Act of aggression run video test again

2 сен. 2015 г. в 12:04

I installed the game and had to sit through the auto graphics test thing. When it finished I started a solo campaign. I then got really unlucky and another program on my system stole the focus. When I switched the focus back to AoA, it crashed. I then reloaded the game and had to sit through the auto graphics test again, which seems to take forever.

I don't understand the logic of starting off with the lowest setting and then slowly jumping to the next setting. That is the slowest possible way to find what the system can handle.

It would be best to start off at 50%, then if the system can handle it you jump to 75%, if it couldn't handle it you jump to 25% etc. You know, the good old binary chop method that has been around for years :-)

It would only take a few tests to get to what the system could handle, rather than having to go through every single test.

2 сен. 2015 г. в 12:48

Not a big problem

Only happen on first start

2 сен. 2015 г. в 13:19

Not true, I had it twice lol

It's such a simple fix and it would improve the user experience.

It's the little things that make the difference at the end of the day. If you ignore all the little things you end up with a low quality product.

My first experience of this game makes me feel like they were under a lot of pressure to meet a deadline, and they haven't got all the bugs worked out yet. There are a lot of little things that I find annoying, so I'm not going to play it until it gets a few patches under it's belt.

I like this style of game though, so I'm hoping it gets better.

2 сен. 2015 г. в 13:25

The only reason you had to sit through it twice is because you crashed, therefore the game didn't save your settings (since you must properly exit the game in order for it to do so). Since it's just a one-time thing, provided you don't crash, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. The test only takes like what, 30 seconds to complete?

My first experience of this game makes me feel like they were under a lot of pressure to meet a dead line, and they haven't got all the bugs worked out yet. There are a lot of little things that I find annoying, so I'm not going to play it until it gets a few patches under it's belt.

Could you elaborate? It definitely isn't a flawless game. Thankfully Eugen did a great job listening to the community during the beta, though, and I expect that to continue well beyond release.

2 сен. 2015 г. в 13:38

>> therefore the game didn't save your settings (since you must properly exit the game in order for it to do so).

How awesome would it have been if the game did though. Meaning, run the test and at the end of the test save straight away. There isn't any point in waiting for the game to exit once you already have the result you wanted.

In my experience in programming (which I've been doing for many years) there are different mindsets. There is the mindset that says "That will never happen", or "People won't mind having to do that" etc. They are normally OK programmers and get the job done. They will never be great programmers though, that create something really awesome.

If you have the mindset "Let's make it easier for the user, no matter how hard it is for us to do". Then you end up with amazing products.

>>Thankfully Eugen did a great job listening to the community during the beta,

That is great to hear and that means this game should become really good, in time.

I will happily compile a list of things that I don't like and I think could be improved upon. That is something I could do over the weekend.

2 сен. 2015 г. в 21:32

Annoying but needed. Steam should really pre-qualify systems and let game developers see if your system is vetted and if you can really run the game.

3 сен. 2015 г. в 1:37

Yeah I know :-( My point though, is there is a more efficient way of testing.

At the moment the test goes through every single possible test. It doesn't need to do that. There has been a method in computing called binary chop (aka binary search) that isn't just limited to database searches. It can be used in any situation where you have a sorted list to go through. That method has been around since before 1960, and actually even before computers existed really. If you had a dictionary and you wanted to find a word that began with the letter J, you wouldn''t go through each page from the start, you would open the dictionary somewhere near where you think J is, and then work it out from there.

Here we have a situation where the test goes from the lowest quality, to the highest quality. That is a sorted list. So instead of incrementing through each test, the system should start in the middle, if the system can handle the middle test, then you can skip testing all the lower settings. You then have another sorted list middle to top. So once again you start at the new Middle etc. repeat until you reach what the system can handle.

Using the binary chop method, you should only need to do about 3 or 4 tests (maybe 5). Instead of about 10.

Also the system should save the results staright away after all the tests have run. There isn't any point in waiting for the game to exit before saving the test result.

It's the little things that make a good game, a great game :-)