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Date: 12/04/11
Posted by: Black Monk
Thanks for checkin' us out!
Hubba hubba!

So as people have figured out by now, this is in fact a beta and we've got some rough edges. This falls into two categories: 1, the gameplay can be tweaked. 2, the video requirements are KILLER.

For 1, please keep mentioning stuff you find either in comments here or in comments on facebook. Ideally you'd enter them into Bugzilla, but any way we can get feedback is good with us!

For 2, it seems like we're under siege about the video requirements; we're on deadly ground for having our glimmer man draw from the fire down below like a patriot (even though he's a foreigner) to stuff more graphic goodies in the game. Some of our fans are out for justice, but we can't act like we're marked for death or we'll end up half past dead. After working on a game for a decade, I think it's easy to see that we're hard to kill. In light of that, I'm going to make the executive decision that you'll want a Geforce 8800 or better or a Radeon 3650 or better to enjoy Reaction. You may be able to get lesser video cards to work, but no guarantees. Intel video? That might just be exit wounds when it comes to Reaction.

To help make things easier for everyone, I humbly request that players take a few demos every so often. Best when on a full server, of course. Just one or two maps, ya know? ZIP 'em up and email them to me. We'll pick out one or two demos that seem to be good for benchmarks like the old Quake "timedemo" stuff. Then we can start getting feedback on which video cards are good to go and which ones totally suck. You can hit me up at monk@rq3.com so I can learn all your secrets, err, I mean so we can pick a nice, taxing demo to distribute as "reactiontimedemo" or something of the sort. Also, heck, we may use some clips for promo material like a trailer! Ya never know! :D

So to sum up, if you run an Intel Atom with built-in video or have a really weak nvidia 8400 GS, well, Reaction might be a bit too much to handle. Quake 3 ran fine on those because Q3 did most of the video rendering on the CPU, not the GPU. SmileTheory's rewritten chunks of the renderer to use features on the GPU. This lets us make more pretty stuff and also do more with less of an fps hit. May be hard to accept, but if it was still all being rendered on the CPU with the new effects, even a new Geforce 680 would be popping out single digit fps.

We'll see what we can do to tweak things to at least work on lower-end video, but no promises.

The servers are pretty much all in Europe so if you're in North America, your pings might not be too hot. I think zakk from ioquake3 might have a North American server set up but I'm not sure.

For some criticism of gameplay, well, if you're going to criticize Action Quake 2, the gameplay that Reaction is based off of, yeah, of course you're going to find fault with Reaction! Such things are bound to happen. :) Can't climb ladders in LCA? If so, that's a bug that should be looked at. We'll take any and all criticism and suggestions into account though, hey, some things might not be changed, gameplay-wise, for a vocal minority. If you run into an issue where the map auto-restarts when the round is supposed to begin, well, that should have been fixed? I guess let us know if you're running into it. Maybe it's a Linux-only thing?

OS X, yeah, we're planning on this but no one on the team (except for the guy who did the original unauthorized Q3 port to iPhone, yeah Blaze, I'm lookin' at YOU) really does Mac programmin'. So we'll get to it when we can.

Other random stuff I've seen since release... yeah, you can get juggled when shot. Some default button assignments can be better, I think. You can customize the crosshair though I thought we did something different for SSG zoom to obscure outside the scope. I'll have to check. The game should work fine on WinXP and if you get errors about GL_ARB_blah stuff, that's related to the video card and how old it is or what it supports, that kinda thing. So you won't need to update to Windows 7 to play the game though you may need a more recent video card (just make sure it has XP drivers before you get it, if you go that route!) Our Bugzilla should be workin'? If not, please let us know in the comments here!

Thanks again for your patience and the time you spent to check us out! We're workin' to improve things!