What, I can die now? why didn't anybody warn me?? :lol:
Haven't progressed too far in the story yet (playing on nothing but a laptop keyboard, ergo the reason I died) so I can't comment on that too much, but it looks promising. I actually thought something like this might work in Spaceway after taking a look at
Rodina.
Anyways, here's what I can say so far:
1. Graphics presets are very appropriate. After being forced to throw out my desktop, I had to contend with "good laptop". Game ran fluently and without a hitch, even without overheating the bloody thing, so these seem to be very appropriate.
2. Nightside's a killer. Needs some ambient lighting. Thought for a moment the game had buged out on me after emerging from a stargate at the nightside and seeing nothing but pitch black outside the window.
3. A few things in the text: I started on Oddball on the second start, and the text went "I wonder about the chemistry of that pink ice is" or something like that.
Of course I immediately jumped the rover off the cliff to see if anything would happen when I get to the pink ice, and nothing did. While nice flavour text, in something that bears a strong semblance to a tutorial it can be a bit misleading.
4. Text for planting fuel generator is a bit ambiguous. It does not explicitly state that you
need to be out of the rover to plant the fuel generator. Spent a minute searching the controls menu to see if I accidently borked up the assignement.
5. Controls... controls, controls, controls. Tough one. The problem is that there is currently some ambiguity about what spaceway wants to be. You want it to be controlable completely newtonian, and that's great, and one day when I relearn TransX that'll be great fun. But the majority of the players will use the warp drive for practically anything. This brings up the first point:
If there's no limitation to where the warp drive can be used, most players will use it for anything, including landing. This more or less puts the flightmodel on the arcade level. That's not neccessarily a bad thing... but they don't make much sense in combination with the newtonian rotation controls, which require you to hit kilrot every other second (especially when used in conjunction with the warp drive, and especially tedious on a laptop keyboard where stuff isn't as nicely grouped together).
possible solutions:
-Make the rotation controls inertialess too when in warp mode, as the linear thrust.
-Define a maximum turn rate, and kick in killrot automatically when button is depressed (Pioneer). That way you could just hit the key, and hold it down until you want the rotation to stop. RCS will never accelerate above maximum turn rate. Would also be easily deactivatable to switch back to more realistic controls.
-Mouse control! Might sound weird at first, but would something speak against a point-and-click interface? You click on the screen, and the atitude autopilot will use the RCS to establish that attitude. Length of click could indicate how fast you want it to rotate (autopilot will fire RCS as long as you keep the mouse button down).
This problem shows mostly when navigating on planets.
6. Throttle controls do not seem to be reassignable in controls, unless I missed them three times. Thruster impulse is (PGUP and PGDWN), but actual throttle control isn't. This can be a problem on various non-english keyboard layouts.
7. When trying to fly without Warp on planets, and especially when entering a stargate, LvlHorizon and AltHold autopilot functions are indespensable (maybe they're there and I didn't find them?). This basically loops back to point 5: How should spaceway be controled, more arcady or die hard realistic? Pick one and make it good, leave both unoptimised, or do double work... I'm afraid there's no fourth option here.
8. Controls the last: Rover... well, it can be extremely confusing to drive the thing in low G because you're hopping around all the time and keep on rotating in that direction. I can't propose a solution to this currently... I can totally see why that is (drive slower in zero-G DUH!), but it will be extremely confusing for players not quite so at home with the newtonian vacuum.
Tilting rover to terrain might really help here to get a better feeling for what you're doing.
Finally, fun stuff:
-Driving over a steep cliff on a low-G world with the rover... GERONIMOOOOO!!!
-Going EVA while jumping over a cliff in the rover: As soon as you touch ground, you stand still, but the rover of course keeps on destroying its momentum. Cue long walk, especially if there's another cliff. Not a problem due to time acceleration.
-look at that 30 meters tall fuel generator I just happened to have in my pocket! :lol:
I would kind of love to give it another go to see what other new stuff this release has to offer, but I need to get into the vicinity of a Joystick first. Non-joystick control is really tedious currently, especially on a laptop. And that can be a problem for the player base nowadays, because only a very specific demographic still has joysticks around. And while I'm part of that demographic, I usually don't carry it around with me when I'm out...
I'll post some more when I complete the short storyline. So far, I'm liking it!