New beta is upon us this weekend. You all know the drill. Drillin’ drillin’. Servers will be up on 7/6/12 at 12pm EST. Servers go back down on 7/8/12 at 11:59pm EST. So better stay in, host some LAN parties, buy your Mountain Dew, and SHOOT SOME AIRSHIPS.
And better late than never, we had a great response to our last beta weekend. Lots of valuable feedback that we’ve turned over. So thank you very much, once again!
Now I’d like to talk to you about a major change coming this round… after the jump!
Reverse Repair Grenades (lol)
So the biggest thing in this revision is a complete overhaul of the repair game. Like I discussed in our previous beta details post, our idea is based around the concept of a “reverse repair grenade.” Think of a grenade and how when you pull the pin you need to wait and then it explodes. Now think backwards: an explosions and then the waiting. This is how repair works now.
- Hit damaged component with repair tool
- Instantaneous heal
- Cooldown starts before you can perform another repair
That should be intuitive enough and still meet our design objectives with the repair game. Rebuilding a component that has been taken offline (0 hp) is the same. Use a repair tool and smack it like you would in TF2. Similarly, you can have multiple people rebuilding a component at once. So rebuilding your hull armor with multiple people is a pretty smart idea.
With that said, this pretty much irons out the design of the core functionality of our classes. Hopefully we don’t need to make any more drastic changes. Crosses fingers. Knocks on wood. What have you.
Bug Reporting
We’re really thankful for everyone putting in the time and energy posting bugs and making good reports. Seriously, your input is what is making this game chug along. Without your help, we’d be rife with bugs and issues that would take us a much longer time in finding. So again, thank you.
One thing to make things easier for us is on GetSatisfaction is to try to search for similar bug reports and upvote those if they’re the same. This way we can more easily see what the more prominent issues are by number of votes. Similarly, please try and separate bug reports into individual posts. We’ve gotten some posts with 4-5 bugs in it, which is totally fine since we get all the reports but again… it’s just for identifying the most prominent issues. That would help us a lot.
For super serious bugs, we might ask you for Unity logs.
- Unity client logs. Go to C:\ProgramFiles\Steam\steamapps\common\
guns of icarus online\GunsOfIcarusOnline_ Data, look for output_log.txt. Replace ”C:\Program Files\Steam” with the location of your steam install if it’s someplace funny.
Installation
- Open up Steam
- Click on Game in the top menu
- Activate Product On Steam
- Copy and paste the key from the email
- Profit
- Don’t forget to set your Avatar name is Avatar Customization otherwise you’ll have gibberish when you chat
Other new things
- Improved in-game UI
- Improved voicechat and UI
- WE HAVE MUSIC DAMN IT… and it’s dynamic! Still working on more tracks though!
- Vastly improved matchmaking (Invite friends from Steam overlay [friend must have launched the game], Random map selection for instant action, crew class drop down should be working)
- Improved performance in several places
- Spotting has changed so that you just spot an entire ship now. Spotting does not give you a huge damage boost like it did. Flare guns do that now, far more tactical we think. Spotting is still important for visibility though. You also have the same indicator from Skyrim (the eye of Sauron) next to your compass telling you if you’ve been spotted or not.
- Targeting components is even more viable now with some tweaks. The Small Howitzer, Missile Sling, Gatling Gun, Carronade, Medium Carronade, and Electric Harpoon are effective against components. Some more than others.
- Tweaked the capture locations in Anglean and made them closer, brought the flight ceiling down. Hopefully that makes things a lot better now.
- Probably more that I’m forgetting…
How to Play
We don’t have any kind of tutorial or level-design to support teaching you how to play the game. The reason is because we’re solely testing out core functionality. Yes, it has caused us some problems (how can you test something well if players don’t know what they’re doing?) but it’s always balancing a million spinning plates. Here is a manual in case you need a refresher for now. Tutorials coming soon.