Well, the good things are good so I only really need to address the other stuff as I can
Meta-knowledge plays a key factor in hacking.
Knowing the commands in one thing, but express knowledge of every bot and item type down to the letter is Nethack tier. What's more, you can't access the gallery while inputting the commands, so you have to alt-tab or have a superb memory. AND the terminal punishes you for misspelling. I'd have put this in the Subjective category if meta-knowledge elimination weren't described as a design goal.
Making manual hacks more easily accessible via menus and such was a feature I considered before, but decided to leave out for now because the entire thing was considered kind of "extra" for the really hardcore hacker players, not for general use. But then as soon as everyone knows about this feature it seems to become a pretty essential/standard way to want to play, or at least everyone seems to believe they're
the way to win :/.
I play the game almost completely without manual commands because the only one you really should use to win in certain situations is "Alert(Purge)". That's it. All the others are highly optional; I can win without any of them.
Now if a player's goal is to become a really good hacker and build robots, I can see how the manual system may be a little tedious. An alternative would be to completely remove manual hacking of standard commands, but that would imbalance the hacking game, and make it a lot less exciting. A better solution suggested by nsg21 that somewhat addresses this issue is to allow your buffered commands to carry over between games. (Did you know about the command buffer accessible via up/down so you don't have to retype previous commands?)
Or another solution for entering robot model names specifically because I know they're not exactly easy to remember as is.
Most of the fonts are hard to read.
This has been brought up before, I'm just adding my name to the list of people saying it. I find 14/Crisp and 18/Narrow the easiest to read, but both are on the small side.
Yep, more fonts on the way. They won't be sci-fi fonts, but they'll be easier for some players to read.
Controls aren't in the manual.
There's no external way to view the controls before you play. While ? is standard to roguelikes, esc is standard for just about every other game. I'm glad I've played a lot of roguelikes, otherwise finding the menu would have sucked.
That's on the way.
However, in anticipation of players needing commands the installation section of the readme does have a section on commands that tells you to use F1 or '?' to get the full list of commands when you start playing.
A larger glowing '?' in the bottom right corner in a future version will also help (right now it glows, but is a little small).
Also, when you play the game for the first time it mentions in the log with a flashing pink message (and a beep) that you should press F1 to see a full list of commands.
The thing with game design is that no matter how many ways you try to convey a piece of information, unless it's via a modal window where the only option is to look at one thing before continuing,
many players will miss it.
Even if there were a separate text file named commands.txt (which there will be), most people won't even notice or read it. But at least such a file will hopefully appeal to other players like yourself.
As for your subjective elements I can't really do anything about those since they form a core part of the mechanics
. Cogmind isn't for everyone! But we can hope that the good outweighs the bad for players who may dislike certain aspects of the gameplay.
Thanks!
Meta-knowledge plays a key factor in hacking.
Actually i can't understand that either... Though i have not ventured deep enough to talk about balance or understand from where did some people find the list of commands but when you have that list it basically invalidates all the choices in the menu?
I was hoping for a some sort of hacking mini game there (though read few devs/reviewers ranting on hacking minigames) e.g. submitting commands that increase chances and maybe reduce alert levels of other actions by figuring out what was wrong with them when used (like when it says "triggered node purge" typing something like "nodes.reinit_cache()").
The other impression or possible way i thought this will work is that you would have a lower level access to same things i.e. you would have more choice with what you get (less alert with less data - maybe only one location of transporter instead of all?).
I don't see this so much as a problem as a seperate option. To really utilize hacking you have to spec out your character for it. If you're packing hacks that just takes away room for combat and evasion. It's just another variable you have to consider and I quite like it.
My problem with hacking is that in some levels you just really don't have a chance to do anything useful. If you can hack a schematic for something you need, good luck finding a fabricator and not blowing it up in a firefight. If you find a repair station, good luck with it being good enough level to actually repair anything. I think the distribution of terminals/fabs/repair/scanalyzers needs to be fixed up a bit rather than the mechanics. But perhaps some help info in the manual commands would be useful to players just getting started too. I dunno.
I agree that there needs to be more tweaking of the hacking system, especially where security levels and distribution are concerned. And I didn't really expect everyone to get into the manual commands so deeply.
Meta-knowledge plays a key factor in hacking.
Actually i can't understand that either... Though i have not ventured deep enough to talk about balance or understand from where did some people find the list of commands but when you have that list it basically invalidates all the choices in the menu?
I was hoping for a some sort of hacking mini game there (though read few devs/reviewers ranting on hacking minigames) e.g. submitting commands that increase chances and maybe reduce alert levels of other actions by figuring out what was wrong with them when used (like when it says "triggered node purge" typing something like "nodes.reinit_cache()").
The other impression or possible way i thought this will work is that you would have a lower level access to same things i.e. you would have more choice with what you get (less alert with less data - maybe only one location of transporter instead of all?).
In designing the system I tried to reduce any possibility of hacking becoming a mini-game. More often than not these turn out poorly, and hacking is really meant to be a secondary endeavor in Cogmind.
Walk up to a terminal, press a few buttons, maybe pull up a buffered manual command to hack, leave.
when you have that list it basically invalidates all the choices in the menu?
No, because when you hack a manual command they are both more difficult and you cannot see the chance of success. So doing it is actually fairly dangerous.
So in that way I'm sort of surprised to such a heavy reliance placed on using many different manual commands. That's only meant for a very specific type of player (biomatter is definitely that type of player), and I believe a number of other players on the forums are possibly being influenced by a minority in that regard.
I'm still too busy with everything to be able to even read the strategies board right now so I can't say for sure. Changes that might emerge from there will come eventually, but first there is all this other stuff, and bug fixes, to tend to.
