Suggestions

[Muzein]

Well, I've been playing the demo a bit, and though I realize it's quite late in the development cycle, thought I'd just toss around my 2¢.

First off, let me just say that I really enjoy the game. The gameplay is very fun, but doesn't feel dumbed down. Good job, this is defnitely a game I will be playing a lot.

Now for my couple suggestions...

For one, I think it'd be *really* nice to be able to select a ship without your view jumping to it. Perhaps make a toggle in the options?
I just find that very annoying personally, having a nice view of my ships, then wanting to quickly check out that enemy on the horizon and losing my place.

Also, when you have a ship selected, you can't pan forward or backward. This too me is also an annoyance.

Finnaly, to finish with camera issues, how about a left/right pan option? As it stands now, if I want to nudge my view to the right, I have to rotate the camera a couple times, go forward a couple times, then rotate back a couple times. This could all be done much easier with Pan Left/Pan right keys.

I realize not everyone will have my same opinion of the camera controls, but I thought I'd bring them up as something to consider, as I don't imagine it'd be *too* tough to make those sorts of adjustments.

Now my last quibble is something more on my part than yours.
The game runs quite poorly on my machine, pausing every few seconds (ambient sound even cuts out briefly) UI clicks tend to be unresponsive, etc.
Now, I meet the Mac minimum requirements, so I was hoping for a bit better, but I don't expect game devs to bend over backwards for old machines. Also might not be much you can do in the way of performance, or at least not easily.

Listed requirements are -
* Mac OS X 10.1.5 or Higher
* 1 GB G4 (1000 MHz Optimal)
* 256 MB RAM (515 MB optimal)
* 2 Button Mouse Recommended
* CD ROM
* 500+ MB Hard Drive Space
* 16 Bit Sound Card Optional
* SVGA Video Card (800 x 600 with 16 bit color or better)


Mine are-

Dual CPU 867Mhz G4s
1.5GB RAM
Many many many GB free space ( http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif )
Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB



Well, that's it for now. Please take note I'm really not trying to be whiny! hehe. This is hopefully constructive criticism.

[Lord Hammer]

I agree completely, the camera movement is horrible. There has to be a better way to scroll the map and/or view ships, it is so unintuitive it makes playing a chore. The camera/scroll movement is very jumpy and i'm playing on an Alienware game rig http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif.
If the demo is a clue then there is much work to be done before release to clean it up and make it playable. Other than that the premise/design is very well done. I could not/would not play this game with anything more than a 1vs.1 battle if i had to use the present "camera system" to scroll thru ships.
I might add that the Ui was unresponsive for me too, sometimes i would have to click 2 or 3 times to bring up a menu only to repeat to exit it.
Alienware P4 2.8ghz
GeForce FX5700 Ultra 128mg w/latest drivers
1024 DDR Ram
Audigy 2 ZS platinum pro soundcard...

[Combat Wombat]

Muzein said:
Listed requirements are -
* Mac OS X 10.1.5 or Higher
* 1 GB G4 (1000 MHz Optimal)
* 256 MB RAM (515 MB optimal)
* 2 Button Mouse Recommended
* CD ROM
* 500+ MB Hard Drive Space
* 16 Bit Sound Card Optional
* SVGA Video Card (800 x 600 with 16 bit color or better)


Mine are-

Dual CPU 867Mhz G4s
1.5GB RAM
Many many many GB free space ( http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif )
Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB




Well it may not run right because the game isn't multi threaded so is only uses one of your CPUs. Please note that most of games retail or otherwise aren't multi threaded. It alot of extra work to do for such a minority of people that use multiple processors.

[Muzein]

I know that, but 867 to 1000 is not much, and the second CPU should easily make up for the difference in the fact that it is carrying all the backround tasks like the OS.

[Combat Wombat]

I have been playing the demo but I also to seem to be experiencing some low frame rates. Also the camara controls are clunky but besides that alot of fun so far.

1.2 Ghz Pentium M
Intergrated Intel Extreme 2 Video
384MB of Ram
Intergrated SigmaTel Audio
Windows XP Home SP2

[PDF]

Agreed on cam control, there're definitely bad. Maybe just making the "jumps" shorter would help.

I'm on Windows and can't get anything else than a windowed 800*600 mode - if I extend to full screen there's some "ocean" with weird graphics to the side but the game remains in the same window area... Is that a feature ? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif

[Andrew Lonon]

Muzien:

“quite late in the development cycle” << I have been thinking of funny (and not so funny) remarks to make about that statement. (Maybe even going as far as to copy boastful quotes from my own previous posts.)

The response to your observations about the Selection and view (Camera?) handling has been clear indication that you are right on target, and that something should be done. I think the Beta group and myself included have gotten used to display system – so your fresh contact has seen things clearer.

Regarding the speed, - I would be interested in knowing if you have upgraded to Tiger. One of my testers upgraded during the testing, and he reported a dramatic speed increase.

[Andrew Lonon]

Lord Hammer:

Hummm, Salvo should be quite peppy on your system, and I’m not sure what to say. See if the Turbo mode (press PageUp one time, many times, or select Turbo Mode from the options screen) helps any. Then turn off the sound, and finally, try running Salvo in the Windowed mode.

I’m not saying you have to play the game like that – just do a few experiments and pleae report your results to me when you get a chance.

[Andrew Lonon]

Selection / Display / Camera Controls

OK – The response is decisive – no need for a pole. I’ll be updating the Selection and Display Controls before the Gold version is out. I don’t know if I will have a chance to update the Demo till after that – but I may ask a few of you to preview the updates – so I get them right. Here is what I propose to add:

A) Return View This will allow you to return to a previous view after you jump to a ship. It will probably be a key that backs up the view to the last location or last jump…. Humm R seems to be free..

B) Zoom In / Out on currently selected ship. How about the Up and Down Arrow keys move you closer and farther from the ship.

C) Left / Right Movement. Check. Im thinking about using the ‘<’ and ‘>’ keys for this.


Believe it or not, A and B were each implemented at one point or another, so they should be easy, and C should be a no-brainer. (Which is lucky for me, if you know what I mean.)

More soon!

Oh yea – THANKS for trying the Demo and letting me know what needs work. I wish I could fix everything, but I will do what I can.

[Lord Hammer]

Excellent, all three would absolutely make the camera issue perfect IMHO. Actually you should be relieved to know that Salvo's biggest problem is the camera ui, and aside from that the game seems like it will be a blast to play from a "fun" and "historical" viewpoint.
The jerky ui response might need some tweaking, on both our parts, so i'll post when i have time to work it over with my Uber-Rig http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif. Now other than the camera/ui issue my only wish is that you could give the game a "high-end" graphics option: 1024x768 very high detail, animations, water etc...requiring a minimum 128 meg video card http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif...but then i would have nothing left to wish for.
P.S. i know many of us are impatient but take your time and do it right, a game like this really needs an easier operating camera ui to appreciate the era of wooden ships combat http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

[Muzein]

Thanks for the excellent replies, Andrew. I'm pleased to see you actively working with the community to make your games better.

I am not currently running on Tiger, still on Panther. I had delayed upgrading to see if there were any issues with the software I use, and I haven't heard any as of yet, so I will do that soon.
I'm not too worried about the performance, really. Minimum specs are minimum specs, so I don't expect perfect performance. But hopefully Tiger will improve things for me.

I'm eager to see how the camera changes work out!

[FJ_MD]

Finally I managed to download the demo http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif


About the camera control, I find it not so friendly when you have to move around but it is very good when you select a ship (and all the arrow movement appear) and the view can only be rotated around it, maybe a zoom in and out will help a lot.


I'm having a lot of trouble with the speed of the game. It run too fast for a couple of second then stop, and so on but I have noticed that when you select your ship and all the arrow for the movement appear, if I move the cursor of the mouse on the border of the screen it run at the right speed.... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[PDF]

Well, I kinda sorted the camera problem with putting the "scroll speed" to 5 degrees, movement is much smoother-looking, but still it's quite choppy and not responsive . I run the game on an Athlon 2400+ with a 9700 Radeon graphic card, hardware should be ok ?

About the display there's a couple issues :
- Why can't the game be minimized ?
- Full screen/extended windows (edited) : when set in the "settings" screen it works (although the graphics are rather blurry in 1024 : the screen mode isn't changed, and the bitmaps are stretched); but if you use the "expand window" button in the upper right you get this :


http://pascal.difolco.free.fr/Salvo%20Garbled%20Screen.jpg


Quite weird ! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/shock.gif

Last issue about menu navigation : how do you get back to main menu when in the Settings menu or in a game ?
"Exit" drops out of game...

[RockHPI]

(Must preface...I only downloaded the demo and played around a bit, did not even learn how to issue orders, just kept hitting 'Next Turn' so these are very preliminary remarks)

I would like to echo the requests to be able to bump up the resolution.

Movement on-screen is OK, but camera panning is choppy.

Not a fan of the look of the water...I understand the desire to have a visible representation of sea-state, but the water reminds me of 3D-Art (which I can't see) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif The ships look great.

Is there a way to slow down the battle reports? I mean the little scrolls that show up and tell me the results when ships are firing at each other. They flash on and off so fast I can't get anything but a brief impression.

I hope to spend a little more time to actually learn the gameplay and I look forward to it - despite my complaints, I'm excited by this game!

Oh, my system is Athlon 3200+, ATI X800, 1 GB RAM so pump those graphics http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

RockHPI

[Andrew Lonon]

PDF:

Thanks for posting that -

Screenshot:
That screen is definitely odd and should not be happening. I’ll look into the settings that prevent the system from doing that, but for now – you may want to try:

Return the screen to a window with the “Restore Window” button in the upper right hand corner.
Use the Salvo ‘Expanded’ or ‘Full Screen’ setting to increase the resolution of the display.

Minimize:
Iv had a little trouble with some of the compile settings and the ‘minimize’ command seems to require a mode that would not allow the current resolution settings to work. The results – as you have seen – can sometimes be odd and unpredictable. However – I will go another couple of rounds with the beast and see if I can find a way to get all the features working.

Navigation:
The current system for closing the 'settings menu' is by clicking outside any of the settings buttons. I guess I should put a ‘Exit settings' button just to make things clearer. <Just lazy I guess – I’ll get on it.> Then – you can return to the main menu by clicking on the top left (right beside your flag) button of the six buttons between the flag and the mermaid.

-------ALSO----------
Sorry for the recent neglect – Iv got two factors running interference on my development and specially my internet time. The first is a house guest sleeping in the old internet room, and the other is a family obligation/vacation. However, things (both) should clear up in next few days and I can get back to cranking on Salvo and these forums.

[Andrew Lonon]

RockHPI:

Thanks for your observations. I’m not on these boards as often as I should be, so you have probably already found the answers that you need, however, here goes:

There are several ‘settings’ in salvo that will help you, and I’ll do my best to cover you other points as well:

The resolution is (or should be) adjustable from the settings menu. Press ‘S’ to open settings and then pick the ‘Full screen’ display mode. Save your settings if you want Salvo to load up in full screen mode next time you load the game. Click on an empty section to close settings.

Choppy Camera. There is a limitation on what the display system can do, but I am working on some improvements that will help.

Water. <Sigh> I’m not sure I’ll be able to revisit that before the game goes gold, but I’m not counting it out.

Battle Reports: There is a setting explicitly for this. Set ‘Message Interval’ to 4 or 5 and you should have a lot longer to view the messages. If the message is there too long, you can also dismiss it by clicking on it.


Thanks again for your feedback – Its good to know the negative as well as the positive, and I do appreciate your positive comments as well.<G>

-------ALSO----------
Sorry for the recent neglect – Iv got two factors running interference on my development and specially my internet time. The first is a house guest sleeping in the old internet room, and the other is a family obligation/vacation. However, things (both) should clear up in next few days and I can get back to cranking on Salvo and these forums.
---------------------

[Charlie_Mote]

Andrew -

The water looks great. Amazing how you are able to implement features so quickly - what you proposed above is fantastic.

In another topic you talked about a battle editor to allow more historically acurate scenarios and so forth - awesome idea.

And I have to agree with the above "take your time" approach - the basic mechanics are key; the hardcores may "put up" with work, but most gamers don't fit that category.

Charlie Mote

[marc420]

I'd like to second the idea of not having the camera always jump positions when selecting a ship. Sometimes that's quite disconcerting. As the first poster described, I tend to have the view set the way I want it, then I select a ship to give orders and suddenly the view changes on me. For me at least, I loose my perspective on the battlefield and suddenly find it hard to know where my ship is and what enemies I have around it. I've played the Demo once, and ended up with a big fleet brawl with the Brits. No line formations here, just one big brawl. And keeping track of which ship I was giving orders to and what was happening around them was tricky, and the constant changing of perspective wasn't helping much.

Sometimes when I selected a ship for orders, the camera jumped far to the rear of the ship. Since the arrows are out in front of the ship, this wasn't terribly useful.

Any chance of a "Next Ship" type of button? Again, in my brawl I was loosing track of who had done what. I was using the Ship List to see what ships needed to move or fire, but if I could scroll through the ships still needing some sort of order ("can move" or "has targets") that would help.

Being able to zoom on a selected ship should help, but I at times had trouble even seeing what movements might be available to a ship. Again, in my big brawl type battle, it was hard to see the arrows out in front of a ship. Having smoke opacity of zero take more smoke off the screen would help. I wonder if zero should be no smoke on the screen.

I know I'm an old boardgamer, but I miss a "top-down" view. In these crowded situations, a top down view might make it easier to see movement arrows. Maybe two different scales. one just big enough to show the ship and its movement arrows. And a "bigger" scale to show the 10 hex firing arcs off each side.

Again, I'm an old boardgamer, but usually when given the option I turn on the hex grid on game displays. To me that might be a nice option to add.


One kind quirky bit of game play. I'd had one ship "capture the deck" of a near-by ship which it had grappled. Then the other ship cleared the grapples and separated the two ships. When that happened, the enemy ship seemed to return to giving its owner full control, and I think my men on th boarding party somehow returned to my original ship. Just seemed a little odd. I more expected my men to continue fighting aboard the enemy ship, and for my original ship to be severely undermanned.

I never could figure out squandron movement. Is there a limit in the demo of only one squadron for the French? Its probably user error, but I could never get my fleet doing anything like I wanted and ended up just moving all my ships manually.

Little eye-candy things wouldn't hurt. Like having the time of day (number of turns) displayed somewhere. Also maybe some more information on the ships. Like perhaps a second screen of the ship list showing some details like number of cannons left on each side, or the ammo loaded on each side, or the crew allocations. Or something that tells me which ships I've taken things like ammo or crew allocations off of "Auto". That's all little things, but as you start to add stuff that gives more information to the player and a bit better control, then the game will get more interesting.

An alternative might be a play mode where things like the squadrons are set in advance and the player can only give orders to those. Something where as Admiral you are limited to only what commands you can give by running flags up your mast. So you can give commands to the ships that can see your flags, but for larger parts of the battlefield you have to rely on your squadron and ship commanders to make decisions. As someone who likes to micro-manage, I'd probably find that rather frustrating. But if you want to develop a mode that really gives a player a feel as to what it was like to command a fleet, that might be useful. With the limited command available during the battle, then why there were such restrictive rules of engagement might become more obvious.

Still, all-in-all this is a pretty nice game. Like many others I see posting out here, I'm an old Wooden Ships an Iron Men fan. Age of Sail never excited me, although I couldn't put my finger on why. But this game I like. It seems to be hitting that nice comfort zone of it being easy to play and move large numbers of ships, and still allow the user to see and feel enough of the battle for interest. There's a very fine line in there where a game is fun and playable, but still interesting enough. And you seem to be very close to hitting it dead-on. THANKS!

[Charlie_Mote]

As per my post under the heading "Questions/Comments" - I had some silmilar experiences as marc420 - especially in really having to work to remember which ships had done what each turn.

Charlie

[Andrew Lonon]

Marc420:

Thanks for your detailed observations and suggestions, they are much appreciated, and I will definitely be implementing the “next ship” button soon, that’s too good to pass up. (Probably two buttons, one for ships that can shoot and one for ships that can move.)

Unfortunately, I’m still in catch-up mode on the old email so I’ll need to reread it more carefully and give you a detailed answer this weekend.

Thanks again...

[Andrew Lonon]

View Controls Update

I have several updates to the view controls and want to let everyone here know how it’s going. I’ll be updating the Demo soon – but for now my Beta testers are playing with the new features. They should be able to help me get the functions right.

New ‘Hot’ Key functions:

R Returns to the last saved view and then the previous – on down the line
T Saves a view location. (T picked because it’s right next to R – no other reason)
Up Arrow Zooms in on Selected Ship in fixed steps.
Down Arrow Zooms out from Selected Ship in fixed steps.
< Moves display to the ‘left’
> Moves display to the ‘right’
/ Automatically selects the next ship that can move, or has not moved
\ Automatically selects the next ship that has a target it can shoot at.

(It just occurred to me that I the ‘<’ and ‘>’ keys may not be consistent!!! I’ll look into it…)

[PDF]

Andrew,
Those improvements look very good. Still can I remind you that not everyone in the world use US keyboards ?
On mine (French), no problem with R, still neighbor to T, nor with < and > (same key, with Shift), but \ is gotten via AltGr-8, very far from / ...

[Andrew Lonon]

PDF-

Thanks for the Reminder of the variation of keyboards and languages. This is a very valid point and deserves the correct treatment. However, I’m not sure what the best approach is, and Salvo is probably going to ship with the keys setup as descried in the previous note. The situation can be fixed later on with…

a) User Customization. Change the hotkeys for various functions, and your configuration will be saved with your settings. (This is probably the easiest option from the development standpoint.)

b) Keyboard Variation. If the game becomes profitable enough, then supporting several languages and keyboard formats will be essential.

c) Command Duplication. A lot of what is currently covered by keystrokes in Salvo is only accessible by keystrokes. This is not the best form for a program. All the functions should also be available through a menu or some visual (clickable) element of the UI.

d) Organization and Duplication. Alternately, there may be a way to use a better and more coherently developed hot key organization to alleviate the problem of various keyboard layouts. This would take some coordination of various formats, but may be worth looking into…

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks again for complicating my life. I’ll do my best to take this into account in the next few updates. It would be interesting to know how many international users there are for Salvo, they seem failry well represented here on the forums. <G>

[Muzein]

Those camera updates sound great, Andrew. Can't wait to try out the updated demo (and the full game!).

[lh]

I have been playing Salvo! demo for the past several days. The games is somewhat sluggish/unresponsive. An example when changing the cannon loading takes a second or so.

Then I was playing the 3rd Tutorial for about 5 hrs and the game quit just when I was about the finish off the French. Gad what frustration. I was having problems direction individual ships, many clicks to set the course and slow response moving from squadron to squadron.

Using Mac G4/1.25 Ghz, OS 10.3.9, 832MB memory.

I am now downloading the latest Demo. I ordered the game and looking forward to playing.

[Charlie_Mote]

Great implementation of changes suggested here Andrew - it's so much easier to navigate and control with the new features. Looking forward to more great work from you!

Charlie Mote

[Andrew Lonon]

Lh:

Sorry about the frustration! Uh – was there an error message? Anything?

<Below is wild speculation!!!>
If the performance seemed to diminish as the game progressed, then there may be a problem with one of the variables storing more and more data and becoming too cumbersome, or there could have been a memory leak. In either case, the best thing to do would be to save the game, close Salvo and then restart, and reload the game. See if that helps, and if not – Please – save the tutorial and let me know. I’ll give you an email address to send the file to so I can check it out and fix the problem – if it is within my means.

[Andrew Lonon]

Charlie:

Thanks for the good word!!