Suggestions

[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


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....

[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 :





Quite weird !

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) 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

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...