GreatGreen

Here's a link to my dxdiag.txt if it will help narrow down the cause of the menu lag. I hope it's figured out because the beta is pretty unplayable with the menu lagging the way it does. http://pastebin.com/j6M0jaM5

Personally, I think party AI in a game like this is absolutely essential. When I picture playing an RPG where you're in a party of characters, I've always thought that idealized gameplay in this type of game would feel simiilar to being the leader of a party of players in an MMO. That is, you would control one main character full time, which itself would have enough buttons, commands, and options to occupy most of your time, and you'd depend on everybody else in the party to do their jobs fairly autonomously, with you occasionally interjecting the odd command here and there based on the dynamics of the situation. I think the equivalent of the MMO party scenario in a single player party-based RPG would be for the player to have the capability of automating all character's combat behavior through scripting, each character adhereing to its own script, and for every character you do not have currently selected to follow those AI instructions. Any character you currently have selected would only auto-attack and would require the player's manual control for everything else. This to me would feel about as close to being a contributor in a party of RPG characters as a single player game could get. This style of gameplay would obviously feel very different than fully micromanaging 6 characters worth of skills and abilities all the time, like how Pillars is currently setup, mainly in that I believe it would allow you to become much more attached to your main character because it would mean you'd be able to spend a larger amount of time using your chosen class in combat relative to other characters, as opposed to feeling like your main character choice is just an insignifficant 1/6th of the total game experience. Also I believe this would help make the game more fluid. You could still make all the important decisions you'd need to on the fly, I'm not talking about making an auto-pilot mode, just a way to automate the small things you'd do during every fight to make things move a bit smoother. This to me would allow the player to put much greater weight on the decision to play any particular class, because under these conditions you'd be choosing your play experience for 85-90% of your game time as opposed to the playstyle of only 1/6th of your game time.

Why not just grab a screenshot of your character during creation and import that?

I don't understand the OP at all. Giving XP for killing monsters does three things that negatively influence gameplay: 1. It encourages grinding. Killing enemies over and over not because you want to, not because it's fun in itself, but because you perceive that doing it will get you closer to where you want to be later on. When you're forced to slog through long parts of a game you don't want to experience in order to get to the "good stuff," that is inherently bad design. In the absolute best case scenario, per-kill XP incentivises grinding, which is bad, and worst case, makes grinding mandatory to progress in the game because the game becomes balanced around grinding out xp, which is very bad. 2. It encourages you to play a certain way even when you're not grinding. Here's a quest to get the goblet from the monster, do you solve it peacefully or violently? Well you get more XP for getting the goblet and killing the monster for his XP instead of, say, completing the quest by making friends with the monster and trading some item that's useless to you for the goblet, so in this case you are effectively punished for thinking creatively to solve a problem because you miss out on that extra goblin killing XP. 3. It makes designing balanced encounters late in a single player game almost impossible, because you have to account for both players who do and who do not grind. How much health do you give the last boss of the game when it can be encountered by a party of level 15 characters all the way up to level 25? Match it to the level 25 party and the level 15's have to grind 10 levels until they're up to snuff. Match it to the level 15 party and the level 25 party cakewalks over the last boss and the player feels like the ending is anti-climactic. At this point you could suggest level scaling the boss, but if you level scale then why have levels at all in the first place? The same thing happened with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The most XP you could get from an enemy was the most tedious way to play. Sneak up to the guy, get sneak XP, knock guy out, get knock out XP, after guy is unconscious, kill him to get kill XP. Optimal gameplay was the least fun gameplay. Optimal gameplay shouldn't be punished. That game should have done what Pillars is doing... provided all XP rewards on quest completion which frees you up to actually do the quests however you want. So in other words, XP per quest only is a fantastic way to distribute XP because it doesn't reward playing one way over another, it simply rewards content completion, which is how it should be.

My computer isn't exactly ancient: i5 8 GB RAM Radeon HD 5800 1GB Every click I make in the character creation interface produces about 5-8 seconds of game freezing lag, whether I change races, choose spells, or even add single attribute points. It's like the game doesn't load any of the character creation screen into the RAM whatsoever and every selection goes to draw a file from a spun-down hard drive (my drive isn't spun-down or asleep in case you were wondering). This extends to in-game actions as well. The game runs at a rock solid 60 fps for me until I do something as simple as click the Inventory button, at which point the game freezes as is totally unresponsive for a good 10 seconds or so until the menu opens. edit - I found something. I decided to play as a Moon Godlike with an Aumaua body... probably the most polygon intensive character model possible now that I think about it. When I do something like pick up an inventory weapon with the dwarf fighter's model displayed, the lag lasts under a second. When I do the same thing with my giant Godlike character, the lag lasts a good 10 seconds or so. It looks like that for every action you take whatsoever in any screen where your character model is displayed, the character model's information is pulled from the hard drive and the character is redrawn on the screen. It's just more noticable with a Godlike Aumaua because that body type happens to use a ton of resources. So in summary - bug found. Every menu action reloads character texture/model data from the hard drive and redraws it, freezing the game until the redraw is complete.