39

>[Edit] Apparently it has. Luchs, are you using multiple monitors?


Yup, but for some reason it does work now without changing anything o_O
Parent - By Caesar [de] Date 2013-06-06 20:39
Fix by bug report. Old trick.
Parent - By J. J. [py] Date 2013-06-02 16:38

>- Poor performance: This might be caused by the overdone effects, but Nachtfalter also mentioned his game became laggy whenever someone climbed a rope ladder. In general, performance in OC is noticeably worse than it was in CR, even on powerful computers.


>- General game speed: The game really felt "slow" somehow. This isn't a lag or performance issue. We noticed this a lot in the action-oriented arena "The Cauldron". Unfortunately, I can't put my finger on what causes this.


I noticed this to and its even worse in mutiplayer somehow need fixed.
Up Topic General / Feedback and Ideas / Feedback by the clonkspot crew :)

Powered by mwForum 2.29.7 © 1999-2015 Markus Wichitill