I bought this on the strength of this game's potential, but I have to say this is the current version's primary flaw. It's very difficult to discern terrain height without using the LOS indicator to fish for valid angles, which removes the ability to plan for any kind of tactical use of terrain (without playing a map into the ground until you have a mental map of what is high and low.)

Also, the new keybindings are a bit strange. As far as I can see this isn't a cross platform game, yet there is nothing bound to mouse2, and both alt and tab are assigned to frequently used functions. Combining alt and tab is always a bad time, and the end result is it kind of forces new players to rebind all the controls to their own settings before they can play properly, since the defaults are fruitcake and you can't look them up in the control menu because only the raw keycodes are displayed. I know they're in the readme.txt, but if the game is distributed using an installer you can't expect people to go rooting around in the game directory for text files telling them which buttons to press to play your game. First impressions count.

While we're on the subject of controls, the game seems well suited to dual analog play (for full 360 degree player movement), are there any plans for gamepad support?

I'm still reserving right mouse button for something that will come, possibly to give orders to the squad. I agree alt + tab may be troublesome, it's pretty funny I haven't yet pressed them accidentally myself to switch the window, but I'm sure someone has.

The game is filled with usability issues, most of which will be corrected in the future. The game is not a finished product yet, from which I expect and hope people to understand that first impressions aren't everything. If the game would be final already, those obvious flaws would be pretty disastrous.

Here's one shot from the new isoline shader I'm working with.



It's done in a pixel shader and it brightens/darkens areas at certain heights with constant intervals. Areas at the player's soldier level and below are darker and areas above are brighter. It also avoids shading large areas at the same height by fading off the shading if the terrain normal becomes close to pointing straight up. Works pretty ok I think.

Currently the interval and the overall intensity of the isolines are controllable from keyboard, I think I'll leave it that way until I get the slider UI control done The isolines can be easily turned off by making the intensity 0.