Suggestions

[Kitokofox]

I'd like to see us be able to use the keyboard to navigate the menus. this is potentially a game that can be played with only the keyboard, if so desired.

[BlueZero4]

Alright, a couple more. Right now my primary use of the game is that I'd want to listen to some sort of recorded spoken word content (like a lecture or something) and am using this game as something to do with my hands and eyes while I'm listening. So, from that perspective:

• Keyboard navigation would be really cool. Ideally, I'd like to be able to get through the menus quickly using arrow keys to select, enter to select, escape to go up a menu level, and possibly have the select and back functions duplicated on the jump and launch/brake buttons. (The mentality of using jump and launch as selection keys in the menu is that you conceive of them as being A and B buttons on a controller. Some of SEGA's recent PC ports have been doing it this way, so it's another option I'm getting used to with keyboard controls.)
• Scroll wheel on the mouse to scroll the menu would be nice. Particularly, I'm thinking about the shop and select-a-hole menus.
• EDIT: After you buy a costume, can the purchased costumes be moved up to the top of the list? Right now I bought costume 4, and it's still listed with unpurchased costumes above it.

[SerialHugger]

I think a game mode that picks levels at random would be really cool, especially if it let you keep the cubes. My biggest problem right now is i'm getting sick of the worlds as I grind for cubes. A mode that mixes the canyon and greenland levels would really help with this.

[Mike]

(01-22-2015 07:13 PM)BlueZero4 Wrote:  Keyboard navigation would be really cool. Ideally, I'd like to be able to get through the menus quickly using arrow keys to select, enter to select, escape to go up a menu level, and possibly have the select and back functions duplicated on the jump and launch/brake buttons. Scroll wheel on the mouse to scroll the menu would be nice. Particularly, I'm thinking about the shop and select-a-hole menus.
EDIT: After you buy a costume, can the purchased costumes be moved up to the top of the list? Right now I bought costume 4, and it's still listed with unpurchased costumes above it.

These are all great ideas - and very ideal for our shift towards PC, too! I've ticketed all of these.

(01-23-2015 12:13 AM)SerialHugger Wrote:  I think a game mode that picks levels at random would be really cool, especially if it let you keep the cubes. My biggest problem right now is i'm getting sick of the worlds as I grind for cubes. A mode that mixes the canyon and greenland levels would really help with this.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that those are the only two level packs currently available...more will come in time, both by us and by our community. On the other hand, a "Shuffle" mode wouldn't be such a bad idea, either. Thanks for the feedback!

For the record, we have plans, textures, and some basic level design complete for three other level packs...if you dig through our assets, you can even play a proof of concept from our Space motif.

[BlueZero4]

Another round:

• I tried to load up Twisty Turns on select-a-hole and it told me that I had to play it in Grand Tour first. Because saving is disabled, I don't know if it will ever let me pick Twisty Turns in select-a-hole, or at the very least, I'm going to have to do it in Grand Tour every new session before I can play it in select-a-hole for that session. Some sort of persistent savedata for addon levels would be nice, though I guess the main feature for that would be to remember your time and strokes. (Also, this is probably waaaay too early to think about this, but maybe it would be nice to do leaderboards for custom content too.)
• Better volume sliders? I'd be happy with 10% increments. (Maybe an overall scalar for the entire game, also at 10% increments?)
• WALK MODE FEEDBACK START. I'm not sure if these are more feature-requests or bug requests, but it's not a simple "hey guys, this is broken" bug report thing, so I'm sticking it here. (I'm testing walk mode exclusively on Twisty Turns ATM, if you're wondering.)
• I'm used to the way the SRB2 camera sits above the player looking forward. I feel like I'm seeing a bit too much ground because it's centered on Roly. EDIT: Is there camera information in the character file? The "Player" character has a different camera position. Would it be possible to raise the default camera rather than needing it to be in the character's file?
• Zip pads send walk-mode into a spindash-like state (more clearly visible on Roly than Player), which has awful handling and doesn't revert to walking after stopping or jumping.
• For walk mode specifically, I'd ideally like a WASD + mouselook control scheme. Granted, that's mostly because I have an itch to play RPP's walk mode like I used to play SRB2. (I don't know if I'd want mouselook for golf mode because I prefer always turning at max speed during the stroke, digital-style. Golf seems to work great with the current control scheme anyway.)
• The "Player" character feels really slippery. Is that a problem with the character's stats, or more of a general physics thing? Roly, in comparison, doesn't seem so bad, but the different camera position is throwing my ability to feel the character a bit.

Yeah. Walk mode is exciting, but I'm worried that after a point I'm just going to be like "Put in more SRB2 features!" instead of saying anything useful.

[Mike]

Custom holes in select-a-hole: Good catch. I'll see about having custom levels be playable in all modes from the get-go.

Anything audio related will be fixed once we make the audio system respond to Win32.

3D platforming should not be tested on golf stages, as they weren't designed with 3D platforming in mind. It's analogous to playing CTF levels in single player. A lot of golf stages have scripted objects that will behave erratically with 3D platforming...for example: There's two 'types' of zip pads and springs - one that launch you while taking your current direction and momentum into account, and others that lock you at a certain angle and speed to force a path. The latter - as you've found out - doesn't really respond well to 3D platforming.

Now, we realize there aren't any 3D platforming stages for you to use as a testbed yet, so there's reference material for anyone to work with... we hope to release a test map ourselves once we're done tuning up the physics. We don't want people to get that "slippery" feel, as you put it.

Regarding the 3D platforming camera: Still figuring out a good place for it. The commands you know and love from SRB2 are at your disposal - cam_height 30 is a good place to start.

Custom controls are coming. MLOOK might be a bit further down the road, but they're certainly doable.


Edit: I've just written a lot of dev. tickets for the issues/suggestions you've brought up - thank you!

[BlueZero4]

A parameter for map warping (the "level" command, specifically) so that you can load the level without any upgrades, specifically increased turning and cube magnet. If I was ever to design a level for RPP, I'd want to be able to do test plays with the minimum set of skills turned on.

(Not a suggestion: The physics update in v0.07 seems to have fixed the slippery-ness of the walk mode.)

[BlueZero4]

I just cracked open RPP and wanted to know if I was actually on v.08 or not. I was reaching for a "version" command, something analogous to the way you'd feed the "-v" parameter to a command in a Linux terminal. After that, I also wanted to scroll up in the terminal to see if the game had printed the version string higher up in the terminal, but at a glance PageUp and PageDown don't move the console. Buttons for that would be nice.

A suicide console command would be great; I was reaching for "kill" from TF2.

The platforming physics overall feel better, though I can't put my finger on most of the good changes. I didn't play v.07 right before testing v.08, but the slope physics seem to be noticeably better. However, I wish I had more grip on the floor (with "char Player" specifically; Roly seemed to be a little bit better). I'm not sure how much of the platforming physics I'm feeling have to do with character-specific stats or the global physics tweaks, so that's something to keep in mind as you're reading this. Also, I'm still testing with Twisty Turns, to give you a sense of the types of turns and slopes I'm going up against.

I found myself angling into the turns, so I'm oversteering and taking the turns at a diagonal. I even turned up cam_speed to make sure I'm not just feeling the camera lag at the high speed, but I still felt like I had to take the turns diagonally.

Additionally, when bunny hopping (well, I guess the term refers specifically to frame-perfect jumping, so I'm using the term a little bit sloppily here), I would turn myself in the air toward the left, because there's a turn coming up and I wanted to catch myself on the ground to reorient myself. I wanted to slow down my forward momentum and start getting some leftward momentum, but the lack of grip on the ground meant that I mostly kept moving forward in the air when I jumped again. I fell off the edge a few times before I noticed that I wasn't getting the grip on the ground I needed to do that sort of thing.

Also, I wanted to kick off the ground a little faster when I was first starting a walk.

Possibly unrelated: When standing still on a slope (the first two slopes in Twisty Turns, specifically), I wanted to be able to push into the slope and trudge up it. I was expecting to be able to crawl up the slope at a fixed pace without accelerating much, but I couldn't go up it at all. I'm not sure where the threshold for the point of not being able to trudge up a slope is, but I felt like I ought to have been able to for those slopes. I was still able to run up a slope surprisingly well if I already had momentum (although at that point, I might have been more sliding up the slope than running.)

[A.J.]

Thanks for the continued feedback, BlueZero4.

Yeah, PGUP/PGDN would be really handy. The game does print the version #, but you have to open log.txt to find it without being able to scroll up the console.

There is sort-of a suicide 'kill' switch, when you pause and hit 'restart level'. Is that what you're talking about and just wanting to invoke it via console, or what?

Can you make a small video of the bunny hopping thing? I'm not totally sure what you're trying to do. If you jump once, turn, land, and press forward to move, that should almost entirely kill your original directional movement. But it sounds like you're wanting to jump twice or something.

The slopes in Twisty Turns are pretty steep -- I'm testing on a different map that doesn't have extreme slopes like that. I'll keep it in mind as things progress!