first off, draw distance is laughably bad, please change this or make it an option or something; currently it looks like the scene is just one house in a giant empty scene until you start moving and then stuff starts getting rendered
rendering, mainly lighting, also does not seem right; environmental light is very VERY dark
movement felt really slow and weird and interacting with items and picking them up and grabbing them also feels cumbersome but I think the FOV isn't doing any favors in this department
I think the interactions with the TV might be a cool idea, I like the texture and videos swapping idea too although I didn't try it myself; it would be cool for streamer communities to make packs of tapes and have their streamer play and get to see the videos as the customers bring them in
I will say it seems your scope is ambitious
the way you have to plotted is having a giant open ended scene with NPC AI, streets, basically an entire town
but I think a more realistic approach would be to have your little house as a scene, then have a "drive to work" button at the front door or something where the main gameplay loop takes place in a different scene
and then maybe if you really want you can add a scene that lets you explore town or whatever for tapes/customers/putting flyers up or something
Hello and thank you! I appreciate the feedback and time you took to test and post. I've got about 85% of an update ready, I'm sure it'll be done by the end of the week. It addresses the horrendous item picking and interacting, adds mouse look, fixes the draw distance, a couple of smaller bugs, simultaneous keyboard inputs and more! It's an overall QOL update before I continue to expand. There are a couple settings in the console that you can use right now for draw distance: turn on devmode with "devmode" and then "set game pdraw to 20000" to unlock the draw distance fully. Driving draw distance is it's own variable named ddraw and can be set the same way. A settings menu is definitely needed and in the works. Also the lighting is on a day and night cycle and I started the day rather late, so it gets dark awfully fast. I know the transitions of sunlight need work as well!
In regards to the individual scenes for the house, shop, etc. I see how that could greatly increase performance rather than having to load the entire scene, but I don't plan on the town being too large. The reason it feels so strangely empty right now is simply I haven't added the surrounding residential buildings. This is just the culmination of a few weeks of work, so believe me, there will be plenty more updated and fixed. Again, thank you for taking the time to play my alpha and for reaching out with your thoughts. I hope with your feedback and the rest of the community's, that I'm able to shape this into something unique.
I appreciate you taking the time to give your feedback! The arrow key aiming is a placeholder for mouse aiming, so I apologize for it feeling so rough. And the radio is empty by default (the tv only has one thing on each channel) but it's made so you can drop as many mp3s, flacs, whatever audio files you have, into the channels in the radio folder of the game. There is a .txt file in Assets that explains how to use the radio/tv/tapes custom functionalities.
This was a "state of progress" posting for my game for me to take part of the jam and to stay motivated to keep working on the game. Forgive me if it is in early stages, I tried to reflect that in my descriptors of the game.
Thank you for taking the time to test and review Cineverse, even in it's early stages. I truly appreciate the feedback and thoughts on this as I want to be able to polish as much as I can (again it is still in its really early stages).
Some things like the FOV, I hadn't thought of previous, but a few things have been known, like the awful "general forward direction" item picking up rather than a centered crosshair that you use to pick up objects. The lighting angle for the time of day is also a known funny issue. The skybox not being visible is due to the draw distance, which I've turned on permanently at the moment because I've yet to make a dedicated settings page to control them all with.
Anyhow, the issues have been heard! Some have been bothering me for a bit, others are news to me, so thank you again for taking the time to test and review this.
This looks really cool, but somehow I cannot walk. Neither Linux or Windows build have WASD working. It's the same PC so it might be hardware issue, idk. I had a gamepad connected, but its sticks did nothing. Disconnected the gamepad, still cannot use WASD. Arrow keys for looking work, though. P/B also don't work.
OK, I figured it out. The problem was I had a Wooting keyboard connected, which also registers as gamepad. So the game presumably still thought there was a gamepad available and ignored WASD keys. I used another keyboard now and played a bit. (Is a bit unclear why you target such an obvious FPS-controls game for gamepad first.)
Not sure if there is yet more to do than I found out, screenshots show a row of video tapes on the shelf but I only found a few on the ground and no way to get more.
You seem to be enginedeving this, so mad props for what you already got, and building for 4 different platforms. I’m curious to see where this will go gameplay-wise. Keep up the grind.
I had never considered keyboards recognizing as gamepads. I have it set at the moment to disable certain movements on keyboard when using a gamepad, correct. With this info, I will likely fix this so you can use either or both simultaneous. And yes it was completely built with a controller in mind, so there had been slight neglect on the side of keyboard users, forgive me.
Most of what there is to do is messing with the TV/Radio/tape systems at the moment, which you can easily add your own files into. There's a .Txt file in the assets folder with lots of instructions and help with this! However many tapes you put into the tape folder in assets, will determine how many tapes are in game!
Next will be some needed polish (like rebuilding the system that allows for item selection/picking up) and some graphical fixes, but then I'll expand the town and add more shops and I'll add NPCS so there will be an actual game loop.
Comments
first off, draw distance is laughably bad, please change this or make it an option or something; currently it looks like the scene is just one house in a giant empty scene until you start moving and then stuff starts getting rendered
rendering, mainly lighting, also does not seem right; environmental light is very VERY dark
movement felt really slow and weird and interacting with items and picking them up and grabbing them also feels cumbersome but I think the FOV isn't doing any favors in this department
I think the interactions with the TV might be a cool idea, I like the texture and videos swapping idea too although I didn't try it myself; it would be cool for streamer communities to make packs of tapes and have their streamer play and get to see the videos as the customers bring them in
I will say it seems your scope is ambitious
the way you have to plotted is having a giant open ended scene with NPC AI, streets, basically an entire town
but I think a more realistic approach would be to have your little house as a scene, then have a "drive to work" button at the front door or something where the main gameplay loop takes place in a different scene
and then maybe if you really want you can add a scene that lets you explore town or whatever for tapes/customers/putting flyers up or something
Hello and thank you! I appreciate the feedback and time you took to test and post. I've got about 85% of an update ready, I'm sure it'll be done by the end of the week. It addresses the horrendous item picking and interacting, adds mouse look, fixes the draw distance, a couple of smaller bugs, simultaneous keyboard inputs and more! It's an overall QOL update before I continue to expand. There are a couple settings in the console that you can use right now for draw distance: turn on devmode with "devmode" and then "set game pdraw to 20000" to unlock the draw distance fully. Driving draw distance is it's own variable named ddraw and can be set the same way. A settings menu is definitely needed and in the works. Also the lighting is on a day and night cycle and I started the day rather late, so it gets dark awfully fast. I know the transitions of sunlight need work as well!
In regards to the individual scenes for the house, shop, etc. I see how that could greatly increase performance rather than having to load the entire scene, but I don't plan on the town being too large. The reason it feels so strangely empty right now is simply I haven't added the surrounding residential buildings. This is just the culmination of a few weeks of work, so believe me, there will be plenty more updated and fixed. Again, thank you for taking the time to play my alpha and for reaching out with your thoughts. I hope with your feedback and the rest of the community's, that I'm able to shape this into something unique.
FoV is way too low, no mouse aiming even on foot is a really odd choice. Radio doesn't work..
I appreciate you taking the time to give your feedback! The arrow key aiming is a placeholder for mouse aiming, so I apologize for it feeling so rough. And the radio is empty by default (the tv only has one thing on each channel) but it's made so you can drop as many mp3s, flacs, whatever audio files you have, into the channels in the radio folder of the game. There is a .txt file in Assets that explains how to use the radio/tv/tapes custom functionalities.
This was a "state of progress" posting for my game for me to take part of the jam and to stay motivated to keep working on the game. Forgive me if it is in early stages, I tried to reflect that in my descriptors of the game.
Thank you for taking the time to test and review Cineverse, even in it's early stages. I truly appreciate the feedback and thoughts on this as I want to be able to polish as much as I can (again it is still in its really early stages).
Some things like the FOV, I hadn't thought of previous, but a few things have been known, like the awful "general forward direction" item picking up rather than a centered crosshair that you use to pick up objects. The lighting angle for the time of day is also a known funny issue. The skybox not being visible is due to the draw distance, which I've turned on permanently at the moment because I've yet to make a dedicated settings page to control them all with.
Anyhow, the issues have been heard! Some have been bothering me for a bit, others are news to me, so thank you again for taking the time to test and review this.
This looks really cool, but somehow I cannot walk. Neither Linux or Windows build have WASD working. It's the same PC so it might be hardware issue, idk. I had a gamepad connected, but its sticks did nothing. Disconnected the gamepad, still cannot use WASD. Arrow keys for looking work, though. P/B also don't work.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2293328836
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2293331589
OK, I figured it out. The problem was I had a Wooting keyboard connected, which also registers as gamepad. So the game presumably still thought there was a gamepad available and ignored WASD keys. I used another keyboard now and played a bit. (Is a bit unclear why you target such an obvious FPS-controls game for gamepad first.)
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2293386768
Not sure if there is yet more to do than I found out, screenshots show a row of video tapes on the shelf but I only found a few on the ground and no way to get more.
You seem to be enginedeving this, so mad props for what you already got, and building for 4 different platforms. I’m curious to see where this will go gameplay-wise. Keep up the grind.
Thank you for the support and feedback!
I had never considered keyboards recognizing as gamepads. I have it set at the moment to disable certain movements on keyboard when using a gamepad, correct. With this info, I will likely fix this so you can use either or both simultaneous. And yes it was completely built with a controller in mind, so there had been slight neglect on the side of keyboard users, forgive me.
Most of what there is to do is messing with the TV/Radio/tape systems at the moment, which you can easily add your own files into. There's a .Txt file in the assets folder with lots of instructions and help with this! However many tapes you put into the tape folder in assets, will determine how many tapes are in game!
Next will be some needed polish (like rebuilding the system that allows for item selection/picking up) and some graphical fixes, but then I'll expand the town and add more shops and I'll add NPCS so there will be an actual game loop.