Pop

I cannot seem to start a new game - The character creation system appears bugged. Without a produced savegame, I can only provide screenshots, but I can walk through what happens. 1) Load the game, click "New game" 2) After loading, there are no prompts beyond "Exit" and the character creation tabs aren't initially available. After a few minutes of waiting, the character creation tabs appear, as does the randomly determined human default character. 3) It becomes apparent that no changes made to the character stick. You can change the gender, race, class or ethnicity of the character but aside from seemingly limited changes to skin color (changing to Aumaua turns skin blue, etc), nothing changes the character model from the default in a substantial way. As you can see, the model is noticeably different from what's been selected. In addition to this, returning to the race or class tab after choosing another aspect of the character causes a UI bug in which all buttons are apparently collapsed into one. 4) It appears that the only aspect of the model that changes is the starting weapon selection, which changes based on class / culture. However the weapons are not held by the model and instead they float at the character's sides. Armor should change in a like way but it doesn't. Strangely, color palette can still be manipulated. 5) Even upon completing all criteria for a new character, the "Done" button doesn't work and a new game can't be started. [Expected behaviour] The character model should change based on the choices of the player, and once all criteria have been chosen the game should be allowed to start. [Other remarks / Comments] I don't know what precipitated this, as of 2 weeks ago I could start new games with impunity. No hardware changes have occurred and as far as I know there has been no change to the beta version used. I can load previous savegames, but the new game attempt was precipitated by an inability to successfully transition from the Gorge area to the Dyrford village (characters start at the north of the Dyrford map and cannot move or take commands). All files in the game's cache have been verified, so it doesn't appear to be due to missing or corrupt files. [Files] Screenshots are attached. [special] My dxdiag file is attached. Pop-DxDiag.txt

Savegame: http://www.upload.ee/files/4244388/GhostWeapons.savegame.html Issue reproduction: 1) Load savegame (provided above) 2) Move between first and second floor of Dracogen Inn 3) Note that items in character inventories are moving about the game world in a disembodied fashion and / or piled in a non-interactive heap on the ground. Expected behavior: Items in character inventories do not appear in game world, those displayed on character models are produced once, on said models. Comments: I first ran into the bug after saving / loading due to non-music sound cutting out entirely after moving to the second floor of the inn. Upon reload, weapons were appearing onscreen as though being brandished, some distance from a given character - these weapons would move with the character, keeping the same distance. What's strange about this bug is that there doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason as to which items are showing the way they do or why. Both the morning star and the rapier visible in the "Ghost Weapons.jpg" screenshot are not equipped by the characters nor are they in an auxiliary slot, they are sitting in their respective characters' inventory (the rapier in the death godlike's, the morning star in bb priest's). Upon returning to the first floor, the heap of inventory items seen in the screenshot appears. In this case, the items appear to be those actually equipped by the characters - you can see the wizard's grimoire as well as the kite shield worn by bb warrior. In addition, the unused inventory items are still appearing, but this time directly underneath the characters who are carrying them. You can see this in "Ghost pile.jpg" (the monk with the stave has no equippable items in her inventory). Saving and loading the game seems to reproduce the appearance of the Ghost Pile pic. I've attached my Dxdiag file to this post. DxDiag.txt

There's a missing string in the options - controls menu list, between "cancel action" and "select all" key bindings.

Update - The corrupted font is the source of these Unity crashes. The problem is that for whatever reason, Microsoft is secretive about its existence. If you've looked for UNCL.tff and can't find it, it's because you don't have system files set to be visible. Despite being a loose file in the font folder that is not int the registry or apparently used by anything, it's marked as a Windows OS file and is thus removed from view both in the folder itself and from windows filesearches by default. After weeks of fruitless snooping, I ended up using an out of date program called Fix Font Folder that apparently has no regard for what Windows wants you to see, and it sniffed out the bastard thing. So here's what you do - open up a folder window, press alt -> tools -> folder options -> view -> uncheck "hide protected operating system files", which is on by default (I keep it on because I like my desktop to be neat and the phantom .ini files annoy me). Search for UNCL.tff and it should show up. Delete it, voila, Unity works again. Hopefully they update the engine at some point so it's no longer vitally tangled up in this junk font file, but for now this is the hotfix. Thanks, Microsoft!

If my guy getting hit is any indication it interrupts any action. Interrupts won't be a huge concern for melee fighters wielding appreciably fast weapons, but for any ranged fighter not using a bow, spellcaster or otherwise, they're trouble.

Because they fold so easily. Simply put, monks in the current system seem to have been backed into a corner. In a combat regime that rarely sees outright missed attacks, lightly armored brawlers just can't deal, at least if the game at this juncture is any indication. The ascetic martial artist is a well-worn but still potent archetype, and the professional flagellant concept that's been made for PoE is an interesting one, but unfortunately these guys just aren't any fun to play. One imagines that monks are meant to be a "high risk / high reward" class, but in practice they're just high risk. If I'm understanding this correctly through play, the idea is that the wound-soak system is meant to be the monk's armor equivalent - that is, other characters see their incoming damage soaked via their armor's DT. Monks, having no armor, soak up a like portion of incoming damage as fuel for their talents, so in theory they shouldn't be at a particular disadvantage - in fact, their ability to soak damage without armor should be a significant positive, since they don't suffer armor-bound speed penalties. However in practice this doesn't seem to be the case. A monk's damage soak is conditional - if you don't use your wound energy, it gets knocked out of your health bar instead. So monks play, as a dude on another forum put it, "hot potato" with the damage they receive, constantly expending energy or being punished for not doing so. They are by some measure the most micromanagement-dependent class of any I've tried so far (with the rogue a distant second). I'm not sure how the math shakes out but one imagines that a monk, played suboptimally in any given situation, is treated within the game as a guy going into melee who is actually not wearing armor - they take a metric ton of damage in every fight. Frontline classes tend to take a lot of damage anyway, but monks, for whatever reason, get knocked out very easily even when their health stays at high levels (though this is just delayed, since the unused wounds will be taken out of health later on). A monk who's flanked is as good as meat. A monk with wounds who is made unable to use his talents, for whatever reason, could end up dead without a killing blow having landed. Going into the beta, monks were the class I was most interested in, and the first one I played as. I soon dropped my guy for a paladin, and the game was much, much, much easier. It's possible, even probable that there are several unimplemented or unoptimized or just plain bugged features that would even the score for these guys and make them better functioning - the currently felt delays in combat commands hurt them pretty badly, for example. But at its core I'm just not sure the class can really work in this system, not in the seamless way other classes do. They're the runt of the litter. Also it was strange and not a little frustrating to me that I would start a game and discover that 2 out of the 3 active talents usable by monks require a melee weapon. I don't know if Josh had covered this, but I've always liked the idea of a formidable hand-to-hand opponent in a setting dominated by weaponry, and it was a bit strange to see what was essentially an inverse of 3E D&D monk design, with most abilities actually disincentivizing HtH builds. Is it simply the case that the talents suited to slap-happy monks aren't implemented yet?

Here's the save. quicksave.txt.txt

Description: I'm playing as a cipher. After cleaning Aelys of memory and subsequently defeating the animancer in the ruins below town, I find that Aelys does not respond to being clicked on. List of steps: 1) Load attached savegame 2) Move to Aelys in the central chamber-thing 3) Click on Aelys Expected: I peeked at the dialogue xml, so I know that Aelys should be responsive regardless of the fight's outcome. Comments: I presume this might have something to do with the loss of quest logs (and variables too, maybe?) relating to Aelys' rescue, but I'm not sure. Files: The save's output is attached to this post. Because both files combined exceed 1 MB, I'll have to upload the save in a subsequent post. Also, the uploader won't take .savegame files so I've changed it to .txt in hopes that it will upload. Feel free to change it back. output_log (8-20-14).txt

I would note that quest items sit in the inventories of companions but when you give them to your main character, it's slotted into the "quest items" stash. So it's not disappearing, per se. But the quest itself may be bugged regardless.

I don't like it any more than you do, that's just the way it is. One of the downsides (probably THE downside) of PC gaming is that there are so many variants in hardware products and driver packages and combinations of said that it can be very, very difficult to determine which link in the chain is messing things up. We are in that position now. Something is causing Unity games to straight-up fail to function, and it isn't anything obvious (drivers, directx, disk space, compatibility modes, antivirus and firewall restrictions, etc). Ideally yes, the devs should be able to fix it, but if the dxdiag and Unity output files aren't pointing in a direction there's not much they can do from where they are. It is what it is. If you've got an external drive you can pretty easily format it, put a second copy of windows on it (provided you have one), and dual-boot it. If that's too much work for the beta, consider that any other Unity game you might want to play will likely need the same treatment. I can't play Wasteland 2 or Gone Home or Shadowrun Returns anymore, they need to be booted through this special, barebones partition. If that's still too much work, all you can really do is wait and hope the guys at Unity figure out something on their end, because if this problem is shared across different games from different developers, it's not a problem any one of them caused and probably isn't something any one of them can fix by themselves. The problem's coming from your computer. To be perfectly honest, I don't think the beta's worth all that trouble, it's a labor of love more than a fun game to play at this point. But if this crap hasn't been fixed by the time PoE drops, I'd be prepared.

I went back and forth with Unity devs on their community site and the consensus seems to be that there's some driver or program that is tripping the games up. It's not Unity itself because "empty" Unity projects run fine on the affected machines, and a clean install of Windows will make the programs work. Unfortunately this is something you'll either have to figure out for yourselves or just cave and make a new partition. Buy a cheap >60 gig hard drive (shouldn't be too expensive), format it as a boot partition, put a copy of windows on it and install only those drivers and programs you need to play the games.

Another bug - started up another game as a druid (much more intuitive class) and I'm running into the "replicating" modal ability issue that a lot of people seem to be having. But more importantly, after loading the game at one point I started receiving a new talent that looks bugged. Observe the attachment. Not only are there missing strings, the text that is there doesn't make much of any sense. The talent is essentially a fireball (?) with a very wide AoE that imparts a status effect, listed in the log as *missing string*. "Enemy X affected by *Missing String* for 54 seconds", etc.

It's probably the same Unity problem I had. The only method I've found to work is a clean wipe and install of the OS / new windows partition. Probably the least desirable fix, but it's the only one I'm aware of! Some people have had luck going into the Fonts section of their control panel, going into font settings and restoring defaults there. Didn't work for me, though.

- There are font issues as well, though I don't know if they're related to the scaling function in the options menu. As you can see, there are margin issues with the header and the body of the text crowds the stylized first letter (I forget what they call that). I'll drop by this thread should I inevitably encounter more bugs!

I'm about 40 minutes into a very leisurely paced run through the beta. Amuaua (or however you spell that) monk, good times. It will interest you to know that I've run into bugs. Here are a few of them: - At present, the fight at the Dyrford bridge between the party and the hooded dudes + their pet boars (shouldn't there be just one?) is an utter debacle, which I'm sure is some confluence of niggling combat bugs and unfamiliarity with the game systems, but more than that it looks like the combination of occlusion in the grassy area (?) and the color of the grass blending with the color of player indicators makes it very hard to track the whos and whats and whys of combat. The high resolution just makes things difficult to see. Beautiful, but incomprehensible. The indicators need to be good and thick and unmistakable when combat is happening. - It appears that priest spells that are described as only affecting enemies are affecting my party as well. - The priest spell "Despondent Blows" is ostensibly usable outside of combat but when activated, the spell won't cast and the targeting reticule apparently persists until the game is reloaded. No other mouse-dependent functions work while the reticule is up, though you can still switch characters with the hotkeys (note that the reticule persists when changing characters). - This has probably already been reported, but there is a problem with characters who get knocked out in combat being unresponsive after recovery. I played through the bridge fight three times - the first time I had cast a vampiric-type AoE spell in combat and had snagged one of my party members in the blast. After combat that character was locked in an unbreakable hit reaction loop at 0 stamina (while the rest of the party recharged in moments). Second time, two party members were knocked out but didn't get up once the enemies had been killed. Third time, a CNPC was knocked out, got back up after the fight, but couldn't be controlled. I reloaded from this point and was able to resume control of him. - Zoom bug: I've only encountered this at the starting area, near where the fight takes place (SEE ATTACHMENTS). Using zoom features in any other area, indoor and outdoor, seems to yield no problems, but it doesn't work here - instead of zooming, it seems like one or two layers of the visuals are affected. While the size of objects and characters on the screen stays the same, fog of war radius constricts with "zoom out", and it appears it messes with water effects as well, creating an empty "ghost" of the waterwheel animation (see image #2). - Beyond that, "The Dyrwood pt. 1" contains a brief shift from past tense to present tense that doesn't make a lot of sense (ex. "he did" vs. "he does"). It shifts back to past tense by the end of the text. I'm out of upload space on this post so I'm writing another one real quick.

I'm not seeing an attachment. Regardless, try starting up another Unity engine game if you've got one (Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland 2, etc) and see if you get the same crash.

I've had it with these delays. Answer our questions, Obsidian. Mods??

I remember meeting him before the great AP Pax East panel in... 2010? He did really great work, sad to see him go.

Introducing the second Russian MMO that Obsidian is currently working on. The cancellation of that next-gen game really put Obsidz out, damn. Two of their three current projects don't really make use of any of Obsidian's self-identified strengths as a developer

I demand answers to these burning questions, it's been 13 months now and your grace period is over, Obsidian

In terms of a game that will probably feel the most like P:E, BG2's likely to be as close as you get. It will be slightly more exploration-friendly but it's the only IE game aside from PS:T to have some party dynamics / NPC personalities (it really sort of set the standard for party CRPGs going forward). More than having weak combat, PS:T is singular in a very intentional way, it's not really an "Infinity Engine" game except in the strictest definition. Save PS:T for the runup to its spiritual sequel. But yeah, that will give you a ballpark feel. All the systems will be significantly different of course, but in terms of the pace and the ambiance, BG2 probably will come closest to what P:E will feel like.

Heh. The place I work is full of folks matching this description-- a whole lot of people with Masters degrees in public policy (or similar), and a smaller group with JDs. (I'm of the latter type, with a History/Econ BA.) Consequently, I can offer little other than well wishes, and congratulations on (a) figuring all this out while you're young enough to do something about it, and (b) avoiding the trap that is Law School. You've always struck me as a sharp individual who can write in an engaging fashion, which should serve well across a broad range of potential endeavors. Thanks! Before I bolt from my program I think I'll probably lock down a few courses on cost-benefit analysis and maybe program evaluation, those are skills that are broadly applicable (and I can always write well, which I'm told is surprisingly helpful). And yeah, I knew law school was toxic from the get-go. By the time I was contemplating graduate studies, research on the gulf between law degree cost/debt and the availability of work in the field was well-established (stories abound of folks outside the top 3 ivies getting secretarial work with their JDs) As a programmer: It is entirely possible to not use much math depending on what you want to do or what type of games you are making. The problem is that you are expected to know the material when taking your test and when going into an interview. The exception may be in the mobile or social frontier, but I have no experience applying for jobs at mobile or social companies. Indeed. I have a friend who makes games for Kongregate and even though he describes a lot of his work as glorified web design he still has to have a solid grasp of linear algebra and trig. He advised me to consider level design as a focus given my limited experience, with engine tools / VFX stuff being beyond my ken. I guess I have to decide whether I want to start going for a BS in CS (which I'm told is more or less a requirement to get hired onto AAA teams unless you are a modder savant) or become an autodidact and start making simple ****. I guess I could snag a free copy of Unity and start learning C# (might be a bit too deep-end) or I could start fooling with Javascript and turn out a tetris clone just like a first-year Devry student. I want to do SOMETHING, though. If only there were better tutorials on how to use the WEIDU stuff, I could have made some class-A BG2 mods (not to brag, I really liked what I was doing before I hit a wall with more complex scripting). I guess I could sit tight til Wasteland 2 comes out and I can try my hand at modding for it, perhaps prepare myself for P:E modding. So, uh, what would y'all advise? Is there a textbook that anyone would recommend?

Excited as I would be by an Obsidz Deus Ex game, I think it would be more likely that Ferg and co would be visiting Squeenix to pitch a fourth Dungeon Siege iteration. This article from November 2011 says Eidos Montreal was working on the new Thief and an unannounced project at the time. That may or may not be another DE game. Sort of hard for me to believe that Squeenix would've let what they've characterized as a core franchise lie fallow for over a year, but maybe E:M earned a new IP, who knows.

HUBRIS

Good points all! I'm in Public Admin because I initially thought it was something that interested me, also because it was the only avenue from a Poli Sci BA that seemed to lead into a good job market.