Some thoughts

[agentmith]

I've been playing through the various quests, and wanted to bring to your attention a few things:

How do you unselect a target? I was doing a mission where I had to scan things or fly around or both, and "Dock with Alpha Station or whatever" was in the middle of the screen the entire time. I couldn't get it to go away.

Flight control snapping to the target is incredibly annoying. If there's a cluster of, say, 5 or 6 things close to each other the bow of the ship freaks out and snaps between targets wildly and you're unable to make small mouse movements. Is it possible to have weapons targetting be separate from ship trajectory, and have like a 5-10% circular targetting area that the weapons will auto aim whatever you're currently targetting? Let me know if this doesn't make sense. I play a lot of space games and have never seen it done this way before so it's jarring.

Clicking anything out in space snaps the mouse cursor back to center, and it probably shouldn't.

Somehow I captured a mothership or something like that, and for the life of me I can't get it to do anything except die and it always takes me a few minutes to get back into a usable ship. The mouse cursor won't do anything while I'm inside it in space, it's really weird.

I just fought some boss, I think, it had drone in the name. I wish I had written it down. It's the one where you have to infect 3 drones. For some reason it flipped to infinite ammo (which I've seen happen every so often and I'm not sure why), and I just sat there unmoving and fired for about 5ish minutes, and every 20 seconds or so I'd get a Second Chance (while still firing), and it would pull me out of it. It took forever to kill and I literally didn't do anything except sit there and shoot the whole time. It eventually died, and I got whisked away to another area afterwards. Is whole chain of events intended?

There's more, but I don't remember offhand. I'll start taking better notes. Also, should I still be in the [testing] branch or can I flip it back to normal again?

[sɹɐʎA xɘlA]

Thanks for the thoughts Agentmith, and Calabrese for taking a stab at answering.

<esc> should unselect your target. If you're under fire with no target though, whatever is shooting at you will get automatically targeted.

I'll keep mulling over your thoughts about the aiming radius thing. Gameplay has been optimized around the new gun mode, where you control a single weapon directly while the rest of your weapons auto-aim. I liked the idea of bringing actual aiming into the game, and find it really enjoyable. I can picture something like what you describe working out well in third person mode, which lacks the aiming/leading mechanics that gun mode has, and could really use some "interestingness".

Calabrese is right about the cursor snapping behavior (among other things). If you click and move the mouse (even just a little bit), the game thinks you're trying to steer and will lock the cursor. There's a little dead zone in there, but it probably needs to be bigger. I need to figure out how other games do it :-)

Big ships are not really working right now, but there are big plans for them. Sorry I couldn't "ship" this in time.

There are a number of chain-of-event things that happen automatically during the campaign, which it sounds like you're uncovering. Usually it's just to usher the player along, because I found that a jarring "okay next stop" mechanic was preferable to players getting stuck or dying with no means to get a second wind (er... last chance).

Public Test is synced with the main branch right now, so it shouldn't matter. If you want to stay on the test train for the next one, it should be fine (it's fine either way.)