Hello old friend (aka: First impressions in years)
Posted: 23 Jun 2012, 18:35
I played Warzone for about 15 minutes last night.
The first time in over seven years.
Wow, it's impressive how many things have changed. Little things, of course, but still.
First, the good:
- I like seeing animated textures on the buildings, like the factory fans.
- The rotating map is a nice touch.
- The timers on factory/research progress meters are a VERY nice touch.
Then as I start playing, the not-so-good starts coming to light, and my suggestions for them:
- How do I make multiple research facilities study the same topic to get it done faster? When I select a topic for one lab, if I then switch to a different lab it disappears off the menu. It should still be shown, but duplicate the progress bar of the facility that's currently working on it.
- I seem to have units getting stuck on each other a lot. I'm hoping it was just a fault of the map I was playing (Sk-Highground), but it did give me a few worries all the same.
- I'm having a lot of difficulty scrolling around the map when running the game in windowed mode. Can the window be made sizable? I don't necessarily mean dynamically sizing the (640x480 by default) render area, but some extra black padding between the render area and the window border so I have a bigger target to move my mouse around on. Trying to adjust the camera on a 640x480 window inside a 1024x768 monitor is almost impossible, because the area I have to get my mouse on to start scrolling is relatively small.
- I see Warzone reacts to mousewheel events. Is that configurable now, or can it be made so? I would personally prefer the combination I see in graphical editing programs like GIMP and Inkscape: mousewheel = camera forward/back, Shift+wheel = camera sideways, Ctrl+wheel = zoom in/out.
- Remember how muzzle-flash graphics have animation frames? It seems their playback rates are still broken - can we fix that? All of them? Most weapons' firing graphics have specified playback rates of "1" (as in milliseconds) which results in weapons only ever rendering their first animation frame - the animation as a whole is simply too fast. Lots of weapons will look much cooler if only their muzzle-flashes get animated properly - like the attachment below.
The first time in over seven years.
Wow, it's impressive how many things have changed. Little things, of course, but still.
First, the good:
- I like seeing animated textures on the buildings, like the factory fans.
- The rotating map is a nice touch.
- The timers on factory/research progress meters are a VERY nice touch.
Then as I start playing, the not-so-good starts coming to light, and my suggestions for them:
- How do I make multiple research facilities study the same topic to get it done faster? When I select a topic for one lab, if I then switch to a different lab it disappears off the menu. It should still be shown, but duplicate the progress bar of the facility that's currently working on it.
- I seem to have units getting stuck on each other a lot. I'm hoping it was just a fault of the map I was playing (Sk-Highground), but it did give me a few worries all the same.
- I'm having a lot of difficulty scrolling around the map when running the game in windowed mode. Can the window be made sizable? I don't necessarily mean dynamically sizing the (640x480 by default) render area, but some extra black padding between the render area and the window border so I have a bigger target to move my mouse around on. Trying to adjust the camera on a 640x480 window inside a 1024x768 monitor is almost impossible, because the area I have to get my mouse on to start scrolling is relatively small.
- I see Warzone reacts to mousewheel events. Is that configurable now, or can it be made so? I would personally prefer the combination I see in graphical editing programs like GIMP and Inkscape: mousewheel = camera forward/back, Shift+wheel = camera sideways, Ctrl+wheel = zoom in/out.
- Remember how muzzle-flash graphics have animation frames? It seems their playback rates are still broken - can we fix that? All of them? Most weapons' firing graphics have specified playback rates of "1" (as in milliseconds) which results in weapons only ever rendering their first animation frame - the animation as a whole is simply too fast. Lots of weapons will look much cooler if only their muzzle-flashes get animated properly - like the attachment below.