Diaspora release

[Sushi]

Alright, covering a few more points:

QUOTE the last dogfight of the training mission surprised me enough that I actually lost.[/quote]
Congratulations, you've found the one actually difficult dogfight in the game. Turn up the difficulty for a really intense duel.
That second training mission is the only one to use an AI that isn't completely nerfed. Unfortunately, in order to be able to have a survivable show-like experience (lots of Raiders) we needed to make them all pretty dumb.

QUOTE Default control setup sucks[/quote]
Rumor has it the upcoming patch (this weekend) will provide more sane default keyboard bindings. I can't really confirm that since now that the game is out, I've retired and don't hang out on the IRC channel all day anymore.

QUOTE Four years and how many people?[/quote]
Many dozens, I think, with about 5 actually active at any given time.

QUOTE now I get crashing, suspect memleak[/quote]
Might be fixed in the aforementioned patch: people are getting a lot of crashes especially in M6, and apparently that will get fixed.

QUOTE I like how flying feels in general, but sidethrusting could use some substantial improvement. The part where you align with the drone in the training mission is...unpleasant. The controls just feel too sensitive. On the other hand, when flying the Viper in combat I feel like the sidethrusting hardly does anything.[/quote]
Unfortunately the Freespace engine has a really annoying exponential-decay curve for thrust that makes it really hard to do fine thrust movements of any kind (it's like there's a minimum amount of thrust applied no matter how quickly you tap the sidethrust key). Maybe it'll get fixed at some point, but it simply wasn't a high enough priority while we were working on it.
The other half of your complaint, about sidethrust being useless in combat... the Viper actually has the least effective sidethrust of any of the fighters (well, except for the 7E). The Raider, on the other hand, has very powerful sidethrust, and is able to use it to much greater effect.
I'm hoping multiplayer will allow all of the fighters to shine in their own way: Mk7 as the tank, Raider with sidethrust and acceleration, Adv Raider sacrificing a bit of that for higher top speed and missile capacity, Mk2 with super-fast ship rotation. (Mk2 has been balanced, but not released in R1 since we don't have a cockpit for it yet).

QUOTE The objective seems to be.....shallow. No real feel of combat or satisfaction of accomplishment.[/quote]
Valid criticism. For this release, we basically opted to prioritize on "make it feel like the show" rather than focusing on gameplay depth. Unfortunately, keeping it show-like also puts some tricky constraints on how to make the gameplay more interesting. Hopefully the Diaspora team will be able to do more interesting things in future releases. But for now, the emphasis is on atmosphere, not tactical depth.

That said, I'm really hoping that when people get around to trying multiplayer, they find the dogfighting challenging and satisfying. Alleg players will likely wipe the floor with everyone else.

[HSharp]

I'm not really fond of the FS engine, you need to change the interface of everything to make it a really nice game otherwise it just seems like another mod. That's just my opinion of course, haven't tried out the game and I'm sure it's fun but im just plain sick of FS2 games because they all seem far too similar with each other.

[jbansk]

I'd like to add that the feel of real control of your ship is lacking in this game.

The turn rate seems too slow and the turn "drift" (turn continues after pointer is stopped) makes it very difficult to acquire a target. In other words, the yoke is sloppy and the ship needs some more drag such as an atmosphere might provide. I know this is space, but to enjoy flying in space combat, you need to have less "asteroids-like" feel and more top-gun feel.

When you turn toward a target, you are forced to apply way too much opposite pointer movement to get your ship to stop turning. You then have to do this constantly while trying to keep your target in your crosshairs. Too much controller movement is necessary and it steals your focus from the other events outside your ship.

Playing allegiance, we've become used to a "side-thrust" type of dogfighting. Ships don't pass each other as they do in real flight combat or in the freespace realm. With this kind of enertia and lack of space drag, combat will be more of a jousting style such as in LucasArts X-Wing Alliance (with less controller response). The unfortunate downside to the jousting type of space combat is that you are going to go crazy trying to kill an opponent who does not want to be killed.

The game theme seems so much like X-wing Alliance except it doesn't have the familiarity of Star Wars to keep your attention. Once you play a few missions, you become bored, I'm sorry to say.

The beautiful thing about Allegiance is that there are objectives within objectives which together build a complex and unique mission for the players. No two games are alike even though they share the same tactics. Allegiance also brings the players into a natural conflict because of the need for territorial domination.

Diaspora seems to lack these very fundamental components and gives you only the space flight with arcade shooting.

I really do like the graphics though.

[Compellor]

QUOTE (jbansk @ Sep 8 2012, 11:12 AM) When you turn toward a target, you are forced to apply way too much opposite pointer movement to get your ship to stop turning. You then have to do this constantly while trying to keep your target in your crosshairs. Too much controller movement is necessary and it steals your focus from the other events outside your ship.

Yeah, a rotdamp value of 0.5 (0.6 on the strike viper) might have been a little high. I think .4 would have been closer to how a heavy interceptor flies (though the physics just aren't quite the same regardless), and 0.35 is standard for Freespace 2 fighters.

[Kevdude]

QUOTE (Doc Izzo @ Sep 6 2012, 04:17 AM) I vaguely recall another game like this called, also called Diaspora, that I played in the early 2000's. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

I also recall a game called Diaspora iirc it was a 2d space trading/combat game?

Edit: http://pdiaspora.sourceforge.net/

This one Drizz?