alanschu

Hahaha I knew where you were going with that after the 6th word!

So these games raised your expectations beyond what Torment provided? Do either come close to threatening Torment's position as your second best RPG?

Not sure what this has to do with customizing how your character looks. And since you were alleging that there were inherent issues that existed in the 1990s that prevented a game like PST from having a customizable character, I'm not sure if your comment here has any bearing on anything. Especially seeing as other games released before PST have allowed for the blank slate character. Baldur's Gate may not have been as text heavy as Torment, but it wasn't exactly lacking in the text department either. I remember metadigital posting that voice work isn't even that expensive, and it also doesn't require copious amounts of disc space either (which we have way, way more of than we did with even CDs). Torment has TNO be who he is because it was what the creators of the game wanted for the story they wanted to tell. This still exists today. But hey, even though your standards have risen, it's still obviously not enough of a flaw to drop Torment out from the 2nd best RPG ever in your books. I'd love another game that could take the place of my second favourite RPG of all time.

Maybe for you, but I have higher standards. Based on what?

Text doesn't take up much space. Especially if you're just using a standard char for a letter. A standard CD with nothing else on it can hold roughly 681 574 400 characters on it (assuming 650 MB CDs). I also disagree that games having defined characters is not fine and dandy today. I'd love for a game to come out today that enthralled me as much as PST did.

I have a hard time believing the fact that the game was created in the 90s was why players were stuck with TNO in PST.

And that is why it is the second best CRPG I have played. Also it is also a game made in the 90's. We have somewhat better tech and better designs since then, you know. I have a hard time believing the technology of the 90s is why players were stuck with TNO in PST.

I only saw the second and third period, but it looked like the Oilers played well. Hopefully they can keep it up and build off of this game.

Well, the return of the Mullet! Always the Oilers fan, but the defense is getting pretty beat up. Just play hard boys!

Mask of the Betrayer Half-Life: Episode 2 Portal That's it for now I think.

That's exactly what I just thought!

Yes I know it's a good point. I said it No doubt people have missed me.

I agree that there is no sense being negative, because it won't really make a difference. At the same time, I can understand if people are disappointed about the possibility of it resulting in a change of direction for Bioware. If games like XCOM and Quest for Glory were the ones that got someone hooked on gaming, then unfortunately the industry right now is a bit less than "awesome" for them. But like you said Hurlshot, being jaded towards the people that ARE enjoying the gaming industry the way it is doesn't accomplish anything. I'm sure many of those people wouldn't be too interested if adventure games and RPGs were the big thing. Well, given how little RPGs are actually on the market, I'd almost think people would want "cookie cutter RPGs reusing engines." Wouldn't an RPG fan rather some IWD type games between the Baldur's Gates, rather than waiting for a long time between games?

Strangely enough, my time away from the board has obviously made me insane, as I wholeheartedly agree with Volourn's comments about playing games that you want to play.

ET:QW shouldn't even be compared to the BF games, but to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. I thought W:ET was a lot better than BF1942. I played the Quake Wars demo, and it seems much faster than the BF series to me. I should give it another go, but I'm the kind of player who likes to find a good sniping spot and pick players off one by one. I find that's incredibly hard to do in many of the faster paced shooters. I vaguely remember you sniping me a few times in BF2!

Thanks guys. I have exams to finish up this week, but I'll probably pick the game up.

Hey everyone, Are there any issues with using the downloaded version of NWN2 with a retail (since I can't find a downloaded version on Direct2Drive) version of Mask of the Betrayer. Thanks.

This game was insanely, insanely fun. I just finished it, and it was a blast the whole way through!

Mr. Wistrik is correct. There are a lot of jumps in the Half-Life games that require you to crouch after jumping. The way crouching works in Half-Life is Gordon pulls up his legs, so while on the ground this kneels, but while jumping, he tucks his legs up in order to make some of the tougher jumps. Cheers.

Bleeding heart liberal fascist nonsense? All of those adjectives do not apply to Taks, and I've bumped heads with him on a few occasions. And I live in Alberta, Canada, and my income level has me pay $44/month for Alberta Health Care. Not an unreasonable price, and whenever I go for a checkup I don't pay at the door or anything, but it's certainly not free. This ignores that many poorer people get their health care premiums fully and partially subsidized. Though to be honest, I don't mind our health care system, and think the critics that whine about it like to take extreme examples themselves to prove their points. Anyways, carry on. See you all next month!

What? It has SPECIAL? I was assured that this game would not have SPECIAL. I want my money back.

I'm certainly no expert in artificial intelligence, and I certainly don't know who makes the "best" AI (best by what metric?), nor am I all that familiar with Unreal's AI (though I do remember thinking that the AI in the original Unreal was, well, unreal at the time), but I will offer my thoughts none-the-less. To be perfectly frank, I can't think of anything substantial in modern AI, in terms of anything revolutionary. Unfortunately, it does not really seem to be the focus in game development at this time. It doesn't take much time to recognize that much of the focus is on the more instant and immediate visuals. By visuals I mean both graphics (as has been the case for the past 10 years), as well as (more recently) physics. It is something that is very easy to promote, as videos and screenshots provide a sufficient medium. As a result, AI has slowly taken a back seat, especially if you look at it in terms of percentage of computational power used. In my limited experience, much of the AI focus in video games is done on things such as pathfinding. I suspect this is both because pathfinding errors tend to be immersion killers (not necessarily bad pathfinding, but certainly broken pathfinding), and it's also an aspect of AI that has had a fair bit of investment, so algorithms are more readily available, and research more thorough. Things such as decision trees for multiple agents inside a 3D space become problematic, especially as games become more complex. I would say that this is mostly due to the size of the search space and its subsequent branching factor. You can easily set up a simple decision tree for determining whether or not a bad guy decides to fight or run away, based on perhaps a metric of health remaining. That's just two options however. When you want them to make their decisions based upon the current situation, which could involve additional enemies, additional allies, and so on. Suddenly, with just the two options of fighting and running away, a more sophisticated AI is going to have to take into account the dynamic parameters of the situation. For instance, an agent could get hit to a point where he has low enough hit points that typically he would want to run away, except that this agent also has 3 friends helping him fight, and his foe is particularly tough and requires a heavy concentration of fire, and it's unlikely that the foe has enough firepower to actually kill the agent. When you start to add to the list of actions so you have more than just fight/run away (should I flank? Should I hide? Should I cover? Should I find healing? Should I rush?), a non-trivial AI will start to eat up an exponential amount of computer cycles. Then you start to take into consideration that it must analyze the environment. It should recognize that doors are choke points and to not go running through them if it knows the enemy is on the other side. So now it needs to address what exactly is a door? You can fake it by implementing some sort of key into the level that will recognize that certain areas are doors, but that's not necessarily perfect, and if you miss one, then it simply will not be treated like a door. So do you spend time teaching it to not go through doors through some reinforcement learning? That could work, but perhaps it finds large garage doors to be the same as small one person doors. It's a lot of work, which means it's a lot of time and money. AI can also be curtailed because a very good AI is not a very fun AI. My boss (Jonathan Schaeffer) has made basically an unbeatable Checkers AI (go ahead and try to beat it here if you want). He has shown that with the first move, it cannot lose unless you handicap it. A smart and dynamic AI can also lead to unexpected consequences. Sometimes this is good (the gunboats in Half-Life 2 ended up assessing that the rockets from the RPG were a bigger threat than the person, and would try to shoot the rocket when you shot one). Other times this can be bad (implementations of the radiant AI in Oblivion that lead to NPCs killing each other, leaving quests unattainable and so on. As cool as this may sound, the fact of the matter is that on the whole, people want to be the one taking part in the action). There is also uncertainties. My University worked together with EA on making a dynamic AI that learned as it played for FIFA 2004. It was very effective, but EA would not ship it with any copy of the game, because it was impossible to guarantee that the AI would never break. The fact that the AI changed and adapted meant it was possible for the AI to for whatever reason get bad input, and break itself. I had a brief discussion with Dr. Schaeffer about the future of AI, and in his opinion, the prognosis was not too optimistic. In his view, things probably wouldn't significantly change until addon cards designed specifically for artificial intelligence became common, since it would be processor power that would be reserved exclusively for the artificial intelligence. Right now it is much more economically and computationally efficient to work on squeezing out better graphics/physics with the available cycles, rather than exploring into the more uncertain world of artificial intelligence. I know research has been done to help reduce the computation time of things such as pathfinding. Abstractions and heuristics are created to greatly reduce the amount of search space (though this is true for all parts of AI, not just pathfinding). In my opinion, there is no technical reason why a game cannot have good pathfinding (just those annoying time and money reasons). I do think that AI has improved in recent years, just not at the same pace as graphics and physics. Perhaps as we approach the uncanny valley, we'll see diminishing returns on continued investment into graphics and physics, and more time and energy will be spent on improving artificial intelligence applications in video games. Unfortunately, simplistic AI tends to be sufficient for a lot of people. The problem is compounded when people don't really want "good" AI, they want "realistic" AI. So what are the metrics for "realistic" AIs? I know this doesn't really answer your question, but that's just my thoughts. Based on what little I have read about the Unreal AI, it seems as though it provides a nice framework for you to implement your own AI. It probably has decent pathfinding algorithms and whatnot, but a licensee is still going to need to set up how the AI should react in situations and determine metrics for its decision making models. Having awesome pathfinding doesn't mean much if the agents aren't sure what it should pathfind to! It doesn't make sense for a squad of troops to stick together unless it knows that there are useful bonuses for sticking together. Stuff like that. Having said that, Epic seems to be in the engine business, almost more so than the game business. Their games seem to be more demonstrations of what they can do with their engine (which means it's still in their best interests to make good games, since it makes the engine more appealing). I have heard that the Unreal 3 Engine is super nice to work with, and I imagine that a lot of the hard work for the foundation of AI is probably done quite well, since Epic has a financial interest in it. Anyways, hopefully you found my thoughts interesting. I will now return to my self-imposed hiatus. Allan

Give me a moment.

My crappy crap crap credit card has 100% fraud protection that comes with the card, which I just confirmed would in fact protect me from this.

Is Grant Ledyard some nickname for Andy Moog?