Colony Ship Early Access Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Daedalos]

I don't really have any real feedback yet, other than to say the game feels and plays great.

A thing I do feel is that the world feels very static at this point, which is fine for an EA. It has been pointed out before, there isn't much going on with the lighting and shadows to portray things in movement, npcs, reflections etc.

It can feel abit like you're running around in slow-motion or somebody cast time-stop ^^

 

[Nick]

I don't really have any real feedback yet, other than to say the game feels and plays great.

A thing I do feel is that the world feels very static at this point, which is fine for an EA. It has been pointed out before, there isn't much going on with the lighting and shadows to portray things in movement, npcs, reflections etc.

It can feel abit like you're running around in slow-motion or somebody cast time-stop ^^

AoD-like (at least) NPC schedules are planned, that should make the scenes more alive.

 

[Savecummer]

i have 10 cha nigger wtf

 

[Geckabor]

I wanted to buy this now for support and so that I can play it when it's fully released...

...but then I decided to give it a shot. The last 9 hours passed very quickly. I haven't had this much fun for a long time.

 

[Twiglard]

I still need to do some lighting passes on the game, especially on the pit, so that should improve.

I'm having visibility problems in Hydroponics. The levels are heavily vertical with lots of occlusion. It's hard to distinguish multiple levels of elevation and know what is or isn't passable. Interactible elements purposely breaking pathfinding only make it worse. If they're made to keep combat within certain areas, dynamic or invisible walls would work better.

Also there are performance problems in 4K, on an overclocked RTX 3070 and i5 7600 @ 3.9 GHz the Pit runs at about 50 FPS with anti-aliasing on minimum and rest on ultra. It's related to rendering more than updates. Rendering itself takes 12 ms according to nvidia's overlay.

There should be an option to turn off anti-aliasing entirely, on 4K the pixels are so small that you don't need it in the first place.

 

[Incendax]

VD is being accused of pushing christian agenda on steam

https://steamcommunity.com/app/648410/discussions/0/3077621988062845483/

It would be pushing ANTI-Christian agenda if anything. But it's not. It's just standard religious nutter fiction.

 

[Agesilaus]

Another typo

Spoiler

When you accept the mission from the church re: rescuing the deacon, Evan says "why are you helping him..."

Response 1 has this error:

"Done the same? I'd've shot that deacon in the face..."

 

[PEACH]

I'd've fits that context fine as a contraction of "I would have"

 

[Elhoim]

I'm having visibility problems in Hydroponics. The levels are heavily vertical with lots of occlusion. It's hard to distinguish multiple levels of elevation and know what is or isn't passable. Interactible elements purposely breaking pathfinding only make it worse. If they're made to keep combat within certain areas, dynamic or invisible walls would work better.

Yeah, I'm planning on doing some passes there regarding mobility and lighting.

Also there are performance problems in 4K, on an overclocked RTX 3070 and i5 7600 @ 3.9 GHz the Pit runs at about 50 FPS with anti-aliasing on minimum and rest on ultra. It's related to rendering more than updates. Rendering itself takes 12 ms according to nvidia's overlay.

I need to bake the lighting there

It takes so much time and I'm still moving around things, so I've been putting it off for a while. Also thinking about looking into DLSS for 4k.

There should be an option to turn off anti-aliasing entirely, on 4K the pixels are so small that you don't need it in the first place.

We'll take a look at it.

 

[Twiglard]

When holding Tab to highlight interactibles, left-click to transfer from dead enemy's inventory doesn't work. The button clicks, but has no effect.

 

[MRY]

I'm having visibility problems in Hydroponics. The levels are heavily vertical with lots of occlusion. It's hard to distinguish multiple levels of elevation and know what is or isn't passable. Interactible elements purposely breaking pathfinding only make it worse. If they're made to keep combat within certain areas, dynamic or invisible walls would work better.

Yeah, I'm planning on doing some passes there regarding mobility and lighting.

I would just second this. I have to assume that you deliberately made Hydroponics hard to navigate for a mimetic reason (there's some of that in the Armory, too, with all the "squeezing" going on). But even coming to the game with a generous perspective, it felt to me like the area was designed to show off that you could have verticality and environmental interactions with foliage and ladders and emergency stairs and so forth. It just felt like intrusions on the player's enjoyment for no good reason -- in particular, there was a short section of catwalk with a ladder at both ends that accomplished nothing other than breaking pathfinding and slowing me down.

Keeping the foliage is probably fine (except that it's buggy) since it's kind of funny that you squeeze through and then encounter enemies -- though I will note that you can see the enemies by panning the camera, so it sort of defeats the point. But the elevation stuff is mostly just annoying. It reminds me of NES RPGs where treasure would be put behind a wall -- "hidden" only because of the camera angle -- possibly on the edge of a map so that if you stepped too far you'd leave the area.

 

[Twiglard]

Pressing Escape while on the journal screen brings up the main menu, rather than close the journal.

Selecting Aimed Burst for rifles via the '2' key is difficult, due to the amount of aimed targetting options. There ought to be another key, or the aimed burst should be grouped with the other bursts on '3'.

I tend to alternate betweeb attacks and check THC. Selecting aimed burst via multiple presses of '2', then going to other attack type (via '1' or '3') and back to '2', resets the aimed attack type and again I have to multi-tap onto aimed burst.

 

[Agesilaus]

Major Bug: sometimes the AI will purposely target the main player character, even though other characters pose more of a threat. I sense that they are purposely gunning for my main character because they know it will send me to the game over screen. It's like the AI is meta gaming, please implement a taunt skill or "battle roar" so my tanks can get everyone's attention.

Even if my player character is a big threat, he's a sniper with a force field, it's not fair to take endless pot shots at him to wittle down his health or kill him with BS critical hits. The AI should only target the SMG pointed at them from 10 feet away.

 

[Elhoim]

I would just second this. I have to assume that you deliberately made Hydroponics hard to navigate for a mimetic reason (there's some of that in the Armory, too, with all the "squeezing" going on). But even coming to the game with a generous perspective, it felt to me like the area was designed to show off that you could have verticality and environmental interactions with foliage and ladders and emergency stairs and so forth. It just felt like intrusions on the player's enjoyment for no good reason -- in particular, there was a short section of catwalk with a ladder at both ends that accomplished nothing other than breaking pathfinding and slowing me down.

Yeah, that's the one that I'm planning to tweak in particular. The idea is to add some skill based challenges along the way, but get unblocked for moving.

 

[Elhoim]

Major Bug: sometimes the AI will purposely target the main player character, even though other characters pose more of a threat. I sense that they are purposely gunning for my main character because they know it will send me to the game over screen. It's like the AI is meta gaming, please implement a taunt skill or "battle roar" so my tanks can get everyone's attention.

Even if my player character is a big threat, he's a sniper with a force field, it's not fair to take endless pot shots at him to wittle down his health or kill him with BS critical hits. The AI should only target the SMG pointed at them from 10 feet away.

They go for the one they can hit more easily. If you use the distortion field, or get some nice googles with thermal vision and use smoke grenades, they will be less likely to target you. I know we don't currently have a very dedicated melee character, but those are great for distracting the AI.

 

[Trithne]

Okay, so I've played the first bit of the EA a couple of times, and while I know there's a tutorial planned, right now I'm a bit unsure what some of the UI elements mean, and haven't been able to find an explanation in the ITS subforum.

What does this marker mean? I think it might be something about reaction fire?

Moved to behind the counter, now there's these.

And on a proposed move it turns into these.

Excuse my , but some pointers here on what exactly the hell these mean would be great.

 

[Reid]

I just finished my first run, seems really promising so far and I'm looking forward to trying out the new content as it's added, will also be replaying a bit with different builds.

I went with low charisma and constitution which was my go-to for combat characters in AoD, but it seemed a lot more difficult to run such a character in this game. Companions apparently make a big difference and I didn't feel as though my maxed perception and dexterity were significant enough to make up for having less bodies on the field.

In terms of criticisms, I think the highlight effect could be tweaked a bit since I found it quite flickery and jarring at times. I'll echo others thoughts that the Hydroponics area was a little annoying to navigate. I do like how it felt like a genuine dungeon-like area to explore that wasn't quite like anything in AoD.

 

[Jrpgfan]

Okay, so I've played the first bit of the EA a couple of times, and while I know there's a tutorial planned, right now I'm a bit unsure what some of the UI elements mean, and haven't been able to find an explanation in the ITS subforum.

What does this marker mean? I think it might be something about reaction fire?

Moved to behind the counter, now there's these.

And on a proposed move it turns into these.

Excuse my , but some pointers here on what exactly the hell these mean would be great.

Enemy reaction zone, reaction chance and line of sight, respectively.

 

[agris]

This is the message I get when I press Continue with no save files present. It crashes to desktop after that.

LowLevelFatalError [File:Unknown] [Line: 932]
ARpgCharacterBase::loadFromStream() - stream version 2 is not supported.

Still looks like it's trying to load an outdated save. Say, from combat demo. Added additional checks, thanks.

1. I had the combat demo installed, installed EA and my combat demo disappeared from my installed games list within Steam.

2. I launched EA, continue was not greyed out and I clicked it, only to get the error text that is quoted above.

I suppose EA saves are stored using the same file path as the CD saves?

 

[MRY]

Finished the EA. (At least, I assume I did -- no quests left but the Chapter 2 one, and this is just Chapter 1, right?) A few more reactions:

- Turning off blur, expanding FOV, zooming all the way out, and doing the always underline (though the last is a bit glitchy) made navigating much easier, but at some aesthetic cost.
- I've long felt that paperdoll characters were bad, and this simply reminds me of why. The characters (including PC) are completely indistinguishable except if I can remember who is wear what goofy helmet at any given time. Tis a shame. (One reason PS:T is so memorable is the lack of paperdoll and the highly differentiated character models.)
- The difficulty completely collapsed, not sure why; I had a ton of quests and felt somewhat stymied, but then I went to do the end of the Armory main quest, and it was quite easy (because I had the skills checked in the dialogue), and then everyone died, I had all the loot and my party could finally cream frogs, and then I could go anywhere, level up Faythe's lockpick on sufficiently easy locks, hack computers and electronics, etc. It took me about four hours to get where I was at the start of this session (very few quests complete), and then they all dropped one after another. Maybe it was finally being able to use the computer on top of the hydroponics tower that did it! Obviously, dialogue resolutions are way faster than combat resolutions, so perhaps there's no fix, but it seems like maybe you shouldn't get all the raider loot in the Armory if you use the autocannons to kill them (perhaps the loot could get destroyed in the attack). That might balance it better, not sure.
- Overall, frogs feel WAY too strong relative to other opponents, but perhaps I just don't know how to fight them. The problem is that they "present" as trash-tier enemies, but are actually really tough, since they always get initiative and can put so many maluses on you so fast.
- Faythe got mad when Braxton was dead, but I don't recall her ever urging me to side with Braxton rather than Jonas.

Overall, had a lot of fun, and may give it another go soon!

 

[Alphons]

Overall, frogs feel WAY too strong relative to other opponents, but perhaps I just don't know how to fight them. The problem is that they "present" as trash-tier enemies, but are actually really tough, since they always get initiative and can put so many maluses on you so fast.

Distortion field with upgraded zap.
Playing solo, frogs usually get 2 attacks each in first turn and get zapped for around 16-18 damage. I can then finish them with a normal swing of my hammer (14 AP for 2 normal attacks) and have some AP left to move towards Spitters and Psykers.




Also got a bug to report Elhoim :

During the quest for the stranger in the outskirts I decided to sneak into the building. I didn't invest into Sneak at all, but I was able to take out the goon in the back room. Guy behind the counter had his suspicion meter filled in around 40%, while the two remaining around 10%.
I could lockpick the door behind the counter, but it said it would make 10 noise. When I did it, it LOWERED everyone's detection (2 guys had empty bars, guy behind counter had around 25%). Opening and closing the door I picked and the one that was already open raised their detection.

 

[Ihavenoidea]

Spoiler

Yes, there're three olptions:yet another +per implant, +1int, both squad leader and +1int. So judging by your screenshot the two behind doors are +1 dexterity and +10 natura resistance. That means you've started with 9 dex?

Spoiler

Yeah, 9 Dex, to have more Con(7), and 4 implants at the end. Neural Resistance you get from killing a psyker frog, and giving the brain to the lady in the dome.
Here is the character from the front - 10, 9, 7, 6 at the start.

 

[coldaqua]

I love what I've played so far but I had a suggestion with regards to the UI.

I have a very large monitor and it's quite straining to view dialog box in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Would it be possible to move the dialog box away from the right margin of the screen and perhaps horizontally centre the text? Similar to what the developers did in Disco Elysium.

I uploaded a simple example of this - made in paint - on imgur: https://imgur.com/a/zKQkc9g

 

[Ihavenoidea]

About the dialogue box - how hard would it be to program an option to show previous messages with a click of a button? Fallout had something similar and sometimes I found myself wanting to go back or reread some info.

 

[Savecummer]

why is this not pinned on the front page?
i thought we were a presitgious magazine