On the road to version 1.2

By Frogboy on June 26, 2009 6:37:27 PM from

Greetings!

Version 1.1 is out! A few house keeping things:

We have put up: http://www.demigodthegame.com/opengames.asp for people who want to keep up with the number of people online which includes also the number of current games, open games, and lurkers.

Second, with v1.1 you can kind-of control the AI with the P (ping) key. Just mouse over where you want the AI to go and it will tend to go there unless it decides there’s a higher priority objective but it works decently (about as well as it does on humans <G>).

Now, with that discussed, let’s talk about version 1.2.

Gas Powered Games is on board to open Demigod up to pretty significant official modding support which I think would be totally awesome. I don’t know if anyone reading this has had a chance to check out the LUA code (scripts). A few mods have already been made but obviously modding right now is a problem because you can’t use them online. We would solve that by having officially sanctioned mods (players would submit them to DemigodTheGame.com and once accepted would be treated much like extra “Game options”). I’d be curious to find out if modders could add new units and such.

But what we are particularly interested in doing with v1.2 is nailing down “features” that users want changed or fixed. So please feel free to use this journal entry as a means to tell us what things you think we could do in v1.2 that would make the game even more fun. Whether that be things I’m already aware of like improved path finding or better queuing up of spell actions or anything else that you feel detracts from the experience.

+897 Karma | 138 Replies

Thanks!

Overhaul the chat system:

1) Movable
2) Sizable
3) Color coding of text
4) Opacity
5) etc.

Custom Games selection screen:

1) Provide ways to distinguish between countries/continents/regions/whatever and group them accordingly
2) Highlight games that have been joined by a friend in your Friend's list
3) etc.

I know you mentioned this in the other post.

Replays and modding for sure. Have the Impulse people get our community feature in for Impulse. Please please get that done!

The minimap being clickable would be a very nice addition, having to scroll everywhere on the map can be a bit frustrating.

Also in the case of generals I would like to be able to see the damage range of my minions on the character sheet (and mini character sheet) (in the case of each general the damage of their main "unique" minion would suffice.

Also possibly the ability to see the damage minions do to others, in the same way damage numbers appear over things your demigod attacks, sometimes I cant tell what my minions are hitting (especially in the case of oak's where they have a tendency to float everywhere) though I can see that getting particularly spammy.

edit: Oh, the ability for (much like in steam) to be able to right click my friends on the community menu and hit "join game" and avoid the custom game screen etc. I know you wanted to add the ability to form groups and play that way (which I defiantely want that was something I have wanted since the game was released) but this is another feature I really love about Steam I would love to see added to Impulse/Demigod

Minimap clickable. Great idea.

I just had a thought...Is there any way to have version of demigod were you are able to create your own demigod?

Uproot, Shamblers, and Yetis could all use some improvement.

That's called modding, yngmod.

I have more ideas. We can see citadel health. What about a toggable window for for forts?

Also: https://forums.demigodthegame.com/355788 That should be the basis of a huge idea. Late game Oak, Sedna, Queen of Thorns have a terrible time targetting the correct teammates or even yourself. Make your own portrait (bottom center picture) targetable and make those windows targetable as well. This would make it so much better.

So the list so far...

Replays

Modding

Minimap clickable

Fort toggable window

Interface enchances ala https://forums.demigodthegame.com/355788

Impulse community features ala friends list/ready to play/etc. should coincide with the next patch.

What else everyone?

I'd like to see some user interface options available eg: maybe you don't like the chat in the top left, you want it bottom left, or bottom right, same with the ability bar maybe you prefer it on the top of the screen.

While an excelent game, it feels like this game is lacks in the traditional RTS strong points. It would be nice to see more about building -- troops or buildings. Eg: a player could by additional minions spawn for the next wave or two. A player could purchase additional towers or long range defence.

i like these ideas

please fix the following:

- more connection issues with 1.1 (takes very long to get a custom game starting). was working fine before 1.1

- still lobby bugs with people being in a different slot than the screen is showing

- favor items have to be bought all over again

- framerates are dropping very low some times! (but get better 1min ater..)

- my characters get stuck all the time or abort movement when i active skills or items, some skills like ooze activate and deactivate only every second time i press the button

- sometimes the buttons (1-4, f1-f4) wont work at all... i have to use the mouse in this case

- alt tab is crashing the game almost always

- unhandled exceptions when starting a custom game, damn often (almost always by now)!!! followed by invalid user error, while trying to log in (some mates even cant get the game closed in this situations, neither with ctrl+alt+del, nor with alt+f4) <--- makes the game unplayable!

- games not counting in the statistics after playing a custom game, or being lost although they had been won.

- ui bugs all the time (radius missing, not casting spells, character standing at one place)

- the statistics page and forum is annoying slow... feels like you are running all game related issues on a pentium 1 with a 1mbit connection??

- the new chat window is ugly and blocks to much of my sight

- impulse chat sends messages way to late and most of the time they dont show up at the screen of the person you wrote to, so you dont get a reply

- random demigof feature not working and the scrollbars are ugly too. 1 option for a random demigod should be enough.

- teamplay awards i.e. for casting shields on allies, or for healing them...

- keep options from ingame settings. every start of the game i have to press tilde many times to get my preferences. (just want to see the healthbars of all demigods)

- make the game options be always visible to the custom game lobby. its just annoying to check the game options in the lobby all the time to see if the host has set up some strange things like strong towers, strong grunts etc.. would be nice if you could see the game´s options while mouseover a game in the custom games list.

-i really would like an option, which lets me decide what happens with the camera when i die and when i get back to life. its annoying that the cam spins around, zooms, whatever...

- After finishing a custom game it would be nice to get back to the online lobby, NOT the main menu!

- would be nice if there would be less gold for kills, but a longer death penalty. this way the lossing team could come back easier and it would make sense to buy the deatch penalty upgrade in the citadelle

- make the win/loss ratio of a player visible in game! annoying to check the stats of all the players with the slow homepage and alt+tab... (i have to play windowed mode in order to be able to see how skilled someone is) else you have no chance to see if the teams in custom games are balanced

- line of the skill´s radius more visible. i.e. the radius of regulu´s snipe... this deep red isn´t easy to be seen

-Being able to target your demigod portrait to cast spells on yourself

-Icons on screen showing your allied demigods and their hp/mana, these are also targetable so if you click heal and then click the portrait your demigod goes on to heal that ally.

Hmm, just off the top of my head:

1) Please let us see the damage from all our minions. Currently some minions will show damage text when they hit a target while others - generally summoned minions - won't ever show damage. It's hard to tell if shamblers are even hitting.

2) Please improve the viability of summoned minions. Purchased minions are great, but many of the summoned minions are a little dicey, especially those that require two or three full skill lines to make useful.

3) I'd love to see an option to permanently set which health bars are displayed instead of having to flip through them every game. Ideally, they'd be broken down by type of unit - friendly DG, friendly creep, owned minion, enemy demigod, etc - each with an on/off. All I really want are my own minions and all demigod health bars, but I'm not sure that's an option at the moment at all, and sometimes an enemy demigod won't display his health bar regardless of the setting.

4) Please fix Torch Bearer's fire autoattack. It cannot be used on the run, unlike other ranged autoattacks.

5) Tweaking favor items might be nice. Currently there's a ton of useful Assassin-only favor items, while Generals end up using very few of their General-only items other than the +mana/sec cloak. This is probably because Generals are extremely mana-intensive and almost none of their favor items do much except boost minions, which are of questionable utility at the moment.

6) Looking into various citadel upgrade costs could be helpful. For example, there's very little reason to purchase the experience bonus, death penalty bonus, or currency upgrades (other than currency 1). Creep damage is also extremely expensive compared to creep health, especially when you could use that gold to simply buy new creeps.

7) Being able to move and resize the new chatbox would be lovely. It's a bit intrusive at the moment.

8) It would be extremely useful to display how many of each minion I currently control, preferably on the main play area somewhere. Right now I find myself hitting the summon buttons frequently, usually seeing a maxed out message, because it's very hard to tell how many of each minion I have when the screen is full of creeps.

9) An optional friendly demigod portrait system would be lovely. It would be very helpful if I could always see my teammates' health on-screen and if I could target them with abilities by using them on their portrait. Right now, heals and shields are sometimes difficult to target when things get cramped, and the lack of a good health bar setting isn't helping, either.

10) Please let us open up all character windows while we're dead. There's not a lot to do while you're waiting 30 seconds, so it seems silly that I can't browse my skills and plan future skill purchases while dead. Also, perhaps consider slightly easing the dark black and white effect so that dead players can at least watch the action a little better.

Edit: Meant TB, not Reg ^^;

How about a a save starting set up feature such as in counterstrike. An example would be say i buy scailmail banded armour capture lock and for my favor item heavens wrath. Now why should i have to spend every game having to rebuy the same items it just waste's time. There should be a save starting setup function.

Unless they changed it Regulus CAN shoot on the run, I have done it many times, but I confess not since 1.1

I will concur with the scroll bars being ugly on the DG selection screen. Making three buttons up top or something would be much better.

Random map option

- mini map clickable

- pantheon & skirmish mode fixed (finally! i'm very bored of waiting 45 minutes to find a decent game)

- make 5vs5 games possible without lag

- a lobby to chat with other people, the impulse sux, you can't even directly invite people from the chat (the "friends system" in impulse sux even more)

- keep up the good work like you're doing right now

Random map
Random demigod working right would be nice
Get rid of Fortress mode on Pantheon/skirmish (oaks last stand exploit)
Some how make game end sooner ( I have experienced very few games below 45 minutes )
Picking the color you want for your demigod in custom instead of where you sit
yeti/shambler overhaul
new items?
new favor items?
fixed connectivity and crashing issues that still linger
REPLAYS

quoting post

I’d be curious to find out if modders could add new units and such.

Modders cannot add new models due to the fact that the models use the Granny 3D format and that there is no exporter that any of us can get to put our models in-game. If GPG could somehow release an exporter for us, then you would see custom models working.

So, aside from unit/structure/map models, you will be able to see custom sound files (FMOD), custom video files (Bink), and all of the other stuff that can be modified with LUA, seeing as all of those are supported and the community has the tools to create it.

Thanks for having the opengames page back up. I really love it and visit it often.

I notice people have mentioned the minimap to be clickable. I think the game is not designed to have the minimap interactive, therefore having it clickable means having the whole minimap redone. Take a look at supreme commander, that had a clickable minimap but it's totally designed on the bottom left like Warcraft3. Demigod is based off of the supcom engine. I rather have the resources spent on other higher priority enhancements.

Thanks for the great patch and keep up the good work.

Wow, everyones being polite and to the point after FB's post, this is great

-Replays

-More viable minions (late game, I give up, and sell mine, especially Minotars)

-Citidel balancing (what bhaiku said). Many things nobody buys. Death Penalty; towers buffs or income past level 1 is rare, or even frowned upon. It would be great if you had a strategic option to spend a lot of money on towers or Grunt upgrades, only to see they were worth the investment (actually scare/hurt/delay the enemy). How about if after someone hit level 20, XP upgrades granted more gold, instead of XP? Or, if the Death Penalty upgrade also gave the enemy less gold/xp when your team died

- Bman's (or simular) Mod; So people can see I'm OOM, So I can see who needs a heal (near impossible in crowded battles).

Maybe tell us a little about the two new demigods coming out? I'm really anxious I kinda wanna know in a new journal from you maybe?

Fixing all of the demigods' auto-attack problems would be nice. As they all suffer from some extent of not doing damage on some moves.

Most of the creep upgrades along with the valor flag does not seem to stack or work properly.

Here's the big thing on my mind though. You said that GPG is looking into official mod support where modders submit their mods and GPG selects good ones and applies them as game options. That sounds absolutely awesome, but....if you take a look at GPGNet's mod vault you'll see hundreds of user created mods. Would this mean that not just anyone could actually upload a mod for them and their friends to play but would have to submit their little mod to GPG just so they can play with a couple friends with it?

I'd hope that GPG goes with the official modding stance where awesome mods can be turned into game options but I would also hope that some sort of mod vault or mod auto-download feature could be implemented for the less awesome mods.

REPLAYS

Fix drop and collect item endless mana abuse.

Fix drop and collect item hp script "immunity".

Quoting transitive,

reply 22

REPLAYS

also...

+ some UI adjustments (though the MOD strategy should take care of this)

+ Better Social Networking in Game and in Impulse (not really 1.2 territory)

so basically:

Replays

The Forums Are Now Closed!

The content will remain as a historical reference, thank you.

On the road to version 1.2