This game should sell like hot cakes, it's sad you didn't reach break-even ... yet. Some miscellaneous suggestions: - why not remove the d-pad in swipe mode? Right now it appears over buttons and icons when you touch them and really isn't any help, just get rid of it but leave it in d-pad mode for those who prefer it - pirates guarding destroyers, cruisers and bigger ships in probe areas should be waaay harder, I restarted with the no perks option but choosing the probe skill make the game too easy, I snatched a destroyer with a frigate and a cruiser with a destroyer without breaking a sweat - this game really need a free look camera - an option to autoskip docking sequences automatically? They kinda suck, by the way (the rest of the game is awesome!) - why not unificate the select target and lock button? Even better, why not get rid of the little icons that shows the targets modules (they are waaay to small to be of any help) and just put one bigger icon per target, tap it to lock? You could then put in the lower right corner a "scan" icon to get all the information about the current locked target I'll play some more and then come back with more suggestions, I hope to help
http://picpaste.com/mzl.ywgexjpz.320x480-75-Tu2QUTiE.jpg Click on the icon on the left to acquire a lock (bracket around the icon), click on the bottom-right icon to pause the game and to examine the ship class and modules to plan a strategy You could show a different icon for stations, frigates, destroyer, hostiles ... by the way, why showing your squad mates with other contacts? You can save up space by ignoring them.
Luckily (for you), it's supposed to be entirely optional. There are quite a few of us for are super pumped about the boarding feature.
Too much work for a two men team, they should concentrate on smoothing the game out, right now the learning curve is too steep. This is just my humble opinion, of course.
Has anyone found/made a jpg that shows the button layout and what each does? I have no idea after running through the tutorial what half the buttons do. Just a simple jpg with text on top would help greatly in finding out how to play this thing.
Yeah. Manual boarding combat has been a pipe dream of space simulations for twenty-plus years now. Not only is there a whole heap of coolness in the fact that Binary Helix might be some of the first (if not the first) to implement this in an open universe simulation, but it will probably add another layer of complexity and challenge to the game, offer yet more sophistication, depth, and variation, and give us fans of twitch-based combat more ways to enjoy combat with manual aiming.
From left to right: the slider with red and yellow arrows on the bottom doubles to control your speed in free flight mode and to control the distance from your target in F, O e K modes. This slider has now a nano warp button on top to double your speed while spending energy. The small red and green crosses represents all of your radar contacts in your vicinity, red crosses mean you have locked on them. The icons with circles and the one with the small ship are context sensitive, the one on the left commands the ship to leave the current gravity center, once you are 10 km away the icon change into a blue one to warp away. The one with the ship makes you dock onto stations. F stands for follow mode, it makes you follow your current target. O is orbit mode, it makes you run around your current target: if you zip around your target fast enough they can't hit you with their turrets. K is keep distance mode, it makes you keep a fixed distance from targets to maximize your turrets hit chance. The eye icon switches camera modes. The "target" icon makes you lock on the current target. Once you have acquired a lock the contact list icon turns from green to red and you can shoot with your turrets and missiles. The strange, last icon make you switch targets: first you select your target and THEN you lock on. You can acquire multiple targets. Just above these icons are located the modules icons, depending on what you equipped on your ship. Tap on them do begin shooting at your currently locked target(s), they will shoot until the target is destroyed. ? and M are two different menus, they should definitely be made as one icon btw. Is everything clear?
For the the controls in this game are still to finicky and the stems from the HUD right through to navigating to fin the quests. Also there is very little feed back once you press the controls. As an example the lock target icon down in the bottom right. From Va's very helpful post above only now do I know that when locked, the target gets a red crosshair on the otherwise of the screen. Other than that there's nothing to tell you how it even achieved the lock or didn't....if it doesn't..does that mean your out of range?? And what is the range..?? GoF makes you fly behind another ship while your crosshair indicates it is locking on.....this game however gives no feed back. Much to my annoyance I'll then go and press the launch missile button and because it's not locked I'll get that annoying sound thT it's not locked (btw that sound is so annoying). Why do you even have this lock requirement? If anything, just to avoid finicky controls..why not just make the lock automatic or at worse automatic and certain distances, distances that can become longer with upgrades. Also, for me, dogfighting (using your manual lasers) is just not on. While they've improved the controls, it still leaves me never wanting to manually fight ever. Again, revert to how GoF does it. Then there's the menus....constantly leaves me going "where was that sub menu again". I'm still not quite feeling the "galaxy is alive" thing this game is meant to have. It still feels very baron in terms of what's around. It's always one space station, a random gateway thing, and a random ship that for no reason wants to fight me and I'll just have to use my turrets on (no way am I gonna dogfight). A promising game, but it still needs a big clean up.
Since this game is basically a Eve Online clone everything I know about the game I know it since Eve. I could go on explaining about shield and armor resistances, passive and active shield tanking, armor tanking, speed tanking, tackling, sniping and so on. You should note that in Eve Online dogfighting and free flight are NOT present, that's why in Dangerous the option is not very fleshed out, still it's a nice option in my opinion. The things you were complaining about were lifted right from Eve Online and while they make perfect sense on a pc mouse interface they do not make sense at all on a touch device. About the galaxy not being alive at all try to go to factions screen and look at the ship list: it is IMPRESSIVE, they actually move about the map on their own agenda, just like in my favorite sandbox game, Space Rangers 2. Galaxy on Fire 2 while a fun game is child's play compared to that, other ships exist just in relation to you, when you leave the system they just leave the game's memory. They're just there to put a show.
Also: move the H button into menus, it's not really needed at all times. Better clear up the screen for smaller devices.
Thanks va, based on what you've said I'll try to keep giving this a go. The game is on the cusp of something great but the controls and fluidity, for me anyway, just get too frustrating to keep going. The content is there, it's just only quality in patches, and strangely enough not really in the space flight/shooting part of the game but rather the menus. I'll try to keep going
I'm really enjoying the game! I look forward to playing it every chance I get. The number of factions and ships flying through the univrse at any given time really gives life to the game. I do have some complaints, which are somewhat minor. Many of those complaints are already listed here, such as the placement of the H button, all the icons that are quite confusing without having a way to know what they all mean, and a few others. One of my biggest frustrations is figuring out how to control my corporate pilots. I have the corporate pilot skill trained and transport ships, but the pilots seems to do crazy actions. If I buy a transport ship in Midori/Allion, I assume its home is Midori. If I want to buy luxuries in Washbo/Toalla, and then sell those luxuries in Midori/Allion, how do I go about doing so? At Midori/Allion, I chose Buy/Sell luxuries, and the target station was Washbo/Toalla, because from what I've read I believe that the pilot buys items from the target station and sells them at the home station. However, after a while my pilot is just sitting in Washbo/Toalla with a bunch of luxuries. I try to send it home, but I keep getting the "enter dock limit" message. I have no idea what that means. Also, how do you un-target a ship in space. I've lost some faction gain from not know how. Regardless, thank you for such a great game with unlimited potential!
This mode is quite useful on iPads and other tablets. Also on retina displays since there's more room. The visual dpad helps you realize when you've moved too far. Our first release didn't have the visual dpad and people complained that it was hard to use. We have some ideas on improving the game's "outfitter" which is responsible for creating challenging enemies. But while those ships are useful in core- or high-security, they probably won't last long in low- or null-security unless you know how to outfit them. This is on the to do list. The eventual plan is to allow dragging the camera when you're in an autopilot mode or if you changed camera away from the default behind-the-ship view. Not a high priority task at the moment, maybe after boarding. Currently, when you see the black bars up, just wait a second, and then you can tap the screen to skip docking or undocking. We'll see about adding an option that always skips those sequences in a future update. Each ship has a limited number of targets it can lock, so automatically locking will cause problems in some cases. The upcoming update already has two new options: 1) minimize the Contacts to only show allies and enemies 2) hide the autopilot bubble, health bars, and modules for all ships in the Contacts list. The thinking is that for screens smaller than 7", these values will be the default and thus reduce clutter. You can always turn it back on if you're used to the info, or use the Deep Scan to see the module list. This was the original thinking, but with other uses like ship status, wingmen control, quest list, etc., we decided to lump the scan into the (?) "menu". We're open to ideas, but have to consider the effects of having lots more buttons. One of the main ideas is to have a radial menu like in Mass Effect. After selecting a ship, you press the radial menu button, and up pops: a list of your ship modules arrayed in a circle which you can toggle on or off, extra scan info on the ship including ship health, maybe zooming into the ship as well. Thanks for the feedback! Yes, if you can't lock something, it's possible that it is out of range especially if you are sensor dampened. The single line of text at the top will tell you the reason, and the error sound will play. Since that line changes quickly during combat, you can also press the (M) button and click on "Log" which gives you a list of the last bunch of combat log messages. In general, everything you press gives you an indication of the state. If you use an autopilot button, there's a halo around it. And if your target docks, the halo turns red to indicate that you're waiting for the ship to undock. One thing we'd like to add is a locking sound that beeps faster and faster until the lock is achieved at which point it would be a solid tone. We're hoping the game brings in enough revenues to hire a professional sound designer, so we can revamp all the sounds. For now, you'll notice that the lock icon changes color from green to yellow when you start a lock. And this changes to red when you've achieved a lock. Also, you'll notice that if another ship is trying to lock you, the bracket color around the lock icon changes from yellow to red the same way. Each module tells you the range if you press the "?" button next to the module name in the hangar or market. And the icons on the distance bar also give you an idea. The left side icons on the distance bar are your modules, and the right side are the currently selected ship's modules. Look to see where the "dist" icon is situated. If the enemy's module icons are underneath the the dist icon, then those modules can't target you. Vice versa for your modules. Equip a sensor damp and use it on pirates to see this in action. As for the why, as mentioned, our game is heavily inspired by Eve Online, and being able to control the locking from a list of contacts gives greater strategic depth. Our system builds on Eve's by giving you even greater situational awareness once you learn to read the bracket colors. In a large battle, it's important to prioritize your targets often times using one module for one enemy and another module for a different enemy or ally. The upcoming update has a new aim assist feature which makes dogfighting a bit easier. If the target is near the center, you'll get aim assist. This is configurable via an option, so you can disable it if you're hardcore. Also, we have added an option that limits the turn radius. This lets people using the dpad or slide controls better control their ships. This slower turning is more in line with other games which you may be used to. I find that tilt is much more precise for me, but with this new slower turning option, aiming with the dpad is easier than before. There's really only two main menus in space and most of the time, you'll use the (?) menu. Each of the ships has a flight plan and don't simply disappear when you dock or warp away. If you come back, you'll see that it has moved. These ships can break down or get attacked, and you can help or not. And sometimes, pirates can masquerade as a broken down ship. With the Corporate Pilot skill or Master Trader perk, you can send your corporate pilots on trading and mining runs. There really isn't anything like it on iOS, and you'll have to dig far back to see a form of this in other games on PC. In a nutshell, we simulate an MMO in a single player game. We've been updating the game constantly, and there's a lot more we want to do. Continued since this response is too long for one message.
A knowledge of Eve certainly will help though we did simplify equipping, resistance types, etc. As mentioned above, the upcoming update has a new aim assist and turn rate limiter which will make dogfighting even better. Not sure which part you're referring to when you say it doesn't work on touch. I find the buttons are easy to press on tablets and require less motion than with a mouse on PC. Also, we have some ideas for improving this like adding a radial menu, etc. Thanks! One of the biggest hurdles we faced was the living universe concept. Under the hood, we have a virtual machine with specialized opcodes controlling all those ships. There really are over 500 ships flying around doing their own thing. I hadn't heard of Space Rangers 2, but it's great how similar some of our concepts are to theirs. I'll have to grab that game on Steam now. Another classic that I managed to miss out on. This was one of my gripes about GoF2. Warp to a station and all is calm as you dock. Immediately undock and suddenly there's an armada of enemies. That button was created specifically to reduce clutter for smaller screens. I'd like to remove it with some more clever workarounds. We considered this early on, but ships can easily hide behind UI elements making them hard to see or select. The upcoming update has some Contacts list improvements like letting you hide neutral contacts, and also not show the extraneous stuff like current autopilot, health bars, and module list. This bit of info can be daunting to new players. It will probably be the default mode for devices smaller than a tablet. Good suggestion, we'll pare this down a little. Glad you're enjoying it! We're looking into these bugs, and should have them fixed up with the upcoming update. Not sure what you're referring to here. Unless you turn off the safety in the options you cannot attack neutrals or allies. You can press the select button in the bottom right to change to a new target. Or you can click directly on the ship icon in the contacts list. If you find yourself accidentally in a fight with a neutral ship (this is possible if you use missiles and the neutral gets in the way), you can just warp to a station and wait 5 minutes. After that, the faction that got mad at you will forget about the infraction. You can do this until your standings is at or below -0.5. Thanks for your support! And thanks for everybody's feedback. The upcoming update has some cool features as I mentioned here. Also, the camera work has been improved tremendously and works even more beautifully now. Stay tuned as we'll submit it sometime this week.
Also, if you package a ship, but leave the station without selling it or assembling it again, do you lose that ship? I lost 300+ million credits worth of ships because I left a couple packaged, but not sold. Perhaps it is a bug, but if not, some kind of warning would save a lot of frustration. I've read all of the information and conversation about docking, selling, etc., but never saw a mention of the loss of packaged ships. It's easy to lose items that way if you have to put items into hangar storage or packaging before you can sell them. There's no safeguard against missing an item left in storage or packaging. Maybe I missed something.
