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4226

Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / Re: Manual command 'repair' without an item scanned causes crash

« on: May 24, 2015, 04:11:00 AM »

No need to send the crash log, I can get it off the server if necessary, but honestly with your steps here it is quite easy to repeat! Obviously I didn't foresee someone might want to repair... nothing .

4227

Strategies / Re: Matter Storage Units

« on: May 24, 2015, 04:06:39 AM »

This is one of the very last features I added to the game before release as I was working on balance. I found it was really annoying to have to juggle utilities just to LOAD matter storage units--it was pointless micromanagement so I decided to have the game take care of it for you .

Of course you can still load manually which you may want to do in some situations, but fabricators and building already require several steps so it's nice to take some out of the loop.

4228

Ideas / Re: Toggle auto-melee?

« on: May 24, 2015, 04:03:11 AM »

The only problem I see with is when moving around corners or through doors. Sometimes I move into a door or around a corner and ram someone accidentally. If two button presses are forced for ever ram without a melee weapon, then that might give someone not equipped with enhanced sensors a freebie clue as to the whereabouts of robuts that are hidden from view. From the layman's perspective it seems like anything is going to be a fix with some questionable trade-offs. Maybe it would ultimately better to just force players to become trained to slow down and use their eyes?

Hm, I hadn't thought of that angle yet. But... how is that possible? As per the FOV calculations you can always see around corners you're next to. There's no situation where you are in a position to move into an unseen space (i.e. adjacent to it), except for the current known bug that occurs when you are already ramming something intentionally and your FOV fails to update on displacement.

I think it's true that players will crash a lot less once they get used to everything, so maybe we could put this off as a secondary issue and see where we stand weeks or months from now when everyone has a bit more experience under their belt.

It has been brought up more than once now, though.

4229

Ideas / Re: Please stop sorting my attachments

« on: May 24, 2015, 03:53:56 AM »

Haha, no, go ahead and complain away. If it's a valid point (and I can fix it) I'll definitely make changes. If not I'll just feed you to The Assembled

mmmmmm... biomatter...

4230

Ideas / Re: Please stop sorting my attachments

« on: May 24, 2015, 03:49:42 AM »

Thanks for pointing this out; it annoys me sometimes, too .

Ideally it shouldn't behave that way at all, and I did intend to do something about it. Probably soon, actually, because it's a really easy fix.

In the future it will remember where components are in both your parts list and inventory, and reload them appropriately. This is caused because the interface is rebuilt from your data every time a new map is loaded, but it's based on those parts' internal arrangement each time, which probably doesn't match where you actually put them!

4231

Ideas / Re: When player die don't jump to the death screen immidiatly.

« on: May 24, 2015, 03:45:58 AM »

No need to die all at once.

Bits of the UI could go away one at a time, ending with the view port then final messages before fading altogether would be immersive.

This much is what I was imagining when the suggestion came up. There is plenty of room for some cool-looking animations here. I would just want to keep the final fade to black for the background, behind the score box. I'll be revisiting it in the future.

I don't mind the death animation so far, but I would love love love an in-game scoresheet (a la DCSS). That might not work out with how you're plugged directly into COGMIND as soon as you boot up the program. Maybe it could be just another menu item (maybe under 5] Game?).

I did intentionally do away with any kind of start menu (there wasn't even a title intro to begin with but I eventually decided leaving that out would be a bad idea).

I hid those features under the 5] Game menu, and I can see putting some more meta stuff in there.

Are you thinking of viewing previous score sheets? Or the tallies for the current run? I haven't played DCSS in a while and don't recall any in-game score sheets except for the high score list--maybe this was added in the few years since I was playing.

Another idea: the game could record your last ~100 moves so you can replay them upon death to see where you took the wrong action

I would love to make complete replays available, and I've tried it with the engine before, but it's not completely reliable due to how some of the game logic is build directly into the animation system

4232

Support / Re: High CPU Use

« on: May 24, 2015, 03:32:54 AM »

It sounds like you have a pretty old laptop? Cogmind is not too demanding (when I play it uses literally 3% of my CPU, which is about 3 years old), but it is run entirely on your CPU (no GPU processing). The game idles as long as it's hitting 60 FPS, because the game is capped at that speed by default. If it's eating up cycles then you must be getting under 60 FPS on your machine.

Aside from the obvious running in windowed mode and/or making the view smaller by using a smaller font and/or map, one way to reduce the load is to cap the FPS at something below 60 to give your CPU a breather.

This option is available directly in /user/cogmind.cfg towards the bottom:

Code: [Select]

fpsCap=60Try some different values like 50, 40, or 30 if you it doesn't bother you,

Although Cogmind is turn-based, it still has to render the UI and anything that might be animated, and it does that at 60 FPS.

Let me know if that helps!

(I'm moving this thread to the Support board.)

4233

Ideas / Re: Save all messages to the scores/*.txt file

« on: May 24, 2015, 03:21:51 AM »

Alright, I'll probably do that before long. I remember considering it, but then dropped that feature for some reason, maybe just due to limited time...

4234

General Discussion / Re: How do I get past this?

« on: May 24, 2015, 03:19:32 AM »

I think I'll start creating a list of key commands.

That would be useful and something I expected would appear before long.

biomatter has already worked out how to get the schematics for high tier items.  I haven't tried it yet, but I will soon:)

Oh damn, WTF? I've only had time to field important posts for now so I haven't been checking the strategies board, but now I'm curious what trouble you guys are up to already

4235

Support / Re: Online payment via direct transfer

« on: May 24, 2015, 02:20:51 AM »

Hi Dave!

The way the payment system works is that any order for which payment has not yet been finalized is held in a separate area for "pending orders," and only once payment is received the transaction considered complete, it's merged with the normal orders and the so-called "fulfillment" contents become available (information email, game).

With regard to direct transfers they say "up to five days," but that could also mean it could happen more quickly depending on the financial institutions involved. The idea is if it's been more than five business days, then you should contact me and I can check what's up. (This is unlikely, but you never know.)

They can't fulfill the purchase immediately since in theory something could either go wrong with the payment, or a customer can cancel a transaction while it is still being processed (i.e. before it reaches its destination).

Hope that helps!

4236

Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / Re: In Keyboard mode, cursor is locked to upper-left corner when Alt-tab'd out

« on: May 23, 2015, 11:50:00 PM »

Descriptive title is descriptive.

Steps to reproduce:
- Be in Keyboard Mode (F2 toggle)
- Alt-tab out of game
- Try to move your mouse
- cry

Or at least, that's what happens to me Toggling out of F2 fixes the cursor lock.

Thanks, it's a known issue in fullscreen mode (not an issue when windowed). Will fix! Until then use F2 before/after tabbing!

Unrelated note: Alt-F4 to save/quit is the slickest thing ever.

Ah, you noticed that? . It's an undocumented feature because you can Alt-F4 to quit from anywhere, even places where saving is not allowed and therefore it wouldn't save under those conditions. In other words, it's not completely reliable, but it's nice to have .

4237

Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / Re: Link to youtube is invalid

« on: May 23, 2015, 07:55:18 PM »

Thanks for checking it out. It's the original video link, but at the very last minute (literally) before lauch, the original YouTube link failed to embed so I had to re-pload the video, re-spec it, and re-embed it everywhere it was referred to. This actually delayed launch by an hour... The problem at that point was the game was already packaged up and ready for download, so I couldn't change the link without delaying launch even further to update more files in the system itself, which would be a bad idea since then I'd have to retest the whole thing :/. I've updated it for the next README.

Thank you!

4238

Ideas / Re: When player die don't jump to the death screen immidiatly.

« on: May 23, 2015, 01:45:14 PM »

This is relatively a little thing but it really irks me. When you die in the game, it immediately jumps to the Game over screen, and you don't get to see yourself dying, I just had to check and see if you even see the final volley that kills you, I was under the impression that you don't even get to see that. This can get really disorienting at times and for a game with such a great visual feedback in battle this is a big missed opportunity.

So I would request for the game to have a "death cam". When you die the game handle it the same way it handle NPC death, you get shot, "explode" (Your icon disappear the same way enemy icons do) and all your surviving modules are scattered on the floor. Then present an in game death message and wait for the player to click a button before going to the score screen.

Hm, I can see this being very cool. That said, I'd be really torn to do it because Cogmind is supposed to be more of an "immersive experience" than a "game where you're controlling something from the third person," and not immediately animating the black screen sort of ruins that.

I can at least image doing an even cooler death animation that does show how you died, and also messes up the interface in an interesting way while/before the screen wipe.

I'll probably put this on the medium/long-term list to consider.

And about seeing your parts scatter, most Cogmind's die naked

Yeah I would love a score screen that also has a shot of the scene surrounding your death, would be nice to share with folks.

So you're thinking the score box over maybe a faded background of the screen when you died? I'd have more or less the same opinion of this, but I can see the value it adds in other ways. I'll have to think about it.

Anyone else feel free to chime in with other variations or related ideas.

4239

Ideas / Re: Toggle auto-melee?

« on: May 23, 2015, 01:35:55 PM »

But accidentally doing stupid things that you have only yourself to blame for is what roguelikes are all about!

Haha, yeah, Maurog's right. You all deserve it!

No really, it's a good point especially for mouse users (as a keyboard user I don't often have that problem, except when some freaking robot jumps right in front of me while I'm rushing somewhere).

Whenever I have to use the mouse I find it easy to crash into robots, especially because a mouse user is less likely to be looking at adjacent positions, but instead at distant ones--the final destination area.

This is definitely going to get some attention.

I do agree that the highlight enemies option should maybe show neutrals and friends too, color coded differently.

There are two buttons, one for hostiles and one for allies, each of which is already color-coded for integrity. It doesn't seem useful enough to add an entirely separate command for non-hostiles, so that leaves making neutrals also highlighted by the hostiles button--maybe in a very non-obtrusive gray. I believe I had this as an option originally, but removed it for some reason. Perhaps because the labels for hostiles should really stand out as they're the actual dangerous ones you need to worry about, but I can see the argument now that under some circumstances there may simply be too much stuff lying around (this is especially true with tiles--with ASCII it's still easier to differentiate robots from parts even in a big cluster).

I think if you're not armed with a melee weapon, ramming should probably require two moves as a confirmation, and maybe highlight the target real quick to show that you're about to smash into something if you really want to move in that direction.

4240

Ideas / Re: Language files as XML or similar

« on: May 23, 2015, 01:23:02 PM »

Yeah, because it's a custom font it's extended ASCII only--no unicode.

I would love it if Cogmind could support translation, but as with many roguelikes, it would be quite a lot of work since sentences are constructed from components which are both ordered and manipulated based on the rules of English grammar, so it's not as easy as replacing a single string for each statment...

While it's true many of the log messages use a simple variable replacement scheme, even assuming the necessary effort was put into enabling translation the game still wouldn't support anything but English letters. More difficult would be the many other sentences (like hacking output, for example) which are hardcoded sentence building functions.

4241

Ideas / Re: Comparison View - a second data window

« on: May 23, 2015, 01:17:39 PM »

You are awesome, Kyzrati. I find it funny, the only real issues I've had are so very minor, and mostly QOL. The game itself has been great, I haven't encountered any bugs that I'm aware of, it plays fantastic. Ya done good, man.

Thanks, I try my best and hope it's good enough

Speaking of stats - do weapons have different fire times, and if so can that be put on their stat screen?

Only a minority of weapons do, and you'll see this indicated as their "Delay." Click on that stat and see the description. If they have no delay, then it's the standard firing time, but that's dependent on the number of weapons in your volley, so for that you should check the manual to see how time works in combat. This will be very helpful in deciding how many weapons to fire!

4242

Ideas / Re: Save all messages to the scores/*.txt file

« on: May 23, 2015, 01:14:24 PM »

Good idea, we're already most of the way there! Check your options--it's off by default, but you can have the entire log output to either a text file or even colored HTML!

It does not, however, record terminal output. I'll have to add that. Noted and will be done, though I'm not sure about the details yet--injecting hacking results directly into your in-game log would be quite easy, but wouldn't that be slightly annoying while playing? Or would that be okay?

As for the "nice memento" concept, I eventually want to look at overhauling the score sheet and also possibly including a "summary" of everything notable you did, which would be a better read than the full log which can have a lot of random messages in there.

4243

Ideas / Re: Stop enemies jumping around.

« on: May 23, 2015, 01:07:33 PM »

Yep, the first attempt to address this will involve optional and tweakable fading movement trails. I'm not sure if they'll be in the next release, but soon because they're pretty easy to do.

4244

Ideas / Re: Hotkey to show all visible items

« on: May 23, 2015, 01:05:01 PM »

Haha, awesome, I love me some charts and graphs. (And EVE is fun, too!) Maybe as an intermediary solution I'll just write a program to convert all the sheets to csv and give them to you

Heehee! That's a bad idea - it'd be a conflict of interest. Although I have some excel skills, I am murderously driven to be #1 - if I saw someone doing better than me, I'd probably die of dehydration before I stopped playing.

Oh man, try to avoid the players who are already using cheat hacks, then. "You got WHAT score?!"

4245

Ideas / Re: Key bindings for equipment management

« on: May 23, 2015, 01:02:47 PM »

I'm just going to say that I usually try to remap my keys as to minimize moving my hand off of the numpad and/or mouse. So key-binding would be something I'd like too. That said, I haven't quite played enough of Cogmind to get my muscle memory down yet.

I considered remappable keys multiple times. As you all probably know I'm big on accessibility so this was something I would have really liked to implement.

Problems exist due to the delicate balance between all the input systems used for different UI components, the internal architecture which uses hacks in some cases to enable keyboard use in areas where it can't be distributed from the central input system, and the fact that Cogmind uses pretty much every single key combination on the keyboard.

Key binding will most likely not be a thing

Keep trying and see if you can adapt... I love my keyboard-only play style, but I'm also willing to move my right hand off the numpad to juggle parts real quick. Perhaps as an alternative you could play without moving your hands by using... wait for it... vi-keys!

The idea is that "ctrl" represents a positive input direction, from inventory > parts > activate (and then deactivate, as a toggle at the end state), and then in reverse you have the "alt" negative input direction, which is parts > inventory > ground.

It is a nice metaphor. My problem with this approach is that as an item moves from inventory to parts, it changes letter, and it changes the letters assigned to other items in the inventory. So, when I try to shuffle armaments slots I have to carefully reread the inventory to see which new number was assigned to the item I was just moving.

Good point. One thing that may help in that regard: If removing something from your inventory everything below that point always shifts up one slot. As for movement to the inventory, that's a bit more complicated but the default is to just put it at the end. How else might that be handled to make it more intuitive/helpful?

4246

General Discussion / Re: How do I get past this?

« on: May 23, 2015, 11:57:20 AM »

You can reduce your Security Level at some Terminals, once I work out the manual code for reducing the threat level it may be possible to do it at any Terminal.

Absolutely, and this is incredibly useful if you've been causing trouble.

"Alert(Purge)", by the way

(And you will only really know this if you read the manual, but the manual terminal input is buffered, even in between terminals. On subsequent uses just press up/down to re-enter the same command!)

4247

General Discussion / Re: Looking for 7DRL Comparisons

« on: May 23, 2015, 11:49:33 AM »

Anything worse?

Are you kidding?!

And thanks so much for fielding questions on the forum for now jimmijamjams. I'm still so busy with external stuff that I've only been able to devote time to the most pressing needs like bugs, support, and marketing nonsense.

That's a nice overview. (And hey you're still using ASCII! I like how we have a really nice division of everyone enjoying what works for them--tiles vs ASCII, mouse vs keyboard...)

4248

General Discussion / Re: Stormtrooper Marksman Academy Trajectory Chips

« on: May 23, 2015, 11:45:35 AM »

Thank you very much for the prompt, though! Now I have a good place to point whenever someone asks about this.

Even just this evening I was chatting with someone who said they were encountering "stormtrooper syndrome," and I said hm, that sounds awfully familiar... and pointed him to this thread. He came back after a short while with the following comment

"Well, that's going to influence my play style..."

4249

Fixed Bugs & Non-Bugs / Re: Crash when right clicking on a part when using Scanalyzer [Alpha 1]

« on: May 23, 2015, 11:14:23 AM »

Thank you for the screenshot and log! This has been encountered a couple times, and will absolutely be fixed in the next release. I could've sworn that was working before, but obviously not. Either way, easy fix with all the reference material we have here.

Thanks for your support, playing, and reporting in!

Have fun on the forums!

4250

Everything REXPaint / Re: Show off your REXPAINT creations

« on: May 23, 2015, 10:00:22 AM »

Looks like it could be a room in the future of X@COM, ozymandias79

I've still got this as my desktop background.  When I told my partner I'd picked up the game she said, "Isn't it called Cogmino?" Still cracks me up every time

I will always remember that, too.

And I didn't know it, but after two years of development, I was talking about the title logo change with my wife and she, too, told me she thought it was "Cogmino" the entire time... because at home she has always just called it "your game" and we never actually said it. Ha.

As promised earlier here is the numbering template I created.

Question: I'm a beginner at using forums. How do I insert an image into the text box rather than adding it as an attachment?

We're using imgur to host, then just linking to that.