[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 ?

[Micky C]

gemeaux333, on 13 March 2018 - 08:05 PM, said:

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

Because the game's strongest feature is its plot and dialogue

[Sanek]

gemeaux333, on 13 March 2018 - 08:05 PM, said:

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

Oh come on, translation can be useful I guess, but the idea of dubbing is just ridiculous! Image classic Build games in any language other than english. It'll lost half of it's charm!

[TerminX]

Text translation will be in but no foreign language voiceovers.

[gemeaux333]

Dubbing can be great if its well handled, and only if !

I could have suggested a name for the french voice of bombshell, but look like it won't happen...

[VGA]

gemeaux333, on 14 March 2018 - 09:49 AM, said:

Dubbing can be great if its well handled, and only if !

I could have suggested a name for the french voice of bombshell, but look like it won't happen...

It's just a small studio, they don't want to pay several translators and voice actors for voiced translations!

[OpenMaw]

It's always down to that pesky thing... Resources.

[Danukem]

Commando Nukem, on 14 March 2018 - 01:45 PM, said:

It's always down to that pesky thing... Resources.

Even big studios often do a poor job of getting equivalent voice actors for different languages, and players often prefer to hear it in the original language. Having translations for the menus and messages while leaving the audio intact makes sense, it's not just a budget thing. They could also add a subtitles option for the different languages if they wanted to.

[cybdmn]

Commando Nukem, on 14 March 2018 - 01:45 PM, said:

It's always down to that pesky thing... Resources.

In this case, the resources are just one reason, but i think localized one-liners would make no sense. These one-liners just worked as they are. If you produce a game with a big story and many conversations from the protagonists, or much narration, a localization would make much more sense.

[gemeaux333]

There is another point I wanna make when it comes to translation/dubbing : except if you belong to the country of the game, you might hardly understand the jokes and/or references, for language bareer and cultural reasons...

There is another solution : like in the Shadow Warrior reboot, display subtitles for the lines/quotes and translate it !

[Perro Seco]

gemeaux333, on 14 March 2018 - 02:41 PM, said:

There is another solution : like in the Shadow Warrior reboot, display subtitles for the lines/quotes and translate it!

Sorry but I think that is totally unnecessary. And I'm from Spain.

[Zaxx]

Perro Seco, on 14 March 2018 - 04:10 PM, said:

Sorry but I think that is totally unnecessary. And I'm from Spain.

Yeah, I agree. Instead make a joke dub where Jon St. John is playing a woman.

[3rdmillhouse]

Trooper Dan, on 14 March 2018 - 01:55 PM, said:

Even big studios often do a poor job of getting equivalent voice actors for different languages, and players often prefer to hear it in the original language. Having translations for the menus and messages while leaving the audio intact makes sense, it's not just a budget thing. They could also add a subtitles option for the different languages if they wanted to.

Too true, I'm Brazilian and here people usually stay away from locally dubbed games unless they can't read or speak english, the dubbing is usually atrocious with the very notorious example of the latest Mortal Kombat game who was met was country-wide mockery from gamers.

[MrFlibble]

Got around to playing again, this time on hard difficulty. Indeed gameplay becomes much more fluid, and there's use for all weapons, although I found the shotgun to be much hit-and-miss (sometimes you score a hit in a single shot, but sometimes the same enemy doesn't go down after three when you reload the save game and try again; but that's in the version before the update, haven't tried the updated one yet). I haven't noticed the ammo to be scarce though, it seems quite plentiful.

Secrets are fun to looks for and find. Some jumping sections require quite a bit of savegame reloading though, it's all too easy to miscalculate your jump and fall off those steel beams. I haven't figured out if the secret area message could be set to appear at the centre of the screen instead of in the same place as pickup messages (a la certain Doom ports).

Do the enemies respawn on hard? If yes then it's done very nicely, without overwhelming the player.

[NightFright]

Zaxx, on 14 March 2018 - 04:14 PM, said:

Yeah, I agree. Instead make a joke dub where Jon St. John is playing a woman.

Actually in World Tour, his performance sometimes was not far off from that.