Closed Alpha Test: April 20th

Just wanted to say a huge thank you for updating the way loot can be picked up! Now I can finally grab loot without spending 5+ minutes trying to get my sensors to detect my hands near the ground!

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Haha you’re welcome! That’s exactly why I added it. The Oculus Touch setup is not very good at detecting reaching for objects below knee height. But with the long-range grab it’s easy.

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Just to confirm, once we name our characters in character creation in this test, it’s saved forever, right? Or will that be in a future test?

Edit : Also, if/when there is a patch once the test goes live, how big can I expect it to be? I’m sure it won’t be an issue, but I only have 5Mb/s down on a good day, so just making sure.

Once you have named your character, you will have that name reserved forever unless you delete that character. Also you can only have one character as of this point so ya…

I could be wrong, but my understanding is as follows:

Your character is saved “forever” as in “as long as your character exists”. I.e, future character wipes will remove items and levels, but will not delete the character itself, thus preserving your character and its name.

If, for some reason, you decide to delete your character, your character’s name will also be deleted and will then be available for anyone to take. If you create a new character, you will then be able to use the same name as long as another player hasn’t taken it in the meantime.
That said, as long as you don’t delete your character, it’s there forever :slight_smile: .

Patch sizes will depend on how big a change is made. Since the launcher is probably around a couple of Gb in size, I’d expect patch sizes to be in the size of Mbs. At 5 Mb/s download speed, it’ll probably take you less than a couple of minutes at most, most likely several seconds depending on the patch.

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That’s all correct re: character names. Basically you make a character now, and as long as you don’t delete it yourself it will carry forward all the way to the game launch, although we will reset the levels of your classes, inventory, etc. There are also some things like achievements that will carry forward as well, though (e.g. “Alpha player” achievement).

Re: the patch sizes, it just depends on how much has changed. Typically speaking we’re gong to try to limit our changes during the time that the Alpha is live to only changing code and not changing levels, which means they should be relatively small (< 100MB). If we do have to make a change to a full level due to a bug or other issue then they could be as large as 500MB but I doubt they would be much larger than that. In-between tests we’ll likely release much larger patches that may involve practically re-downloading the whole game since I assume a lot will change, but obviously that’s less of a concern since you’ll have plenty of time to download it before the next test starts.

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Oh nice, achievements!

One additional question on this, but will there be a way to modify your character’s appearance without deleting and remaking from scratch if we change our mind about something or as new character creation options become available?

I assume we’ll eventually add something so you can do that, but I doubt it will be in before Beta. For now if you change your mind I would just delete the character then re-make it. The chance of the small group of people who are in the Alpha trying to make a new character with the exact name you were already using in the 10 minutes it takes you to re-make the character is pretty much nil.

The other thing you could do is just wait until we say that we’re going to reset character progress (e.g. in a month or whatever) and then you could take that opportunity to delete and re-make the character since you were going to lose all progress anyway. There will be several opportunities like that throughout the Alpha I’m sure. :slight_smile:

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The Oculus Touch setup is not very good at detecting reaching for objects below knee height.

It’s really a matter of setup. I havent ever had issues reaching to the floor. But its a great addition for “default” setup rift owners!

Just FYI, there is a new patch that is being deployed right now. We were able to sneak a few new things in that I think you all are going to like, and fix a few more bugs. So be sure to give yourself time to download it tonight or in the morning. I’ll update the download client thread once it’s ready to download and include the size.

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Could you tell us what the things you added are?
I plan on putting quite a bit of time in during the 48 hour period and want to take time to test every aspect and provide feedback. Since this is my first time entering the game I have no clue what it was like prior to this test. Could you tell me if there are areas within the game you would like extra attention on? Is there a current bug list that is known so I don’t bother you with things that you are aware of? I’m very excited about this game and want to do my part in making the game all that it can be. Thanks.

will there be any in game signs to show the runemage’s list of spells and how to cast them?

The Wiki has some spells listed and how to cast them. No clue if they added any more.

But an in game spellbook would be really cool.

an in game spell book is a must in the future, but I can look them up until then. :sunglasses:

Yep. An in-game spell book would be nice. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is implemented in the future. Until then though, our best bet is to read through the player guide and try to memorize them. (there’s only a few at the moment!)

They’ve been really good about updating the patch notes on the wiki, but I don’t know of any “Known Issues” lists or community driving bug databases as of yet.

https://wiki.orbusvr.com/Patch_Notes

How quick is upgrading your account? Depending on how my schedule looks this weekend I may be able to have time to play and would like to upgrade my account in that case, but if it takes a couple of days and can’t be done for this 4/20 - 4/22 testing I’ll wait.

Riley has said before it’s instant (but the download isn’t), See the reply in this post: Paying For Epic Founder After Client Is Sent, Question
Just note the download is like 2GB

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Thanks! Sorry, might have been too quick to post, thought I looked around but missed that answer. Unless it’s P2P on a bad server or something 2gb download won’t be an issue for me.

edit: Whoops, didn’t notice the main forum, see that post now