Adam Brennecke

and let the render spend 15-20mins per area to get really high quality areas. Or days in some cases. We render on two machines that spin all of the time. Sean can chime in on how long it takes to render a scene like Dyrford Village, but I think it's several hours now. It used to take over a day before we optimized it.

Pitching new game IP to anyone is near impossible now. Case in point: Obsidian. If you have an idea, you can try to Kickstart it or make it small enough that you can fund it yourself. If you are lucky and find someone to make or fund it they will own the IP. Pretty sweet eh?

If you can reproduce this, can you hover over your attack roll in the combat log (and take a screenshot of it)? That can help us figure out what's going on. Thanks! Adam

I prefer it too, but we need to compress the images for things to work (like the build process). They are much smaller when loaded in memory by a factor of 10.

off topic... sorry! The party stealth stuff has nothing to do with anything you think it has to do with. We want to change it and our current plan is to get around to it for the patch/expansion. Any changes requires time to refactoring the system from the original design. We felt like it wasn't worth the time investment (time away from bug fixing) because it doesn't make how you play the stealth game that much different, and refactoring at this time would introduce many new bugs into the system. Does that make sense? Even if it takes a only a few days to do, that could mean 20-30+ bugs don't get fixed. -Adam

Further putting ranks in my delusional skill—if those things get done for PoE2, is there any chance you'd back-port them to PoE? I can't predict the future. Haha

Chances that this makes it to the expansion? It would be a pity if that was a PoE2-only feature. Major graphics enhancements are not expansion work unfortunately.

Popping in for a bit bold question: But since I don't know much about how shaders/lightning work, is this custom stuff, the reason why the character models of our party don't look really lit up in certain areas, and why they have that opaque look to them sometimes? In other posts, I have naively been hinting at how clear char models look in InXile's WL2 - also Unity, but now I realize you have made some custom lightning/shaders, and you also have that clever 2D/3D painted background trick to keep up. No, it really doesn't have anything to do with that and that's a good question. We have an ambient term in our shaders that is added to characters. We use it to make the character fit into the scene better (which in our first batch of screenshots - this was one of the biggest complaints). It just needs to be adjusted by artists where the term is too strong. In other places, the directional and fill lights need to be tweaked to bring out the character silhouettes. But I agree with you. The characters do get washed out in certain places in the game, so I may globally scale down or adjust the ambient term before we ship. Additionally I would like to explore tighter shadowing (including point light shadows) and a slight AO around the feet to ground the characters in the scene, but that's work for down the road on future projects. Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to look into graphics improvements over the past several months.

and to add, most games are like 10-20 hours long... Wasteland 2 and POE are giant games compared to most nowadays.

Unity doesn't have much to do with how the game looks because we are using custom lighting/material shaders for most things. Game art production is a budget/time/cost/scope thing, and games can look significantly better when you have the resources for it. A heck of a lot of time was spent making that Katarina model for DS3. There were only four characters to choose from, so much more time could be spent on each one. We also had more resources for graphics engineering, a dedicated lighting artist, and more character artists on that project compared to POE, so generally things are going to look better. How many different heads/bodies can you choose from in character creation in POE? Dimitri can only spend x amount of time on each thing, and he has a massive balancing act to perform when trying to polish all of the character art in the game. He actually did the model for Katarina, so given the time and resources, he can make things look pretty darn good. That's also why characters in Final Fantasy games look so good (despite the arguable art direction) - they have a limited cast of characters and they never change appearance throughout the game. Cheers! -Adam

Just for fun, I want to point out some of the hell we have to go through when designing UI. Thanks for being a good sport! I encourage people to keep making mock ups because it might show something that we haven't thought of yet. If Kaz showed me this I would give him these notes to work on: 1. Combat log wouldn't resize properly in that position. It would quickly overlap the camp and stronghold buttons, and it would be even more problematic if you made the backing solid - probably not ideal. It might work better if you made the log look and work like BG2 and it expanded the entire length of the middle and could be resized up and down. 2. There's many more abilities that can be displayed that what you have room for (remember you also need to account for quick items and items that grant abilities). There's no room on the right to expand it. I'm not sure of the ability count that you need account for. First level priests have nine spells. 3. Our general policy is any mock up needs to display status effects, chants, focus, wounds, animal companions, etc. These are pretty important to display on the HUD. You have the room for it, so it's not that big of a deal, but I thought I would mention it. 4. You are missing the formation and stealth buttons. Again not that big of a deal since you have the space. I suggest making the portraits larger, just to see how it looks since you have the room for it, and move all of the middle elements to the left side and make them smaller. Kaz would have to show mock ups for varied resolutions include high and low res 16:9, 16:10, and 4:3 to see how things fit together. This can be a pain in the ass, but it will save hours of time down the line if he finds things don't fit in a particular resolution or aspect ratio. I really like the look of it. It's a great start, and thanks for sharing! -Adam

Also summoned creatures will only be available in combat, and I don't see us changing it anytime soon. We did this to solve a number of design and programming problems.

Possibly on some abilities! Can't say we will remove it completely, because I know a few things will be very difficult to get working proper.

We are working on it. What class/race/gender combo do you feel is missing? I'll pass that on to the portrait artists. Thanks! -Adam

We haven't done any performance optimizations yet. Today, Roby is looking into optimizing factions that might help in larger areas with lots of baddies/people.

Yeah, pretty much. There are some other reasons too - like solving the issue with per encounter abilities outside of combat.

Most of the issues with the combat only flag is restoring the game state after a save/load is performed. As you probably have noticed, we've had a fair share of issues with save/load over the course of the Backer Beta. Since you can't save in combat, we don't need to restore combat only abilities after a load. There are a few balance reasons, but most of those are minor compared to the save issues. We are going to evaluate combat only stuff moving forward (Paladin auras have been discussed), but I can't promise any changes right now.

Any talk of a sequel have been no more than a few discussions in a couple of meetings. Feargus and the project leads of the teams plan where people are going after Pillars is done for staffing/hiring needs across the entire company. No one is actively working on it, and this is standard for every project that is winding down.

Base Concentration is 50 for all units AFAIK. So it's 50 * (1 + [{(Resolve - 10) * 6}/100]) 15 Resolve - 10 = 5. 5 * 6 = 30% 30% of 50 = 15 Concentration = 65 correct.

I think they are all skippable now. Haven't tried it yet.

We made the movies last a bit longer and we made them skippable. *High Five*

We've already fixed the implement/pistol dual wield issue, the dex attack speed issue, and are still investigating the reported problems with interrupt. It's hard to test every bit of this game everyday with our internal testing resources, so things can break with a minor bug fix to a unrelated system. Thanks for the feedback and bug reports! Keep them coming.

Build 435 is going through QA right now, and we are preparing patch notes.

I think this is fixed in the next build. Thanks for the report!

This should be fixed in the next build. Thanks for the report!