A guide for testers -- thanks!

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)]

Hi all,

If you're one of the testers then you'll be getting an email from me shortly with a steam key and a link to this thread.

First off: thanks for your help in testing the game!  Here are some notes, which I will try to keep as brief as possible, and which I hope you will read. ;)

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The Big Points

1. There are notes on the development status on the title screen. Please read them before posting anything about those.

2. If you have general suggestions and whatnot, we ask that you do follow the usual procedure that we're able to respond to most easily and report those on mantis[arcengames.com], which now has an entry for this game.

3. Please try to avoid duplicate reports, although I won't yell at you if you add one by accident.  Better to double-report than not say something.  If I close yours as a duplicate, it's nothing personal and simply was already fixed for the next build.

4. If there are bugs in the two static demo levels, those I don't care about, heh.  Those are there just for fun at the moment.  I think the lab level crashes sometimes when entering or exiting, and I have no idea.  I've never seen it on our procgen levels or the industrial level, so for release purposes I don't consider that a "real" bug at this point. ;)  TLDR: what I really am interested in you testing is the procgen levels.

5. If you experience an error or crash or whatever else, please include the contents of the PlayerData folder (just the log files directly in there, not any subfolders) from inside your game folder.  Most likely it has some log files that can help figuring out the problem in question.

6. If there's a problem with a level, please take a screenshot of that for us, and potentially give us the map seed you were on (that can be found inside InfoLog.txt in your PlayerData folder).  You can upload directly to mantis, but you have to submit the report first and then the button appears in the middle of that next screen.

7. There's no need for some convoluted format or excessive detail on bug reports or other issues you log.  Just talk to us like humans and please be as clear and thorough as the situation warrants.  We've done this for a long time and have something like 13,000 bug reports and suggestions logged in our system, so we're fairly easygoing.

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What I Most Want To Know

1. If there are material defects, that's the sort of thing I most want to know.

2. If there are quality of life improvements or whatever other sort of suggestions you have, then I'm also interested in knowing that, but it's not something I'd have time for prior to Early Access.  If you feel like it's super important for prior to that release, then please do let me know, though.

3. Please bear in mind my mental state.  I'm very very tired, I've been working weekends and nights for months, and this is my baby.  Tell me all the bad things, but please tell me in a way you'd tell a friend.

4. If there are good things, too, then I'm always interested in hearing that sort of thing.  Though bear in mind that my time is suuuper limited right now, so I'll be trying to devote my time almost exclusively to things that are blockers for the EA release on Wednesday.

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Okay, Two Formatting Things

1. A lot of people like to give what I call "narrative style" feedback.  This is pretty weary-making on my end, because it takes a lot more mental work to process.  I really don't mean to be rude, but please boil it down to the core points in some sort of structure.

2. Please do use mantis rather than email, and please leave only one bug or suggestion per report.  I like being able to close reports, and have a discussion about a report if need be.  If there are a bunch of unrelated or very-semi-related things in one report, then I can't close it until all of the issues are done, and so it hangs out like a zombie report for a long time.  It makes a big mess.

2.a. THAT said, if there are some clearly-related things that you figure I'll hit all at once, then please do just put those all in one report.  Typos are the most common example there: just slap a big list of typos in one report, not one per typo.

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Anything Under Non-Disclosure?

Nope!  We don't really do that when we're at the point of sharing things with players.  Feel free to do videos, let other people try the game if they are at your computer with you, take screenshots, whatever else.  Don't feel like you NEED to, either, but a lot of people worry (with good reason unfortunately) about devs coming after them with DMCA or whatever nonsense.  We don't.

That's everything!  Thanks so much for doing this. :)

Best,

Chris

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)]

Oh! Also, I'd love to know your system requirements and how the game runs for you with those specs.

[Faulted Nova]

Heya X i was wondering if you could link me your mantis page? I've been there before but i cannot remember where its at.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)]

Gah! I just realized this thing ate ALL my formatting. >:( I'm not sure how that happened, but here's the link: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/

edit: Turns out I'm a moron (or very very tired) and I used my little converter wrong to get the steam markup. ;)

[kateyknow]

Цитата допису x-4000:

Oh! Also, I'd love to know your system requirements and how the game runs for you with those specs.

Do you want performance reports in this thread, in Mantis, or in email?

[Cinth]

Hi and welcome new testers!

I'm going to correct him a bit and say he would like your system specs, and probably best to post that stuff here.

[kateyknow]

System specs:
OS X 10.11.6
MacBook Pro Retina, Mid 2012
16 GB RAM
Internal SSD
GeForce GT 650M (1024MB)
3 Displays: internal @1440x800, 2x external at 1920x1080
Running game on external display

Performance is pretty jumpy and poor (which should be expected on this old of a machine, and under OS X). At 1080p, straight default settings on Standard are around 10fps at rest. Turning DoF, CTAA, SS reflections, and AO off, I get around 30fps. Turning all settings to minimum (including all shadows off, textures at 1/8th quality, etc.) and running at 1600x900 I get 130+ fps. However, I will stutter down to 20fps periodically, dropping down to 2 or so fps when interacting with physics objects.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)]

Цитата допису medgno:

MacBook Pro Retina, Mid 2012

dropping down to 2 or so fps when interacting with physics objects.

This is the bit that surprises me the most out of that. I am guessing that the fracture algorithms are what is hitting you hard there, but I'm not sure. I have it set to fracture only a certain number of objects at once, and just treat the others as rigidbodies, but I could shift that to being another setting that you can adjust.

That said, are you seeing a performance difference based on any specific sorts of interactions with objects? Aka, if you knock something around without breaking it, I assume that's fine. If you break a barrel -- specifically a barrel -- does that perform okay? Those are prefractured and just spawn their objects. There are a few like that, but those are the most noticeable. If you break something small, but just one thing, how does that do? Plowing through a ton of stuff I understand would cause a lot of issues.

Most likely this is a threading issue, since the fracture thread runs on a separate thread but that sort of machine might not have too much room on its second core because of things like rendering and audio.

Heck... if you mute the audio, do you get the performance hit as bad when fracturing stuff? It could always be some sort of audio spam, come to think of it. I may need to set the audio to decompress sooner on some files.

[criggie]

system specs
windows 10 pro
amd phenom ll x6 1090T processor
16 g ram
7870 gpu
Running 1920x1080 im having serious fps drops and it doesn't matter what settings Im running at whenever I encounter any kind of combat game comes to an almost halt. When breaking objects it remains consistent and only seems to happen when its time to crush some robots. when running through say the apartments level as soon as detected by a robot whenever I get into close proximity of said robot I encounter dips from the 50's to single digit fps and then when I engage into combat game stutters and freezes..However in the lab section I am havig zero problems..everything running smooth as silk

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)]

Okay... so basically what is happening is that robots are causing huge slowdowns for you, but ONLY when you're encountering robots in the procgen levels?

Is it something that is happening when their voice commands are played for the first time, do you think? Or is this something that is continual while they exist?

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)]

There is a new version out now, just fyi for folks!

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park)]

Thank you!