Some kudos to Gas Powered Games

By Frogboy on May 27, 2009 10:56:36 PM from

Working late into the evening, GPG has sent us an updated v1.01 build based on recent feedback on the forums. Yes, GPG is reading the forums in case you were wondering and have put together some exciting stuff.

Here are some of the additional new features that will be in v1.01:

Here is a quote from the log:

· Fixed chat history and announcement text overlays interference with mouse clicks.

· Switched order of data calls after hosting.

· Teleportation effect failure handling.

· AI

1. Adjustments to caution and hazard detection and avoidance.

2. Adjusted health level flee percentage.

3. Demigods do not use minions when fleeing, may summon minions in combat.

4. Improved teleportation

5. Increased Demigod planning frequency

6. Improved item usage when endangered.

7. Tower tag improved.

And last but not least:..

· Moving targets in Ability task now properly handled (the famous “Sedna bug”)

This was finally isolated by bman654 who went beyond the call of duty to actually track down the specific lines of script that call the function. Special kudos to him.

Although we didn’t use his “patch”, we did edit the exact functions he had isolated, and cleaned up quite a lot of surrounding script. The forums are expecting this fix, and we would love to encourage more excellent sleuthing like he did.

We’ll be testing this tomorrow. I can’t promise we’ll be able to get it out tomorrow though (and there won’t be any updates either way on Friday as that’s just playing with fire). But we are going to try very hard and enlist extra QA from the apps QA team to expedite.

+897 Karma | 62 Replies

I get tired of getting excited when I see patch notes that 'fix' a known issue then find the issue still there.

It is mildy humorous to see the same item in 4-5 sets of patch notes in a row though.

I get tired of getting excited when I see patch notes that 'fix' a known issue then find the issue still there.

Some bugs just refuse to die; ask Bliar, I made him a monkey's uncle once upon a time (long story). What's generally happening in these cases, is that there are multiple causes for one 'single' bug, and fixing one cause will fix it in some cases, but not all. With bugs that can't be reproduced reliably (for example, the 'sedna' bug is one the devs don't run into because they don't play the same way we do) it's difficult to test 'in house'.

I gotta say as a single player gamer I've already bought my two copies. I mean sure, I don't go playing it every day but when my brother was home I got quite a few games in on the LAN...so maybe it'd be more correct to call me an 'offline' gamer. I get around 80k upload and download at the moment, so apparently that's not quite up to standards for this game. Ah well.

Just fyi - this game only requires 1 copy to play over lan legally.

I'll QA for ya my ping spikes so bad I cant play the game anyway.

does 1.01 even address ping spikes ?

Quoting Harkonis,

reply 1

(for example, the 'sedna' bug is one the devs don't run into because they don't play the same way we do)

To be honest, I don't see how "targeting someone who is behind you" is like, some weird alternative method of gameplay that every tester missed.

Then again, apparently no one ever left a game during beta, otherwise they would've fixed the "You get to stare at the connectivity dialog for 30 seconds" issue.

To be honest, I don't see how "targeting someone who is behind you" is like, some weird alternative method of gameplay that every tester missed.

Then again, apparently no one ever left a game during beta, otherwise they would've fixed the "You get to stare at the connectivity dialog for 30 seconds" issue.

Well #1 was officially posted in January - and yah we knew about it a long time before that

#2 didn't exist, there was no 30 second delay, you just got split games (which still happens, though it wasn't introduced in Beta until late March)

Beta testers reported this stuff - don't blame us

Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to trash the testers. The significant part of my quote was "...is one the devs don't run into...".

It just seems like GPG was either inept or naive when it came to responding to these reports. Judging from the fact that these bugs were reported (albeit not very clearly in some cases) but not responded to in any way seems to validate that opinion.

Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to trash the testers. The significant part of my quote was "...is one the devs don't run into...".

I was semi-quoting from an earlier GPG post -- apparently we aren't talking about the same bug

I was refering to the one where if you use too moves to close together (e. g. swarm then bite) it occasionally 'locks' the character until you issue a move command. This bug is one the devs don't run into because (and I didn't 100% understand this) they 'knew' that issueing two commands to close together slowed the character down because of the way the command queue system worked.

Quoting the_hunger,

reply 4

@twifightDG

Thanks very much for your thoughtful post. I'll be sure to look for your review of the "new" AI.

(+1 Karma)

Only played one game so far, but there is definately an improvement. Especially early on in the game, AI demigods will 'kamikaze' less into the enemy base. I still had 2 of those silly chases (had probably around 10 before) where they were bound to get sniped by the towers, but overall they run away sooner, not entirely, just retreating to their nearest tower. Maybe not entirely up to par yet, but atleast they won't feed as much, giving the other team a great advantage in gold and xp. AI seems more survivable now.

Two things I noticed though, albeit maybe not entirely AI related, is that my demigod didn't move to a flag to cap it when I clicked it. Some of my minions did. And secondly alt click to attack move only works one third of the time for me.

I'll play some more later, hopefully seeing a bit more of the AI. I'll update when due

Another (long, long, long) game played, with 5vs5 on normal difficulty. I think it was on Prison (the dark 5vs5 map).

Rook kamikazed a couple of times in the beginning, being a bit overconfident. Might be the class vs class thing, rook is very slow eary on and can be quite vulnerable. But he chased enemy DGs into their towers, which you don't surive <lvl10. Enemy AI seemed quite keen on teaming up on me, which is good. Too bad my own AI teamplayers didn't do the same with me. Overall in the game the AI was suprisingly competative in a positive way. Teamin up, running away when they should, they were on the winning hand for most of the game, till my rooks (I had two on my team) got into towermunching mode and we could make some headway.

Erebus still has a 'bug' that in the Prison map he will go for the enemy gold mine (right next to our citadel) without caring for much else. Often he won't even grab the minion spawn flag which is along the way. This all I could understand. What I don't get is why he will keep standing at the gold flag, doing nothing. If I port there to attack him his minions will attack me but he does little and I can always just kill him off, not even having to use special powers. This must be a bug. It was there before the v1.01 patch.

Thanks for the updates, twifightDG. It sounds like the AI has definitely improved. While I've decided to hold out until the demo is released before making a decision to buy the game, the improved AI is very encouraging. I do hope that they sort out the remaining bugs and get those 2 new demigods (and a few more maps) out promptly.

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Some kudos to Gas Powered Games