1st try impressions (awesome work thank you)

[DwarfFighterCleric]

Oh man what I coincidence, I got this random urge to replay some MAX on dosbox, I didn't even know this project already had executables, really cool...

Okay first of all I like that the game automatically captures the mouse (Edge Scroll)
The only problem with mouse is that it seems like there's no mouse acceleration at all, so the mouse is very slow inside the game window compared to system mouse (I guess SDL uses Raw Input which is useful for a few games like Shooters but not really useful for this kind of game with constant mouse controls)

The other thing I noticed arrow keys are disabled. It makes the game unplayable to me not having keys to scroll the map because the mouse is so slow. Maybe support for WASD keys would be optimal, but Arrow keys would be enough (I can remap these with AutoHotkey to my liking...)

I managed to get the game on window mode (Settings.INI screenmode=0 disableARcorrection=1) but then I noticed mouse was even slower, so I play on default 640x480, it's no big deal since Alt TAB works fine

Disabling AR Aspect Ratio correction also fixes the issue of map being stretched on Landing Site selection screen (lower portions of the map non acessible on default settings because it stretches to 16:9 AR )

It seems like Scroll Speed and Audio Volume settings also reset on each game startup of new game. Even reloading a saved game the game is very loud until I change volume sliders.

These are my 1st impressions. As soon as map scroll keys are enabled I can play it, otherwise relying on mouse only would render the game unplayable for me.

[klei1984]

Hello,

Okay first of all I like that the game automatically captures the mouse (Edge Scroll)
The only problem with mouse is that it seems like there's no mouse acceleration at all, so the mouse is very slow inside the game window compared to system mouse (I guess SDL uses Raw Input which is useful for a few games like Shooters but not really useful for this kind of game with constant mouse controls)

You are right, there is no hardware accelerated mouse in the game. It is quite difficult to do as context specific mouse pointers are generated on the fly by the game which is not viable in hardware mode the way I expected. I attempted to do it once already and gave up at that time. The mouse uses the OS desktop coordinate system and translates that coordinate system to internal game resolution coordinate system. From this my guess would be that mouse movement speed in-game is exactly the same what is your OS configuration, but you are right it really seems to be different, generally slower. I will try to look into this topic.

The other thing I noticed arrow keys are disabled. It makes the game unplayable to me not having keys to scroll the map because the mouse is so slow. Maybe support for WASD keys would be optimal, but Arrow keys would be enough (I can remap these with AutoHotkey to my liking...).

The game still simulates an MS-DOS US keyboard. Internally SDL uses the USB keyboard scan codes (raw key press codes) and layout as source which means that on laptops and similar to have arrow keys you must disable Num Lock now. Please try that. On the roadmap there is a work package to handle locales (e.g. keyboard) properly in the future including key remapping which would allow you to use WASD in the future too.

This is a very complex work package though and it makes no sense to do it as long as there is no decision on whether to migrate from the original GNW window and human input manager library to something else entirely (e.g. Nuklear). GNW does not support mouse wheel, hard codes keyboard and mouse handling on every single game window in a window specific way, and does not support widget or gui control auto scaling to game resolution. E.g. if I migrate to Nuklear, I might not use SDL's input event handling system anymore as then GLFW would make much more sense as that would be more future proof if the game migrates to OpenGL 3 or Vulkan API eventually to really support high screen resolutions at high frames per second. In short, support for keyboard locales is far far away...

I managed to get the game on window mode (Settings.INI screenmode=0 disableARcorrection=1) but then I noticed mouse was even slower, so I play on default 640x480, it's no big deal since Alt TAB works fine

In your specific use case, if you are on Windows 10 or the like, I would use "full screen mode", screen_mode=1 as in that case the game resolution and the OS desktop or screen resolution is equal, thus you should not see any difference in game vs screen mouse coordinate system.

Disabling AR Aspect Ratio correction also fixes the issue of map being stretched on Landing Site selection screen (lower portions of the map non acessible on default settings because it stretches to 16:9 AR )

The game does not implement window mouse scrolling on the landing site selection screen. If you enable arrow keys, by disabling Num Lock, you can move that screen around with arrow keys. Mouse scrolling will be added to the screen in the future.

It seems like Scroll Speed and Audio Volume settings also reset on each game startup of new game. Even reloading a saved game the game is very loud until I change volume sliders.

The [OPTIONS] and [PREFERENCES] ini sections are saved into and loaded from saved game files. Audio volume settings are stored in the [SETUP] section, they must not reset or change between game sessions or maps. This must be a bug in my new audio engine code. I made some quick tests are volume does seem to change erratically.

[DwarfFighterCleric]

Okay, just tested again.
NUM LOCK disabled made the Arrow keys work. 👍

Audio settings still not being saved. The game was on 100% until I click each individual slider.
Related to audio I just noticed another thing: as soon as I land on the planet audio settings get reset once again.
It seems like audio settings are going to need to be saved in one global place, not savefiles.
If time is short, one temporary workaround would be to set the game's volume to 50% globally, that would make it a much less painful experience than ears exploding at every startup.

[DwarfFighterCleric]

For future reference, version tested is 0.6.0 Win x64

[klei1984]

I will look into the audio problem. It has to do something with the new audio engine's configuration. I did not notice this issue before as I have a lame laptop with even lamer speakers and even then I just use a global volume of 22% in the OS and leave all settings in games and other apps always at 100%.