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Old 03-18-19, 04:14 AM   #1
DICY
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Default Captain DICY's Fabulous Feedback Thread

Hey guys, long-time Subsim lurker here, had to post because this game is so good. Been playing Silent Hunter on and off for the better part of a decade now, a couple of my friends and I discovered this game over the weekend and have been having a blast with it.

First I just want to say incredible work, you guys have really nailed it so far. The attention to detail is phenomenal. As I'm sure plenty of people have said already, this really feels like the first steps towards a game many Silent Hunter fans have wanted to see for years. This is a really unique and interesting project and you guys should be proud of what you've accomplished so far.

I know a lot of the feedback and suggestions coming in are fairly large in scope and your roadmap is already a huge amount of work for two people to take on, so I thought some feedback with a bit of a narrower focus might be welcome.

Here's a list of smaller "quality of life" improvements my friend and I put together after a weekend of U-Boating with our buddies that should hopefully be fairly low-cost to implement and have a nice impact on the overall experience:

__________________________________________________
User Experience

1. Ladder navigation - when climbing down the ladder from the bridge to get into the conning tower it's easy to go a little bit too far down the ladder, right click to get off in the tower, and slide down into the command room instead. If you're careful you can play around it, but it's cumbersome and frustrating when it happens. Easy solution here would be to move the slide button to Left Shift, since that's already the sprint key it should feel fairly intuitive.

2. The interact radius is pretty big on some of the stations, sometimes it's easy to get on the wrong station because your aim was a little off. Probably the worst example of this is the ladder and ballast tank valve controls, you can actually reach the ballast controls from in front of the ladder, which means if you're in a hurry and miss the ladder mesh when you click you can actually end up on ballast by accident. Not ideal in an emergency.

3. Player can't fit between UZO and OP on the bridge. This is a really minor thing but it looks like the player should fit through, sometimes I forget and get stuck and that kind of thing can be immersion breaking.

4. I don't know if this is historically accurate but a knot meter and compass in the conning tower would be reeeaaally nice. If there's some historical reason why they didn't have them here then obviously stick with that, but I was a bit surprised to see there isn't one.

Realisation/Immersion

5. Death and damage are a bit underwhelming, I think this is actually one of the more important points. The game does a great job of building tension and delivering plenty of terrifying moments, but when you finally die it's a very abrupt cut to the death screen. The same is true for when you approach and reach crush depth, the only thing indicating damage is some drips from the ceiling. This is obviously a little more work than the other suggestions, but a few simple things like lights going out, loud bangs and crashes, and maybe some water particle effects spraying in from a few pipes would go a long way to making damage and death a lot more terrifying.

6. I was also a bit surprised to see no wake behind the ship or torpedoes. I'm not sure if the torpedoes are electric (side note: some info on the torpedoes would be nice to have in the manual), but at any rate the ship should certainly have a wake. I assume this is more a question of scope or maybe technical limitations and not an oversight, but I thought I'd mention it here regardless.

Bugs & Potential Bugs

7. Client replication on Join in Progress - we had at least two occasions where someone joined us after we already started the game and couldn't see the character models of the other clients. The client who joined could see the host of the game, but not the other clients. Host and clients could all see the client that joined. I don't know exactly what the occurrence rate on this is, we didn't look into it further and I don't remember how many times someone even joined us during the game but it's possible we were 2 for 2 on this. Let me know if you want us to dig into it a little more.

8. Close hatch while submerged? - this might not be a bug, but my friends and I often play shorthanded and we're also idiots, so there's been more than one occasion where we accidentally submerged when the hatch was still open. We noticed you can't actually close it after this happens, is that intentional or a bug?

Fun Stuff

9. More gramophone songs! Seriously, these are so good for immersion and just generally having a good time on the ship. We were giggling like children when we discovered you can play songs over the loudspeaker and other boats can hear it. Whatever songs you can get the rights to, throw them on there, because that thing is amazing.

10. The captain needs a luger because how else are you going to deal with insubordination on your boat?
__________________________________________________


That's it from me for now. I'm super excited about this project and will be playing a lot as well as keeping an eye on development so I'll update the thread as more things come up.

Keep up the great work guys, I can't wait to see more.
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Old 03-18-19, 04:23 AM   #2
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Originally Posted by DICY View Post
9. More gramophone songs! Seriously, these are so good for immersion and just generally having a good time on the ship. We were giggling like children when we discovered you can play songs over the loudspeaker and other boats can hear it. Whatever songs you can get the rights to, throw them on there, because that thing is amazing.
ALSO....

A user music folder, with a config file for us to edit (so the tracks can display nicely in the gramaphone UI).
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Old 03-18-19, 04:52 AM   #3
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Love these suggestions
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Old 03-18-19, 02:38 PM   #4
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Love these suggestions
Thanks! I noticed most of the feedback is for things like single player, campaign, bots, fully modeled ship interior, etc. and while these are all great they also take a ton of work and planning and need to be viewed as longer-term goals. Sometimes it's nice to get some bite-sized feedback that can be quickly addressed with a few hours/days of work.

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ALSO....

A user music folder, with a config file for us to edit (so the tracks can display nicely in the gramaphone UI).
This is a great idea and would be really nice to see, but it's probably a bit more complicated than it seems. I'd have to do some digging around to confirm, but if you want all players to be able to hear the user music I believe it creates a legal problem. The game would have to transfer the music files to the other connected players for them to be able to hear it too, which is obviously an issue since that's copyrighted content that isn't owned by the player or developer.

The alternative would be to make it so people can only hear music from their own user music folder (similar to what Rockstar does with their Grand Theft Auto PC ports), which would be cool but not as cool as if everyone can listen to the same music together. Also I'm making some assumptions here, but my guess is there are a couple technical/design conflicts this would introduce that might actually require the entire system to be rewritten, it's possible that this is actually a lot more work than it might seem. Only the devs would know that for sure though.
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Old 03-18-19, 02:59 PM   #5
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2. The interact radius is pretty big on some of the stations, sometimes it's easy to get on the wrong station because your aim was a little off. Probably the worst example of this is the ladder and ballast tank valve controls, you can actually reach the ballast controls from in front of the ladder, which means if you're in a hurry and miss the ladder mesh when you click you can actually end up on ballast by accident. Not ideal in an emergency.

The worst one is the observation periscope when it is looking forward and the forward ballast tanks. If you miss y our click instead of looking through the periscope you are not opening or closing the forward ballast tanks which can cause problems.


The most useful one we found was that if you stand at the bottom of the ladder and look up at the hatch you can bypass 2/3rds of the ladder and get a warp up by clicking the ladder activation at the top of the ladder which standing at the bottom.


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Originally Posted by DICY View Post
5. Death and damage are a bit underwhelming, I think this is actually one of the more important points. The game does a great job of building tension and delivering plenty of terrifying moments, but when you finally die it's a very abrupt cut to the death screen. The same is true for when you approach and reach crush depth, the only thing indicating damage is some drips from the ceiling. This is obviously a little more work than the other suggestions, but a few simple things like lights going out, loud bangs and crashes, and maybe some water particle effects spraying in from a few pipes would go a long way to making damage and death a lot more terrifying.

This is very underwhelming. You can take a single hit from a gun and get that screen just because you have an unstoppable leak. The crush depth kind of makes sense but i'd prefer something like SH where it goes black and you hear crushing metal sounds for a bit.


The whole point is that the game is very immersive and then you are very abruptly removed from that immersion when you die. If the ship doesnt outright crush then you should be able to ride it down to crush depth trying to save it. There should be water coming out of everywhere and a feeling of frantic impending death.


What we have right now is an instant, oh, you died here is your stats. which is... underwhelming!




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7. Client replication on Join in Progress - we had at least two occasions where someone joined us after we already started the game and couldn't see the character models of the other clients. The client who joined could see the host of the game, but not the other clients. Host and clients could all see the client that joined. I don't know exactly what the occurrence rate on this is, we didn't look into it further and I don't remember how many times someone even joined us during the game but it's possible we were 2 for 2 on this. Let me know if you want us to dig into it a little more.

We had one instance of this where someone tried to load in, we saw his character load it. the text buffer listed him as loaded in but he got stuck looking at the ship selection screen. To fix it we had to restart everyone's client. I think there was some corruption causing the game to not be able to match the game in progress to the new joiner.
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Old 03-18-19, 03:02 PM   #6
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This is a great idea and would be really nice to see, but it's probably a bit more complicated than it seems. I'd have to do some digging around to confirm, but if you want all players to be able to hear the user music I believe it creates a legal problem. The game would have to transfer the music files to the other connected players for them to be able to hear it too, which is obviously an issue since that's copyrighted content that isn't owned by the player or developer.

The alternative would be to make it so people can only hear music from their own user music folder (similar to what Rockstar does with their Grand Theft Auto PC ports), which would be cool but not as cool as if everyone can listen to the same music together. Also I'm making some assumptions here, but my guess is there are a couple technical/design conflicts this would introduce that might actually require the entire system to be rewritten, it's possible that this is actually a lot more work than it might seem. Only the devs would know that for sure though.

yeah i guess you're right. Blasting SLAYER over the intercomm at unsuspecting lobby players might be a bit much anyway
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