F.A.O Developers. From a new player.

[Darksat82]

I've been playing for two days after spotting this title many times over the last few months. I didn't pick it up initially as I am becoming averse to partially finished games involving square blocks.

 

But what I've just seen is frankly so impressive for a small title that I came to congratulate you.

 

So I've started to build auto mining ships. Now, anyone who knows anything of the tech side of gaming, knows how bloody difficult it is to get an A.I NPC component to behave in an adaptive manner.

 

For example, its very easy to record a set path for an AI to follow over a given time, its not so easy to tell an AI to make its own way to point B avoiding obstacles and unforeseen events as it see's fit.

 

I did a test. I told my tiny 300m/s mining ship to escort me, I then bolted off at 1800m/s and jumped using gates to 3 gates away. I thoroughly expected the AI to freak out, cancel the order and be left dangling in the original sector.

 

I went and made some food, and ten minutes later it warped in by my side.

 

I know there are bugs, but for a small dev team on a tiny game this is rather impressive. Space Engineers, with 6 million dollars in the bank and 6 years developing the title (space engineers is it's second incarnation) AI autonomy is still non existent unless you are a programmer in C and even then 50% of the time it will lamps itself into an asteroid. Even the mods haven't been able to address this.

 

Combat, again is impressive. I've had near two dozen ships taking chunks out of each other with no slow down. And its fun, and lucrative.

 

Basically, I am saying thank you, as you appear to have given me a game called Freelancer, crossed with the market economy of elite, and the creativity of space engineers.

 

Suggestions:

1. Slow down the target select when holding tab so that it only rotates through no more than 6 targets a second. Any faster than this is near impossible to track with the human eye resulting in much back and forth via TAB / CTRL+TAB to find your target. This cuts spamming the tab key when looking for resources as you can hold it down and scan the objects as they rotate through the targeting window with better visual acuity for selecting the target.

 

2. A method to turn off inertial dampeners (unless I've missed something) so that you can rocket up to speed but drift rather than having to spam the w key for the journey.

 

3. The music, is... nice enough but after an hour is a little annoying, sorry to the composer, nothing wrong with their talents, it just doesn't seem to sit in the background. I get what they were trying to do but I find this works better.  ;D

 

I have more but they are relatively simple things I felt would make for an easier life in game but they by no means spoil it. I look forward to the finished product. At which point I am sure a playable version of Star Citizen will only be several years away... *sigh*

 

Cheers. From a grumpy old gamer.

[Ravien]

You can turn off flight assist (I think that's what it's called). I forget exactly where you go but you can see a screen with all your ship's systems and you can manually deactivate any that you want.

 

You can also bind it to a key in the keybindings.