alanschu

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No game can cover all aspects of every possibility. They had to ship the game some time.

Keep that rally cap on! Georges appreciates it!

Cleary good sir, you are better than me at this game :D And I thought I was pretty good!

You were the lead designer for IWD2 right?

Well, KOTOR 1 and 2 also sold millions of copies. The Vampire computer games were not good sellers at all. You may have enjoyed it, but no one is going to finance a game if they don't think it will sell.

The game pretty much already does play itself. Much more so than your Jade Empire example. That's only because you can never look past the rules. Get over it. People are tired about hearing your schtick.

Errr, I've not been following the game...but that's usually not good.

I agree.

Be honest....did you exploit save/load if fights didn't go as expected or anything? I'll admit I sometimes am suspect of that

Okey doke then. Basically, performing a meaningful AI search is computationally expensive. Lets start at the highest level, which is the current situation in the conflict, with a 1-on-1 fight. At this point, the AI can choose any action it wants, be it flurry, attack, heal, etc. There are a variety of ways it can choose on option. The easiest way is to just randomize it. Naturally, this would not result in a smart AI, as it just chooses from a list. Next you could give a weighting to each action, and have it pick from that. This would mean you could have it choose to attack more, but it's still static and not very smart. The most obvious way (to me) is to set up conditional probabilities based on the current situation that both you and your opponent are in. But this is not easy. First you have to determine how you can determine which action is the best course of action. And we have to properly define things. Do you want the AI to think that attacking high with a chop is better, or are you content with just "attack." If you're content with just attack, then you aren't going to get much better than what you have now. As an aside: Even if the "attack high" has no actual difference from a gameplay mechanic, you'll still need a mechanism to select the correct animation to provide a fluid looking motion, as I'm assuming poor animation would be unacceptable. If we simplify it and say we have just 4 areas to attack, which would be high, low, left, and right then you have to take into consideration that each attack location would require at least 4 different animations. This is because attacking high will look different depending on where you last attacked. This is also too simplistic, as it ignores the possibility that your opponent might attack you at any of the 4 locations. Therefore, you'd actually need 8 separate animations, depending on whether you had to defend at any of the 4 previous locations, or attack, prior to your attack. Even then, this still gets repetitive as you only have one animation to choose from for each attack. So how many animations are actually required for it to provide that cinematic nature you want? The situation becomes exponential when you have to consider the fact that a character could get attacked by multiple targetsEnd Aside Chosing whether or not to perform a type of attack depends on the situation, and could be better if you follow it up with something different. This means you have to start performing predictions, all of which have a conditional probability on them (with an increasing variance), and next thing you know your computer is now chugging along at fractions of a frame per second. The situation is worse for each additional character you have fighting, and becomes even worse if you start getting characters fighting multiple characters at once. You also have to make concessions, as you could literally go on forever, and eventually cut off the search telling it to stop. Trying to determine the heuristic for something like this would be a nightmare for a programmer as well. To do something like this, I would think that at the very least, you'd need to have a multicore processor, with one of those cores used just for determining how the AI should proceed with battle. For example, it takes modern computers a moment to determine where it should put queens on a chess-board to make sure that the queens aren't attacking each other. If you have 6 guys parsing through trees of information, calculating the probabilities of the Bayesian network, it's not going to be very fast. But the thing is, you want fast. I am quite confident you aren't happy with the AI taking a second (or more) just to determine what type of action it should do at this moment. This is especially unacceptable if you are looking for sequences as fast as the Obi-Wan/Anakin fight. To do what you want to do, in real time, would probably take computer hardware that hasn't even been designed yet. Maybe a little faster if you restrict everything to 1-on-1 encounters (and not even 5 different 1-on-1 encounters...I'm talkin ONE 1-on-1 encounter at a time). With respect to the animations, you can either try to acheive them procedurally (might as well add a few extra years on to both development to make sure it mimcs human movement perfectly, as well as even more demand on computer resources), or you can hire even more animators to work on them. The thing is, creating art in computer games is VERY expensive. Hiring even more animators to make sure that they have plenty of smooth, animations that flow nicely into each other, is going to skyrocket that cost up even more. Either that or they can take even more time making the game...which is probably even less acceptable as I doubt they want to go 6 years without selling a product. And this is just concerning fights. You also mentioned dialogue animations and stuff like that. Animations don't become cheap. And the more you add, the more testing time goes up exponentially. Especially when you commented on finding a clipping error with the lightsaber as being unacceptable. Doing what you would like is not cheap. With respect to both money for development, as well as computer resources. It's not what he's looking for though. You still selected the attacks you wanted to do. He wants AI to take care of it.

You certainly do move slower and slower. I imagine that if you get captured enough times, it will become a problem.

Hmmm. If you play on higher diffculties, I bow before you. Is this in Medieval?

Why?

I think negative ad campaigns are annoying. I'm much more interested in hearing what a party's plans are in the upcoming term. In terms of voting practices, while I do have right-wing beliefs (fiscally), I typically like to see governments change, even if they aren't doing a "poor" job necessarily. It helps to provide accountability to governments. Here in Alberta the same party has been in control pretty much forever.

I'm not sure why people have such an anti-American sentiment. People talk as if we have crap relations with them at the moment. EG: Yes, a friendship with thim is alright, because we're each other's largest trading partner. A large part of Canada's economy is related to US trade. It's a parliamentary democracy, with a first-past the post system. There's 301(ish) seats in the House of Commons. The candidate that receives the most votes in a constiuency receives the seat. The party with the most seats in the house are declared the party in power, with the 2nd place party being the official opposition. The last time was 2000-2004. It is not uncommon to have a majority government. Minority governments are quite rare. Just guessing, but probably income tax The GST stands for Goods and Services Tax. It is typically only applied to things such as "luxury" items that are not necessities. Though it's a bit bogus, because things such as gasoline still get the GST, as well as other things that we can't really do without. Though AFAIK we don't get GST on basic utilities, and most food (at least if it's bought in a supermarket) does not have GST on it. The GST "hatred" is kind of silly, as it was brought in to replace the Manufacturer's Sales Tax. It actually helps Canada's export industry, as manufacturers no longer pay the tax when the commodity is created. Naturally, the public became upset because the tax was directly placed upon them (an economist would argue that it doesn't really matter where the tax is placed though...we all pay for it somehow). The current party in power, the Liberal Party, made the GST a big issue in the next election (and it has come up in all elections), stating they will remove it. They have yet to do so. All in all there are some things that I hate about the Canadian government system. John Nunziata actually voted against the Liberal's first budget, because they were not abolishing the GST. He was expelled from the party. According to Wikipedia though, it accounts for 15%-17% of Canada's federal tax revenues.

I don't remember that happening. Unless something changed more recently in a patch. I had no problems (seriously) persistently clicking on charm to improve the characters.

Ottawa has Toronto's number this season.

It did affect lots of people though.

In which aspect in particular? I'm also about to step out and get something to eat, so it might be a bit.

Fair enough.

To each his own I guess. I get way more out of the game when I roleplay it.

I have played through Morrowind. I actually enjoyed the game. And while I wouldn't disagree that characters had rich histories in books...that's not dialogue. Repeatedly mashing on the skills to improve their perception of you isn't exactly "engaging."

Once you get the hang of it, you'll love it (and hate it! sucks when YOUR guys freak out! :D)

I wonder if you actually played it. There was a known bug, that the developer admitted to, that deleted important system files when uninstalling the game. You wouldn't be able to start your computer after uninstalling the game. Odd how you were the only person that didn't seem affected by this.