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J.E. Sawyer

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Everything posted by J.E. Sawyer

  1. J.E. Sawyer
    Currently, corpses "hang out" for a while, as in the IE games. After an amount of time has passed (currently only a few minutes, but probably 24 game hours in the final game), the corpses disappear. We probably won't do any sort of decomposition modeling.
  2. J.E. Sawyer
    Shapeshifting (for PE druids, it's called Spiritshift) allows druids to turn into anthropomorphized forms, with abilities that are more inspired by the emulated creature rather than literally transforming the druid into that creature. Druids will always be allowed to continue spellcasting while spiritshifted. We definitely want it to be an ability you want to use often.
  3. J.E. Sawyer
    Thanks for the link.
  4. J.E. Sawyer
    5 years is a long time in terms of game development and PC hardware. At 5.2GB uncompressed for a small area, 100GB is probably far shy of the data for a game of this size. It would probably be pushing a terabyte. And remember, we're not talking about just clicking a button to render out at a higher resolution. The textures on the objects in the environment actually have to support that density. I.e., we would need to build every texture at double the size (4x pixel data) to maintain the appropriate density. It's true that Max Payne 3 and RAGE push huge amounts of data. They're also huge budget games that primarily sell through physical retail channels. PE is a ~$4 million budget game built primarily for digital distribution with a small team of environment artists. Instead of pushing enormous amounts of detail for ultra-high resolutions that few players use (or will be using in the immediate future), I'd rather target the most common resolutions at the low and high ends, which Steam overwhelmingly shows are 1366x768 and 1920x1080 -- and get as many high quality areas done as we can. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
  5. J.E. Sawyer
    Newcomers will probably not be as efficient, but efficiency is more important at higher levels of difficulty where the margins of victory become smaller. Additionally, we're designing these mechanics to align with the traditional concepts of the classes. I believe most players think of barbarians, monks, and wizards as characters that wear light armor. If you put them in light armor, the mechanics will support that. If you put fighters, paladins, and clerics in heavy armor, the mechanics will also support that. You can also play against traditional concepts, and in certain circumstances that will be mechanically more advantageous, but typically there's efficiency loss or little benefit gained. E.g., if the monk is really being slammed by attacks so hard that his or her Wounds are filling up too quickly, it may make more sense to wear heavier armor. If the monk wears heavy armor all the time, he or she will be protected against more damage (like anyone else), but his or her Wounds resource will take longer to build up, meaning he or she will spend more time in combat building up to the use of Wounds-based abilities.
  6. J.E. Sawyer
    Just to give a frame of reference, the map you saw in the visual demo has 1.3 gigs (uncompressed) of 2D data. That's not a particularly large area. While compression will significantly reduce that, you can pretty easily extrapolate what the size on disk will be for a full-sized area and, from that, for an IE-sized game. Now, if you want to double the length and width of those screens for even higher resolutions, you're looking at roughly 4x the pixel density and roughly 4x the size on disk. So, for the visual demo area, that's 5.2 gigs of uncompressed 2D data. It really does not make sense for us to render out at those resolutions.
  7. J.E. Sawyer
    We will not be building out cities for the sake of building them out. Content density is important to us and, we believe, to most players. On a related note, while we do try to follow the exterior layout of buildings on their interior, we often TARDIS their interior space up to 40% (we did this all the time in IWD and IWD2). Following a 1:1 size relationship interior:exterior typically makes those buildings have an enormous exterior "footprint", which means content density goes down and fewer locations can actually be fit on a map.
  8. J.E. Sawyer
    Armor speed penalties currently only affect the speed of actions, not movement. They modify attack animations directly but may wind up dominantly affecting downtime between actions instead (because it allows more scaling before the animations look... not good). Fighters currently have a passive ability called Armored Grace that increases the DT benefit from armor. The benefit of augmenting DT rather than reducing speed penalties is that it doesn't make the lightest armors irrelevant for fighters. Of course, in the heaviest armors, they will probably have the highest DT of any class (all other things being equal). If you want to keep a similar DT to other classes but "gain" speed (lose speed penalty), Armored Grace allows a fighter to use a lighter armor type. E.g., if a cleric is wearing plate armor with X% speed penalty, a fighter may be able to wear brigandine with the same (effective) DT as the cleric's plate armor and a lower speed penalty. We are not preventing classes from wearing any particular type of armor, but the mechanics of classes may lend themselves more to certain weights. E.g., many monk abilities (both active and passive) are powered by Wounds. You acquire Wounds by taking damage, after armor. Several monk and barbarian abilities are effective for a certain amount of time rather than a certain number of attacks, which encourages faster attacks -- both from the choice of weapon and from a lower armor speed penalty. Paladins have more targeted-use abilities and "Zealous" auras but are not especially durable. I.e., the party gains the most benefit from having them on the front lines, but they do not need to be especially fast-acting, so heavier armor often makes more sense for them.
  9. J.E. Sawyer
    Skuldr are more difficult to sneak around, not impossible to sneak around.
  10. J.E. Sawyer
    Any additional changes would come from perceived failings of it during playthroughs/testing.
  11. J.E. Sawyer
    Every type of armor has a specific speed penalty that correlates with (but is not specifically calculated by) "weight" (higher DT).
  12. J.E. Sawyer
    With weaknesses and strengths against different damage types, it's also a lot easier to communicate that through the UI. Additionally, once you've learned the strengths and weaknesses of a given armor or creature type, it stays consistent. If you see someone in crummy Oromi steel mail (the worst steel in the Dyrwood), it has a lower base DT, but it still has -40% DT against crushing attacks. When you go up against guys in March or Ymyran steel mail much later, it still has -40% DT against crushing even though the base DT is significantly higher.
  13. J.E. Sawyer
    They are organized like that conceptually, but currently those classifications don't have any direct correlation to specific game effects.
  14. J.E. Sawyer
    It's less a clash of cultures and more of the intermingling of them. Places settled by Aedyrans in the Dyrwood tend to have Eld Aedyran or regular Aedyran (i.e. plain English) names. The common names for some creatures are Glanfathan but others are Eld Aedyran or (rarely) Vailian. The cultures borrow terms from each other, too. The title of duc (ducs bels and ducs panits) is used in the Vailian Republics for the sovereign ruler of a city-state, but the Dyrwoodans borrowed it when they rebelled against the Aedyran Empire. Admeth Hadret was originally an erl palatine (palatine/palatinate also being borrowed from the Vailians), but he styled himself as a duc of the "free palatinate" during the rebellion.
  15. J.E. Sawyer
    The advancement system is not as homogeneous as 4E, but classes do gain a class-specific ability (passive, modal, or active-use) every level. We're implementing the quest system right now. We're going to use a visual flowchart for our quest implementation which should help with seeing the potential complications of branching or skipping objectives. The armor system hasn't changed since the last revision a while back. The system currently uses a single DT for a suit of armor with additional modifiers applied for things it is better or worse at. E.g. ordinary mail has 12 DT but it is 40% worse against crushing attacks. We're still implementing some aspects of the reloading system. Aim and fire are part of the same animation. Reloading is separate and moving interrupts it. Reloading a bow is relatively fast. Reloading a crossbow or arbalest is more time-consuming, and reloading a firearm is the most time-consuming (though not as long as it would be in real life). Most attack animations will probably not have early cancels, but we will probably have them for longer events like casting spells or special attacks. It is.
  16. J.E. Sawyer
    She's a human godlike. Sorry for any confusion!
  17. J.E. Sawyer
    Well, one way or another, we will not have literally infinite combinations. There's always going to be a practical limit to what we can implement. Portraits will be more limiting in that regard than character models, though you can always override the portrait.
  18. J.E. Sawyer
    We have not even started to figure out the total number of permutations of skin/eye/hair tones, hair styles, etc. We are not going to offer "eye shape" customization because you're never going to see the character in enough detail for that to matter. Those systems are extremely expensive to implement.
  19. J.E. Sawyer
    They are the only ethnicities known of in this part of the world. I'm still really not sure what you're looking for here.
  20. J.E. Sawyer
    Ethnicity and culture are separate characteristics in the game. Individual meadow folk can be from the Vailian Republics just as coastal aumaua can be from Aedyr. The common-name descriptions of ethnicities don't restrict where they can be from. Literally every ethnicity in our race document has a bit-by-bit description of what physical characteristics they have, including facial features, skin tones, hair colors (and textures), eye colors (and shapes), etc. E.g., only savannah folk, pale elves, and boreal dwarves have epicanthic folds. Of those, only boreal dwarves have them consistently.
  21. J.E. Sawyer
    Wood elves make up almost half of the population of Aedyr and orlans are also found near savannah folk, north of Readceras (which is north of the Dyrwood). Even the elves and orlans in Eír Glanfath migrated to the area within the past two thousand years; they don't have any apparent connection to the original residents and builders of the ancient structures.
  22. J.E. Sawyer
    So I can't be a native, Glanfathan elf for example? No. The player can't be a native Glanfathan or Dyrwoodan. We want your character to be as unfamiliar with this area as the player is. Does this mean that Aumaua are limited to large, salt-water, aquatic origins (sea/ocean)? Or is there potential for freshwater dwelling Aumaua? I'm thinking about being the P:E "Swamp Thing"! Aumaua aren't amphibious, just semiaquatic. They can live anywhere other races can live, though they are usually most comfortable living near water.
  23. J.E. Sawyer
    To answer a few comments and questions that have come up in the thread: * The baked-in 2D lighting will not shift with time of day. This is an acceptable trade-off in our opinion because the shadows can be very high quality and it puts no burden on the system. We really do want this game to look great and run well on a large spectrum of systems, so we want to be careful about processor-intensive lighting operations. * Dynamic objects (like the characters) can cast dynamic shadows. We are already exploring how we want additional dynamic lights in the scene to a) light the objects and b) affect their shadows. * There are some known character animation glitches we weren't able to work out before we finalized the demo. Our idle is very subtle right now; it will be more pronounced and include fidget animations in the future. The walk animation is also new and hasn't been tweaked much. Finally, there is some odd blurring/artifacting that appears in the compressed videos of the characters, which is why the walk cycle seems to have a blur/stutter in it. That doesn't appear in game. * The scene where the characters enter the scene and the sabre guy walks across the creek is our current default zoom level. We currently control zoom on the mouse wheel. It can get closer than what's in the demo and as far out as the "wide" shots, so you have a lot of flexibility there. * We are still experimenting with the tree, grass, and bush animations. Our goal is for them to look natural but add life. If they are distracting/odd or too still, that doesn't work. Thanks for all of your feedback.
  24. J.E. Sawyer
    We won't have alignments in PE, but we will have almost everything else you've suggested. We will probably not have 290 quests and we're not going to have 20 companions, but we do want to have many quests you can complete in many ways and at least 8 companions. We would rather do a smaller number of well-developed companions than have several dozen with less individual attention given to them.
  25. J.E. Sawyer
    We will likely target the larger IWD2 and ToEE battles but not go significantly above that. It's not necessarily a matter of engine capability, but I think it starts feeling less like a D&D/IE game when the ratio of foes to friends gets too large.
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