Tigranes

How many hours has it been?! :'( My puny scripting skills have regressed into near-nothingness and it's not as if I've modded more than a decent amount for other games, but just tinkering with the idea of a short module and see how it turns out. Of course, all toolset-related discussions on this forum seems to have fallen off a cliff and drowned. Takes a while to create an area that looks reasonably okay.. kinda. Fog is off for a couple of them, and all of this is the non-playable area so.

..... This is stupid even by our standards. I'd have thought that the combat mode fix implemented in 1.04 beta would have pleased a lot of people; it certainly was a point of complaint for many on here and elsewhere. How do you guys feel about it? Is it enough? I think it is, but then I was never too bothered by the 'bug' in the first place.

Finally went back to tinkering with the toolset. I maintain that it takes WAY too long to make the terrain, since you dont have a Paint Trees tool that works like Grass, and you can't undo anything. Oh, and the lighting took a while and still looks fugly. :'( edit: also, if the lighting isnt that bright it looks like all the tile textures are the same. It's gonna take a nub like me a while to get anytihgn done.

Whether one is better than the other is debatable; but certainly, using BG and BG2 as the easiest examples, the lower level campaigns always offered a different sort of charm. I'd love TBH's first incarnation to be level 1-8, so that if it ever got further it could simply continue where it left off without going into epic levels (since we're not likely to see true epic levels, just NWN1 style).

West Harbor is usually a good point of reference, yes, now that lights and shadows indoors don't cause a disproportionate amount of lag as they did in pre-1.03. Just about the only area that will cause you to lag more is Neverwinter Castle, but nothing can fix the lag in that horrible place. Going to get 1.04 beta now and see if this can improve performance, I still can't believe upgrading from Radeon 9600 pro to x800 XT did nothing.

Mine did the whole thing in less than 2 minutes... considering the fact that I usually get 30kbps max in this stupid New Zealand broadband, that's amazing. Haven't tried it yet though, playing the BG Saga again and just finished BG1. Improved Ilyich is a b*tch.

Different engine, which has been the point of discussion for about 2 pages. I expect it from DR, but still. Looks pretty much exactly like PST pr IWD2 though, that screenshot. I have no idea why people are complaining.

Awesome. Good to see Wii get a lot of love, because I really want the 1.1.1 market share thing going. Hopefully then there will be more progress. How are the European / US / Worldwide sales? Figures shouldn't be this hard to get.

Udon.

I'm Korean and my feelings are hurt by their callousness! :'( In true American way, I demand monetary compensation.

Yeah, I want to see this.

That baby laughs like Palpatine.

Looks pretty good actually, the screenshots I mean. They look pretty much exactly like IE in art style, just lacking a little in quality. The characters are a little different and bigger, though.

Yep. It gets really funny in Poland and Russia and so forth, you can have a guy who's name is pretty much something like Red Hat Sh*tmucker or something. Not to mention, you're not even allowed to have any unique names that are never replicated, every single name youa dd in the game must also be added in the Pool of Names.

Ooh, right. I actually did read BOMB-001. I remember thinking, totally damn awesome. Very similar to PST, actually - sometimes, there are just things you can't escape - or in thiscase, stop. Brilliant. Now soemone needs to mod Gothic 3 for VB.

What? We know the VB ending? I knew I should have finished reading all those design docs.

FFIX's ending was really 'hollywoody' because the game went for a lighter tone from VII and VIII, and as a result its melodrama gained a distinctly happy-go-lucky feel. You can tell from the way Zidane is a lot happier than Squall or Cloud, and Dagger could have been plucked straight out of a growing- up Disney channel soap drama. Oh, that, and the final boss was STUPID. Some sort of giant puke comes out of nowhere and says DEUS EX MACHINA FIGHT YOU NOW, prompting Zidane's uber-inspirational speech of defiance in a parody of FFVI's antikefka speech.

I liked FFVII's ending. The hoopla with the Lifestream was difficult to fully unravel but not impossible; i.e. with some thinking and some remembering it was possible to piece it all together, which is satisfying. I liked the story in general, actually. Torment is the other one that I liked. It brought the excellent thematic point that at the very end of the road, the Nameless One must face the consequences (also gave Avellone's answer to the Nature of Man question), the final boss wasn't too flash but offered some nice dialogue options as is PST's wont, and so forth. I thought one game that really disappointed in the end in general and hasn't been mentioned here, is Arcanum. I really loved that game, but once it got tacked on the Endgame Railroad (Xanatos, Vendigroth, The Void) it was really boring, both gameplay and story wise. I did enjoy the twist just because it was so in your face, but really, it was pretty bad. The one positive was in the end boss's explanation about his motivations; it was a classic Destroy All Life motivation, but it was the only time that I've actually felt that it even had a shred of validity.

Ah, I remember it now. It amde it pretty damn useful. You can still pepper entangled people with arrows - of course, they can, as well. Ctrl+T is useful at killing Entangle once the fight is done.

OH, MY, GOD. Someone get a stopwatch and time how long it takes for ramza to arrive.

What's this, my big long post isn't rewarded with other big long posts to groan over? Tangential from Ros' post, but I think slander could also be very interesting. To continue the ship situation, say you are lost inside some dungeon, or out on the high seas on a ship, and the NPCs are trying to deceive you and deceive each other (as opposed to them deceiving each other and telling you the truth, which is what usually happens); a little bit of mystery and detective work never hurt, without stupid journal entries and arrows that mark the X. Slander is always always fun, especially if your double-dealing gets found out by NPCs. That can work well with usurpation and stuff you were talking about.

The only really bad voices I remember are the epilogue / Highcliff battle narrations, the guards at the Manor, and possibly Qara was a little grating. Grobnar isn't that bad at all IMO. But then, Sammael hasn't heard the narration yet, has he?

Saw Haruhi on both manga and anime, it's one of those things that really comes alive on anime. But then, I always have trouble with manga where everything is really messy and cluttered and there are people and speech bubbles at war across the boundaries. Way too unsettling. Show itself was pretty fun though. Nothing special, but fun. Recently saw: Kare Kano (the OTHER gainax), Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society (good as always), Eureka 7 (some blatant Eva ripoffs but still pretty fun), and Welcome to the NHK. The last isn't as well known so I don't know if anybody here ever picked up on it; it just finished in Japan, 1 season, 24 episodes. NHK is the Nihon Hikikomori Kyokai (the Japan Hikikomori Organisation / Conspiracy); a hikikomori is someone who has extreme antisocial tendencies, even phobia, and can't bear to go outside or interact with other people because of paranoia and lack of self-confidence. As a result they cannot work, socialise, or study, and live holed up in their room - financially assisted by their sympathetic partners, friends and/or parents. It's a big syndrome in Japan (and smaller elsewhere). The main character, Satou, is one of these hikikomori - and the story revolves around him and his two only acquaintances, and Satou's troubles as he struggles to overcome his hikikomori status. It's funny, witty, well paced and pretty damn nice overall. The only complaint is that the anime convention of artists getting tired mid-season is really really prevalent here; frankly the faces and character art in most mid-season episodes are ****. Still, good series. But then, my tastes are a bit different in terms of anime, especially from Adult Swimw atchers, I believe. I generally get really bored by sci-fi or adventure anime (Naruto, Champloo, etc) and in fact usually go for the 'lighter' ones - and anime being anime, that usually means Japanese high school (Fruits Basket, Kare Kano, Azumanga Daioh, so forth). More of a social setting. The only exceptions to that are Evangelion, GITS and Full Metal Alchemist, which I enjoyed. ONe of the big reasons for me is that fighting in anime is really really boring. Martial fighting is boring because in manga they just have outrageous poses and random slashes (exception is Holy Land, by Kouji Mori; that thing reads more like a street fighting manual, it's excellent.) Fantasy / Sci-fi ones have that Ever-Escalating Scale of Once-Awesome Moves, also called the Dragon Ball syndrome. I think the stupidest one in recent memory is in Naruto. I was watching a few eps ..around 40-something, I think. That fat little kid, the main character, he had taken about 10 episodes to perfect this awesome move that would totally destroy anybody. He finally uses it and succeeds, with much hoopla, one hit kill, etc. Then in the next episode, some guy just invents some sort of flaw or rule that renders the move useless and brushes it aside. And so I understand the episodes are somewhere upt o 200 now. Can't keep using the same moves, right?

But then, you coudl get some crazy multipliers with the Assassin. Nothing beats the BG experience where you sneak in with your thief, backstab x6 CHUNK that baatezu then run out with boots of speed as the fireballs come in. Then the said Assassin would sit around while the rest of the party fights.

I think even a utilisation of well-known personality cliches can make for a bigger variety of Good and Evil. For example: -> Good: man who will stop at nothing and will commit lesser evils to save ze world - i.e. if you dont give me that keycard i'm going to kill you, because i need it to save the people. -> Evil: or rather amorality, where dialogue options denounce the flimsy notion of morality and one acts in self-interest, which does not exclude helping others depending on the situation -> Evil: kill everyone, etc, etc. -> Good: Pursues a particular moral or legal code that overrides all feelings of compassion and pity. etc, etc. The problem is that the current dialogue system in CRPGs treat each dialogue choice as a separate one; there is no interrelationship or the creation of a real personality. It is possible to talk to one beggar and be nice, then be evil, then be sadistic, etc, etc - in other words, play a compelte schitzo. The game deals with simple variables (Good points, etc) so that a composite picture can never appear; that is why everything is so simplified. If we were to, say, script it thus: Please give me money, good sir. I'ms o hungry! A) Yes. B) No. A-> Oh, thank you, sir! Thank you. A) Here, guards! Guards! He's taking my money! He's a thief! B) Right, just so I know you're not some druggie, I'm going to follow you and make sure you get food with that. C) Bye, hope I have been of help. B -> But sir, I'm so hungry! A) Do I look like I care? B) Try working instead of begging for food, it will be better for you in the long term. C) Sorry mate. If I give you money here, then it will break down the social structure and people won't be rewarded for hard work! Its nothing personal, but I can't give you money in good conscience. Now, dialogues like this exist in current games. However, there is no correlation, composition, relation between your first choice of answer and your second choice. This is grossly simplified, of course - but in the current system you'd get "Evil" points for first picking No, then get Good points ironically (or get nothing) for picking C) afterwards. You would end up with G/E points cancelling each other out, or just being termed evil. But what if the system was revamped so that the system considers ALL the dialogue choices you picked in a paritcular conversation branch before dealing out "points"? For example, B->C would give you, say, Lawful Good points, but I don't know, crank down on the Compassion point meter. A->A would give Evil and perhaps Chaotic points? Sadistic points? So you see the challenge is to create a system where there are enough 'categories' to reflect these multiplitous facets of a personality, then use these variables in a complex set of scripts that recognise a person's consistent personality and direction at least within a conversation branch, if not throughout the game, isntead of judging each dialogue choice by itself.