Just a few notes

I just played the new alpha, and I have to say it’s actually pretty great. (For such a bare-bones alpha, anyway) Because it’s my unofficial duty to report bugs and such, I have a few things I’d like to bring up:

  • I did encounter one crash. When I first tried to play Ball Race, I got a crash. I can’t post the screenshot here because I just joined a couple minutes ago, but here’s a link to the photo on my dropbox. I highly suspect it could be because I changed my graphic settings to get the alpha to actually run on a playable level, but that’s just my guess.
  • I did get Ball Race to work after that by restarting the program. I have to say, it worked a lot better than it did with that Ball Race standalone alpha you released previously, but I suspect that has something to do with being able to lower the settings.
  • That said, it was probably just my lower settings, but the cuboids seem to blend in. The bananas from Gmod Tower stood out, but these are too similarly colored and too seethrough.
  • Also, my slightly customized character wasn’t the one I saw in the ball. I think she looked kinda like Chell from Portal…
  • I customized my character, but the options are (understandably) very limited. The only things I could get to work were skin color, hair color, eye color, shirt and pants color, and some of the glasses.
  • The ski goggles are too far forward
  • The shoe color didn’t seem to do anything
  • The preset skin colors look way too orange
  • The hats (or at least the ones I tried) didn’t show up
  • In the README file, you misspelled “streaming”
  • You can easily see a headless version of your character by looking down while you jump. Maybe a third-person camera option would help?
  • There was a “fluttering” issue with the top step in one of the condo’s upstairs rooms
  • The plaza looks nice, but with all of the stores removed it seems kinda barren
  • Finally, I would REALLY appreciate a built-in screen capture. Because I was playing in fullscreen, the only screenshot I managed to capture was the above crash log. Adding a button to take a screenshot (and making sure players know it’s there) would probably help you receive more helpful bug reports. Once you switch over to Steam you could probably take this out because the Steam overlay lets you take snapshots with F12, but in the meantime it might be worth it to add something like this.

Sorry for taking up so much space to talk about so little, but hopefully this will help. Good luck!

Update: A few more things I noticed:

  • You can get stuck in the first stage in the Midori Ball Race world by entering the center of the disc with the attractors in it
  • That headless avatar effect I mentioned is best viewed by jumping out of the ferris wheel and looking down
  • I got an identical crash as above when I first tried to enter the Midori Ball Race world. It could just be that whatever caused the other crash is tied to the world you’re going to and will only be fixed for each world as you encounter this crash for each one
  • You can clip through the rocks near the waterslides
  • My screen when entering the plaza remains black until I start moving or looking around. The ambient sound still plays so I know it’s at least loading, but the screen still blacks out.

Update 2: Just noticed there’s a “Bug Reports” category. Sorry for posting in the wrong area; moving thread now.

You can actually add the Alpha to your Steam Library. The Steam Overlay will then be present, and you can take snapshots and browse the internet without issues!

Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.