Antstream - It's Netflix for Games!

[deKay]

OK, going to try and stream in a minutes:

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq28CzBYtOv4qBhQec8Aikg/live

 

[Camel]

42 minutes ago, dumpster said:

F Keys are working for me on PC , I can select all the pinball tables. it feels like there is more lag on this game than the others I have tried.  Really struggling to acively aim the ball by hitting it with the right part of the flipper. Timing is crucial and the lag, however small is a problem there. 

 

Could be the flipper animation. Some old school pinball games do feel a bit laggy even on original hardware.

[hub2]

1 hour ago, Anne Summers said:

Not sure to be honest, and tech support have gone home. All I know for sure is that some controllers work (Xbox, PS4 wired) and some don't. More will work as we go along. 

 

What!!? This should have been get the pizza and beers in night. You're not even celebrating the launch? This is why 6pm was a bad idea for a launch time.

 

Good luck however, will take a look at the weekend.

 

Also, looks like Rllmuk should have been your QA team.

[deKay]

1 hour ago, dumpster said:

F Keys are working for me on PC

 

My controller doesn’t have any F keys

[DeciderVT]

51 minutes ago, deKay said:

OK, going to try and stream in a minutes:

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq28CzBYtOv4qBhQec8Aikg/live

 

 

Watching a stream of a streaming game is where we are now.

 

(Or not, looks like I missed it!)

[deKay]

1 minute ago, DeciderVT said:

 

Watching a stream of a streaming game is where we are now.

 

(Or not, looks like I missed it!)

 

Still rendering or whatever Youtube does, but:

 

[Anne Summers]

3 minutes ago, hub2 said:

 

What!!? This should have been get the pizza and beers in night. You're not even celebrating the launch? This is why 6pm was a bad idea for a launch time.

 

Good luck however, will take a look at the weekend.

 

Also, looks like Rllmuk should have been your QA team.

We got KFC because everyone is sick with the amount of pizza we've had in th last few weeks. 

And no one really fancied beer so we were on the rum and cokes. 

[hub2]

Acceptable response. However, pretty telling the team in already moving on to hard liquor.

[Anne Summers]

20 minutes ago, deKay said:

 

Still rendering or whatever Youtube does, but:

 

Spent ages trying to replicate that bug that stopped your game of Xenon 2 from restarting. Can't believe you got it first time. 

[deKay]

3 minutes ago, Anne Summers said:

Spent ages trying to replicate that bug that stopped your game of Xenon 2 from restarting. Can't believe you got it first time. 

 

It's my super power

[Anne Summers]

10 minutes ago, deKay said:

 

It's my super power

I got a load of really useful feedback from watching that, so thank you !

Plenty of fixes to get working on tomorrow. Not sure how the buttons being the wrong way round on Mega Lo Mania got past everyone. 

[easilydone]

Have to be honest I'm a little disappointed after downloading the app, I was quite looking forward to at least wasting a tenner but can't really justify that based on what I see from installing it.

 

The biggest issue seems there be the games selection, the website claims thousands coming, the loader shows, at best, a hundred (and that's including the duplications over differing platforms). This creates a big disconnect in me. I did a quick search on games I remember playing (e.g. North Vs South, Shadow of the Best 2, Lemmings, populous, even Oscar) and nothing was there. I look at Strategy and there's 4 games showing, it doesn't really match with a claim of a large, or essential in any way, catalogue.

Alongside this, there's artefacts on the loader (MacOS), and the scrolling messes up when loading the header view (keeps dragging the screen upwards), also the toolbar items seem to have no description and the most prominent one closes the app, which seems an odd choice. So whilst not that important, alongside the website design, it comes across as a little rushed and cheap. I would love to try some actual games but I'm not paying a tenner for such a small selection of stuff. Maybe I'm not being stupid and missing something simple?
 

[Fletch]

I subbed I'll probably cancel, the selection of games got me right in the nostalgia gland but I just don't enjoy playing them anymore plus the awesome intro to Xenon 2 and Magic Pockets were missing. 

[dumpster]

Don't know if this affects anyone else, but after three years of owning this laptop, Antstream has just taught me that it's impossible to fire and move diagonally at the same time if your fire button is mapped to the Z key.  Every keyboard game I have uses CTRL, Alt, Shift and Space for the fire buttons and that works fine, but Z and the arrow keys don't work together.  How odd.

[Anne Summers]

1 hour ago, easilydone said:

 

The biggest issue seems there be the games selection, the website claims thousands coming, the loader shows, at best, a hundred (and that's including the duplications over differing platforms). This creates a big disconnect in me. I did a quick search on games I remember playing (e.g. North Vs South, Shadow of the Best 2, Lemmings, populous, even Oscar) and nothing was there. I look at Strategy and there's 4 games showing, it doesn't really match with a claim of a large, or essential in any way, catalogue.

 

 

There are exactly 400 games , not including alternate versions. I know this, because I put them on there myself.

Including alternate versions the total is around 570, can't remember exactly. And that number will grow very quickly. We are in advanced discussions with the rights holder to more than one of the games you mentioned. In 6 months time I'm fairly confident the catalogue will look very different to how it does now. 

 

I've taken your other comments on board and will pass them to people who can fix them, thanks for the honest feedback. 

[Anne Summers]

28 minutes ago, Fletch said:

I subbed I'll probably cancel, the selection of games got me right in the nostalgia gland but I just don't enjoy playing them anymore plus the awesome intro to Xenon 2 and Magic Pockets were missing. 

Working on fixing the missing intros to the Bitmaps stuff . I'm actually going to try and swap the Amiga version of Xenon 2 which is on there for the CDTV version, which plays the full, CD quality version of the soundtrack all the way through the game.

[T Pot]

Is there a reason why the XB1 version isn't full screen? Even the menus have a nasty big bright white border around. 

[Anne Summers]

2 minutes ago, Mr Tony said:

Is there a reason why the XB1 version isn't full screen? Even the menus have a nasty big bright white border around. 

 

Will find out. I guess the reason is because it isn't working properly. 

[T Pot]

3 minutes ago, Anne Summers said:

 

Will find out. I guess the reason is because it isn't working properly. 

 

If it helps diagnose, Xbox One X, 4k on a 4k screen. Didn't try games, The whole app had about a 2 inch white border around them. 

[Marlew]

I didn't realise this was on consoles as well. I might give it a whirl then. 

[SozzlyJoe]

11 hours ago, dumpster said:

Don't know if this affects anyone else, but after three years of owning this laptop, Antstream has just taught me that it's impossible to fire and move diagonally at the same time if your fire button is mapped to the Z key.  Every keyboard game I have uses CTRL, Alt, Shift and Space for the fire buttons and that works fine, but Z and the arrow keys don't work together.  How odd.

 

I think this is known as 'ghosting'. Some keys are on the same matrix, so when you press multiple keys it registers a ghost fourth. Or possibly jamming, Wiki gives the goods as ever:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(key)

 

To link this into the retro theme of the thread, later spectrum models suffered very badly from something like this, with all a lot number keys being linked in this way. No big deal, except some fuckin' genius decided the best way to implement Sinclair joysticks would be to translate the directions to number key presses. So for Joystick 1, it used 6-0, for joystick 2, 1-5. Moves made on one joystick would cause ghost moves on the other. This made playing two player games actually impossible, despite there being two joystick ports. Possibly it was only Amstrad speccies that suffered from this, good old Alan Sugar mark of quality.

[jdanddiet]

2 hours ago, Mr Tony said:

Is there a reason why the XB1 version isn't full screen? Even the menus have a nasty big bright white border around. 

 

I've been using the xbox one version on my 50 inch Sony bravia smart TV and not had that. Here's a grab I posted on Instagram the other day.

[GamesGamesGames]

20 minutes ago, SozzlyJoe said:

So for Joystick 1, it used 6-0, for joystick 2, 1-5. Moves made on one joystick would cause ghost moves on the other. This made playing two player games actually impossible, despite there being two joystick ports. Possibly it was only Amstrad speccies that suffered from this, good old Alan Sugar mark of quality.

 

There's a "You're fired" pun somewhere amongst that, but it's so tortuous I can't make the trek.

[SozzlyJoe]

Just now, GamesGamesGames said:

 

There's a "You're fired" pun somewhere amongst that, but it's so tortuous I can't make the trek.

 

Haha, the ultimate nerd comeback for an Apprentice contestant. King Sugar, or whatever the hell moniker he goes by these days, points at you:

 

"You're fired!"

"OH REALLY ALAN DID I PRESS THE 4,8 AND 9 KEYS AT THE SAME TIME?!?! BUUUUUUURN"

 

Cut to Alan's face of utter, total incomprehension.

 

(And even then, you'd be more lucid than Katie Hopkins.)

[T Pot]

14 minutes ago, jdanddiet said:

 

I've been using the xbox one version on my 50 inch Sony bravia smart TV and not had that. Here's a grab I posted on Instagram the other day.

 

Xbox one X in 4k?

[catinthehat]

Kinda nice to see that this seems to be going well. 

 

A few teething troubles are to be expected.  Hope you've got a strong pot of coffee on the go.

 

[deKay]

A note on the UI - it is very Netflix and suffers from the same problem Netflix does in that you can't properly browse and many games end up in multiple categories. There's also some disagreement over what genre games should be (Xenon is "Action", but Xenon 2 is "Shooting", and Xenon 2 and Sly Spy aren't even similar but are both "Shooting") and there needs to be a way to show "Spectrum Games" or "1989" or "Raf Cecco".

 

You have a "flash" on the artwork for game formats, but it's covered by the flash for "Challenges".

 

When you have a game with multiple formats, it's not obvious there are other formats, and you have to cycle through them to find out. Xenon 2 has two formats (but you can't tell until you click "Amiga", when "Amiga" is already the one chosen):

 

Whereas EDF only has one format but it's only the slight shade of blue that gives you any idea:

 

 

Either have all the formats as separate buttons (with the current one highlighted), or have a "Available on other formats" menu or button. Maybe even say which is the most commonly played, or highest rated, or even explain what the differences are!

[Anne Summers]

12 minutes ago, deKay said:

A note on the UI - it is very Netflix and suffers from the same problem Netflix does in that you can't properly browse and many games end up in multiple categories. There's also some disagreement over what genre games should be (Xenon is "Action", but Xenon 2 is "Shooting", and Xenon 2 and Sly Spy aren't even similar but are both "Shooting") and there needs to be a way to show "Spectrum Games" or "1989" or "Raf Cecco".

 

You have a "flash" on the artwork for game formats, but it's covered by the flash for "Challenges".

 

When you have a game with multiple formats, it's not obvious there are other formats, and you have to cycle through them to find out. Xenon 2 has two formats (but you can't tell until you click "Amiga", when "Amiga" is already the one chosen):

 

Whereas EDF only has one format but it's only the slight shade of blue that gives you any idea:

 

 

Either have all the formats as separate buttons (with the current one highlighted), or have a "Available on other formats" menu or button. Maybe even say which is the most commonly played, or highest rated, or even explain what the differences are!

Going to try and get this sorted out today. I think there should be categories for each format but it's not my decision. 

 

By the way - I think it was you who mentioned on your stream (or in here) that we have a redundant "Dive" button mapped for Xenon 2 - I thought you were right at first, as I played the game a lot and couldn't remember there being a dive feature. However on checking the manual it appears it is a feature you can buy in the shops. 

 

Dive

And you thought that parallax scrolling was just a frill. Press the Space Bar to dive "into" the screen. A timer will appear and count down from ten to zero, Whereupon the ship will come back "up". Alternatively, pressing the Space Bar a second time gets you back up into the swing of things. However, be careful not to come out of the screen and crash into any scenery.

 

Fixed the issue with Mega Lo Mania - changes should go live when we update the content , hopefully later today. 

[jdanddiet]

44 minutes ago, Mr Tony said:

 

Xbox one X in 4k?

Not sure on the K unless its spectrum games which case def 48k or lower.

 

In all seriousness my TV is not 4k no 

[deKay]

15 minutes ago, Anne Summers said:

I think it was you who mentioned on your stream (or in here) that we have a redundant "Dive" button mapped for Xenon 2 - I thought you were right at first, as I played the game a lot and couldn't remember there being a dive feature. However on checking the manual it appears it is a feature you can buy in the shops. 

 

 

That's fair enough then. I played B-Wings just before and that had seemingly identical button config and *did* have a dive from the get go.