OfficerMeatbeef

This. Also, even a Ramjet will take multiple shots to down an aircraft, whereas that Ramjet character will be instantly killed by a single counter-snipe from a teammate following the very clear trail of those Ramjet bullets that are completely distracted by trying to take down the aircraft.

I don't see the problem here at all. A Flame Tank will get destroyed vs a single Mammoth long before it can do any substantial damage if it has to close any reasonable distance. If there's anything else supporting the Mammoth, it will probably not get more than a few feet. Even if it does get up to the Mammoth, if the Mammoth is properly supported it will probably still win out. That "rather short flamethrower range" isn't just some minor detail you can handwave away; a Flame Tank is a relatively large target with moderate speed that is completely outranged by every single other vehicle on either side. If it manages to close the distance against all that fire, it should decimate whatever was foolish enough to allow it to, end of story.

A single Ramjet-carrying character, or two 500-credit standard snipers, cost more than a single Orca/Apache, though. A standard sniper is basically all a good sniper needs to decimate infantry, so the Ramjets need to be able to do their job of long-range destruction of light armour to be worth the cost. Rockets work well against flyers, sure, but at long range they are easily avoided by a competent pilot, as there's both the travel time and the audible warning of the launch. They can't do the job of effectively actually killing a pilot at range, and they shouldn't because they're so cheap. That's the Ramjet's (or multiple sniper's) job.

Yeah, still not sure why this isn't happening. The capability is almost surely there for the server list to not show Beta 1 at all anymore (as it worked fine for the maxplayers limit) and to display a notice about Beta 2 being available, and even several days later there are clearly still many people unaware the new version is out, as your own example indicates. They are likely occasionally trying to join a server, getting dumped to the menu without knowing why, and moving on until they find one that happens to still be Beta 1. You might be misunderstanding here. The auto-patcher won't make it so you don't have to download everything over again. The reason you have to download everything over again is because many of the changes were core parts of the game that changed it entirely. Some updates will require you to download a lot of stuff again, some won't. The auto-patcher won't change that, it will patch what needs to be patched just like the manual one. Also, yes, people are still getting crashes. That's why this is a test, and people need to be downloading and playing it anyway to get enough data for devs to discover why. This is the entire purpose of an open beta. There's no reason to be supporting people playing the first version at all I can see.

ok bye How do you do that though? More selection process for more people for more closed betas? Closed betas work fine for highly anticipated games from big known companies where there are hundreds of thousands of people looking to play it early, they're not stupendously effective for something that nobody knows about. Eventually you need to get a decent number of people playing a thing to actually test things, like the crash bugs which they've been quite clear never showed up in their closed, smaller-scale testing. And this is a test. It's an open beta. That means what it says it means, it's a work in progress that's more or less feature complete but needs to be tested for bugs. Do people really expect an entirely free passion project being worked on by a team in their spare time to have some kind of extensive QA team or something?

Hmmm, ok. Yeah, I've checked the uninstall for Beta 2 out and it also UAC-elevates, though I haven't had a chance to download the installer again so I haven't let the uninstaller complete. So it seems the most obvious difference here is that my account's admin and yours isn't, so that's something to start with at least. Hmmm, sounds like you did due diligence, certainly. To be clear, I'm not trying to accuse anyone here of incompetence or anything, just theorizing and trying to help figure out what went on. After all, all I know is we both ran what should have been the same uninstaller and clearly got vastly different outcomes. Do you recall if you altered the default paths for any part of the original install? Yeah, that is crazy. It really doesn't make any sense; even if the installer was set up to restart you automatically at the end (which, from some research, appears to be possible with the installer Ren X uses but it's not how it functioned for me, for sure) it would just do that, it wouldn't prompt you and I certainly can't see it closing other things while it waits to prompt you. Just bizarre all-around.

It doesn't, or at least shouldn't. It might prompt for that (I can't recall, and I don't have the installer available at the moment unfortunately) but I didn't restart after install and had no problems. Prompting for restart is a simple flag feature of Inno Setup, nothing more. I don't think it can even force a restart like you describe (shutting down other programs etc), though I could be wrong. But it certainly didn't for me. Where did you get this installer exactly? I'm starting to worry there may be a rogue version of the installer out there that's causing all these problems.

I literally don't even see that loading screen anymore, such that I forgot it even existed. Haven't seen it since like the first time I ran the game, it never appears at all. Does make me wonder if it could somehow be related to the crashes.

This is a very troubling thing! In fairness to the devs though, uninstalling the first beta doesn't seem to have affected my Start Menu at all. So they very well could have tested it and had no trouble. It seems to use a fairly standard uninstaller application. Not saying it doesn't suck though. But, ummmm, yeah... beta. We need to find out why this happened with you and not me, who's also running Win7 64-bit. Make sure to post about this in the bug report forum. Edit: Having dug deeper into my own situation, here's what I can provide: as the only account on the system, I'm admin. All my start menu stuff (including where RenX defaulted to) just goes in C:/ProgramData/Microsoft/Windows/Start Menu, my Users (Documents & Settings for XP) Start Menu stuff is pretty much dry. I haven't ever changed anything related to this in Win7, so it would seem to be the default? So I'd hazard a guess that this happens if you're on a system with multiple accounts, but then we run into the question of why it would happen, since from looking at the unins.dat for Ren X I see no indication it would delete anything but what it originally placed, like any other standard installer/uninstaller. As it didn't, in my case.

Yeah, I find it hard to believe that there's more or less exactly 40 people that want to play at most times but have to go for the one or two full servers. It's not helping that there are still many formerly usually well-populated North American servers that have yet to update, but it's mostly the eternal quandary of how to get an empty server to that critical mass where most people see it as a viable choice and start to join. I'm surprised the Beta One servers are still on the list at all, honestly. I guess I can't speak for the dev team, but I can't imagine they want anyone to be using it anymore; kinda defeats the whole purpose of a beta release if people aren't even playing the most recent revision.

When you say "can't rejoin any server" do you mean the joining fails and you get dumped to the main menu, or do you mean it just crashes every time? If it's the latter, yeah I definitely had it before Beta 2, though it's seemed to be more rare now though it's hard to say if that's just because I haven't gotten to play B2 as much. And the fact you have to wait a certain amount of time before it works again could very well suggest something to do with authentication causing a problem. Something else I just realized that I hadn't even noticed until I installed Beta 2: the loading screens? Like the ones that show Havoc running etc? I have never seen them again since the first time I loaded up Beta 2, and before that, likely the first time I loaded Beta One. I had completely forgotten they even existed! Are they literally supposed to only show up the first time you ever load a map in the game? If not, could be something else related to these mysterious crashes I suppose.

Sounds good. Did just have a crash where there were only 4 of us on server, never was more than that there, this one was immediately before new map loaded, ie. voting was done and audio/etc. stopped as if map was going to change but never did, when I alt-tabbed found it was crashed. I will try to be streaming more often and I'll make highlights when I run into a crash, hopefully that will help you all out some. These seems like an excellent observation! This would also very much coincide with how these crashes tend to happen immediately on start or immediately during map change. Mid-match crashes are much more rare for me. I will try to be more observant on this, but my feeling is I see this happen more often when I've already joined or tried to join another server. Also, I'm pretty sure I never get crashes loading a Skirmish, and in fact with Beta One I was finding that loading a Skirmish first sometimes seemed to help with getting on a server that was crashing immediately before. Maybe that was placebo, but it might be a helpful clue.

Are you dev folks still having problems reproducing these crashes? I'm finding it seems to be more frequent when joining servers that are at a high capacity, which would perhaps be tricky for you to replicate in testing. It seems to happen immediately prior to spawning; I'll see a bit of a building, the minimap will show me at the very top corner with no actual map terrain displayed. Maybe it's related to something to do with where people "spawn" before they are put on a team, or just how a new player is initialized? Just throwing out theories here since the crash logs aren't helpful for you.

In honour of Beta Two's release (and my first vid apparently getting to 1000 views when I wasn't looking) I'm finally posting my unit overview vids here in the Tactics 'n Strats section. These are meant to be a basic, informative & entertaining look at each of the units, so I don't get too crazy deep into too many advanced strategies or anything, but I still tried to work in some fundamentals where possible. The GDI Unit guide: zafA1uNZrKA The Nod Unit Guide: BAPbEh7oAH0 Vehicle vid will hopefully still come together sometime in the future, things have gotten a bit crazy around here lately.

Quake is great! Tactical FPS games can be great too! One is not necessarily better than the other, they each are trying to do different things and designed to make the player make different choices in given situations. Quake is about balls to the wall, always moving, straight up pure point-n-click skill. That's rad! Tactical FPSs are about more realistic, deliberate movement, where you're choosing how to balance your more effective movement options with still being able to deliver accurate enough effective fire. That's rad too! Man, it's weird nowadays to see tactical FPSs be the "noob games" or "casual" games or whatever pejoratives people like to use nowadays when it was kind of the opposite back when games like Quake etc. ruled the scene, but I guess that partially speaks to how a lot of the big things people call "tactical FPS" nowadays.... aren't very tactical. They took the parts that were specific to tactical FPS design, sorta smashed them together with some Quake stuff, added XP progressions and called it a day. But I digress... I like the gunplay style of Renegade X. It's an interesting mix of arcadey and tactical, which is totally appropriate for something recreated from an FPS adaption of a classic RTS. I think there's a bit of room for something like iron sights to add a little bit of extra utility and choice to weapons that otherwise wouldn't otherwise have anything but "aim and hold down the trigger", like the carbine or assault rifle, without getting away from the core gunplay that makes this game (and its predecessor) so unique. I think the way they are in now is mostly ok, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for refinement. Here's an idea off the top of my head: another of the unique things about this game (and was very unique even back then) is how it doesn't bother to simulate bullet drop, which wouldn't really suit it I don't think, but still makes range an essential consideration by simply making each weapon's projectile travel on a certain difference before it ceases to exist. In the game, the shotgun isn't just poor at range because it spreads too much to do damage; its shots literally won't exist beyond its effective range! So what if we use the iron sights to play around with that a bit more here. Maybe firing from sights could make the shotgun spread more focused? What if aiming down sights for the Automatic Rifle/Carbine didn't effect spread so much as it gave the weapons a bit more range? The game is already arcadey and ridiculous enough that I don't think it matters if these are given fictional justifications, but I dunno maybe say something like "it's required to use the more precise aiming mode to allow the gun's advanced stabilization mechanism blah blah" whatever it's for gameplay purposes anyway. It would further emphasis that ADS in this game isn't meant to be the go-to way of dealing with most engagements, just an option when you want to be more effective at an opponent a bit further out than normal. Like I said, this is just an idea off the top of my head, it's not meant to be particularly well-thought-out or nothing, but it seems like a decent way to balance out the severe disadvantage aiming down sights gives you in movement penalty.