ClaytoniousRex

The base FOV is 80 degrees. There's currently no way for that to be changed outside of changing the code.

Consider the Size tag to be deprecated. It no longer has any real purpose and is now basically cruft.

The next time it happens, will you please send your DropTeam.log along with a note saying that you're Ithai on the forum? The log might be pretty large so if you can't email it then let me know and I'll arrange a place for you to upload it to.

A robust set of diagramming tools in on its way for the commander. This will help a lot. Platoons are coming, too, but much later. Roles sound like a good idea and easy enough to implement. We'll consider that feature again when we get to platoons. Far and away, though, the primary obstacle to teamwork at the moment (which will remain the primary obstacle regardless of technological innovations in the game's interface) is COMMUNICATION. Every couple of days I manage to get into a game where my teammates are using voice chat, talking to one another, and supporting one another. These are great games. And honestly, with only 12 units on the field, simply talking to one another and using waypoints on the tac display is usually plenty sufficient to cooperate on various plans of action. Current issues that are limiting even this simpler kind of coordination are: </font> DropTeam does not currently do a good job of normalizing voice input volume from microphones. Consequently, when using voice chat, many players are inaudible because they don't speak loud enough or have their microphone volume turned up high enough. On top of that, of course, players with laggy connections hear choppy voice chat. Because of these two issues, some players stop using it after they initially try it. We're going to fix the first issue in the code, and the second issue will be less of a problem after the public test when servers are more geographically distributed (so players can connect to closer servers with better pings).</font>There are still a lot of people dropping in just to "see what this is all about" with no real intention of sticking around and playing a full game (or at least no intention of trying to win a game).</font> I didn't mention those points in order to brush aside your idea of "Roles" or other teamplay aides. As I said, we definitely want to get to those features over time, too. I just think it's important to realize that the primary causes (and solutions) to this kind of problem aren't technological - they're behavioral. In general, there's a lot you as an individual player can do about this. I've often dropped into a game that seems very quiet until I or someone else takes the initiative to start talking.

The filtering is all done on the client side, so if it's in your way then you can kill it yourself. Edit the file called Profanity.xml and simply remove all of the "Words" tags. Or, if you're a parent, you can add more to the list. The original list was a lot longer than this one and compiling it was - uh - educational, for sure.

Oh yes, I'll take that log! You can email it to me along with a note that you're Pilgrim. Thanks!

Any other heavy multiplayer games acting this way?

Post the details of the access violation when you get back to that PC. Also, if DropTeam.exe is managing to generate a DropTeam.log (will be in the /bin subdirectory) before it dies then post that, too.

Hi, Mobile. That NULL address (00000000) is a clear indicator of OpenGL drivers not being installed. It's a 0 because a required (and very basic) OpenGL extension was not found in your OpenGL dll. It must be that on your first pass with the ATI drivers, the OpenGL drivers were not installed. When you installed again with the ATI control panel, then the OpenGL drivers were successfully installed. I wonder if the Catalyst download with control center is required to get real OpenGL support? If so, that might be confusing (and crashing) a lot of ATI users out there. Has anyone else had this experience?

Yes, it is intentional but, no, it's not desirable. The reason static objects like turrets and jammers are visible in the planetside view is simply because it's a way to conserve precious network bandwidth. So, yes, we delibertely made them visible but, no, there is really not a good supporting gameplay reason for this. Eventually, our plan is to have the best of both worlds: conserve bandwidth by not needing to dead reckon these objects but ALSO make them invisible when out of LOS. This will require some risky foolishness on the client side which is why we haven't done it yet.

Fixed for 0.9.45. Thanks, guys.

In the upcoming 0.9.45 release we've made two changes that are related to this discussoin: 1. We've improved the fragmentation system so that it's more closely correlated with the amount of armor penetrated and the amount of penetration - sort of in line with what Drusus was proposing. So when, for example, you do penetrate a heavy target like the Thor with AP you're going to see more fragmentation damage than you did before. Conversely, when penetrating a light target like a Shrike with AP, you will see less fragmentation damage. 2. It is now possible for direct hits on components to do more damage. This increases the chance of direct hits killing components in fewer shots. The amount of randomness is not greatly increased here - so don't worry about an unusually high number of 1 shot KO's, Yurch. Both of these are pretty minor tweaks. We prefer to ease into these changes over a few releases rather than do them abruptly.

Yes, they ought to be reassigned to the team itself instead of being deleted. This is an easy fix, but is risky wrt to testing, so we will probably wait until after the initial release.

That would be very useful, indeed. We're working on it, but won't be adding it until after v1 ships.

Has this happened again, kmead, or was it just the one time? If this does happen again, would you please send your DropTeam.log along with a note that it's about this issue? Thanks!

This is an unfortunate side effect of dead reckoning on the network. You should only be seeing this if your ping is pretty bad (such as > 200ms). We should be able to do some client-side tricks to alleviate it some, but it will never completely go away.

I don't want to stop you from installing that helipad on top of your Thor. This might be especially useful since I've seen you out there wearing burning dropships on top of your vehicle. All objects are modelled at 2x scale. This means that all of the distance and size values in the .physicalobjectgroup file are 2x larger than their actual size. This is simply a matter of convention for the base game. As a modder, you're perfectly welcome to use literal scale for all of your objects if you like, but in early alpha testing we settled on the 2x scale to make the game an order of magnitude more playable. At literal scale, due to the limitations of consumer graphics displays, the player is usually dealing with distant objects that are only a single (or a few) pixels wide, etc.

Moon will have to confirm this, but I think you will have the option to do a "digital delivery" when you order. This means you could download the full version without waiting for anything.

The plan for infantry is that they will always operate in squads. A player drops and manages a squad of infantry very much the same way he currently does with a vehicle. There are different types of squads with different loadouts (every member of the squad is not identical even though they are managed as a "whole" by the player). This will make sure they integrate well with the "platoons" feature once it is added, too.

Posel, are you seeing a good 5 or more servers, or are you still only seeing that one Goethenburg server?

Well of course it's a stupid bug that caused this in the first place (obviously it should work even when scrolled right). Fixed for the next update. Thanks for reporting it, Konstantine!

Konstantine, I've looked at your DropTeam.log. Are you, by chance, scrolling the server list right or left before clicking the Join Game button? Have you tried clicking a server while the list is scrolled all the way to the LEFT before pressing Join Game?

That's great, Poesel. Can you please email me directly for the IM info? Thanks!

Can you email your DropTeam.log to support@tbgsoftware.com? Thanks!

See edit in original post above, Type.