1.0 pre release - impressions, proposals, bugs?

[Azagatoth]

first of all my compliments to the developer team. since yesterday i can play the pre-release and i am impressed by the improvements since 0.9. keep up the good work!

first impressions:
-trading is now much more similar as in the old privater (although i miss selling radioactives on helen, that was a profit...)

-the talons are still not to be underestimated, two or three well armed ones can be a real nuisance and a single one is only dangerous if you ignore it... good balance for gameplay in my opinion. (next thing i try is to fire 2 image rec missiles in its back, this worked perfectly fine in the original game but i doubt it does here, they are a bit tougher)

-much better solution to keep the base background small. those old pictures looked bad in higher resolution.
(...) i'll keep it short here

proposals:
-add a price or a price list to the buy-screen of the quadrant maps i couldn't find one and was quite surprised when i accidentally bought one for more money i wanted to spare back then. is there a way to see, which maps i already possess?

-during flight, after i pause the game, it is not possible to alt+tab out. this works while i am landed on a base. could this be added?

-i missed an entry in my cargo manifest: available empty space

-in the mission computer, there is no indication how far the mission targets are away. i also missed this in the original game. could there be a number added, that indicates the necessary jumps to reach the target?

possible bugs - at least some things i am not sure they are meant to be this way:
-yesterday, i was able to buy uranium (about 15) on perry naval base. for 0.00 credits. nice earning after selling it on a refinery for over 400. if this was accidentally, please don't fix it
btw, the uranium was the only thing available there... or was there also some weaponry? not sure about it

-i searched the manual for ecm systems and found it. after activating my system with alt+e and pressing "r", i could see it working. fine. then i tried to deactivate it because the manual said it costs energy but it wasn't possible. pressing alt+e again made the entry ECM "active" flicker but it did not switch to "deactivated". and no, i had no hostile missile at my back. no reason to auto-activate the system.

-i saw a hunter and a militia craft fire on an opening jump-field. (on two different occasions) there was no target in sight yet and i am not sure which ships wanted to jump in.

-today, i was chasing software, computers and pilots with my tractor beam and i was quite successful. after 10 minutes or so (there were lots of targest floating around) a confed ship started to search my tarsus for contraband. bad thing.. before i could decide if i should run or fight it out with very bad odds, the confed declared me a target. luckily they were quite a distance away so i ignored them at first. a short while later they informed me that "my profile was clear to sectors edge"... ?? fine, so no bust-the-smuggler today?
this happened again and they left me in peace twice. during those procedures, the faction relations was reduced from +100 to +99 and the second time to +98. ins't this a bit sparse?
i mean, don't get me wrong, i am a very loyal and righteous trader and i give ejected pilots just a ride to the next planet. no reason to bust this old tarsus at the first opportunity.
maybe the relation should be reduced by 10 per possible smuggling attempt?

-the last thing are the golden guns you can see in on the added pictures (if i manage to include them). this happened in a system with colourful bright golden background. maybe tiggerhoff? somewhere up there.
the ship looked normal at the shipdealer and in the landing platform, just the guns still reflected the background.

(thanks for reading this monster-text )

 

[hellcatv]

thanks for some insightful comments...

I was under the impression that anyone who scanned you would end up getting very mad at you...but that new confed you might encounter would not... was this not the case...

perhaps I didn't test at +100 with confed...but the insystem guys certainly get more than -1 mad...it's just that's the permanent ratio

 

[MamiyaOtaru]

-yesterday, i was able to buy uranium (about 15) on perry naval base. for 0.00 credits. nice earning after selling it on a refinery for over 400. if this was accidentally, please don't fix it

Certainly not supposed to be possible. Price of 0 means that base does not sell or buy that product, it simply shouldn't be available. I wonder why that is though, you'd think Perry would have a use for uranium. I'll look into it.

-i searched the manual for ecm systems and found it. after activating my system with alt+e and pressing "r", i could see it working. fine. then i tried to deactivate it because the manual said it costs energy but it wasn't possible.

It's supposed to start out on; I don't believe it uses any energy in Privateer. If I'm wrong, then yeah it would be nice to turn it off.

-i saw a hunter and a militia craft fire on an opening jump-field. (on two different occasions) there was no target in sight yet and i am not sure which ships wanted to jump in.

Just an oddity of the game. AI ships fire at jump points to activate them hehe

i mean, don't get me wrong, i am a very loyal and righteous trader and i give ejected pilots just a ride to the next planet. no reason to bust this old tarsus at the first opportunity.

Maybe you should let the pilots you pick up out of your hold instead of keeping them locked up

-the last thing are the golden guns you can see in on the added pictures (if i manage to include them). this happened in a system with colourful bright golden background. maybe tiggerhoff? somewhere up there.

The ship is lit with the same light when landed as it is in space. The guns have weird reflectice properties that don't really match the ships at all, it's something I'd like to change. The guns probably looked like that in space too?

Thanks for the feedback

 

[Azagatoth]

Maybe Perry Naval Base simply wants to get rid of its nuclear waste? ...no problem, let me give it a hand...

correction to my proposal: alt+tab out of the game during paused flight works. must have been a temporary problem last time, sorry.

if i am in this system, the guns look golden too. the whole ship reflects the light. the difference is, in the hangar the ship looks normal again.
talking about guns, do you have plans to include damaged guns as pictures? like in the original? (would be a nice extra, quite unimportant, i admit)

 

[Azagatoth]

SCANNING FOR CONTRABAND

i tried to get new information on militia and confeds scanning for contraband - here are the results:
after picking up a floating pilot, a militia ship starts to scan. i continued with my patrol mission and checked 3 nav points with my autopilot. a second militia starts scanning. after about 5 minutes, the first militia detects nothing... i check my manifest: 1 pilot. ok, lets see what the second one does. he calls me a "filthy little brilliance runner", my relations with militia reduces to +99. this one must have very much better scanners than the first one. he could detect that my rescued pilot was on brilliance while the other didn't even detect the whole pilot.

several flights later, i am again rescuing pilots (btw, i do not shoot their ships, i just pick them up), a militia gladius detects my pilot immediately, relations drop by 1, he accelerates into my direction and aborts his attack after a few seconds.

and the last report for today:
another flight, militia gladius starts scan, finds nothing -at that moment, i was on the way to my 5th pilot- i pick him up. confed scans my ship and finds contraband, relations drops to +99.
i pick up my 6th, militia scans and finds nothing.
all in all i picked up 7 pilots in this flight which was more than i ever had.

my impression is that confeds always find pilots, militia not always. i cannot say if it is different with other illegal stuff. maybe i check later, with a faster ship.

i hope this helps you find the problem.

 

[Lazy Panda]

-trading is now much more similar as in the old privater (although i miss selling radioactives on helen, that was a profit...)

There is a nice trick on this:
Since 0.9 savegames can be inserted into Privateer Remake 1.0 just by changing directory, you can use 0.9 to make plenty of profit with troy runs and then switch to 1.0

 

[Azagatoth]

stuff to be fixed

thanks you for the trick... fitting name... ;D

can someone give me a hand here, i'm new to this forum and i don't know where to post bug reports. (so i just place it here and hope...)

1. after i purchased the centurion, the tractor beam was not displayed in action. it worked and it used energy but i could not see it. after several jumps, landings and re-starts of the game it worked. don't know why.

2. the "game-paused-after-jump bug" hellcatv told me to lookout for appears now and then. after the jump nothing moves except rotating space garbage and the mouse crosshair. can't tell you more about it. seems like the machine has to load a lot.

3. the afterburner sound is sometimes very faint. happens now and then, maybe it's a problem of my machine.

4. i did the first mission for destinee in the tiggerhoff refinery bar ("remove" all pirates in the af-?? system). after i come back to the refinery, the landing pad behaves normal but after entering the concourse the games crashes. the people still move and those fighters in the window still fly but no matter where i place my pointer, the only selection is "concourse". no ship dealer, no bar, no landing pad. see for yourself...

 

[MamiyaOtaru]

1: known issue, being worked on

2: what kind of pause are we talking about? It's pretty normal to get a five second pause or so. I never see anything longer than that. Try fiddling with your settings. Tell setup you have more RAM so it precaches things, and try without using VBO.

3: Is it faint all the time or only some of the time? If it is all the time you can try increasing afterburner_gain in the config file.

4: lol. work in progress

 

[JKeefe]

MY afterburner is faint some of the time, too. Sometimes refireing it fixes it, sometimes not.

Annoying, but not critical.

 

[Azagatoth]

yes, not critical. it happens now and then. most of the time it is as it should be.
...have you already thought about an alternative sound, something more powerful than a leaky valve?
i mean, it doubles your speed...

good to see, that you already know the issues. maybe i can find something you do not know yet.

what about this: yesterday i accepted 2 missions of the merchants guild. after that i asked the mission computer if he had something for the same location. those 2 merchant missions were not displayed as "active missions", so i (having played 0.9 the last weeks) thought my cargo hold was too small and i simply couldn't do them.
ok, no problem, so i accepted another 2 missions at the mission computer. in space i had 4 active missions. (weren't they limited to a maximum of 3?)

 

[hellcatv]

mission problem: fixed