***I will make this post in both the steam and official forums. Link to steam post: http://steamcommunity.com/app/270150/di ... 622323188/

Suggestions:
Fade footstep sounds between speakers: With the sound design as it is, the very moment that someone runs across the very middle of your screen, their footstep sound is 100% in the left or right speaker (depending on which side they ran to. This makes it pretty difficult to audibly track allies or enemies. Having their footsteps slowly transition from one speaker to the other (and also volume based on proximity) would help tremendously in establishing where your team mate or the enemy is coming from...rather than continuously sounding 1 distance and 1 direction away.

Type numbers for sliders while making a match: This is in reference to how much xp and rp you start with. Being able to type the number you want would make the process quite a bit easier when you have a specific number in mind (especially very even numbers). I used to have it on 5k even...now I couldn't slide it back to that number to save my life.

Map preview for map select: Have a thumbnail of the map (or some kind of preview of it) pop up when your cycling through selecting one for a match would be helpful. It'll be a while before I am able to remember what each map is like.

Enable the player to affect his own strategy (AI strat or bust): As it stands, if I feel that capturing a certain area would be more beneficial to the game than the commander...I'm pretty much screwed. There's currently no way to direct the flow of battle towards a more logical position thus leaving you to capture the desired area essentially alone. This is an open-ended suggestion, but I feel it needs to be done...especially since the game is designed to be played as a team..i.e. you are a grunt with non-heroic sway in the fight making solo capture VERY VERY VERY difficult.

Official Quick Match Ending: Right now, you win a fight and everything just awkwardly stops and there's a little commander message that says you won the fight. I think giving the player more feedback would help them feel like they accomplished something. Maybe some kind of temporary pop up that says "Victory!" or "Defeat!" on it with some cool art work and maybe some cheering or booing crowd sounds depending on win or loss. As it is right now...when I won a quick match I just thought.."Oh...well I guess that's it...". I really didn't feel like I had done much because there was no feedback given to me (sort of like a dog doing a trick and getting no treat). It's small and psychological, but it would go a long way for those of us who really enjoy going solo vs. AI.

I WAS going to suggest single player pause since I hadn't seen a confirmation for it, but I just found a post that said it was planned. Yay!!


There you have it!! Hope these are at least constructive..if not useful.

The stereo panning is already handled in smooth manner. What kind of speakers do you use?

There's also distance based volume fading and low pass filtering for sounds that are originating from farther away.


You have all the enablers. You can call paratroopers at a location, it's common to need to use several 8x paratrooper drops to capture another location while your commander keeps pushing at another.

Depending on how many bots you've got set up in the match, you can at times easily capture a less defended side base with a squad of 5 without calls too.


The game is designed to be played in 3 different ways:
* run & gun with the main attack group
* have a squad of your own and support the main attack group or lead an attack to another base
* go lonewolf and stealth by dropping all your squadmates out and execute certain side objectives harming enemy substantially for the main attack group to push forward easier

Using only one of the 3 ways throughout a game session is probably not the best way if you're looking to complete a match.


You can also go change the settings directly in the files with Notepad if you like typing You also gain access to many more options that way.

Quick matches are no longer considered the main mode to play RWR in. At this stage quick matches mainly serve for testing purposes of gameplay mechanics and new assets for campaign, and as basis for sandboxy PvP gaming.

The options available for quick matches will change in the future, you can't currently e.g. dial in boosts / nerfs for your / enemy teams like in campaign. This can make quick matches immensely difficult, as even in Hard setting in campaign, the player faction is configured to have a capacity boost over the enemy.

There's a shitton of useful options the quick matches could have but we can't really add them all in as it would defeat the purpose of having a UI in the first place to dial in settings. We'd need to make new decisions on which things are customizable in the match menu and which are expected to be done as mods. This thought-work won't progress until we're done with 0.96 and 0.97.


We had a crude placeholder image for the map ending situation but due to a bug it has gone disabled since several versions now (media/packages/vanilla/textures/hud_victory.png). Ideally I'd use something else than just the image for it, but let's see. The ending pimp up has been on the radar for 3 years now, but you can probably understand it's not the most important thing Sure, it'll be in there for 1.0 in one form or another, same as the campaign can't just end abruptly once you're finished with the last map (which doesn't exist).

I'm using Sennheiser HD 428 headphones plugged into my laptop. Tanks and gunfire and just about every thing else are handled smoothly and apply the low pass filter, but footsteps seem to have one constant volume and transition between speakers almost immediately (or maybe just a very, very quick but smooth transition) once the source crosses the center of the screen. I'll do some double checking on that later today.



This is true once you're at the appropriate rank in campaign (or playing multiplayer where you start off with enough experience to make those calls), but I'm about 10 hours in and only have access to 4x paratroopers (I think I'm pretty close to having 8x soon). Do you all intend for the first 5-10 hours to be like a tutorial type of thing? If so then limiting the starting player to where they have to follow the commander makes sense. Or maybe its a realism-in-ranking thing where low rank soldiers would have no free reign/commanding power in real war and so it is in RWR. Elaboration on the purpose of limiting the player so that he, essentially, "must" follow the commander in the first several rankings (freedom prior to more advanced radio calls/personal squad cap is heavily discouraged) would be helpful here.



I guess what I was getting at here was not a critique of the amount of tactics available to the player, but rather a supplement to my suggestion to be able to direct soldiers a little more fluidly rather than leaving 100% of soldier concentration up to the commander. However, this could possibly be cleared up once the questions above are elaborated on.



I would imagine the notepad thing would take a bit longer.. haha! It'd just be a small quality of life improvement to just click the numbers and type out "5000" or whatever you want rather than tediously moving that slider to just the right spot.

To clarify (even though much of the rest of the post was somewhat of a tangent), are you saying that campaign and pvp are considered the main modes that RWR is intended to be played in? If not, what is your team's vision for how you ultimately see RWR primarily being played? Are you trying to phase out quick matches? Or is it simply a tacked on addition to appease the folk such as myself who enjoy skirmish AI modes?



Good to know.

At least both on my headphones and 2.1 speaker setup I can hear a smooth transition from one side to another if I e.g. run alone in the lobby and first look as far as possible to one side with camera and then take camera to the other side, so that the sound source of my soldier goes from one side of screen to another.


Hmm something sounds way odd about this. 8x paratrooper call unlocks somewhere at 4k XP which you should gain in about 4 hours of gameplay if you're playing with Hard difficulty, even sooner if you're with Less hard. 10 hours in you should be nearing 10k XP and probably close to completing the campaign, or maybe done it 3 hours ago.

But well, those relations of numbers are based on stats from veteran players, nothing wrong with playing it a bit longer if you're only getting to know the game, but going twice longer seems maybe a bit unintended.

You are playing with either Hard or Less hard difficulty, and not something custom dialed in the campaign menu, are you?

What is your K/D?


Yeah, I think I got that bit about the comment. What I meant was that while it may appear that you as a player are just one grunt in a big battle following orders, dying and trying desperately to capture the sometimes foolish target base the commander has chosen, it's not (supposed to be) forever like that. After a few hours at tops into the campaign, you should already have a few squad mates, at least the 4x paratroopers call, which you can optionally put to a good use for side base capturing if the invasion seems to be stalling otherwise.

Paratroopers and squadmates are different from the forces of what your commander controls, sure, paratroopers and squadmates don't keep flowing to your location "for free" once they die, but rather you need to have the required Relation/Reward Points with the commander to make the flow happen - i.e. keep calling more paratroopers. Poorly chosen side base attacks can become costly this way, but hey, that's the only reason RP even exists in the game, to spend it.

There's some easter eggy plans to add a "super call", a very expensive one and requiring very high rank, which would allow you to persuade the commander to either start a massive charge leaving all bases defenseless for a short period of time, or, you could change his mind about where to attack until that base would be captured. For most purposes, you shouldn't need these options, the game is balanced to work without such cheats.


Yup, I'm with you, but before the customization menu is started to improved on once again (we didn't always even have the sliders), we need to decide what to do ultimately with it.

A perfectly viable option to the menu would be that you'd only see a list of names, names for externally created settings files, and a button to create a new one or edit an existing one. Clicking on the button would open e.g. Notepad on a template file of match settings which people would be able to fill with whatever kinky settings they want (100x + 200 bot multiplier and offset for Greys, make Browns not respawn after initial spawn, Greens to have 0.5 AI accuracy and all forces in attack, friendly fire on, custom faction resources, etc..). We would of course provide a few sets of settings which we think work fine.

With that approach, no sliders, choice buttons nor text fields at all in the menu, nice, clean and flexible!


The single player campaign is the mode RWR has a clear focus in currently. The same thing works great as small scale cooperative, but also works pretty ok up to 20-40 players in online with some settings changed to make it harder (until the trolls come in).

PvP isn't in the development focus area right now, the whole thing is more like an afterthought. Once we're done with campaign, there's going to be more focus in PvP side of things I think, but we still don't know which modes should be done. Classic (i.e. quick match with specific settings), Team Elimination and Deathmatch modes exist, at least the basis for them, but mostly it's time we are short of for improving these; all efforts are in completing the campaign right now.

Quick match (=RWR 2011-2012) is there as it's the very core thing RWR is without the extensions used in campaign, thus making it an important development and testing tool. We the developers aren't playing any quick matches to completion these days, so I'm not sure if the balance there in the presets is what it used to be back in the day.

For instance, at some point important AI fixes were made, resulting the game becoming much harder, needing a friendly faction boost (and peaceful first base extension) for campaign to be reasonably difficult but beatable - while campaign was rebalanced that way, quick matches were not. Also campaign is easier in terms of balancing as it's a fact there that players are all in one faction.

So yea, not sure where quick matches are going. In one sense it's close to being a custom scenario creator, but really it's not. One could have a whole editor application devoted to such thing rather than single half screen menu page. The most likely thing here is that the settings presented in the menu will go through some minor changes so that it's possible to boost a player faction if there's just one player, and the rest of funky match setups are expected to be loaded in as mods/additional settings files.

Extension script support will be added in quick matches soon, as it seems it's starting to behave mature enough.

I have no idea what was going on. Maybe it was just for a certain play session that it bugged out, but the audio is working great now. Tested in lobby, quick match, and campaign and the audio transitions are entirely smooth. Granted distant footsteps still sound about the same volume as my own.




I was going by what Steam says in terms of my hours. Checked the score screen and I'm 6.3 hrs. (377min) into the campaign with ~3150 xp. I'm playing the standard hard difficulty with a k/d of 3.06




So to make sure I'm hearing you right, the way the player more heavily influences the flow of a battle is by forcing troops into a certain location through paratrooper calls/generally the radio feature as a whole, correct? In which case RP acquisition rate/spending cost becomes one of the most important balance areas in the game.

Would you think it to be a good idea/plausible to implement the ability to give movement orders to paratroopers you call in? Or possibly cause them to follow you, making them a kind of squad boost? Or do they already follow you?



I LOVE this idea for the quick match menu. That kind of customization for quick matches would be superb!



That info will be helpful in how I see future suggestions if I think of any. Again, love that menu idea for quick matches you stated above this quote. I also like the idea of it being a "custom scenario creator" as having so many parameters customizable in some kind of user friendly way for AI skirmishes would add a ton of replay value (for me at least).

Side note: Not to sound like a noob or anything, but I've no clue what extension script support would do for the game as I also have no clue about what extension scripts are or how they work. D: I'm going to assume that they're files to be loaded into a quick match for custom settings through some sort of dark magic..

Allright, that sounds better, still perhaps a bit more time/XP than I would've expected, but quite ok. As we are getting some new info about how the campaigns are going for new players in Steam, we just lowered the XP requirement for most of the weapons for 0.95, we could actually do a somewhat similar thing for the calls.


Yeah, the radio surely is an important thing, that's your way to draw anything temporary but powerful to anywhere you want.

E.g. one of the ideas behind the ~800 RP reward for cargo truck theft & delivery objective was that if you succeed in it (not always quite that easy), you get a "guaranteed" base capture as a prize. As it would've been boring to just grant you the ownership of one of the bases, instead you get RP which you can use to storm a side base.


No, I don't think so. You've got your own squad, some of the paratroopers will join your squad if you've got empty slots, and the rest of them will form other squads. The other squads will automatically engage in combat with enemies and help you if you're in trouble.

We're still not looking to make RWR as an RTS where you've got direct control of several squads; we are holding on to the idea that you're just a squad leader at max. The max 10 mates you can have in a squad is also feeling a bit too much, it gets simply awkward with such a large squad. Mostly people are expected to complete the campaign before reaching 10k XP, and if they do not, maybe they needed the extra meatshields.


The customization provided by the suggestion is already possible of course, that's the Setup mods list when choosing the map and factions in quick match + making an overlay mod for changing the default match settings with that single text file.

The menu improvement would mostly make it more convenient to try different settings without going back to lobby menu and then again through map loading.


Mostly it's about being able to have the certain extensions campaign comes with (prison break objective, cargo truck delivery tracking, unlockable items, peaceful single base owning situation, and the rest of them that are currently just plans) available in quick matches too. Also serious modders could come up with plenty of additional stuff this way.