[Feedback] Tile Clarity and some minor bugs and annoyances
Posted: Thu Dec 24, 2015 10:44 pm
Since Darkgod asked me over in the steam forums to compile a list of IMO not-so-ideal tiles and make a post here, I took some notes during my last plays, and here is my current feedback about stuff that coud or should be fixed, upgraded or otherwise changed to make the game clearer and more enjoyable.
Tileset readability
As I said in the respective steam thread, there are some clarity problems with the "floor" and "wall" textures in some zones. After a few dozen hours, it gets of course better because of familiarity, but the initial impression and ease of play is pretty horrific in some places and could be improved upon.
- The double height tiles are a problem in general. I know I can disable and cut off the high trees and similar stuff, but perhaps a 1.25 tile high "big tree/shroom" could be drawn to give the height illusion (at least as long as the player does not play an ogre) without obscuring the line above those tiles. Anyways, the game is barely playable without the cut-down option checked. To a lesser extent, this also applies to big mobs, although those are much more manageable. Still, I had a case where I did not notice a guy because he was "in the shadow" of a giant.
- Characters, objects and even the exit can hide behind the UI. An especially irritating offender is the map with exits in the top right corner. I know I can cycle the map of for a moment and could move any interface parts, but still, it happens too often. The exit-behind-map-problem could likely be fixed by changing the maps around a tad so the zone exits rarely sit in the corners and generally tend to be more top-bottom instead of left-right. Btw, applaud that the UI is click-through besides the skillbar, which makes combat under the HP or buff bars actually possible. A more permanent solution would be a small frame of non-gamespace at the borders (optional, of course, and ideally movable so it can fit individual UI positioning). On my huge widescreen, shaving of two or three columns on one side would actually be feasible if it brought more clarity.
- Some overlays are a bit heavy. I was screaming at those clouds to go away on one map, to no avail (damn these clouds, they never listen!). The fog over the caldera is a bit heavy, too. Some of the CC overlays could be softened up a bit (ideally, make a third option - on, off, reduced).
- General terrain tilesets that are overall hard to read: Mushroom Forest (completely nuts) and to a lesser extent Volcano tiles (including the floor tiles of the gem caves depending on which color shift the mood lighting currently has) and the bog tileset. Most everything else uses a variation of dungeon, sand or forest, which are generally very easy on the eyes and well readable.
Minor annoyances
- The game seems to have a memory leak or does not flush out long unused stuff. When playing for a few hours without quitting in between, saving and zone generation start to take noticably longer, and soon after even effects or simply combats with many opponents at once start to stutter. Easily fixed by making a manual quit and relaunching, but still. Most likely the game simply never "forgets" anything during a running session, making the memory imprint bigger and bigger as you progress. If that is the case, purging "old" data (like dungeons you have not been in during the past x-thousand turns for example) could make this a non-issue.
- The achievement popups in the game come up for each and every character again and again. Not only are most of them clearly adressed as if they should be account- not character-specific ("...a character to level 20"), they do not get supressed with the lore-supression option. If it were fewer of them, they might actually be nice as a kind of milestone reminder, but after the tenth character or so, I really do not need a popup for killing the slaver lord again, for example.
Small bug
- I seem to have a texture bug with certain skill effect layers. It happes most often with those wizards in the scar, and in my current playthrough I noticed that the ability "Suncloak" behaves badly like those, too. The texture is a blocky square covering the whole character tile, but flickers away sometimes, looking normal. I guess there is a bad frame in the animation of those flame auras?
Unexplainable stuff
- In the santascape, some of those shivgoroths seemed to be undamageable for most of the time. Only some of them were, they had no buffs in their list, they were completely ordinary mobs and I always dealt only a handful of damage to them (plus some healing because of cold element procs). It looked like the main weapon damage got completely negated and they only got the proc damage, which effectively did no real damage. The strange thing is that a shivgoroth next to one of the problem ones would be dispatched with one or two normal melee attacks easily. It even happened with one rare mob, which was a real problem. I could wear him down with spells, eventually, but that took ages.
Tileset readability
As I said in the respective steam thread, there are some clarity problems with the "floor" and "wall" textures in some zones. After a few dozen hours, it gets of course better because of familiarity, but the initial impression and ease of play is pretty horrific in some places and could be improved upon.
- The double height tiles are a problem in general. I know I can disable and cut off the high trees and similar stuff, but perhaps a 1.25 tile high "big tree/shroom" could be drawn to give the height illusion (at least as long as the player does not play an ogre) without obscuring the line above those tiles. Anyways, the game is barely playable without the cut-down option checked. To a lesser extent, this also applies to big mobs, although those are much more manageable. Still, I had a case where I did not notice a guy because he was "in the shadow" of a giant.
- Characters, objects and even the exit can hide behind the UI. An especially irritating offender is the map with exits in the top right corner. I know I can cycle the map of for a moment and could move any interface parts, but still, it happens too often. The exit-behind-map-problem could likely be fixed by changing the maps around a tad so the zone exits rarely sit in the corners and generally tend to be more top-bottom instead of left-right. Btw, applaud that the UI is click-through besides the skillbar, which makes combat under the HP or buff bars actually possible. A more permanent solution would be a small frame of non-gamespace at the borders (optional, of course, and ideally movable so it can fit individual UI positioning). On my huge widescreen, shaving of two or three columns on one side would actually be feasible if it brought more clarity.
- Some overlays are a bit heavy. I was screaming at those clouds to go away on one map, to no avail (damn these clouds, they never listen!). The fog over the caldera is a bit heavy, too. Some of the CC overlays could be softened up a bit (ideally, make a third option - on, off, reduced).
- General terrain tilesets that are overall hard to read: Mushroom Forest (completely nuts) and to a lesser extent Volcano tiles (including the floor tiles of the gem caves depending on which color shift the mood lighting currently has) and the bog tileset. Most everything else uses a variation of dungeon, sand or forest, which are generally very easy on the eyes and well readable.
Minor annoyances
- The game seems to have a memory leak or does not flush out long unused stuff. When playing for a few hours without quitting in between, saving and zone generation start to take noticably longer, and soon after even effects or simply combats with many opponents at once start to stutter. Easily fixed by making a manual quit and relaunching, but still. Most likely the game simply never "forgets" anything during a running session, making the memory imprint bigger and bigger as you progress. If that is the case, purging "old" data (like dungeons you have not been in during the past x-thousand turns for example) could make this a non-issue.
- The achievement popups in the game come up for each and every character again and again. Not only are most of them clearly adressed as if they should be account- not character-specific ("...a character to level 20"), they do not get supressed with the lore-supression option. If it were fewer of them, they might actually be nice as a kind of milestone reminder, but after the tenth character or so, I really do not need a popup for killing the slaver lord again, for example.
Small bug
- I seem to have a texture bug with certain skill effect layers. It happes most often with those wizards in the scar, and in my current playthrough I noticed that the ability "Suncloak" behaves badly like those, too. The texture is a blocky square covering the whole character tile, but flickers away sometimes, looking normal. I guess there is a bad frame in the animation of those flame auras?
Unexplainable stuff
- In the santascape, some of those shivgoroths seemed to be undamageable for most of the time. Only some of them were, they had no buffs in their list, they were completely ordinary mobs and I always dealt only a handful of damage to them (plus some healing because of cold element procs). It looked like the main weapon damage got completely negated and they only got the proc damage, which effectively did no real damage. The strange thing is that a shivgoroth next to one of the problem ones would be dispatched with one or two normal melee attacks easily. It even happened with one rare mob, which was a real problem. I could wear him down with spells, eventually, but that took ages.
