alanschu

Mmm, I was going to reply, but I'd like you to expand on your thoughts before I do, please. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> What you are asking for would require many, many, many, many, MANY more animations in order for it to work. Art content has already resulted in an explosion of development costs, which is part of the reason why a game like Spore uses algorithmic patterns for its animations. But it's being used to animate non-human creatures based on their size, skeletal structure, etc. Stuff like this is also more expensive processor/RAM wise. Furthermore, the AI required would also be very expensive. Not just dollar wise, but in system requirements. You'd be requiring the AI to do some sort of search algorithm to determine the best course of action to do at any instance. And given you want these actions to be fast, it's going to be performing this very frequently. But the thing is, for the AI to actually be good, it has to anticipate what it thinks YOU will try to do, as well as predicting how results we look into the future, based on a whole bunch of conditional probabilities that would become murderous for the CPU to try to calculate in a quick manner. Even if you store the probability distribution table in memory. Finally, this is only concerning a 1-on-1 fight. What happens if there is more actors? Even if it's all 1-on-1 fights, it still causes more AI searches to be performed to determine the best action in every situation (I couldn't even imagine the heuristic involved to determine the cost of each action). What about N vs 1 fights, where N > 1. Now you have to have your AI determine what to do when fighting MULTIPLE targets (which is sick), and create even more animations to take care of that. Trying to mimic the Darth Maul vs Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon fight would not be easy to do in a video game. And how does the AI react in a multiple enemy situation? There's been no success on finding an optimal solution for a battle with two sides, both sides having more than one guy. So if you're leaving things up to the AI for determining who it fights, it's not unlikely that it might do something "stupid" based on its target selection algorithm. If you'd like me to go into more detail, I can.

Fortunately my computer is plenty fast and restarts the game in no time Someone somewhere probably just forgot to put in a 'delete' line, and if it's not picked up when it happens, then good luck finding it.

If that's the case then fine. Though you already stated your intent when you said "why bother" because you already knew the outcome. You're just trying to rationalize your decision to take you sweet time.

That thought occured to me but to give hime a chance to explain i imagined this to be in development fantasy land - infinite money and time. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Either that or they'd have to do some sort of algorithmic process ala Spore. Though I'm not too sure how that game does it either, nor how easy it is to program or anything like that. Even then, I doubt you could get the algorithms to properly apply rules to people so that their animations would look proper. I bet you'd get wierd results. Though I'm not so sure because he is tossing around words like "simply" and "just do this" a bit liberally.

If there's a leak though, you'll still expend it all.

Hmm you could play Baldur's Gate 100 times and it would never go stale. New games they make these days. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> False. 100 times playing the same game gets stale. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Nonsense. You're just not a die hard BG fan like me. BG and Fallout never grow tiring no matter how many times I've played them. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Then why do you buy new games?

And obviously doesn't care much about her hometown.

It did slow things down for me. I don't recall a workaround though, outside of getting the fan made patch (which may not have even fixed it). Unless the work around was "restart the game" at which point I performed that work around often

Right

It's called roleplaying. If your character cares about the village, then you should proceed to find the GECK as fast as humanly possible. If your character doesn't care about the village, then don't worry about it.

Just inexperienced. The tactics of the game are very important, and you want to do whatever you can to try to hit the flanks of your opponents. Routing is great, as it spreads. One squad panicking causes other squad's morale to sufffer, and once they've routed, it makes life easy on you as you mop things up.

Well, slowdowns caused by that memory leak are a bug

What you propose will absolutely explode the development costs.

That's exactly what I thought too. Which is why I was surprised with your comments that Epic rules were needed to balance the game. Epic rules in D&D I think are dumb. Hey, look at me, I can swim up waterfalls and run along clouds.

Kudos to the guys that did take some urgency to actually perform the quest. If you care about the village, you should do things quickly.

What is the Society of Leopold bug?

I disagree. Especially on defense.

Isn't Morrowind repetitive as well, as you just wander around attacking stuff? But hey, you didn't need to do the sword fights, nor the dancing. Just like you don't need to take part in the "engaging" conversation in Morrowind.

The AAA comment was directed more at Arkan. But rarely are games such as BG or Fallout seen as AAA titles before anyone plays them. That's why I can't stand it when people criticize companies because they are new and don't have a history of AAA titles.

It's just a different type of RTS then. No need to stereotype.

You're just trying to ruin my future job! :'( EDIT: Personally, even though I can't vote in this election as I'm still 10 months away from being considered old enough, I really don't like any of the candidates. All of the local candidates are idiots... <_< <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Hehe, welcome to politics :D

I think that that is a cop-out. I do stuff like this as well if I think people are making misinformed statements. Given boards have a search feature to speed this up, it doesn't usually take that much anyways. To be quite frank, as someone that didn't initially see it on the Bioware boards, I'm glad he went through the trouble. As to developers making AAA titles....god I hate comments like this. Whether it be that cherished "experience" in the workfield, or with stuff like this. Newsflash....the AAA developers weren't born into this world with a reputation of making AAA games either.

Mine was definitely my first experience with Ultima 9.

I was never able to sell it....it always had a value of $0. Where did you sell it?

I actually agree with you here. For the most part, I am in the "lucky" camp, and never seem to experience the majority of bugs that most people do. It's funny, because my showstopper wasn't in Leopold Society, but in the Kuei-Jin temple. There was some door block I had to push out of the way, that it wouldn't let me push. It's just the only way that makes sense to me with respect to Activisions involvement based on the conjectures we've heard :D