PAT5 Surveying

The fifth Pre-Alpha Test (short: PAT5) for Stars Reach took place on Saturday, Oct 19. Like the previous tests, it ran for two hours and was focussed on very specific aspects of the game.

The first two tests were mostly about stressing the server with increasing numbers of people who login, move around, chat and dance. The next two tests were mainly about stressing the world simulation, by having everyone modify the terrain and trigger simulation updates like water and lava flowing, sand slumping, caves caving in. All of these tests unearthed some issues and bottlenecks, that subsequently got fixed. The most pervasive issue though, was a bug happening somewhere between Unit and AMD’s graphics drivers. That’s something PW cannot fix - but they managed to work around it, by adding a -force-vulkan option to the game, which would not trigger the DX12-related bug.

This fifth test, was the first ever to focus on play-testing actual gameplay mechanics. And the chosen mechanics were cartography and camp-building from the Ranger profession and skill-tree. In order to spice things up a bit, the map was populated with aggressive creatures - so a little of bit combat was part of the equasion as well.

In fact, the map was the same as used in a previous test - but basically “hundreds of years later”. The simulation had been fast forwarded to erode and soften the terrain. Apart from that, some recent performance improvements had allowed to significantly increase the max number of allowed objects on the map. This resulted in large areas of the map being densely forested, with just some clearings in between. A large lava lake had developed as well. As a result the map was barely recognizable - only a fery few more memorably landmarks (like a certain triangular cave), gave away that it was indeed the same map as seen before.

The set goal for the players was to survey the map. And the forest and creatures were purely meant to make this more difficult to achieve. And difficult it was, as the creatures were made more difficult in anticipation of the testers just mostly zerging them. As a result, the creatures, which tended to stick together in groups, weren’t exactly solo-friendly. But since everyone was doing the same thing, it was unlikely you’d end up by your own lonesome anyway.

The bigger issue was, that there was something about a combat effect, or the way it was handled, that caused client crashes. And that meant, the more players joined the server, and the more combat was going on… the more frequent those crashes would become. While at first, I’d only be likely to crash when doing combat myself - I was able to play an entire 10 minutes, while avoiding combats. Just run past the enemies, try to circle them when possible, and use your protective energy shild-bubble to absorb damage. That tactic would allow you to get around the map. The creatures wouldn’t follow you indefinitely - once you got far enough away, they’d loose interest in chasing you.

But as the combat got more intense, especially around the main spawn site where all players loaded in at first - I would crash out just a mere two seconds after loading back in… and thus became entirely unable to continue playing. The devs quickly pin-pointed the source of the crashes - but of course couldn’t fix them that fast. So the solution was to turn off creatures and remove them from the map entirely. Which meant no more combat after that point (except for a little surprise at the very end - more on that later).

All in all, I did not get to see much of combat. I tried my hand a fighting a little bit - but due to the incessant crashes, I didn’t really get the hang of it. The crash-issue got fixed, and the developers held two more short, unannounced test-runs on monday - but at times of the day that didn’t work for my timezone. So, I cannot talk much about combat at all. Just a tiny little bit.

Players started with an omni-blaster. It’s regular attack was to shoot a single energy projectile that had slight homin abilities. You didn’t have to aim much, it would auto-aim and then curve in during flight, to hit it’s target. It was not a guarantueed hit though. The homing effect would only do so much, and it was still possible to dodge these projectiles.

Each shot would use weapon energy, which was shown as a blue ring around the weapon icon on your UI. When the energy got depleted, you couldn’t fire anymore, until some of it was replenished (which it did automatically over time). There was a secondary attack that shot three projectiles at once, and used more energy, but also fired at a slower rate. A third firing mode existed as well, but I didn’t get around to actually try that.

Killing creatures gave you combat XP - which you could use to unlock new stuff in the combat skill tree. Well not the real one - the skill tree we got to see in the test was some early WIP placeholder one. The only upgrades available there, were two new weapon unlocks: companion orbs and the gravity gun. If you unlocked those, the appropriate item would just appear in your inventory. Again - just for the test.

I got to try the companion orbs - to floating sphere that follow you around and shoot at your enemies when you pull the trigger. Compared to the pew-pew of the blaster, these orb had a sound with more of an “physical projectile” feel to it. More of a “crack” with some bass to it. It seemed to have some aim-assist, but no homing projectiles. It also seemed more powerful then the blaster - but take all of that with a grain of salt, as I played very little combat, and could be wrong about stuff. Sadly I didn’t manage to try out the gravity gun - the final unlock. Maybe some tester who did, can post their impressions below?

Killed enemies would not only give you XP, but also drop glowing pickups that would give you temporary buffs if you ran over them. They’d also drop a few materials, like gas, fish meat or a few other things you could collect, and later use in an upgraded camp.

The Ranger skill tree was separate, and got it’s own, independent XP. You started out with two items: - a survey tool, a ranger tool, each of which had two modes. The survey tool could switch between survey mode and waypoint mode, the ranger tool could switch between camp mode, and ray (heat-reay, freeze-ray) mode. The waypoints were just something you could place anywhere, so you’d later be able to find back to that spot. The heat-ray let you burn trees, and the freeze-ray let you put out fires and freeze water. These were fun to play around with, but didn’t serve any direct purpose in this test.

The camp tool allowed you to place down a camp. A shortlived, small one at first, but as you gained XP you could upgrade that to become bigger in size, and last longer. A camp was just a smallish rectangle (a few meters each side) with a yellow glowing light-fence around it, and some items placed in the center. The main item in the very center was the reLife station. ReLife stations are places were you can respawn after death, but activating them also saves your inventory. You will respawn with everything you already had on you last time you saved - but everything else will be stored in a glowy gravemarker at the location of your death. You’ll have to walk over there and pick it up, to regain your stuff.

Being inside a camp gave you a number of other benefits as well. You’d not be save from enemy attacks in there - but you’d have increased health regeneration, the ability to switch your loadoat (you can’t switch weapons/tools out in the field - only inside camp) - and watch someone dance (entertain you), to heal wounds. (Wounds are basically lowered maximums for health/stamina/etc.)

Upgraded camps would also spawn with a few statins inside of them: a cooking stove, a workbench and a lathe. The latter two were purely decorative and not usable in this test - but the stove would allow you to craft a few consumable buff-items from the materials you got from killed creatures.

The nice thing about the camp was, that you would get XP for other players using your camp. If someone else went into your camp, and healed, saved, respawned or crafted there, you - as the provider of the camp - would gain XP for that. As you could only have one camp out at any given time, placing that at a strategic location could mean a lot of XP earned, over the camp’s upgraded lifetime. You first had to unlock the camp though - as that was not unlocked when you first loaded into the game.

And that finally brings us to the survey tool - the actual core element of this test. In order to start gaining Ranger XP and to be able to unlock all the other stuff, you first had to scan survey points. 64 such survey points were scattered around the map - roughly in a 8x8 grid, but at a random location within it’s square on the grid, which could lead to places were 4 survey points were really close to each other, and other places, where there was no survey point at all, in a relatively large area. But on average, they were just strewn about the entire map, in a more or less even distribution.

The survey markers were glowing diamond things, which you could only see when you had your survey tool equipped and set to scan. Scanning them basically meant just clicking on them, with the survey tool active. So, the main player objective for this test, was to find all the 64 survey diamonds, and click on them. A task that Raph in chat compared to “pac-man”, from a design-angle.

In theory it’s similar to having to scan the entire map - you have to visit all the 64 squares of the survey grid. But instead of “drawing” the map and having to walk everywhere to get it “filled out” - it feels a lot more arcade-y in nature. Find all the glowing diamonds and click on them. On the upside, this allowed some survey points to be harder to get than others - hidden between dense trees, stuck on a steep cliff-side that’s hard to climb, or sitting right out on the lava-lake, where you have to freeze a path to it, to be able to get it. (Or you just jump at it, click it and die. That works too.) On the downside, it does feel a bit more game-y and gimmicky than something like drawing out a map would.

Also, you’d inevitably miss a few diamonds and than have to go search those… trying to then find those would have been frustrating, if it hadn’t been for that placeholder ascii-map that you could unlock for a fairly large amount of XP. With that map, you’d at least know the rough position of where you still had to look for more. It still took a while to hunt down the final few survey points I had previously missed. This would have been a lot more of a chore had the creatures still been around. But those had to be disabled halfway through the test, because of the crashing issue I mentioned before.

At the very end of the test neared, for just the last few minutes, the devs then enabled PvP on the server, allowing players to try those weapons and fortress shields on each other. At that point in time, I was still out and about searching my final few survey points - so I actually missed most of that. When I finally returned to the main spawn, the test was already past closing time. People had left, devs were meteor-bombing the place, and I was suffering from a bit of lag (crappy internet…) - so I didn’t really get to participate much. But people seemed to have fun, blasting each other.