QA Tester

[AdmiralDarksky]

Ahoy! I've been lurking around PiratesAhoy and yer mods for a while now, just never managed to work up the nerve or find a reason to say much on here. I sung silent praises though, Especially for HoO and the build mod. Figured this would be a good excuse to make up for my mute tendencies.

CPU: AMD Athlon II x3 455 3.3gh (Hey, it works.)
GPU: AMD Raedon 6950 HD (2g VidMem. Probably the only good thing in this entire computer)
RAM: 4GB DDR3 (A pain in my rear.)
OS: Windows 7
I speak: English (US and UK), technically German too.

Well... You do need something low-end to eye up, right? At any rate, if there's anything else you need me to throw in here just let me know. I'll be getting something better soon anyway (It's smelling a lot like Christmas!)

Also, besides being a QA tester I can certainly do other things. Storyline, quest ideas, anything that requires me to use my imagination more than actual skill. I took coding classes in school so I can probably help figure some stuff out, but I doubt i'd be more useful than finding a semicolon where a comma should have been.

At any rate, hopefully I can be useful SOMEHOW.

More about myself: My dad got me into games years ago. In fact, one of my first games was PotCO. Oh the memories of that game, i'm surprised it kicked the bucket when it did. I have both PotC (Build mod of course!) and AoP2, both of which I enjoy playing. It's somewhat frustrating the lack of pirate or age of sail games. There's so much you can make a game of! Exploration, piracy, warfare...

Another game I thoroughly enjoyed was Pirates of the Burning Sea. A pity it died a slow, painful death. I think it's still alive but apparently it's taken such a negative turn...
If any of you have ever seen a certain Escobar Herandez sailing around that game in the long distant past around when it was still pay to play, that was almost certainly me.

But enough of my gaming experiences. I'm here to help, not gab about myself!

Fast Edit: You can call me Evan, or Darksky. Either works.

 

[Thagarr]

Ahoy Evan, welcome aboard mate! POTBS was based on the Storm engine, which POTC is also based on, if you have played New Horizons, you may recognize several ships. We have had several moddelers that worked on POTBS port their ships into New Horizons.

Anyway, back on topic! We most certainly need a wide rang of hardware to test Hearts of Oak on, and yours will do quite nicely mate! My old rig is very similar, but I am having some issues with it and am still debating on building a new one. When you get the chance, could you please write up and post here how the latest demo works on your rig, and what kind of problems you encounter, thanks!

 

[Pieter Boelen]

PotBS was Storm engine? You sure? I know VCO was....

 

[Thagarr]

Nope, I am not sure, I could very well be thinking of VCO...

But we did get some ships from POTBS didn't we?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

But we did get some ships from POTBS didn't we?

That we did. It seemed that PotC made a good testing ground for the modelers as it allowed them to see their ships in a game before they were added to PotBS.
And then the game developers on that side decided not to include some of them, so those ended up pretty much unique to us.

 

[AdmiralDarksky]

Yeah, I did notice a fair few of POTBS's ships on there. I loved the Poseidon. I think the La Courrone is in there too, however it's spelled. I never had a trader character, I was purely a privateer
VCO is also another game I used to play. I know for a fact that's still got running servers but it's quiet as hell and has zero progression anymore (you start with level 10 ships).


As for the Testing --------------------------------------------------------------
The demo works surprisingly well. Some moments of no response during some loading times (like entering character creator) that are probably due to the fact I'm without an SSD, although in the Creator's instance it was only once. First starting the game though does cause a hang, although it's consistent across several starts and seems to just be a loading thing. The loading screen is only up for half a second and that half a second is the only time any music plays. The character creator itself works splendidly, although the menus tend to flicker when you scroll up and down along the list and switch items on your character, although that seems to be more of a design thing than a bug.

On the Main Menu I get a solid 75 FPS, although that's because it's the Main Menu. Nothing but a pretty blue Ocean to look at.
On the Island I get a decent 35-45 FPS. I'm used to 30FPS though so it's entirely playable and I dont get eyesore.
On the Ship I get averaging around 40-50 FPS with the occasional high 30.
(These are all on the "Fantastic" setting which, knowing Unity, likely doesnt change anything at all. Fullscreen 1280:800 too)

The Main Menu works fine, for what little there is of it. I mean, the Exit button works. That's a plus! Rolling the Credits works fine. Checking for Updates does open a window, and I hit the Launchie button, though that doesnt seem to have done anything. Opening the Options menu works, but there doesnt seem to be anything in there, which makes sense.
The Island is also pretty okay. My character tends to veer to the left or right when going up or down a hill, and if the hill is long or big enough do full circles. Did you give the characters rum before turning them loose? Also, getting up the stairs on the house requires a few jumps. But that's just nitpicking. The Camera on the other hand might get annoying when it only faces where your character is facing, which makes getting around corners a bit of a "see what sticks" situation when you try going through a door you cant see because there's a big white wall in your face.
The Ship has some problems though. Whether or not steering works is entirely up to the powers that be. The wheel in the bottom right likes to flicker, and sometimes setting the sails to a different percentage doesnt register until you hold A or D, which are necessary for steering! And on one occasion, once I started turning Right, I couldn't stop doing so. Alt+Tabbing on the game works fine though, unless that's what's causing the problems.
Oh, and the cannons dont fire when I press Space. Or if they are, i'm not getting a visual or audible indication that they are. The elevation controls seem to work though.

Exiting the game from the ship makes you click several times as the menu toggles between "You wanna exit?" and "You wanna stop controlling?", though it happens eventually.

That said, it's a working tech demo, and just getting to this point after changing engines two (three?) times is already quite a lot of effort. It's looking good, lads. Keep up the hard work!

 

[Thagarr]

Nice writeup mate, thanks! I have added you as a provision QA Testor, you should now have access to the development forum. Please post all further reviews in the appropriate demo release thread, you should also be able to post on the Bug Tracker if you find an issue serious enough. Welcome to the team mate!

 

[AdmiralDarksky]

Right-o, Thanks Thagarr. Eager to see what's in store along the line!