For the few of us that stayed around, we got to meet CR, Sandi, Ben Lesnick and a few others which was awesome. I got about two minutes with Chris, and he was a very down to earth guy who felt awful the demo didn't go as planned.
Anyways, after I got his autograph I went and watched a few of the developers playing the DFM, and suddenly they started letting the couple people that were left play as well!
I jumped in the seat, got in my hornet, and was off
From a technical standpoint:
The visuals were stunning. There's no way the live stream could have done it justice, as the big screen they were casting on wasn't a great resolution. I just sat for a minute taking in the scene that was the dog fighting field.
Movement was smooth, no studdering when the ship move or having items glitch through you. The character moved as I would have expected with the ship and the controls were responsive.
Collision detection and damage states also worked great. I misjudged my flight path and my wing clipped an asteroid, which knocked some pieces off and the end of the wing starting sparking. I didn't notice any difference in how my ship was flying, but it might have not been enough damage for that or I just wasn't used to how the ship handled yet.
Gameplay:
Overall the game play was pretty great. There is definitely some tweaking that has to be done to different controls, such as acceleration and deceleration, but those were minor issues. Movement was pretty easy to pick up considering the complexity of moving around in space. I wasn't able to figure out how to lock and launch the missiles (they might have been turned off), but we were able to see that during the demo.
One thing that was a bit bothersome was causing damage to the other ships seemed to be a bit difficult. There was one point where I was about 50m behind another ship, pummeling him with laser shots, and he barely seemed to be taking any damage. I don't know if I was using the wrong weapons or what, but I think the shield were recharging really fast, as I kept seeing them pop back up after a second even though I kept firing.
Overall the experience was great. I got to play for about 15 minutes then I let someone else try it out. Most of my gripes about it are just tweaking damages and other stats, which is what testing is all about. Don't let the fact that the demo failed worry you too much. I was talking with one of the AI programmers and he said they had a server in Boston they were going to use that crashed, which had the stable build on it. They quickly connected out to the Austin server, but that had newer patches on it they caused the issues we saw during the livestream.
I have full faith in Chris Roberts and the CIG team to give us what we're looking for and more, and I can't wait to get my hands on it in a few weeks with all of you!
So my apologies for not tracking you down Durron.
