Made a list of some re-occuring problem spots for NPC pathing I've seen so far:

• Benches in Lancaster State. Nearly all plays of this area have enemies walking into benches.
• The end of this type of wall in Lancaster State: http://i.imgur.com/s2xj4yg.jpg
• The interior furniture of inclined two-floor classrooms in Lancaster State.
• The doorways of single-floor classrooms in Lancaster State
• Second floor doorways in houses in The Howl, particularly the first door you see after coming off the stairs.
• Pumpkins outside houses in The Howl. Not too common because of their small size, but in can occasionally happen to chasing enemies.
• Coffins in general particularly those against indoor solid walls. Since the update increased the number of coffins this has become really noticeable.

Just got the Build 42.

Most of the major pathing issues seem to be resolved. I haven't run into nearly as many stuck enemies anymore.

Bugs and Issues:

• In "dark" runs of Logan's Woods it's brighter in the cavern than it is outside. This is rather strange.
• Enemies spawning in two-floor inclined classrooms in Lancaster State can end up in a position where they often don't engage the player at all unless directly attacked. Specifically they end up "at a desk" but facing backwards towards the desk behind and above them. It's possible that this awkward position simultaneously blocks their vision and prevents them from turning around unless alerted. Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/JLdjosQ.jpg
• I've had a couple occasions where an enemy spawned right in front of me. If it helps, both occurred in The Howl and both involved tall grass.
• For some reason the issue of enemies sometimes spawning in illogical places really close to the player seems to have become much more noticeable in this build than it was before.

Suggestions:

• "Elite" vampires really suck at close combat, which could be a bit of an issue with how often the player comes into melee range in this game. They might need some help here.
• "Big Bads" might need something to differentiate them from "Elite" vampires other than being more durable.
• It might be nice if there were more reasons to pick a mission other than the ones with the most threat on the map, besides getting equipment and coffee shop NPCs.

Have you considered having elite vampires alert nearby minions somehow?

Maybe it would be interesting if an elite vampire going into combat would alert nearby minions to attack its target, and an elite vampire getting silently killed caused nearby minions to investigate the spot as if they heard a noise.

That could be a neat way to give elites an buff of sorts would vary based something that is visible to the player. Also the player would have a some different options to deal with it, like drawing the minions away from the elites, taking out the nearby minions first, locking the minions out of a house, or quickly leaving the spot where they quietly killed the elite before the minions come along to see what happened.

I guess this would also come with a bit of a lore bonus as it could imply, or be explained as, a sort of one-way "link" between the elites and their minions.

It could be something worth considering if you haven't rejected it already.

Hi, loving the game so far. I was wondering if the combat might benefit from a few more moves, nothing that necessarily makes the player character significantly more powerful, just some things to give the player more options. The only real defensive options are sprinting and/or jumping out of the way of attacks, which feels a bit awkward, and it makes longer fights like with elites look and feel a bit silly. So maybe some way to block/reverse attacks? I was thinking maybe the throw could be used to redirect vampire's momentum, that it isn't always just a forward shove. An example of something like this can be seen at about the 14 second mark of this video:

I do like how the shove currently functions; watching Buffy there are countless moments where she stuns a vampire with a kick or punch and then immediately stakes them, and the shove works in that way, but it would probably be more satisfying, gamefeel wise, if the 'stun' action was in fact a punch (or a high kick; Buffy is nothing without high kicks) with a punchy sound effect. It would be nice to have some sort of grapple, shove, block, etc as a defensive move. That said, the elite vampires should also have some more tricks up their sleeves, close combat wise; as a poster above said, they're not great at at it, and melee fights that last more than a second or so tend to devolve into running circles around an enemy while spamming click and occasionally jumping out of the way of a fireball. I'd love to see the close combat become a bit more tactical.

All of the movement in Slayer Shock is so kinetic and satisfying and, if the combat could be as well that would be fantastic.

Also, does the AI have a mode in between not alert and hostile? They seem to not react to noise particularly often, and many times I'll kill one from range and another vampire quite nearby won't react at all.

Great work on the game, keep it up! I'm having a lot of fun so far, and it has the best feeling sprinting of any first-person game I've ever played; you really nailed the feel there.

The mission locations could probably benefit from some "flavor text" to describe what sort of location they're supposed to be.

Since each of the areas is supposed to represent some part of town, it would probably make sense for each area to have some lore and/or a brief history associated with it for world building purposes. It would also solidify early on that the different terrain types are tied to specific map locations.

Also it would help cut down on complaints like "why is this area all just rows of houses?" (of course it's rows of houses, it's a residential area!).

I hadn't noticed this before, but since Right Click is used for Aim it pretty much doesn't do anything for a good number of the weapons.

Maybe it should do something for those weapons, otherwise it just ends up being wasted much of the time.

Alternatively, maybe Aim should switch default bindings with Shove. Shove is likely to be used more often and is more important than Aim most of the time. Also Shove's current default to Ctrl means it's not easy to run while using Shove, while Aim is less likely to be used while running.

Setting UseFixedFrameTime = false introduces a significant frame rate dependency in mouse sensitivity w.r.t. player character's view angle. The higher the frame rate goes, the less sensitive the mouse becomes. This has the effect of producing a wildly varying mouse sensitivity when frame rate is unbounded. Bounding the frame rate by enabling VSync will produce a stable mouse sensitivity for any nominal setting and refresh rate, but the same nominal setting will still produce different effective sensitivities across different refresh rates.

UseFixedFrameTime = true appears to be unaffected by this issue. In this case, nominal settings produce the same effective sensitivities across different frame rates. Frame rates lower than 60Hz were produced by VSyncing on a 30Hz display mode.

Hold-to-crouch and hold-to-sprint options would be appreciated QOL features since those two stateful modifiers have effect over the game's stealth system. Sprinting is currently a little cumbersome because it's not entirely clear for how long the PC has to stop moving in order to exit the sprint state. This can lead to the PC sprinting when it is not intended for them to do so.

Just got the first release candidate.

Thankfully I haven't run into any major bugs or anything like that, so most of this probably isn't too urgent.

Bugs and Technical Issues:

• High windows are exploitable because enemies often can't deal with players crouching in them. This might also apply to other high locations NPCs can't path to and are high enough to be outside their visual range, but not sure. They just keep helplessly clustering under their location. See screenshot for example: http://i.imgur.com/QOlMIL9.jpg
• Trees in The Howl may occasionally get NPCs stuck. It's kind of rare, but it can happen. See screenshot for example: http://i.imgur.com/XSsXNoB.jpg

Balance and Gameplay Issues:

• Changing ammo is slow once you get a third ammo type. Maybe there should be a "previous ammo" key that way you wouldn't have to switch more than once (assuming there's always 3).
  
• In my opinion the Katanas are overpowered with dealing so much damage and having such reach. I actually stopped using these because they made the game less fun for me. I guess other players may disagree with this however.
• Old Town levels can sometimes come out really long. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does it can be noticeable. I suspect it might have something to do with the "Station" area of this level but I'm not entirely sure.
• Enemies sometimes spawn too close to the player, like around corners the player already checked.

Other Suggestions:

• Maybe have a listing of "plot events" somewhere, similar to the Yearbook but available before the end. Maybe a "news board" in the coffee shop.

There should be a way to see researched weaknesses without talking to your researcher.

Ok, unfortunately there does seem to be a more common gameplay issue related to the "high window" issue from my previous post.

Right now, melee enemies have no way of dealing with players on top of furniture or in spots they can't path to in general. Basically if you are sitting on top of a table or something the minions just get stuck near you with no way to respond, and you can just pick them off from safety. It looks really broken to be clearly visible in the same room as an enemy and for them to be pretty much unable to respond because you're standing on top of something.

Obviously elite vampires don't have this problem as bad as they can throw fireballs, but enemies like Minions (and possibly both of the "specials" though haven't had a chance to try it with them yet) are susceptible to this.

I guess as a possible solution, The Dark Mod (http://www.thedarkmod.com/) used to have this exact same problem with sword-wielding guards in that they'd be left with no reasonable options if they were trying to attack a player in a spot they couldn't path to. The solution that was implemented there was to give all melee NPCs a last resort low-damage range attack that they'd only use if they saw a player in a position they couldn't path to, which in that case was throwing small rocks. The rocks do very little damage and aren't anywhere near as good as "proper" ranged attack, but they reduce the awkwardness of the situation a lot and mean the player can't just sit there and eat rocks as long as they wanted.

I'd like to be able to bind Mouse Buttons 4 and 5 (SDL_BUTTON_X1, SDL_BUTTON_X2), at least on Linux that's doesn't seem possible at the moment.

Oh by the way, SDL_BUTTON_X1/2 need SDL2 2.0.4 or newer to work correctly on Linux, you're shipping 2.0.3 so you may wanna upgrade that (2.0.4 also has lots of other bugfixes, so upgrading is a good idea even if you choose not to support these buttons).

I tested SlayerShock with 2.0.4 and the buttons didn't work with that either, so I guess it's not supported by your code yet.

I've avoided SDL2 2.0.4 because (at least the last time I checked) it's only available as x86_64 on OS X, and Slayer Shock is built for 32-bit on all platforms.

That being said, it looks like the headers for SDL 2.0.3 do support the X1/X2 mouse buttons, and I've made the appropriate changes for that; but I don't actually own a 5-button mouse I can test with, so that'll be an experimental change whenever it comes out.

I just got to Gen2 on my latest run and again I notice that it's still a LOT better than Gen1 in terms of balance.

I know I've voiced this opinion before, but I still really think Gen1 needs a difficulty increase. I can understand trying to allow new players room to get used to the game, but most players and reviewers are only ever going to play Gen1 Normal which makes the enemies too weak for a lot of the gameplay to really work.

As it is, I think this is going to attract a some of criticism about enemies being pushovers and most of the weapons/gadgets being completely unnecessary.

That said, if you're really set on keeping the current difficulty curve, then consider maybe adding a "skip Gen1" option as a new game option.

SDL 2.0.5 is supposed to be released soonish - I hope they provide OSX 32bit binaries again (as far as I know not providing them for 2.0.4 was an oversight). Otherwise you could build it yourself on OSX, it shouldn't be hard with the provided XCode project.

Anyway, thanks for adding X1/X2 support, looking forward to that experimental update (I'd like to bind melee shove to one of them) :-)

Sometimes I get crashes (segfaults) on Linux.

So I ran the game in gdb, here's part of the backtrace:

(gdb) bt
#0 0x0823e7d0 in VampWorld::ClipPortal(VampWorld::SSectorPortal const&, View const&, Plane const&, Matrix const&, SRect const&, SRect&) const ()
#1 0x082424b1 in VampWorld::GatherVisibleSectors(View const&, Plane const&, unsigned int, SRect const&, Array<unsigned int>&, unsigned int) const ()
#2 0x08242500 in VampWorld::GatherVisibleSectors(View const&, Plane const&, unsigned int, SRect const&, Array<unsigned int>&, unsigned int) const ()
#3 0x08242500 in VampWorld::GatherVisibleSectors(View const&, Plane const&, unsigned int, SRect const&, Array<unsigned int>&, unsigned int) const ()

It goes on like that forever (>6500 stack frames) - apparently some kind of endless recursion?

By the way: In the Steam devtest Beta version, Mouse Buttons 4 and 5 work and I didn't get anymore crashes - thanks! :-)

It's pretty hard now, though. Before I just killed everything that moves, now I gotta play quite stealthy (in gen2).

I think it would be really, really cool if there was a better way to get rid of the HUD(as to have a more compelling atmosphere. Here's my basic idea:

Create a mode where you have a phone, one that can check the minimap, your health, the ammunition, the objectives, the dust you have. Pretty much every function of the HUD would be on the phone, but the game world is still active when you use it, and it would be on the scroll wheel(though wouldn't take up a weapon space).

I think this would push the game to the next level, like the hud-less mode in the metro games, but would also make playing hud free on expert difficulty an enjoyable experience.