Last night's EE testing results
Finally was able to get some multi-player testing on EmptyEpsilon for 2 hours last night with a couple of friends who help me run games at conventions.
I had some crashing issues on Windows 8 when trying to connect to a Windows 7 server. Older builds ran fine back in September. It might be my build of it that's causing problems. Will have to test the official builds to see if the results are the same. Also had issues detecting and connecting to the same server from my Linux build. Ran fine under Wine on that machine though.
My touchscreen Windows 7 x86 tablet didn't want to press buttons when using the touch screen. I didn't configure the options.ini for touchscreen though. We had enough problems with some of my boxes, as mentioned above, so we hooked up a keyboard and mouse to that tablet.
One thing we discussed after playing it is that Science scans are too hard for new players. This would be especially true for conventions, where time to get used to those controls are limited. It would be nice for an option to vary the difficulty/number of scans on the server screen. What I'm thinking is 3 settings: One that is the same as it is now; the second that reduces the amount of "slider screens" from 4 to 2 for full scans; the third that is a click & wait similar to Artemis. The click and wait should take longer than it would if you do the sliders by hand. The 2nd option (just 2 slider screens) should have some sort of delay for "processing of data" since you aren't doing it by hand. This should even out the reduced difficulty and make it more advantageous to run the full 4 slider scans.
They were inpressed on how it looks and how it plays as compared to Artemis. They also mentioned that the AI is much smarter.
In the next couple of weeks we should be able to get together and do some more testing since I'm wanting to run EE at our next Convention on Nov 14-15.
Edit: changes for clarification
I had some crashing issues on Windows 8 when trying to connect to a Windows 7 server. Older builds ran fine back in September. It might be my build of it that's causing problems. Will have to test the official builds to see if the results are the same. Also had issues detecting and connecting to the same server from my Linux build. Ran fine under Wine on that machine though.
My touchscreen Windows 7 x86 tablet didn't want to press buttons when using the touch screen. I didn't configure the options.ini for touchscreen though. We had enough problems with some of my boxes, as mentioned above, so we hooked up a keyboard and mouse to that tablet.
One thing we discussed after playing it is that Science scans are too hard for new players. This would be especially true for conventions, where time to get used to those controls are limited. It would be nice for an option to vary the difficulty/number of scans on the server screen. What I'm thinking is 3 settings: One that is the same as it is now; the second that reduces the amount of "slider screens" from 4 to 2 for full scans; the third that is a click & wait similar to Artemis. The click and wait should take longer than it would if you do the sliders by hand. The 2nd option (just 2 slider screens) should have some sort of delay for "processing of data" since you aren't doing it by hand. This should even out the reduced difficulty and make it more advantageous to run the full 4 slider scans.
They were inpressed on how it looks and how it plays as compared to Artemis. They also mentioned that the AI is much smarter.
In the next couple of weeks we should be able to get together and do some more testing since I'm wanting to run EE at our next Convention on Nov 14-15.
Edit: changes for clarification
Comments
That's what I was thinking.
I think the crash bug I'm seeing has to do with my builds (Win 32bit built on Debian Linux). They work fine on XP and seem to work OK on Windows 7. Windows 8 (32bit) doesn't like them.