Guns Of Icarus Online
Info => Feedback and Suggestions => Topic started by: Nietzsche's Mustache on August 01, 2014, 02:54:13 am
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I'm really saddened that I have to come to the forums with this sort of angry mindset. I love this game. I want it to work. I want it to work, REALLY badly. But here's the deal: every time we get a patch for this game, we get new bugs. We get loads of them. You guys take 2 steps forward, we take 10 steps back. I mean, new themes or figureheads are nice and all, but ...
FIX YOUR FUCKING SHIT.
... Seriously, why are we focusing on adding more features when every time we do, it breaks the game? Ships STILL disappear inexplicably when in a dust cloud. Just when you think we're supposed to have performance improvements with flamethrowers, we start getting reports of 3 frames per second when flamethrowers start firing.
So, I'll put it to you this way:
SUSPEND ARTWORK. NOW.
ONLY PAY ENGINEERS.
If you have artists that are decent programmers, put them to work. We want this game to work in the first place, not break every time a new patch comes in. It was getting good before this last patch, some people reported no lag at ALL. But now it's all ruined. All for not.
Fix it.
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You... do know that's how programming generally progresses right. New patch, new unforseen bugs pop up, takes a bit to squash them, new patch, etc... Some patches will have something go horribly wrong more than others, but that's the cycle that generally happens.
So really, your suggestion is for them to fire the hard working art folks they've got who have supplied us with some awesome stuff and hire programmers (not even going to touch the "artists that are decent programmers" btw, that's a huge facepalm by itself) instead? Putting aside just how insulting that is, Muse is still made up of what, a dozen staff, it's not like there's hundreds of engineers they can just throw at problems that crop up.
Yes, we'd all love a completely bug free perfectly working game, as would literally every other company that has ever made a game. Your suggest here is just... well it's just ludicrous.
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(http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/4f/f0/9a/4ff09a54916159779c31be5cfa6152c5.jpg)
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How are they going to make us a chef hat if they suspend the artwork? Didn't think about that now did you.
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Ok. so I exaggerate the point.
The point is not that people need to be fired, although I did word it that way in the initial posting.
The point is that I expect this kind of buggery from free and open-source software, but not in commercial software. When I was running Arch Linux, I continually broke the system because I would update pieces of software which other pieces of software depended upon to work properly before they themselves had actually been updated to use the new-found "shared libraries"
But you know what? Those problems get fixed pretty quickly. I remember installing a fresh Arch installation IMMEDIATELY after an update a bug in GRUB popped up, causing configuration errors. Not only was there a solution ready in 24 hours, but a hard fix was ready before the next version of GRUB.
But that's Arch Linux. It is notoriously hard to use and I was warned before hand that these kinds of things would happen. Guns of Icarus is different. This is commercial software that is expected to work out of the box and it is (as far as I'm aware) illegal for outside sources to view and fix the source code. And not only that, but bugs that have been known and persistent for mooooooonths have gone unfixed while new bugs get created. Perhaps the issue is this is the only Indie game I've taken a liking to and that my expectations are unrealistic. Either way, I think that the MUSE team can do better than this. They HAVE to do better than this. Or else these words will echo from every reach of the internet:
"How the hell is "Adventure Mode" supposed to work if they can't even make the game they've ALREADY PUBLISHED work?"
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man cmon it aint that bad sheesh. theyll fix it in a week, 2 tops
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man cmon it aint that bad sheesh. theyll fix it in a week, 2 tops
That's what we said about ships disappearing on Scrap NEARLY A YEAR AGO.
This, in the middle of MLG nonsense and the Gold Playoffs for Hephaestus League? Sorry, but no. Not going to put up with nonsense. Whenever I've emailed the devs and been offered freebies in return for my troubles, I always replied "I don't want your freebies. I want this game to work."
That's still yet to happen. I'm always in-game asking other players "why can't you do this?" and being responded to "because my framerates are too slow!" or "because lag!" I'm saying the same thing to captains that I fly under more now than ever before. Consider myself on strike. Sadly, just in time for a fresh wanted season. I was looking forward to winning that.
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Whenever a ship disappears in a sand storm a Sky Whale appears in it's place.
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I'd like to actually be able to shoot at that Sky Whale. Or the potted plant that's always spawning with it, saying "oh no, not again."
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"because my framerates are too slow!" or "because lag!"
I'm hoping these new found frame rate issues will prompt them to optimize the game to a higher standard than before this patch.
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Well, I can certainly relate. I've felt the same way about the game off and on for a year now. Especially about the start of the Heffy Challenge when we had to compete under some of the worst lag conditions the game has ever had.
Gotta admit this is a sign you are passionate about this game and care for it more than normal players. Pretty much how I feel about the squid and why I'll never stop demanding my baby back.
However, I do feel you are coming off a bit hard. Patch was just days ago and they are working to figure out what went wrong. Goldenglade's post is very accurate in what they are having to deal with and honestly, I've never seen a Unity engine game run without very visible bugs. This is one reason why I'm not jumping off the walls about MLG. When you compete in this game for as long as myself and others have, you realize there are a lot of things you'd love to see happen, but then there is reality.
Reality dictates that this game will never be ready for MLG unless Muse had 2 teams working at once. One team on Skirmish, and one on Adventure could do it. The amount of work involved is just too much as they are now, sorry but the game is just too buggy and PVP games take extensive focus and tuning. Don't believe me, look at how WoW and other MMOs have splintered their playerbases between PVP and PVE players. Both sides hate each other because the dev hasn't gotten smart enough to separate the games. It is a never ending balancing act which PVP turns into. There will always be one class or another that is stronger and people will always mass around it till it changes. Just like what we have in GOIO. The only positive thing for Muse is they seem to be keeping both separate. That helps a lot but still PVP will perpetually require attention and tuning.
One has to suffer for the other to come to pass. Now here they launch a patch while heavy into COOP dev and its probably forcing them to focus time away from that to fix Skirmish. All we can do is be patient. If you have logs, send them in. Help them out.
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As unfortunate as it is ...
show me one game that doesnt have this issue.
We all know the sentence: Never play on patchday.
And that one exists for a reason.
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I'd like to actually be able to shoot at that Sky Whale. Or the potted plant that's always spawning with it, saying "oh no, not again."
Try using a flare gun to spot ships in the sand storm. It can be very useful on desert scrap because that storm is always rolling in.
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As unfortunate as it is ...
show me one game that doesnt have this issue.
We all know the sentence: Never play on patchday.
And that one exists for a reason.
Play on patch day. Report bugs!
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I think the problem is uh, artists and software engineers have completely different skillsets, and work on completely different things, all the time.
I'm pretty sure its safe to say, we'll still have this many bugs, if we had 0 new artwork/models, or if we had 100 new artwork/models every single day.
Unless its something like a clipping issue or something I have enough faith in "black box" and modularity to feel that no amount (or lack thereof) of artist work is going to significantly impact programming work.
That said, you must also know the "too many cooks in the kitchen" thing where throwing (or hiring) more programmers isn't going to solve this problem either.
I have no opinion on the graphics bugs - yes they suck, but from the few courses I took on graphics programming, its hard. And oftentimes you are working with an abstruse (or obtuse...heh) graphics engine that is out of date or significantly customized and it is hard to figure out a solution without causing more problems.
Art, assets, new content, is always the scapegoat when it comes to things breaking, while 99% of the time they aren't the problem.
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Perhaps the issue is this is the only Indie game I've taken a liking to and that my expectations are unrealistic.
Yes, this is very clearly the issue. Your post is characteristic of someone who has never played an online game. This isn't Microsoft Word, an enterprise program that is expected to remain stable for 30 years. This is an indie game developed by a group of 15 people. Game patches change fairly big components that are frankly impossible to test 100%. Bugs are (and should be) expected. I would truly be more surprised if there were absolutely zero bugs -- that just tells me that there are likely more insidious bugs that haven't been uncovered yet.
Software has bugs. Online games have even more bugs. Online games developed by a small team of people? Of course there will be bugs. That said, Guns of Icarus is a pretty well-polished game. I don't think I have ever encountered a game-breaking bug.
Also, your suggestion that they stop paying artists and only pay engineers is completely absurd as well as goddamn insulting.
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Honestly, the situation with this is little different from, say, Minecraft.
A small team working on a very LARGE game, making it difficult, if not impossible, to fully test everything in a reasonable amount of time.
Coding is not a simple process; so many lines rely on other lines that changing one can have a cascading effect that accidentally inverts gravity or something.
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I am bemused by people bringing up the MLG "nonsense". Remember, it wasn't Muse who went to MLG and asked to be put in, it was us.
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I thought ship disappearing was a feature. Since we all play a different graphics settings some of us will render more cloud particles than others. It would be unfair for the extra cloud particles to obscure a ship on a higher end system that a lower end system will less cloud particles can see clearly. I think the game detects the number of cloud particles between ships at the server level and sets the ship to invisible when the number is too great. The glitch is not that the ship disappears but that you can't see the cloud particles partially obscuring the ship as it transitions from visible to invisible states.
Of course I could be wrong, and just making up excuses.
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I thought ships disappearing in clouds is normal. How do you see a ship that is "hiding"? And I personally like that ship disappearance in scrap. The calm before the storm, first there is nothing, suddenly the entire enemy team. And sandstorms coming in during a fight could lead to potential saves as a ship could (while maybe unintentionally) go behind another one.
What I am concerned with MUSE is not that they publish as many bugs as they do, but rather they don't seem to test such things before they publish them. When they released the patch, the infoboxes of the badges were sometimes covering the entire badge, making it impossible to switch it since you couldn't click on it because the infobox was blocking it. Something like that has to be noticable when you look at it for 5 minutes max. But nobody seemed to really bother checking it out, not even the normal players that are testers in dev app as well.
And such a massive fps drop with flamers and sometimes hwachas can't go by unnoticed if you test it.
When a developer releases a patch, I expect them to look at the most noticable and easiest to notice things, like said infoboxes and fps drop. I don't doubt MUSE's inability to check for bugs like this, but they apparantly didn't invest as much time in it as they should have. And hopefully, they will invest more time to search for these bugs now.
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I am bemused by people bringing up the MLG "nonsense". Remember, it wasn't Muse who went to MLG and asked to be put in, it was us.
Yeah, and you just added one more thing that Muse has to deal with now. Granted it is something a lot of us wanted but you didn't stop for a second and think one bit what it would mean and why this game was not ready. Heck, a year ago I'd have been all up in that and rearing to go. But in 1 year, I've seen enough to know MLG is going to make a lot of buzz and then just pile on more stress on a small studio which has more important stuff to do. The game needs to be in a better state than it is.
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I am bemused by people bringing up the MLG "nonsense". Remember, it wasn't Muse who went to MLG and asked to be put in, it was us.
Yeah, and you just added one more thing that Muse has to deal with now. Granted it is something a lot of us wanted but you didn't stop for a second and think one bit what it would mean and why this game was not ready. Heck, a year ago I'd have been all up in that and rearing to go. But in 1 year, I've seen enough to know MLG is going to make a lot of buzz and then just pile on more stress on a small studio which has more important stuff to do. The game needs to be in a better state than it is.
Muse doesn't have to deal with jack squat. Other than Keyvias helping flesh out some rules, Muse and MLG have nothing to do with each other. Anything that happens through their Arena system will all be community dependent, and has nothing to do with Muse staff.
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Imagine, are you delusional? You don't think there will be added pressure when there is an MLG event and a patch like this last one comes out? Sure, Muse could decide to whistle through the graveyard and pretend MLG isn't there, but that's simply not realistic. MLG is a real opportunity for serious expansion of the player-base. It only ratchets up the pressure Muse is already under trying to hear all the suggestions and complaints and address them. Do you read all the "suggestions" to improve competitive play?
Either this is an opportunity for GoIO and Muse or it isn't. If it isn't, why did anyone try for it to begin with? If it is, then there is pressure to make the most of that opportunity. And to say MLG and Muse have nothing to do with each other, other than Keyvias fleshing out some rules (any tournament runners out there want to talk about how that's not a big deal and takes almost no time?), again, is unrealistic.
What if MLG or their fans or whatever overwhelmingly "suggest" the game is too slow, hard to follow, boring, whatever? I guess Muse just ignores that. Has jack squat to do with that? We both know that is not the way Muse operates.
Oh, and don't forget about Adventure Mode. Only so many man-hours in a week. Only so many balls you can keep in the air. If Keyvias just takes 5 hours total to address MLG rules, that's 5 hours he could have been putting into the game itself. And as a percentage of man-hours, I'm betting it's a pretty high number.
I'm certain Muse has priorities. I'm certain they evaluate these priorities. I'm certain they listen to the community to inform those evaluations. Maybe they listen to us a little too much sometimes.
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Imagine, are you delusional? You don't think there will be added pressure when there is an MLG event and a patch like this last one comes out? Sure, Muse could decide to whistle through the graveyard and pretend MLG isn't there, but that's simply not realistic. MLG is a real opportunity for serious expansion of the player-base. It only ratchets up the pressure Muse is already under trying to hear all the suggestions and complaints and address them. Do you read all the "suggestions" to improve competitive play?
Either this is an opportunity for GoIO and Muse or it isn't. If it isn't, why did anyone try for it to begin with? If it is, then there is pressure to make the most of that opportunity. And to say MLG and Muse have nothing to do with each other, other than Keyvias fleshing out some rules (any tournament runners out there want to talk about how that's not a big deal and takes almost no time?), again, is unrealistic.
What if MLG or their fans or whatever overwhelmingly "suggest" the game is too slow, hard to follow, boring, whatever? I guess Muse just ignores that. Has jack squat to do with that? We both know that is not the way Muse operates.
Oh, and don't forget about Adventure Mode. Only so many man-hours in a week. Only so many balls you can keep in the air. If Keyvias just takes 5 hours total to address MLG rules, that's 5 hours he could have been putting into the game itself. And as a percentage of man-hours, I'm betting it's a pretty high number.
I'm certain Muse has priorities. I'm certain they evaluate these priorities. I'm certain they listen to the community to inform those evaluations. Maybe they listen to us a little too much sometimes.
You're putting waaaaaaay too much stock into MLG Arenas. Yeah, it's a cool (and frankly surprising) thing that we got on there, but it really really has nothing to do with anything as far as the game will go. I mean, it's been what, a month since we've added to their list and have you seen anything that indicates that we're suddenly flooded with new players coming from MLG? I sure as hell haven't.
Once again, Muse had nothing to do with the addition of GOIO to the MLG Arena. They have no obligation to even think of it, or even to take it under consideration when looking at the state of the game. You speak in a bunch of hypotheticals bringing up possible "problems" which we've had zero indication of happening as some basis as to why MLG will be a horrible thing, for some reason assuming that it will happen.
Saying Keyvias spending time reviewing and hashing out rules for x amount of hours while he could've been spending those fixing the game is about as insulting as people who were bitching about the Hamsterdam art and how dare Muse work on x while they should be working on y. It's an asinine statement and best, and horribly insulting at worst to a staff that has done nothing but be completely transparent with the work they do for us.
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The ships 'vanishing' is not just from view. They are literally not there. Shots will pass through them. Not only that, SHIPS will pass through each other. Moonshine ramming through a Mobula, only to see it appear behind you fully intact... is pretty weird.
But, I understand how small teams work, and don't fault them completely for not getting everything done as fast as we want. There is always a huge list of things to do.
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Imagine, you can't have it both ways. You can't say that Muse has nothing to do with MLG and diverts no resources toward it while also stating that one of the devs is diverting time, any amount, to MLG. To say that Muse had nothing to do with getting into MLG is blatantly and patently false:
Congratulations Everyone!
You are now working on an official MLG game.
After working over the weekend with Dan from the Rob and Dan show.
https://twitter.com/MLGRon/status/488558791839866881
Hats off for Howard putting me on the trail with the link from Gabe Connor on facebook.
We spent the weekend pushing and we got it. We gathered the community and dominated the MLG forum and got enough pressure to get noticed by the organizers. After trying out the game and seeing how passionate our players were they said they would start with working on the ladder for it.
We're just starting out so I'll keep everyone updated on what comes next.
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-Matthew Hartman
Muse Games
So this is your definition of having NOTHING to do with it? And since when has Muse's standard for involvement in their game been whether on not it's obligatory? Muse go above and beyond in just about every aspect of this game, why would they treat MLG like stinky red-headed step child with leprosy?
And commenting on the validity of your statements about Muse's involvement with MLG is hardly insulting Keyvias. He is free to do with his time as he sees fit, and is probably the better judge of what to do with that time than you or I or anyone else. You claimed it had no effect. That's simply bullshit. 40 - 5 cannot = 40. I'm not even arguing about whether or not this game should be involved with MLG or whether or not Muse should be working with MLG or not. What I'm saying is you're not dealing with reality if you think that GoIO being in MLG has no effect on Muse. It's an impossibility. If only because they actually give a crap about their game and the people who play it.
No, they are in no way obliged to devote any time or energy toward MLG. But neither are they obliged to post on this forum, play the game with their customers, provide prize support for tournaments, and the list goes on and on; however, they do these things.
For the record, I have no idea what impact MLG will have on this game. I hope it's good. But to believe it has no impact, especially on developers, especially Muse developers, is insulting to the level of Muse's involvement they have constantly had to this game. Look at their involvement in community run, rather small tournaments. You truly think their level of involvement in MLG will disappear? Come on, man.
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Do I expect a patch for an indie game with a small developer team to have some bugs? Yes.
Do I expect it to be so severely bugged that it is actually UNPLAYABLE? Nope.
The past two days have been awful. My framerate drops to as low as 3 (yes, three) FPS in combat, especially when fire weapons, carronades, and hwachas are used (though most everything affects it to some extent), and my audio sounds like it's been run through dBlue Glitch. This is clearly not an isolated problem and one that should have never made it out the door. It makes me wonder what kind of testing was done on this patch before its release, since quite a large number of people are reporting the same issue occurring extremely consostently. This isn't some minor bug that occurs in some rare random scenario; this is most combat being broken entirely all the time.
I love ya Muse, but as Niet said... fix your fucking shit. O_o
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Next time this happens to you, we need your log and your graphics settings. If we don't get those, we can't do anything to fix it. Nobody in the office has been able to reproduce it. It got released in this state because it has literally never happened to any of us. We don't have a publisher dedicated to QA testing on a variety of hardware. There was no way we could know it was broken. It may not be a minor bug form a rare, random scenario, but we can't tell that unless we get logs and accurate reporting. We've got such a small pool of data to work from because so few players have sent in the logs and reports we need to make connections and figure out just what is broken for us to fix.
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Next time this happens to you, we need your log and your graphics settings. If we don't get those, we can't do anything to fix it. Nobody in the office has been able to reproduce it. It got released in this state because it has literally never happened to any of us. We don't have a publisher dedicated to QA testing on a variety of hardware. There was no way we could know it was broken. It may not be a minor bug form a rare, random scenario, but we can't tell that unless we get logs and accurate reporting. We've got such a small pool of data to work from because so few players have sent in the logs and reports we need to make connections and figure out just what is broken for us to fix.
Found the list of requested information in another thread; e-mailed all the logs and such. Hope it helps.
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So, I have to put my foot in my mouth regarding some of the performance issues that are going on. From what I understand, 3v3's are still kind of gnarly when the flamethrowers and other particle start to come out (reports are the Iron Fork of Friday was pretty abysmal for that reason.) But I played a few 2v2's over the past few days and at least those games seem exceptionally stable, even when I'm playing on Euro servers (I 'm on the west coast of the U.S., the best coast).
So, yeah, stuffs clearly getting fix, and a lot faster than I was expecting, so I have to thank the Muse for the work that they've put into stabilizing this game post-patch, much better than the work I've put into this run-on sentence.
I haven't been able to do any 3v3's though, but as soon as I can get into another game of Scrap, you'll be getting a log. Hopefully it'll be helpful.
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So, I have to put my foot in my mouth regarding some of the performance issues that are going on. From what I understand, 3v3's are still kind of gnarly when the flamethrowers and other particle start to come out (reports are the Iron Fork of Friday was pretty abysmal for that reason.) But I played a few 2v2's over the past few days and at least those games seem exceptionally stable, even when I'm playing on Euro servers (I 'm on the west coast of the U.S., the best coast).
So, yeah, stuffs clearly getting fix, and a lot faster than I was expecting, so I have to thank the Muse for the work that they've put into stabilizing this game post-patch, much better than the work I've put into this run-on sentence.
I haven't been able to do any 3v3's though, but as soon as I can get into another game of Scrap, you'll be getting a log. Hopefully it'll be helpful.
I still had problems on 2v2s as of yesterday. Just loaded up the game for the first time today right now; will report back with my findings.
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So, I can confirm that regardless of whether I'm playing 2v2s or 3v3s, the framerate is fine when I start playing but then gets progressively worse after a couple matches, memory usage goes up to 2GB or so, and restarting the game fixes it temporarily. All signs point to memory leak.
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So, I can confirm that regardless of whether I'm playing 2v2s or 3v3s, the framerate is fine when I start playing but then gets progressively worse after a couple matches, memory usage goes up to 2GB or so, and restarting the game fixes it temporarily. All signs point to memory leak.
This issue is in the game since the Day 1 I played, game launcher file constantly increasing in size until you run out of memory, and I believe it has something to do with the game being available on Steam, and definitely getting worse because of minimizing the game. There's that one unwritten rule "Never minimize games on Steam". I'm not sure if you actually do minimize it, but another way to make the issue not affect you as much is to avoid it as much as possible, as it only makes it worse.
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I never minimize the game so I have no data to contribute to this theory.
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The company called Introversion Software, also small company, who created game called Prison Architect, may be a good example of what Muse should do. Of course their game is completely different but they work on a monthly basis (game is still in alpha and every month there is an update with new stuff) and one month was dedicated only to fix all the bugs they could (reported by players) in the order of most annoying (most votes) to least annoying. To gather all bug reports together player used website called mantis (https://www.mantisbt.org/). Maybe if we give Muse enough support and make this kind of deal with them - at least most annoying problems will be fixed? I'm a little concerned that Muse may not have enough raw workforce to handle both the developement of skirmnish mode and making co-op/ adventure mode.
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An open bugtracker would be nice to have so we know what's being worked on. The developers of Natural Selection 2 for example have a public trello for example. We already have a rudimentary system like that with the friday chats, but it doesn't work very well.
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...it doesn't just happen on windows or Linux... It is present on OSX (tested on 10.9.4 Mavericks and 10.10 Yosemite public beta.) Integrated graphics or not doesn't matter, the lag's still there.
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After several hours of play yesterday, I did not experience any framerate drops. New patch seems to have fixed it! Thanks!
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After several hours of play yesterday, I did not experience any framerate drops. New patch seems to have fixed it! Thanks!
Yep, however I am experiencing occasional freezes for a second or two at a time. Doesn't really impact gameplay much (not as much as the lag bug at least) but they seem pretty regular.
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How are they going to make us a chef hat if they suspend the artwork? Didn't think about that now did you.
:o
DO WANTS!!!
To give an actual post, I do notice a significant drop in FPS on certain maps whenever the flamethrower starts going.
I have never had that problem before this patch.
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Muse has already made leaps and bounds working with players and fixing bugs, and their extensive network of CAs and devs working closely with players with the dev app have performed admirably directing amateur testers such as myself and many of the others with the dev app to clear up graphical and framerate issues.
TLDR: Stop bitching and email Muse about getting a key for the Dev App, then get testing. Seriously. I don't even play GoIO competitively (as of yet) but I'm willing to drop time for some bugsearching. If there's a biiiiig problem, then help to fix it.
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Disappearing ships is just people playing as a spy.
Use a flare gun or flamethrower to reveal their position. (Or make whale calls in crew chat to act as a sonar.)
In all serious though i mean there are bugs, but personally they don't 'bug' me.
Sure ships vanish sometimes, sure it goes into slow motion sometimes.
I still had fun in those games. Surely that's what games are about no?
They need fixing, sure and they will at some point. But hey let's all chill and shoot each other in airships and have a good ol' time in the mean time.
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If you think GOI is buggy, then you haven't played gw2, haha. And I agree with Replaceable, none of these bugs really bug me either..