[Hendricks266]

If I remember correctly, we didn't have any qualified applicants with voxel skills. Unlike sprites and 3D modeling, the talent pool for voxel design is small enough as it is.

[NightFright]

I wouldn't be too surprised if a voxel pack will be made by community members eventually.

[cybdmn]

Hendricks266, on 12 March 2018 - 10:58 AM, said:

If I remember correctly, we didn't have any qualified applicants with voxel skills. Unlike sprites and 3D modeling, the talent pool for voxel design is small enough as it is.

To be honest, i found the voxel pickups in SW and Blood rather ugly. The only needful usage where the locks and switches in SW, where the voxels add much to the visibility.
I wouldn't mix the great pixelart in IM with voxels. Just my two cents.

[Zaxx]

cybdmn, on 12 March 2018 - 11:58 AM, said:

To be honest, i found the voxel pickups in SW and Blood rather ugly. The only needful usage where the locks and switches in SW, where the voxels add much to the visibility.
I wouldn't mix the great pixelart in IM with voxels. Just my two cents.

Yeah, I agree: I like the voxels in the old Build games very much, I just think that here the sprites look so much nicer that voxels would look worse. You don't need voxels for switches here either as they are nicely animated instead of just having two states. Sure, they don't bump up from the environment but that's not something hugely important.

[axl]

cybdmn, on 12 March 2018 - 11:58 AM, said:

To be honest, i found the voxel pickups in SW and Blood rather ugly. The only needful usage where the locks and switches in SW, where the voxels add much to the visibility.
I wouldn't mix the great pixelart in IM with voxels. Just my two cents.

I kinda like voxels. But only if they're not overused. The rotating sawed-off shotgun or tommygun in Blood look awesome for example.

Anyway, I just tested the beta through steam: performance is a lot better, mouse is way smoother and the armor upgrades are far better ! Keep up the good work !

[Danukem]

Forge, on 12 March 2018 - 09:03 AM, said:

Hank is asking about the update at the 3dr forum. No response yet.

I'm glad that a larger portion of the funds from my purchase went to support the voidpoint team, but 3dr is moving at the speed of smell.

Same

[NightFright]

I intended to replay IM with every update, but it's kinda hard if I can't get my hands on the latest version.

De profundis clamo ad te, 3D Realms!

[Lunick]

Steam is always going to be fastest because Voidpoint have the ability to upload builds themselves, either to the public branch or to testing branches. Any DRM-Free builds are sent off to 3D Realms to upload to their store and GOG.

[Zaxx]

Btw. why was the 144 fps option for the frame limiter removed? The game needs more of those options, not less.

Anyway there is something weird going on with that feature: usually when I don't hit the limit (for example I set it to 120 and get something like 105-110) and I turn off the frame limiter my framerate goes through the roof to something like 150-250 indicating that the limiter is buggy. In the subway the limiter just locks me to 90 and once I disable it I play with 300-400 fps, what's up with that?

[Hendricks266]

Zaxx, on 12 March 2018 - 03:07 PM, said:

Btw. why was the 144 fps option for the frame limiter removed? The game needs more of those options, not less.

Because the engine runs at a 120 Hz tickrate and limiting in uneven intervals will harm performance.

[Hank]

Forge, on 12 March 2018 - 09:03 AM, said:

cut
I'm more than happy with my purchase, but I'm starting to get buyers remorse about where I made said purchase.

cut

Please don’t.
I for one got it through 3D Realms because of it being DRM free.
The game is a, and will be a winner; methinks. Current poor PR work at their (3DR) forums, or slow response on their website won't change that.

Look at it at the bright side:
First update was 9 Mar, and there is another one on Steam, today, 12 Mar.
Obviously, Voidpoint is working their butts off. Eventually, even the publishers will have to follow suit with that pace on their own website, or loose what little reputation their have

[Forge]

Forge, on 12 March 2018 - 09:03 AM, said:

3dr is moving at the speed of smell.

just to be clear ^this is what I'm concerned about.

I know I'm going to get a full version copy some day (probably a week after it's released on steam).

I'm merely wondering if 3dr is even going to bother posting updates. It's been 16 hours and they still haven't bothered to reply to the query about it.

With this kind of customer service, I hope they don't host the server if this game has multi-player.

[cybdmn]

3DR should get their butts up. It can‘t be a big deal uploading a patched version of the game. I mean, at least it is more or less „their“ game, they havn‘t to deal with release processes from third parties on their own website.
It is not like releasing this on Apples AppStore or Googles Playstore.

[Lunick]

It's available now

[NightFright]

Excellent! Didn't take that long after all. Let's check this out... Hm. Any particular reason why they changed the name of the executable? Not that it really matters, but...

[Lunick]

The.exe changed from "maiden.exe" ?

[NightFright]

It's called "maiden_nodrm.exe". There is also a .bin file with the same name which does not seem to be needed, but well...

[Micky C]

The .bin file is the Linux executable.

I recall my windows executable being called something like IonMaiden_win.exe or something like that. I haven’t checked the latest version.

[cybdmn]

Excellent.

Is there a Chance that the preview will be available for OSX in the future, or will i need to wait for the full release of the game?

[oasiz]

Friend ran the win exe through wine on OSX with good results apprently.
Aside from some DPI scaling stuff it was very playable.

[cybdmn]

I will try. Thanks for that suggestion.

[Zaxx]

Hendricks266, on 12 March 2018 - 08:03 PM, said:

Because the engine runs at a 120 Hz tickrate and limiting in uneven intervals will harm performance.

Hm? I always used EDuke32 with the 144 limit and never noticed a single performance issue.

I went into the cfg file and set it back to 144 that way so it's no biggie, I just find it weird that you guys removed an option that was in EDuke32 for the longest time. What would be wrong with a slider or a customizable value?

And what should people with a 144 hz monitor do now? Piss off?

[TerminX]

Zaxx, on 13 March 2018 - 05:01 AM, said:

Hm? I always used EDuke32 with the 144 limit and never noticed a single performance issue.

I went into the cfg file and set it back to 144 that way so it's no biggie, I just find it weird that you guys removed an option that was in EDuke32 for the longest time. What would be wrong with a slider or a customizable value?

And what should people with a 144 hz monitor do now? Piss off?

We talked to several users who were having performance problems with 144Hz monitors, and all of them reported that the game worked better at 120Hz and suffered at 144.

[Forge]

NightFright, on 13 March 2018 - 02:11 AM, said:

Excellent! Didn't take that long after all.

3dr: The update will be hosted, "When it's hosted".

[Zaxx]

TerminX, on 13 March 2018 - 08:16 AM, said:

We talked to several users who were having performance problems with 144Hz monitors, and all of them reported that the game worked better at 120Hz and suffered at 144.

If the tickrate is fixed at 120 hz then I can imagine that, guess the engine can't sync to that framerate properly and the game will just appear stuttery at 144 hz. However with my 60 hz monitor I prefer locking EDuke32 and BloodGDX at uneven numbers because (and guess this is also because of the fixed tickrate) at even multiplies of 60 I always get two ugly tearlines on my screen and that's is very distracting. If you set it at an uneven number that problem disappears, the tearing becomes barely noticeable just like any downsides the uneven lock may have.

Overall I think that some of the problems EDuke32 have are caused by the fixed tickrate so in my opinion that is something that should be looked into so the game will become smoother and smoother as the framerate increases. There is even an old forum post that implies that EDuke32 doesn't like vsync because of the fixed tickrate:
https://steamcommuni...46432323169127/

Quote

Well there is an improvement here in terms of smoothness with vsync enabled. If you try other versions (Megaton/EDuke32) with vsync enabled, and just stand in one spot and spin around in circles using a keyboard turn key, you should notice that the game will alternate between periods of smoothness and stuttering (at refresh rates that are a multiple of 60, at any others it's just constant stutter). I'm not sure why this happens, but I'm guessing it has something to do with a fixed tick rate (60Hz?) for game state updates that is decoupled from rendering updates, without any kind of interpolation to smooth out the jitter that will occur when they invariably fall out of sync. World Tour is the first version I've played that doesn't have this problem, and is perfectly smooth with vsync enabled at any resolution. So that's the good news, and depending on your tastes that could be a huge deal.

Now I don't know much about this subject but from my user perspective the best thing about a modern source port like ZDoom or GZDoom is that you can run Doom engine games at such a high fps that screen tearing simply stops being a problem even without vsync because the tearing is essentially unnoticeable. Somewhy EDuke32 doesn't have this effect, even when I'm rocking 1000 fps in polymost I still get agressive tearing by seeing those two "large" tear lines.

My guess is that this is also why EDuke32's performance appears to be bad when the fps goes below 120 fps while something like 100 or 90 fps is actually not bad at all when you're playing a modern game. I don't know what would be the solution for this problem (getting rid of the fixed tickrate? framerate interpolation? I think that second one is how ZDoom does it) but since Ion Maiden is pushing EDuke32 pretty hard I think it could be hugely benefitting for the user experience if this was solved somehow.

[NightFright]

I just checked Steam ratings. 98% positive with 398 reviews now. That's pretty impressive.

[KaijuTurtle]

I made a video of me playing through the preview campaign. Was going to as soon as it dropped but until update patch my recording software was making things too sluggish to really show it off.

[cybdmn]

oasiz, on 13 March 2018 - 04:04 AM, said:

Friend ran the win exe through wine on OSX with good results apprently.
Aside from some DPI scaling stuff it was very playable.

My MBP is a little bit older, but it runs very well via Wine.

Just a tip for others wo want to try this via Wine: You need Wine in 64bit. I downloaded the installer for wine stable 3.0, for my installed version was far too old.
Fresh installed wine start as an 32 bit version, and you can't start IM. To get 64bit support i opened the wine console, and executed the following commands:

export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine64
rm -rf ~/.wine64
WINEARCH=win64  winecfg

[3rdmillhouse]

This preview campaign is really good, I can't wait for the full game. Maybe Voidpoint has cracked the formula, maybe this retro style of FPS games is the way to go for the Bombshell franchise. Also the sprite work is ridiculously good and the the Loverboy is one of the most satisfying handguns I've ever used in a game.

[gemeaux333]

Perhaps I know the answer by advance, but what about multilanguage translation and dubbing ?