Suggestions And Minor Issues

[azoundria]

This game is so amazing and addictive and I cannot stop playing it. So these are just a few minor suggestions.

1) I get an error if I try to resize the game (or full screen it). The lighting just shuts off. Lamps stop working, night is pitch black, etc... The error continues if I size it back to normal, and doesn't go away until restarting the whole game. Windows 7 64 bit if that helps. I don't know if anyone else gets this error.

2) If the player quits and has not recently saved, at least warn them. Ideally, you should prompt them to save. It's far too easy to accidentally click 'Quit Game' and lose hours of work.

3) Allow disabling of smoke in the graphics options. I'm fairly certain it's causing major lag (especially with 20 steam engines going full tilt).

4) It should be possible to issue urgent items to be built, so you don't have to remove your entire queue just to get an item you need right away.

5) Let the player start with resources generated near them. Specifically, stone. Just enough to get started.

6) The aliens should give up chasing you after a while. It's unrealistic and makes the game impossible if you run out of ammo.

7) Allow the building of some kind of wall to keep out creepers. (Wood, stone, and ultimately steel wall would be awesome.)

8) There should be a coal light source, other than an oven, like torches. Or you can burn wood.

9) Allow some degree of customization when creating a new game. For example, a difficulty level, resource rarity, etc...

10)The game desperately needs a map/radar technology of some kind.

11) Killing creepers could give you loot of some kind?

12) Wood can't be harvested except by hand? Also, it becomes almost completely useless in the later game?

[faerbit]

In response to 9: you can use this map editor feature, also I'm not sure about any controls there...
I would like the idea of an seed (which contains all parameters for the map generation) which you can input before you start the game (like in Minecraft). This would also allow to share seeds.

More suggestions:

13) Make escape key close the current window and only open up the game menu, if there is no current window. PLEASE! Ideally add an option to control this behaviour.
14) Make stone more useful. The only recipe now is the furnace, which is needed only a few times at the beginning.

[kovarex]

Hi azourindria, thank you for all the suggestions!

This game is so amazing and addictive and I cannot stop playing it. So these are just a few minor suggestions.

1) I get an error if I try to resize the game (or full screen it). The lighting just shuts off. Lamps stop working, night is pitch black, etc... The error continues if I size it back to normal, and doesn't go away until restarting the whole game. Windows 7 64 bit if that helps. I don't know if anyone else gets this error.

You are not the first one saying this, but I was not able to reproduce, but we might update the graphcis library we use, they said they solved some bugs there..

2) If the player quits and has not recently saved, at least warn them. Ideally, you should prompt them to save. It's far too easy to accidentally click 'Quit Game' and lose hours of work.

We will do that, but you don't loose hours of work, you stil have autosaves. (And not one, autosave1 every minute, autosave2 every two minutes, autosave 3 every 4 mintues)

3) Allow disabling of smoke in the graphics options. I'm fairly certain it's causing major lag (especially with 20 steam engines going full tilt).

Ok, I will do it, but the main reason of lag is, that we still didn't put rendering and game update into separate threads, we have prepared this and some optimisations that could make the count of objects visible until it lags double or more.

4) It should be possible to issue urgent items to be built, so you don't have to remove your entire queue just to get an item you need right away.

That is right, I have different proposal to solve this issue:
What if new added items were added to the front of the queue, not end, wouldn't this solve it? (Without the need to add another different control for the player)

5) Let the player start with resources generated near them. Specifically, stone. Just enough to get started.

I might create some special feature to do this, but I always found proper place with all I need in less then minute in new game, maybe I was just lucky

6) The aliens should give up chasing you after a while. It's unrealistic and makes the game impossible if you run out of ammo.

You are right, we will make that, combined with making them actually faster than player could keep the balance.

7) Allow the building of some kind of wall to keep out creepers. (Wood, stone, and ultimately steel wall would be awesome.)

We have the wall (with tiles for connecting) ready and programmed, we just have to wait till the graphic draws that, as these are just black boxes atm
Generally, the graphics part is always behind the programming in our game ..

8) There should be a coal light source, other than an oven, like torches. Or you can burn wood.

Torches would remind me the minecraft too much, but we should probably make something like that anyway, maybe small fire place, that would be easy to make.

9) Allow some degree of customization when creating a new game. For example, a difficulty level, resource rarity, etc...

That is actually possible, when creating new map in map editor, we should add this customisation to the new game creation as well, I will do it

10)The game desperately needs a map/radar technology of some kind.

I couldn't agree more with you, what I image would be good is to have some large scale map you could open, it would show places you already visited and your position.
I might do this soon.

11) Killing creepers could give you loot of some kind?

Good idea, we will thing about something.

12) Wood can't be harvested except by hand? Also, it becomes almost completely useless in the later game?

Yes, the reason it is almost useless is because it can't be harvested automatically at the moment, so we won't force the player to mine it too much.
Automation of tree harvesting is one of the many things we would like to implement, I might even add to the new concepts.

[kovarex]

In response to 9: you can use this map editor feature, also I'm not sure about any controls there...
I would like the idea of an seed (which contains all parameters for the map generation) which you can input before you start the game (like in Minecraft). This would also allow to share seeds.

Right, we use random seed now, so it is really easy to add seed based on text or number.

13) Make escape key close the current window and only open up the game menu, if there is no current window. PLEASE! Ideally add an option to control this behaviour.

Now, it is possible to stop the game without closing the gui (and save the game with any gui opened, and it will be opened when you load the game ..).
I guess, that this feature is not really important for players after all, so we might do as you said (or make it togllable in options)

14) Make stone more useful. The only recipe now is the furnace, which is needed only a few times at the beginning.

Ok, I will try to think about that, btw walls will use lot of stone, and maybe some bigger buildings could use stone.

[faerbit]

To 13: Thanks, I just find kind of unintuitive, because it is handled in a lot of other games this way. But maybe you are right and I'm just a little bit weird and most people don't have problems with it.

Another Suggestion: Make the technology GUI in a tree form, so you can easily see which depends on what and so on.

[MatLaPatate]

I agree mostly with what he said. I haven't experimented issues with steam, however.

Also, on the creepers topic, I really think we should be able to hit with hands/melee weapon, which would deal with very few damages, but would let you a chance not to die when you're running because of no ammo and 1 HP creeper ^^

[kovarex]

Another Suggestion: Make the technology GUI in a tree form, so you can easily see which depends on what and so on.

This is definetly the plan, tree will be in similar form as on the wiki: http://www.kovarex.com/wiki/index.php/Research

I agree mostly with what he said. I haven't experimented issues with steam, however.

Also, on the creepers topic, I really think we should be able to hit with hands/melee weapon, which would deal with very few damages, but would let you a chance not to die when you're running because of no ammo and 1 HP creeper ^^

Yes, several people already suggested this, I think, that the axe will be used as weak melee weapon.

[Narc]

4) It should be possible to issue urgent items to be built, so you don't have to remove your entire queue just to get an item you need right away.

That is right, I have different proposal to solve this issue:
What if new added items were added to the front of the queue, not end, wouldn't this solve it? (Without the need to add another different control for the player)

Make the queue into a stack, eh? That would be really really neat.

Speaking of the build queue, I have a suggestion: when you click the upward-pointing arrow to expand the full crafting queue, the down-pointing arrow to re-collapse it should retain the same position (i.e. bottom-right of the crafting queue display). This should help prevent accidental double-clicks from cancelling crafting orders when you're just expanding or collapsing the queue.

13) Make escape key close the current window and only open up the game menu, if there is no current window. PLEASE! Ideally add an option to control this behaviour.

Now, it is possible to stop the game without closing the gui (and save the game with any gui opened, and it will be opened when you load the game ..). I guess, that this feature is not really important for players after all, so we might do as you said (or make it togllable in options)

In this case, I think it's more important to behave according to expectations (Esc == "get me out of here"). I've found myself running into this bit of strangeness and, as a result, thinking about the UI -- making players think about the interface is not a good thing.

Another Suggestion: Make the technology GUI in a tree form, so you can easily see which depends on what and so on.

This is definetly the plan, tree will be in similar form as on the wiki: http://www.kovarex.com/wiki/index.php/Research

I'd love to see the crafting list as a tree, as well, while you're thinking about it. A few times while thinking about how to make a simple Science Pack 1+2 factory I wished I could see the steps involved in a graphical representation. Perhaps a recipe lookup tool, hopefully supporting multiple recipes simultaneously and combining the graphs?

[UnrealDiego]

Another minor suggestion I have are better stats. For example, show us the output per minute or per day or whatever on assembling machines and ovens, so it is easier to optimize our factory.

[ssilk]

Would say this is 95% implemented.