Alpha 1.1.0 - Pc Edition

This isn't an alpha! It's just a transparent attempt my A&S to install elaborate keyloggers that they can use for psychological profiling and eventual kidnap-planning! You're not going to catch me that easil...

Aw, fuck it.

*Run as administrator*


-Bats

 

Just saw this now. Tried this on my ultrabook because my actual laptop is broken. Login screen is very atmospheric and loading screen was actually quite fast. I have quite a bit of lag in the TV room but this thing has lag when playing an adventure game from 1999 so I am not sure who is to blame here.

The map was a bit unresponsive, but that again might be because of my laptop, but I found it a bit clunky. It did however get better over time and when zoomed out further it works smoother. Some people seem to live in the water according to the map. Also when playing for even longer and after the initial load the map is actually pretty smooth.

Opening the settings menu while on the map brings you to the main screen and that feels a bit weird to me. I really like the audio, but the mute is indeed a must have. We might go mental after listening to it for more than 24 hours.

The browser seems to remember the forum login, but doesn't save the pages I had open before I closed it and sometimes when I opened it none of the pages loaded. The browser also gives no feedback if you go to a non-existing website. Honestly for me though, the browser saving what was open would be the biggest must have.

 

Uppercase letters do not seemed to be allowed in user names and the game seems to actually run better in windowed mode which is quite rare (usually games run less good in windowed mode).

Oh yeah settings were on fantastic actually. The map works a little bit smoother on lower graphics and video screen room lag is reduced quite a bit (still not entirely fluid though, but I don't mind too much). I think that most of the akwardness on the map comes from having to "drag" the map around the screen. Maybe arrow movement would feel more smooth, along with a zoom in/out button?

That would be really REALLY great.

Edit: Two crashes so far. One while afk and the other while trying to post here via the webbrowser. There is also no blinking cursor thingy or any idication of where you are typing in the webbrowser.

Edit Two: Opened the game in windowed and lower resolution and then forced full screen. This causes the map to not fill the whole screen and you can see the room behind it. Webbrowser does fill the whole screen and so does the room itself.

 

I had the exact same thing happen - it froze when I was trying to use the in-game browser to post here to say how well it was running. It wasn't an actual attempt to post that caused it to freeze, I'd only typed a sentence or so before it froze.

Other minor things about the web browser: I noted the same lack of blinking cursor that TheChosenOne did. Also, the mouse pointer isn't changing when I mouse-over a link. And it won't play your videos. (Not that I expected it to. The Vimeo errors are cute, though.)

I was actually surprised at how well it ran, especially using the "fantastic" settings. I have too many apps running right now that have already been causing my computer to lag. The initial load of the browser was a bit slow, but the second time I opened it, it ran almost as smoothly as my usual one.

And I was able to alt-tab out and back in again with no problems. That may be normal and expected, but it almost always caused Skyrim to crash.

Going to go back in now to poke around some more. Just to make sure, the only sections where we can really do anything are the web browser and the settings area, right? The map can only be panned, and the TVs can only be viewed? If there is more functionality there that I didn't find, I want to make sure it's just user error. ;-)

 

Anashel's playing with the TV remote right now, and that might be causing crashes.

Spoiler

 

Very short in-game post to test.

Edit: The posting is working (the above was posted with the in-game browser), it just seems to be when you're trying to type more than just a few words that it crashes. I noticed the browser icon on the bottom was blinking with every keystroke. Makes me wonder if the keystroke detection is causing some kind of memory issue.

I wasn't expecting the in-game browser to store my forum log-in for some reason. Nice surprise there!

Ok, it just crashed in the background when I was typing this. Going to see if I can figure out what exactly is going on there.

 

- Changes to In-game settings (Music & Sound Effects) revert back to 'on' when you relog, if you disable them.

 

I loaded the game with my Task Manager overlaid and just sitting in the situation room, the memory usage just went up and up and up until it crashed. Going to go back in now and try the forum test to see if keystrokes are causing something similar.

Spoiler: Typing testing (for memory usage)

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 310MB memory used
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 325MB
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 335MB
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 353MB (had paused for a moment)
*pausing for 60s* 384MB
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Above done via copy/paste, 441MB

After adding spoiler tags and a bit of editing, am now close to 575MB.

 

You're welcome. I added some more specific testing results up there.

Basically, even just sitting there, it's slowly ticking up memory usage. Opening the map (or panning it) didn't seem to make it jump up much faster, opening the browser did, but I expected that. The memory usage increased more while I was typing, but not by as huge of an amount as I was expecting. Before, as I mentioned, I already had some other memory-intensive apps open, so it was dying around 280MB of memory usage, which is about what it took me to casually load things and get to the forums.

I closed some of those apps before the above testing, and stopped typing and closed the browser around the 575MB point. Then I just left it on the situation room and it continued to slowly use more and more memory (maybe... 300KB / second?) until it finally crashed somewhere around 650MB.

Let me know if you want me to try anything different or more specific.

 

Bugs/Issues/Oddities/Petty Complaints:

• Tabbing between fields on the registration screen doesn't loop from Confirm Password back to Username, and Shift-Tab doesn't work
• Clicking 'Register Now' doesn't appear to do anything. Mouseover highlights it in blue instead of white, but clicking it shows no reaction.
• Username is forced to lowercase, Email allows both lower and upper. This makes it hard to guess whether, behind the ***s, passwords are actually case-sensitive or not.
• On my first try, I couldn't make it past the registration screen - clicking 'Register Now' did't appear to do anything. Mouseover would highlight it in blue instead of white, but clicking it showed no reaction. The login screen, on the other hand, appeared to work properly... although an onclick blink/color change of the button would still be nice as, a "Yes, you just clicked this. I acknowledge that, but am deliberately ignoring you" indicator.
• 'Your Location' dot is skewed about 50-60 miles north of me, or about 75 miles north of my current IP's location.
• Hitting ESC dims screen slightly, makes controls unresponsive, but doesn't actually exit.
• Flickering tube sound FX from Sit. Room continues playing on Agent Map.
• Geolocation only occurs on registration or initial login, and disregards subsequent moves. I hopped over to Hong Kong, but I'm still showing up with the New England location of the first IP I connected through. While I'm definitely on the paranoid side when it comes to tracking (see Notes), I think there would be advantages to updating agent locations on login (preferably with a 'disable' toggle) - especially taking the possibility of real-world multipass-requiring events into consideration. Just imagine seeing the growing concentration of agents
• On the Situation Room screen, resizing the window vertically will scale the room/TV content, but resizing horizontally will only letterbox or cut it off (this may be a matter of preference, rather than a bug... I'd rather see it resize to fit the smallest dimension). The toolbar/agent info pane doesn't rescale at all, and doesn't get cut off - at least without shrinking the window to ridiculously small dimensions.

Notes/Requests:

• I'm using multiple monitors and the launcher actually cares! It doesn't just slap a fullscreen app wherever the fuck it feels like with a blatant disregard for my feelings, like some games I could mention. Ok, like nearly all games I could mention. This makes me happy.
• It alt-tabs very gracefully into/out of fullscreen - no hangs, no slow mode changes, no delays at all.
• But, the last two points aside, is a borderless-windowed mode a practical request? It'd be nice to be able to leave it fullscreenish on one screen while using another.
• You mention the browser being windowed as a known bug... This seems to me more like it could be a feature. If it's kept around, it would be nice to see it made movable & resizable as well, so that even with a single monitor browsing could be done in fullscreen while still doing other agenty stuff.
• Saving login info and audio settings between sessions would make Alpha 1.1.1 easier to test.
• It's obviously far too early in the development to worry much about implementing it, but there should be some consideration given to an eventual non-tracking/invisible/"deep cover" mode toggle, even if it necessarily limits some of the social/collaborative features a player could use. While it's not something I expect I'd be inclined to use much in TBW, I'd feel very uncomfortable if I couldn't find an option for it in a game run by a company I knew or trusted any less.

If it matters, I'm on Win 8 x64 (yeah, yeah, I know... but my Win 7 box is the one being rebuilt... then this one's probably going to Win10) FX-8350 / 16GB RAM / AMD HD7970, running (mostly) at 1920x1080 Fantastic.

-Bats

 

Hello, crashed on Exit. Win7, windowed. cf. attachment
Regards

 

One more thing about the memory issue, it's happening even if I just sit on the log-in screen. Very very slowly, about 5K/s maybe, but I've gone up about 20MB so far leaving it in the background for a while. Oh, double that for foreground, about 10K/s.

I agree with Bats about the browser: "If it's kept around, it would be nice to see it made movable & resizable as well, so that even with a single monitor browsing could be done in fullscreen while still doing other agenty stuff." I'll add "able to be minimized" to that list. (So you can do other stuff without losing the page you're on.)

Oh, another nice thing would be the ability to exit before logging in without having to close it via the task bar or task manager. I'm always clicking the wrong icons for things and it would be nice not to have to log in to exit it.

Edit: Actually, never mind about that reasoning, I managed to forget there's a window in between. Still, the ability to exit from the log-in screen (if not in windowed mode) would be nice. Also the ability to mute the sound from there, rather than having to log in first.

 

Hi all.

First of all, i have to say: Woot. Great work so far, i like it very much

Now to my little list:
1. The scrolling of thee map is very slow. Starting it is ok, but zoom in / zoom out and moving in any direction isn't...
2. Same with the scrolling in this in-game browser here. The pages will opoen fast, but scrolling up and down isn't...
in fact it is really slow for me, be it with the mouse wheel or with the sidebar...
3. No visible cursor in the browser...(could be this was mentioned before, if so, then sorry)
4. Pos1 and End are not working when writing a comment...i think they will do normally?

 

Just to inform you about the obvious memory leak:
it seems that your nice little alpha is a memory eating monster, hehe
I have an Intel I7 machine here, with Windows 7 64bit and 16 GB RAM.
At the moment your process took 2.159.758 K Memory, and it is still eating more
It looks like it does it in pieces of 512K or 256K per tick in the Taskmanager, and it uses
about 12 percent of my CPU, i will try to sent a screenshot:

Some more investigations: even the login screen is consuming memory. The amount isn't that
big as mentioned above, but still every tick in Taskmanager shows that it increases in steps
of 12K...
The map is eating memory in pieces of 128K so far...but oh lord, when it comes to the browser,
the nightmare begins, hehe...every tick 512K of memory is added to the process, until you end the browser.

 

Nothig new to report. Experiencing the memory leak. Everything else seems ok except I have just noticed I get no cursor in the browser.

This is posted orfm the browser.

 

i have a little problem, i want register me. But my email adress is already taken... I don't understand. (and i have try whit my login and password forum but... nothing )

Bon en francais pour anashel car mon anglais est vraiment pitoyable (et plusieurs voudront ma mort si ça continue.) En gros, j'ai essayé de m'inscrire mais, mon email est déjà pris. Pourtant j'ai essayé de me connecté sous "erebe" ou même "sherc" mais rien n'y fait :/