Wistrik

I like these cars and buses. I didn't get a shot of it, but the underground train she takes to North America looks great. BTW, these vehicles speed by at whatever highway speed is in this game, which is probably better than 55mph or 90kph. This shot shows the nearby building reflecting off the buses' windows, and the glare of the sun off the bumper. Normally you wouldn't see these with the vehicles speeding by, but it's nice that the developers added this much detail anyway.

Argh, this 1Mb upload limit per post kinda stinks. I guess I have the upload abusers to thank for that. What's a city or town these days without a coffee shop? This one's cool because you can actually read the menu, and almost the newspapers. Excellent textures in this game.

Dreamfall!!! Been a headache day so I've been listless and unfocused. Started with NWN and ended up in Dreamfall. Basically trying games out again now that I've got a slightly faster processor and better video card. I had to compress these images down from 6.7Mb so quality might suffer. It's awesome playing games on a 24" display in its native resolution. The 7950GT KO is a big improvement over my old 6800GT. Zoe Castillo up close. Though the skin textures can tend to be shiny in certain scenes, overall head quality is better than in NWN2. Hair is attached to the head, eyes glisten, lips look moist, no light shining inside mouth, etc.

Back to NWN... Sedos is showing her age well. Except for much simpler character and object models, NWN looks almost as good as NWN2 sometimes. The ridiculous far (not far enough for me) clipping plane fog is sure annoying though; can't see where I should be able to see. NWN2 improved on this, but both games are a far cry from Ultima IX. NWN2's clipping plane slider would have to go to 1000 to match U9's rendering distance (which was only achievable by editing the INI file).

Neeshka didn't have a tail in my games until patch 1.05, but that was an incremental upgrade process because I was installing patches as they became available. It's possible they missed a file or two in the 1.01 (or whatever the earliest version is) to 1.05 patch. It's also possible she got a tail earlier than 1.05, since I didn't always restart my games every time a patch came out, and there was a period when I'd stopped playing altogether. Changes made to characters won't be seen if you've already entered a 'module'. Modules can contain many areas (watch them listed during the loading screen) so even if you haven't actually entered the map a character is located in they are still considered "spawned" by the game.

The game has worked fine for me (albeit slow as molasses in an Alaskan winter) since it came out, but my computer seems to be able to run for months without needing rebooted (APC power conditioner helps tons). Stealth works too, but you need lots of skill points invested in Hide and Move Silently, as well as equipment that provides bonuses to those skills. Wearing anything with an armor check is just asking for trouble; as it seems enemies can Listen and Spot too. Of course, some get to cheat by script. (I cheated my assassin's dexterity to 50 and the halfling crossbowman guarding Old Scab still managed to detect me.) You can't open a chest right next to someone without them noticing, which makes sense. I wish we could knock people out (w/o killing them and possibly ruining a quest), take any loot, and get away unscathed. Alas, there's no "unconscious at zero HP, dying between zero and -9, and dead at -10" in this game, or at least I've not seen it. It'd make more sense to bandage Khelgar to keep him alive, then heal him after the fight. Better than "Ugh, I died" - combat ends - "Whoa, I'm alive again!"

The Granny tool will be interesting. One thing I'd like to do, if possible, is increase the number of polys in the character models. Sure, it'd bog my current computer down, but by the time I got the project done I'd have a much faster machine. I'd have to take a crash course in 3D modeling, but I've yet to fail in anything I put my mind to.

I wanted to be a video game developer. By the age of 16 (in 1984) I'd already written my own 2D (overhead) game for a computer with 3.5K of RAM. It was half BASIC and half 65xx assembly language. I had a blast writing it, and never managed to beat it. That was my first introduction to 'game balance'. However, I ended up doing other things, and now I'm sort of like a bard in that I can do many different things, but I'm no elite specialist. When I learned about the long hours involved with game development, especially at 'crunch time', I lost interest in doing it for a living. Instead I write programs as a hobby. No stress, no deadlines, no long hours encroaching on my social life, etc. And it's still fun. I haven't written another game since that first one long ago, but I'm tempted to since developers are constantly falling short of my expectations. (I have rather high standards, which some people appreciate and others despise.) Ideally I'd be a powerful wizard king of a peaceful empire, and I'd wile my time away writing programs in my spacious, airy castle office.

No. I submitted a list to Rob some time ago and none of them are listed. Maybe they'll make it into the final 1.06, maybe 1.07, maybe never. I have little confidence in developers anymore. One of these days they might surprise me.

The Daily Tech Article Interesting reading, and a sign of good things to come in the personal computer department. I guess I can't call them "Itty Bitty Minds" anymore.

I'd look up the motherboard specs if you can find them. (Asus' site would be my first visit.) The motherboard determines which memory configurations will be DDR/2 and which won't. There are usually four slots for memory, and the type of memory and which slots you stick it into determine the final result.

My relatively limited experience is that 2Gb of fast memory is better than 4Gb of slow/mediocre memory. (System memory is already slow enough, which is why processors have L1/L2/L3 caches consisting of superfast memory.) Business and non-entertainment applications don't care as much about performance because they spend most of their time waiting on the user for input, but games must render scenes and run fast refresh loops constantly, regardless of what the user is doing. Games tax a computer more than just about anything else, except perhaps benchmarking software and commercial renderers (and other specialized applications), but in a game I tend to care more because the frame rate directly corrolates to how smoothly my commands and actions are performed. I can't answer the motherboard question(s) because the scenery is going to change by the time I'm ready for a big upgrade. The new Penryn and Barcelona cores will be out by then, and I'm waiting to see which one ends up being the better buy. That'll determine which motherboard I get. SLI is a given, and probably SATA2. I don't need video processing because I don't watch DVDs on the computer. We'll probably see GPU power cables from here on out, so don't get a PSU that doesn't support them. Thanks for the tip on the modular PSU. I hadn't considered that before.

Your soul is bound to the Fifth Totem, Homid: The Monkey. Homid appears as a viridian monkey. He embodies intelligence, potential, understanding, and skill. He is associated with the color viridian, the season of spring, and the element of fire. His downfall is pretentiousness. You are most compatible with Owls and Tortoises. Entertaining, at least.

I got up to around 6Mb but deleted it all. My two new screenshots are all I have right now. I appreciate the upload space, so I try not to abuse it.

I love the attention to detail in some of NWN2's interiors. It's a shame the game lack's an Ultima's object interaction, but we may never see game worlds like those again.

Here's my new human sorceress who'll be a Red Dragon Disciple after a few levels... I used the modified GFFEditor to give her Hezebel's tail and Erinyes wings.

So far I'm the only d10. It's a cool looking die, same color as my car.

I used bold font to highlight the accurate points. The first point is funny because I have a reputation as a stereotype breaker. I chose d10 in the quiz because it can be a poor man's d100 (two d10s), and I'm often using the poor man's equivalent of more expensive things.

fortunately, for me at least, texture settings don't have much of an impact on frame rate with NWN2. They don't affect me much either. I experimented with them while trying to see what did have an impact, and quickly decided only "high" quality textures were worth looking at. Where my video card has trouble is at resolutions beyond 1024x768; it's just not powerful enough to pump out lots of pixels with high FSAA and Anisotropic filtering. I can run HL2 at 1920x1200 so long as I use recommended settings (mostly max but low FSAA and Aniso), but it'll be two EVGA 8800GTX SLI on a quad-core Penryn or Barcelona before NWN2 will do that for me. In my experiments, HL2 benefits more from a faster CPU, while NWN2 benefits more from a faster/more powerful GPU. I can OC my CPU (Athlon64 3800+ from 2400Mhz to 2625Mhz) and get +(10-30) extra FPS in HL2 but barely +1 FPS in NWN2, and if I OC the GPU (GeForce 6800GT from 350Mhz to 375Mhz) HL2 barely improves while NWN2 gains +(5-10) FPS. I probably won't be upgrading until the end of the year due to some unexpected circumstances, so in the interim I upgraded the CPU slightly (I'm limited by a 939 socket, but the 3800 gave me SSE3 instructions and faster clock at same temperature), and I have a XFX GeForce 7900GT on the way.

Agreed; I always look at the "Recommended" hardware suggestion because minimum isn't guaranteed to run the game, even if you have all options at their lowest settings. Nevermind that most games look really ugly (or uglier than normal) with most options disabled. For instance, I can't stand to play NWN2 at any texture quality setting less than "high".

Anandtech Review Anandtech also indicates that the current overclocked EVGA 8800GTX offering (for about $650) is a better value, despite the potential clock rates achievable in the Ultra. I agree with the reviewer that it would have been nice if NVidia had been more forthcoming about the changes to the silicon.

It's refreshing to read an honest review. I agree with Josh about the camera. The default mode is the only one I care for, but I find myself trying to see around obstacles all the time. I really miss Ultima IX's movement and camera system; I feel it is much better for an RPG than NWN2's system. I always 'fix' the soldiers in the siege and squad combat scenerios by using the console to buff them somewhat. Without doing that, they fall as easily as a level 1 character, sort of like hirelings in pre-expansion Diablo 2. I might as well fight the seige alone for all the good they do. Hopefully Josh has a sizeable influence over development of NWN2's expansion. It might end up being what the OC should have been (in my view).

Hmm, I think I'll wait on this one and read reviews first. The mention of getting somethign done "in time" raises a red flag for me because I have come to despise games that impose time limits on the player. Invariably there isn't enough time for me to do what's necessary, and I end up getting rid of the game. Aside from that disappointment, I'm still looking forward to HL2:EP2, and Dragon Age, and NWN2's expansion. I'll wait to read several reviews on all of them first. Not previews, but reviews of the final shipped product. I don't mind the wait because I do a lot of programming and game modding inbetween releases, so I'm always busy no matter what. Edit: oh, and I hope the hotrod in HL2:EP2 is easier to control; the buggy and boat in HL2 tend to be too sensitive to keypresses and will constantly oversteer. Also I don't understand the remark about the buggy not having much power; I wonder if either of the guys bothered to to use the nitrous the buggy comes with. Sure it's not as fast as pod racing, but it's faster than any of the Combine equipment.

Patch 1.05 definitely breaks the script controlling the scene where Daeghun and his group of rangers attack Bladelings during the final wave of the battle in West Harbor in chapter 1. I created a second character and just went through this area, and had the exact same sequence of events happen as before. Three Bladelings stop moving while the dwarves continue running, then the scene changes to Daeghun and Co. The ranger on his left fires off a single shot at some off-screen target, but nobody else does anything. Finally the sequence times out and Daeghun initiates dialog. When the dialog is over, you're left with two or three extra Bladelings to deal with. Don't worry about Daeghun though, this game uses the MinHP1 trick to keep plot-critical characters alive (I let Khelgar fight the three thugs alone, hoping he'd die so I could continue alone, but alas, he fought while "Near Death" for a minute or two, while continuing to take damage, before finally killing the last thug. Thankfully I was able to ditch him with "rs kr_roster_edit" after the forced drink and conversation. I really hope the expansion doesn't force as much onto the player as the OC does. It's very, very annoying.) I'd like to see the height adjuster modified to allow taller/shorter characters than is now possible, since human adults can vary in height by as much as two or three feet (dwarfism and giantism aside). In the meantime you can always use the GFF Editor to tweak your character's height and girth further than CG allows. I tried adding a tail to my tiefling rogue, but the game seems to ignore wings and tails when the character being edited is the main character. That's disappointing. I'd edit the OC myself to fix the few bugs remaining, but Obsidian keeps modifying parts of it when they release patches. There are still several glitches in the 'tutorial' area, which I enjoy playing through. I suspect they don't care much about that module since the glitches continue to exist after five patches. On the other side of the coin, I'm experimenting with my first evil character, ever. I agree with some opinions here about it being either a LG or CE game, as it's hard to find the middle ground. If NE doesn't get easier, I'll dive into CE and kill everything that isn't using the MinHP1 cheat and that can be targeted. I'm going to be an Assassin (just two more levels) so it doesn't matter what flavor of evil my character is. I see the point about skills and feats; I wasn't thinking about the feats that require certain skill levels when I posted/PMed my idea. Perhaps the screen could be divided horizontally with skills on top and feats below, or tabs. Either way would allow us to more easily design our characters before thrusting them head-first into the game world. Back to my tailless tiefling rogue, the woman who only wants to adventure alone in the world, but who must always summon a script from the ethereal 'console' to dispose of an unwanted leech.

I like the height and girth adjusters... My aasimar paladin is taller than everyone in town. I maxed her height but left her girth alone. Tall and slender, the way I like 'em. The first female aasimar face is the only one I like (one of the tattooed faces uses the same base model but I'm not big on tattoos). Her eyes are the lightest blue in the default palette; from a distance it looks like they're glowing blue-white. The last battle sequence in West Harbor messed up for the first time since I got the game last September; Daegun and pals usually show up and drop a few bladelings at the start of the last wave, but this time the bladelings stood still and Daegun didn't do anything until it was time to start his little spiel. Might have been a one-time glitch, but it's odd that of the ten (or so) times I've played through this area (starting in patch 1.01 or 1.02), the glitch only happens post 1.05. It's odd that I have a Blessed of Waukeen feat; aasimar can't select Waukeen as a diety and I selected Tyr as her diety. I suggested to Rob that feat selection be done before skill selection in character generation. The way it is now, if you select Able Learner you aren't able to benefit from it until you level up.