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Old 03-18-19, 04:14 AM   #1
DICY
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Join Date: Mar 2010
Posts: 4
Downloads: 27
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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:

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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?
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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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