My experience with Alpha, not bad, not good

G

GabrielFarr

Sea Legs
First off I want to say thanks to everyone who is taking time out of their lives to bring this experience back to us fans. As a game dev myself I can imagine how hard it must be decompiling and going through other people's code hoping to make sense of it and get it to work again. I also must say that I enjoyed walking through the islands tonight and reliving some memories. I wanted to give you my experience so that it can be of some use to the devs.

Firstly I tried installing it on my Vista even though that didn't match the requirements. The game just died immediately after the launcher went console. Maybe you could display a quick alert that says that the system doesn't match the requirements here.

I then installed on my Windows 7 and it worked. As soon as I logged in a popup said that the Server appears to be unavailable. Maybe this is because your server is not keeping up but this popup appeared every time I tried to log in later on. Anyway I logged in and created a char. Note: The beard slider is glitched that once you select a beard you cannot go back to beardless but are forced to scroll through the beards.

Anyway as soon as I entered the game I went to the options and changed to fullscreen. The game crashed and I reloaded. This time fullscreen worked. I chatted a bit and walked to the Port Royal jungle. The game crashed before it started loading, I think it had no memory left. Pretty sure an occlusion culling/area of interest/LOD system has to be implemented here.

I reloaded and visited the other islands which worked well. I was a bit disappointed that there was no combat/questing/sailing as these were all on the dev streams and I was expecting them. Finally I went back to Port Royal and tried some fishing but it crashed before I started.

All in all I had slightly higher expectations but I guess I have to realize this is still far away from actual alpha. Still, props to the team that you actually got this far and hope you keep this momentum for the future. Hope sailing and combat come soon!
 
GabrielFarr said:
I was a bit disappointed that there was no combat/questing/sailing as these were all on the dev streams and I was expecting them. Hope sailing and combat come soon!
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It's been stated that the dev server is separate from ours (the Alpha server/servers), the update notes on the official site (and on these Forums) all state the updates to the Alpha server :)
Also, sailing was implemented into TLOPO a while back.
 
Well when I was playing yesterday sailing was out so for me it's not implemented as I never tried it. Can't wait till it's in though.
 
I think you make some good points. Hopefully we'll see more optimizations in the coming weeks/months. My PC is pretty high-end and I still run out of memory pretty frequently when I play TLOPO -- less frequently that I did a few months ago, but enough for it to still be annoying. This makes things like streaming or Skyping while playing especially hard.

That's why I think bugfixes and optimizations are undervalued around here. They're crucial to an enjoyable game experience!
 
DefectiveGamer said:
I think you make some good points. Hopefully we'll see more optimizations in the coming weeks/months. My PC is pretty high-end and I still run out of memory pretty frequently when I play TLOPO -- less frequently that I did a few months ago, but enough for it to still be annoying. This makes things like streaming or Skyping while playing especially hard.

That's why I think bugfixes and optimizations are undervalued around here. They're crucial to an enjoyable game experience!
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Hey man, thanks for the input. Recently, we've been taking bugfixes and optimizations more seriously. They've started to become higher priority as we prepare more and more for beta, because after all, what's the fun of questing or sailing if you're just going to lag and crash? This is all being taken into consideration, and we've been putting more effort into fixing up what we currently have rather than adding more content to the game. This may not be noticeable just yet, but it will be soon enough.
 
With all due respect if an entire feature is completely taken out for some bug fixes its not implemented, its in testing at best. If sailing was still in and for example the sloop was acting a bit glitchy, that would be partially implemented.

Personally I think you're trying to rush features to compete with other PO Recreations. I hope this is not the case as your product is far more along than others and at the end of the day slow steady progress will get you the market share.
 
GabrielFarr said:
With all due respect if an entire feature is completely taken out for some bug fixes its not implemented, its in testing at best. If sailing was still in and for example the sloop was acting a bit glitchy, that would be partially implemented.
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While I agree that I wouldn't consider sailing to be fully implemented at this time, it's important to remember the entire game is still "in testing." Having everything tested and ironing out the remaining problems is what the alpha is there for.

GabrielFarr said:
Personally I think you're trying to rush features to compete with other PO Recreations. I hope this is not the case as your product is far more along than others and at the end of the day slow steady progress will get you the market share.
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I wouldn't say that's the case, as sailing was initially released before other "recreations" were even announced. I'm not entirely sure why it was pulled, but it could have been because of an issue that didn't manifest on the development server, or it could have been due to a conflict encountered in a subsequent update. Either way, it'll be back soon.
 
GabrielFarr said:
With all due respect if an entire feature is completely taken out for some bug fixes its not implemented, its in testing at best. If sailing was still in and for example the sloop was acting a bit glitchy, that would be partially implemented.

Personally I think you're trying to rush features to compete with other PO Recreations. I hope this is not the case as your product is far more along than others and at the end of the day slow steady progress will get you the market share.
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Sailing could've been bugged due to a new feature/bugfix. Things like that occur fairly often.
 
I think the crashes are because of your client, I've played 6 hours with only 1 crash on a decent end pc, however I don't like the fps being capped at 30...
 
My connection dropped once during three hour alpha testing. I had to take 30 minutes off my total playing time to just upload the updates. I think that's expected though. The original game did the same thing. I am playing on a high end newer laptop, and still had these issues.
Some bugs will/may never be fixed. Hence the reason why there are glitches ( at least in the original game - that and the creators like to add them in here and there just to see how much we're paying attention).
I think the creators are working their bums off right now to make everything going smoothly for everyone involved. It's part of game development. Hang in there....and just wait and see.
-Em
 
Crashes are to be expected obviously, but they should be minimized, especially when its memory related. I have another playtime coming up in an hour and I'll give an updated post here.
 
Just had another playtime. I enjoyed it, experienced zero crashes. Not sure if I got lucky or devs fixed the memory leaks. Did some Blackjack, went to buy a hat and did some fishing. It took me 3 tries to connect to the server however. Also Blackjack appears to have a 1 player max limit before the table becomes full.

In my opinion if combat and sailing are implemented and the fps is fixed you would have made wonderful progress.
 
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