Astatine

No really, it does! When scrolling the viewport around, grassy outdoor areas flicker noticeably. Windows 8.1, AMD Radeon R9 290X, latest beta driver, and playing full screen at 2560x1440 resolution, in case any of that makes a difference...

Echo this one: in full screen mode, the game doesn't seem to steal the mouse aggressively enough. Suggestion for bludgeon fix: make an area of some 10, 20 pixels around the screen edge "sticky". When cursor moves into this area, treat it as scrolling and call SetCursorPos() to prevent cursor from wandering further (i.e. out of Eternity onto second screen)?

I've only played around for half an hour or so, but so far... The level art is fabulous! I agree with the poster above that the inn is a bit wooden-generic... but the outdoors is inspired. Baldur's Gate yanked into the present day. Exactly what I was dreaming of. Character creation is lovely and deep. And a bit confusing right now, but that's okay Equally, the combat dynamic is a little confusing at first, I think it's the characters finishing their turns at different intervals that does it, but I'm sure I'll get used to it just fine. I'm loving the writing, and those sort of self-scribbling parchment screens that appear at story points. Even though it's supposed to be a non-spoily beta I find myself handling it really tentatively for fear of spoilers... Negatives? Not a great deal... a few bugs that I'll write into the bug reports forum... the character models don't seem quite AAA (but I've been spoiled by MMOs in that regard...) and what exactly causes Health loss, as opposed to Stamina loss? Oh, and I'm not convinced by the Monk: without an obvious threat/aggro mechanic, getting creatures to hit him and not the other characters seems pretty finicky... But, I'm not regretting my pledge and ever so looking forward to the full thing. :D

damn, I haven't posted for years, what am I doing this for... That's because D&D is built to be a monty-haul (see the various loot tables in the DMG for proof); if you don't it gets unbalanced. This irritated me enough as a DM that I rewrote all the classes so that I didn't have to remember to give them all their individualised Random Objects of +N at appropriate times...

This appears to have made KOTOR2 finally run on my new PC Thank youuuuuuuuu Can this be stickied?

Haven't heard much about NWN 2 and what they are planning since the boards got moved to Bioware. Pocket Familiars? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> They appear to have thrown away the gratuitous tanks wizards and sorcerers got in NWN as their familiars and replaced them with familiars more in the spirit of the pen-and-paper game... Remains to be seen how the (already somewhat low) viability of those classes at low levels is affected... Never liked familiars at all myself. In pen-and-paper I tend to ditch them entirely and give wizards and sorcerers other titbits instead...

So they say, but I have yet seen any proof of that so I will remain skeptical. Also I doubt we will get a long campaign. BG 2 is what I consider long. BG 1 and PS:T is what I consider average. Jade Empire and KotOR 1-2 is what I consider short. I am expecting a short game. The NWN campaign was pretty long. At least BG sized. I think. Felt like that anyway. I never finished it... Is it worth it putting down another $50 for a another mediocre DnD game? I think not. Dungeons and Dragons has lost its flavor, its fun factor since BG 2-ToB. Maybe it is because we have already seen the height of DnD gaming with PS:T and the BG series or maybe it is because those who are doing the current DnD games just can't cut it to make a DnD game of that caliber any more either due to lack of creative talent or market pressures. I'd certainly think twice before shelling out for a "Greyhawk: Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil" or something But the Obsidian team are responsible for some of the best D&D game material we've had in the past and they say they're really focusing on making a good Official Campaign, so I, the eternal optimist, will believe they can still do it and blithely put my $50 (or rather, my

But we're going to get a good long exciting single-player campaign in it! Which we didn't get first time round. And the NWN graphics engine is really needing that lick of paint. I always thought NWN looked clunky, much worse in a way than the 2D games that preceded it. The graphics are functional maybe, but they're Polygonisation City and don't bring the world to life in the way the Infinity Engine's did. (Though I'm still impressed at the way when characters swordfight they, well, actually swordfight, at least after a fashion... ) I still haven't found any third party NWN content I enjoyed at all. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places... (Multiplayer, yuck )

OOI, where did you get that from? Right now it's ATI who are behind on API support (read: Shader Model 3), not that I remember exactly what the requirements for the various "levels" of Aero are...

Melee fighters seem to end up being the best characters in combat in pretty much all RPGs...

your stuck with OpenGL 1.4 and not only that it runs on top of aero which affects performance. so: you can't update to OpenGL2.0 and you can't get rid of aero under it... Windows XP OpenGL with Nvidia/Ati is fully native and doesn't run on any emulation layer like in vista. again developers screwed over by Microsoft. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Actually, this is disinformation spread by a reactionary press. To the best of my knowledge: It will be possible to do OpenGL natively in Vista, with no speed penalty, including OpenGL 2.0, so long as it's supported by the GPU manufacturer or someone else with direct access to the GPU hardware. I'm sure Nvidia will at any rate. The only problem is the 3D rendered GUI of Vista will have to be turned off in order to do it, because that GUI hogs the GPU resources (which it needs to do its compositing and other effects) and prevents anything else (e.g. an OpenGL layer) from taking them over. In order to merge the "Aero" 3D rendered GUI with OpenGL-using programs the OpenGL-using programs must use an OpenGL implementation that converts into Direct3D that can merge into the rest of the "Aero" GUI, resulting in a performance hit. Of course, airy-fairy eyecandy-loving management types will think having to switch off the "Aero" UI (which buys you nothing except for looking "new" and "trendy" and "Apple-like") is a bad thing and so professional OpenGL applications might migrate to Direct3D, with nasty consequences for cross-platform compatibility of those applications, etc, etc. Whilst it's almost certain that Microsoft are basically layering OpenGL over Direct3D when "Aero" 3D GUI rendering is enabled for technical reasons, knowing the attitude of their management folks they probably think the bit of extra collateral vendor lock-in is a happy coincidence. OpenGL games run in full screen anyway and so switching off the "Aero" thingy while they run will be no big deal.

As the sort of person who wastes too much money on PC hardware and upgrades his PC about once a year I've had both Nvidia and ATI graphics cards in the past and I thoroughly recommend Nvidia, because: Performance wise the two manufacturers' cards of the same generation tend to perform similarly and rumour suggests this is going to continue (the R520 isn't yet out but hearsay of 16 pipelines and a clock speed around 700MHz would put its performance by and large the same as the G70's, maybe a little faster). Image quality wise Nvidia appear to have issues more frequently than ATI because of their enthusiasm for aggressive software optimisations (e.g. currently the G70 has a texture shimmering bug in a few games, not a very serious one) but they do usually fix these issues when they occur. Nvidia GPUs are usually rock solid stability wise. By contrast, ATI GPUs have crashing and similar "It doesn't bloody work" type issues with a non negligible proportion of games, especially less "mainstream" games such as hardcore RPGs and the like. This is entirely more irritating than minor image quality problems

I think it does. I might go and have a squint at it to confirm.

I enjoyed Doom 3. The gameplay was repetitive and it got a bit predictable but it had a real sense of atmosphere, heightened by the way it gave you hints about where you were going and what you were going to face, and all the extra bits and bobs (the movies, the emails, the what have you) that they included to make it feel as though the Mars Base really existed. They could have done the scariness aspect better, but it had its moments (although none as good as the lights-out corridor in Unreal.) The later weapons were truly awesome too :D Played a couple of levels of the expansion and gave up in disgust. The same gameplay but none of the atmosphere-building or the sense of place -- it felt as though they'd just chucked some random levels together without a story -- and instead, rip-off city (gravity gun? bullet time? Gah.) They kept the bad bits, threw away the good bits, and added worse bits. I also enjoyed Half-Life 2. Overall it's better (less predictable, less frustrating, more varied). The difficulty level wasn't thought out so well, though. Doom 3's is just right: it's very consistent. Half-Life 2 was generally too easy with sudden flips into hard and frustrating (usually the "defend a location" type missions: not enough health) that made it a pain to try playing it on the harder difficulty levels. (Note I used the past tense, I find none of these FPSes have much if any replay value...) I just played the demo of F.E.A.R. and it's looking really really good, although I'll need a new PC... Thought Doom 3 was hard on the system? Wait until you try this one

Good stuff. I'm impressed. Maybe the headphones thing is under the expectation that people have dodgy little tinny PC speakers