Feedback posted on behalf

[Dave]

I'm posting this feedback I received in an email so as to be able to keep track of things in one place.
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You guys have done some amazing stuff here. I have a few comments to help iron out the wrinkles.

I can't seem to add topics to the appropriate forum threads so here is my feedback as I have logged it during my first couple of runs:

New cube description comes up with minimum description length is 10 characters no mater how many you enter. Title and description fields should be labeled, new users don't know what they are, it looks like you should be able to select something there but no selections are available.
Bug Noted

No hand-off message to tell new users that cube must be entered after launch. The pause makes it look like the client has crashed trying to load.
Bug Noted

The corner control panel takes (or at least took) a long time to load, I had pressed all the buttons a few times and thought it was not functional. As I was walking away, I drop-spawned into my cube center and the photo boxes popped up on the wall. A message to say "loading please wait" or something might be good.
This is caused by having 400 textures for buttons load up all at once. We were considering a paging system for the buttons to eliminate this delay.

When I double clicked "my media" I got options for audio - But WHAT audio??? Is this ambient sound??? or is this a triggered sound??? What triggers it???
This is any audio, to be used on an object. Right now the only option is double-click style audio (drag a sound to an object and double click the object to play. We are going to be adding triggered audio soon

When you click on the sounds, nothing happens :/ Is something supposed to happen??? More contextual help messages that could be turned off by expert users might be good.
Bug Noted

Regarding wall and ceiling/floor UV scale - You may wish to consider a scale adjustment slider for cube surfaces, textures properly scaled to the cube walls/floors/ceilings, or make them scaled smaller and tileable. The stock textures are about 8x the size they should be in relation to the avatar. This makes it look like the avatar is about 6" tall.
This is a design issue really. Many of the textures do represent a normal sized room, while they are being used on a very large room, giving the effect of making the avatar seem smaller. It's something that can be worked on an ongoing basis. What we didn't want to do was eliminate the nice continuity you see when you put those 'roomy' textures on the wall... they have features on the top sometimes and tiling them vertically would look wierd. I know this can be solved by adding border textures as well, so I am going to be looking at that route (which you did suggest earlier )

I hit the "home" button because at one point my avatar could not move and all my cube edits disappeared :/
This is something we haven't seen yet, I will try to reproduce it here but please keep an eye out for it happening again.

I was spawned back in the starter cube and then I got a "server timed out" error and was disconnected.
Are you in XP or Vista? Right now you maintain a connection to the Master Server which keeps track of everyone, as well as your local Cube Server when you are in a cube, so the timed out message probably came from the Master Server. Had you been in your cube for a while when it happened?

CubeKind Crashed when I attempted to import a photo file from my E: drive. It occurred on the switch from C: to E: drive.
Bad Cubekind! Bug noted. XP or Vista?

The console is accessible via the ~ key while in-cube. I have seen one TGE game where talented script-kiddies were using the enabled ~ function to do things they normally shouldn't be able to do. I don't see this as a high priority item, but may be a security risk down the road at some point.
I thought it would be useful during the Test Drive, sometimes we will ask people to enter in a command to run to gather some information for debugging. Like trace(1);

Free grid membership for testers is mentioned as the "mystery gift", but can't access "the grid"
Grid memberships will be setup this week

In forum... No topic in TEST DRIVE to post in
Also No topic for support. You should double check the last 3 forum threads. I use the same PHP with our Golem Graphics site and ran into similar issues. I find that you really have to kick it sometimes to get it working the way it should.
These have been addressed

I'm going to try it one more time and see if I can't get it working :]

Also I mentioned to a couple of budding 3d artists that you may be looking for additional content for your Cubekind store.
Send em on! The Affiliates Program is perfect for artists.

Best of luck!

[maelstrom]

But WAIT!!! There's more!

I'm running XP BTW

Pets, no preview ability? A button next to the pet name to delete them or control actions would be good. Renaming features??? pet-4789 is a bit of a mouthful

Pets buttons remain after pets have been deleted.

Can't walk under the arch object/building block. You should be able to walk through things like that.

In editor mode, while trying to manipulate the smaller lamps, you often grab the "light" and not the lamp itself. I managed to edit one of the small lamps only by scaling the light as small as I could so that I could grab the lamp object itself.

A list of the cubes objects might be a nice feature where the owner could select from the list and manipulate the object that way. This might be important where objects are mistakenly placed inside or behind another or somehow fall outside the cube boundaries. Then the user could still manipulate the object from the list.

The couch and chairs have basic outer bounds. This will make it so that the avatars can not properly sit in them. (assuming you or someone eventually implements a sitting feature). Also, when you stand on them, you do a hovering act.

How do you rotate the camera? I can't see my front!!!

Since PROPS controls object behaviors, shouldn't it be called "behaviors" instead of "props"??? granted, "behaviors" is a bit large for the GUI button, but more descriptive of it's function. I found props a bit misleading.

Crashed on trying to upload user textures when I switched to E: drive. I emailed my console log to Dave, but I took a look at it and didn't see anything useful about the crash. I'll log in again and try to upload a user texture from my C: drive this time.

[Dave]

You can dismiss a pet by right clicking on the titlebar of the pet button window, and rename it by clicking *in* the window. Buttons coming soon for those.
You can select an object and press M to mount it/sit, and it will put you in the orbit cam mode. This works for the chairs already. The orbit cam mode can be toggled with the Z key.

Collision on the arch and other objects is being revisited, which is why we only have a small handful of items available now as opposed to the many in my own interface from screenshots.
HA! I had that GUI named behaviors for quite a while, changed to Properties just before the Alpha.

Thanks again for the feedback, keep it coming.

[maelstrom]

You asked for it!!

OK went to put a custom photo into a photo box and it worked, however, I stopped being able to move after that and less than a minute later ... I timed out.. Lost connection

Logged back in... can see new user photo where it is supposed to be... this is good!


Added a building block... no troubles, but once I textured it, my avatar can't move. This is similar to the occurrence where I added a custom texture and timed out.

Found Rick's cube in search but could not enter it.

Timed out shortly after trying to enter ricks cube... Less than a minute.

Went into "loading Data" but locked.

Was able to hit "cancel" and get back to main menu outside of cube.

Ended up closing program.

As I was saying to Rick, The custom textures and manually opening ports to allow them to be shared is awkward. I don't even know how to open specific ports with my current firewall (my old one yes That may be a bit daunting for the average user. But I think sharing custom textures are essential. In all likelyhood, my cube would be completely customized once finished. If friends logged into a blank cube that would kind of suck :/ Is there a way to host custom content on the servers and make it available that way? There is also the security issue of not knowing what textures users are loading into there cubes. I certainly wouldn't want my teenage son visiting the mammoth boobs cube for example :/ Not quite sure how you guys could control that.

[Dave]

The movement issue is indeed a known one and will be in the first update. For now the solution seems to be hit tilde twice to open and then close the console.

As far as the ports go, it's a rough subject so far. Cubekind allows you to run your own server and world in essence, so it should seem likely that you may have to do some configuration to be able to do this kind of thing. We do want to make it as easy as possible, and that means finding and documenting the means to do this for various setups.

We have discussed the possibility of hosting content on a centralized server, which does have the added benefit of being able to screen the content as you noted. This is entirely possible as is BTW, Cubekind is built with a few different tools which can fetch files from an Internet based location. Right now our architecture is distributed such that the only centralized server needed is the master server/database. This means low overheads for us and a huge distributed network. At some point we may decide to add a storage server specialized in file storage and retrieval. Then, when you imported files, they would ALSO go to your online storage account, and people who connect to you would grab files from there and also stream in any music that needs streaming. It would definitely be a premium service though, for folks who really didn't want the burden of serving files and opening up other ports. I have seen some excellent guides on port manipulation for all kinds of brands of routers, so hopefully this isn't too bad a technical hurdle.

Rick's cube contained a lot of music (he's a very good songwriter!) and I had been trying to stream in music as the client loaded, but this was only viable for low-file sizes. In the end, he gave me a use case which required some re-architecting. In the next update files will be served by a silent http process running side-by-side and therefore as fast as humanly possible. This will also allow music to actually be STREAMED and not need to be downloaded completely to the remote client before it plays. A nice innovation, and it will prove to be exceedingly handy later on.

[Rick]

Hi Maelstrom,

There are helpful hints under the help key that covers naming a pet and what to do if you lose your movement keys. The help key has a lot more there too. Please give it a reading if you have not already and let us know your comments on help.

We are still developing the tutorial tools. What you tell us helps in what we need to do there. Thanks for all the help.

Cube the world,
Rick

[maelstrom]

As a lazy spoiled user... I want any interface to be as intuitive as possible! The minute I can't figure out how something works and have to start searching help, that's time I'm not using the application as it was intended. Spore is a nice example of a really intuitive interface. The game is highly complex, but the GUI is very understandable. And I'm not faulting you guys, You have put a serious amount of work into it to get it rolling and I realize you can't do everything at once. I'm just pointing out that in my opinion, help files should be a last resort.

You mentioned a tutorial. How about a tutorial mission, where you have some sort of mentor (Cube Master???? Maybe he looks like Blue Guy ), that assigns you various cube tasks to get new users familiar with the interface and features? Successful completion of the mission could unlock bonus content not otherwise available. The mission could be accessed with the other games.

[maelstrom]

Getting a bit deeper into cubebuilding and stuff now.

It didn't like multiple copy (I'm going to guess it works just as well in regular TGE?)

Only copied the 1st of the selected objects. the group of selected objects then lost the second object on move and it became misaligned with the group.

Tried to import an OGG and MP3 file, when I clicked on them, it immediately said they were imported. But I assume they need time to upload? You may want to take a look at the mechanics of this process and adjust the feedback messages accordingly. I.E. "Uploading audio", or "file qued for upload, please wait for upload to complete before using file", instead of "uploaded". Or does it only upload when you go to link it to an object??? At any rate, better feedback to describe what is happening would be good. I'm the type of person who if I don't get an idiot light, eyecandy, message or sound, I assume it didn't work and try it again - Sometimes that can cause a crash or issues if it is already doing what it should

I created 2 pane building blocks, but they both spawned below the floor and I can not access them.

Also, panes only appear to texture on one side. Is that intentional?

Large building blocks that are maybe 1/4 of the rooms dimensions would be nice for creating different levels and partitions. Making 10 to 30 blocks (even at max scale) to create a floor rise was a bit tedious, although I did manage to rescale a pane quite large. I couldn't get it rotated perfectly flat though.

Disconnected - Timed out while actively editing objects.

On re-enter attempt, got "syncronising files please wait... followed by another time out message.

On querying cubes to join... you can't read the cancel button, it's too dark.

1610 - re-signed in and launched cube.

Ogg imported OK, but I couldn't assign a user MP3 to the jukebox. Tried double clicking and dragging. Is MP3 supported? Are there file size constraints?

It might be labor prohibitive, but a 90 degree button of some kind for rotating objects would be very good. Rotating them by hand almost always leaves them off a bit, especially the pane!

Power of 2 textures also includes 64x128, 128 x 256, 512x256, and 1024 x512. Some of these resolution textures would do well on the walls. And would make a better resolution for certain photos, but currently, they are not allowed.

A different color or means to tell which cubes are active and may be joined/visited would be nice. I tried to enter every cube listed, but I couldn't enter any and eventually crashed the engine.

I'm really good at that!

[Rick]

Hi Maelstrom,

We will have a tutorial but I agree with you that the more intuitive Cubekind is to use it is the better. In the long run I expect to see 2 types of members those who want to make/have cubes and those who want to travel the world or go to business's show room. If you are just a cube jumper than there is little to learn that is not intuitive. If you want a cube then the tutorials will help you do that.

As we work thru all the bugs, we can start putting in more content. We will be adding more building objects with different sizes so it is easier to build different levels in a cube. I like the 90 degrees and drop to the floor suggestions.

Dave and I really appreciate all the feedback you have been providing.

Rick

[maelstrom]

No problem Rick!

I realize you guys are just getting started and there is a lot to do. Just jotting down some notes as I go through the process really. Glad some of them came in handy!

I noticed today that when I deleted lamps, the lamp light stayed, even after I re-entered the cube. I was unable to delete it using the editor mode.

Also, I couldn't seem to delete music that I had imported.