cronicler

Kirottu: Basically it is easier to program AI for TB. No sorrt scratch that, It is easier to make mistakes when you are programming an AI for Real time. They both use the same principles but in turn based system you can use the whole enemy turn to calculate movement for the whole enemy force (thus giving the illusion of Cover/Flanking etc) while in RTS you only have 1/x amount of time to do it and you have to do it individually and hope that your overall ai does act coherently. So in a way TBS is a bit easier to create a better quality product with less (not really the best word but i hope you uncan understand my meaning) effort.

Please don't brandish that MMO name around here too much . Sure I am a biased observer but FOnline 2238 is going to be based on hardcore Ultima Online style instead of the modern "Soft" MMOs with holding hands and babysitting. Sure the modern games may have left you jaded but if you have time I do recomend you to take part in the new beta to see for yourself. (then again reading this a second time, I noticed that I sound like a used car salesman . Not very trust inspiring. ) Anyways I'll try to keep you updated if anything new comes up on this subject.

As you mgih (or might not ) know there is an online mod in development for Fallout 2. Some weird modders got their filthy hands on that mod's bones and started creating some "stuff". You can check the project at: FOnline 2238

Gromnir; you generally use the "effort and time required to make this right is not worth the end product" argument but in this minor issue the fix is already out there in the form of Mods. Incorporating it is not a Herculean task. Also while needing an overhaul in the "Skill" area, Obsidian team is also going to go over the Medicine skill. Tieing the ability to heal crippled limbs to a perk (skill number and in the world trained perhaps?), Adding negative side to combat drugs, overhauling the healing mechanisms (toilet drinking and all) would not be too little gain for a lot of work On the weight & Travel issue, I am curious. Would you prefer timed travel (Fallout 1&2 style on the map) to Insta-Travel (Ala Oblivion and F3)

Erm, I was not talking about animations, those are still the same crap carried over from Oblivion. I was just talking about item and ermor (Edit: ermor? WTH is ermor? Elmer's armor . Sorry for typo. Armour) models themselves. The Body models need to be somehow randomised with added new body models (by using Oblivion model mods for example). The animations.... Well I saw this very nice combat animation mod for Oblivion

Gromnir: On the subject of Vats and Skills you are both right. That part is in dire need but I had assumed that pnp and comp. gamers that are a part of the Obsidian team would be aware of that (and we all have mentioned that aspects time and time again )

If I am gauging this correctly, the main problem people have with medicines, and ammo is the over-stockpiling aspect of it. With L4D method, i tried to implement a soft limit / reduction to players hoard (depending on the difficulty level) without giving it a hard cap. Hard caps (be it 4, 10 or 1000) just irritate people. I just say that adjusting the random drops would be a better and subtler way than giving a limitation on the player side of the interface. Besides the place is supposed to be desolate and bare! I am not really bothered by medicines having no weight. It would be nice if they had some token minimum weight but that is a minor gripe. However weightless ammo was a WTF! moment for me. Yes I know it is a game but there is a reasion why Rocket Launcher teams are made out of 2 man teams; 1 carries the tube and 3 or so rockets, the other carries 7 or so (when loaded for bear). Those friggin 50cal boxes are a bear to carry. And this place is supposed to be a wasteland. A battle to scavenge. Edit: On a side note, the whole weight system is topsy turvy. The basic unit of weight is 1 so a lot of stuff gets funny weights like 13 forks being heavier than a rocket launcher and so on. IF I remember correctly, there was an Oblivion mod to give detailed weights to the items in it. Why can't we have it here? Sure FO2 had it wrong too but does it have to be wrong in every game?

Bhlaab: I didn't really compared them to any other game tbh. They are sufficent to represent their items and they are don't look too bad (to me that is). Sure they can be better, much better in fact but they didn't feel too primitive to me at least. Besides fixing the textures and models are not as bad as trying to jam the capability into the game in the first place Edit: Besides, I really don't like cutting edge graphics anymore. Let the 13 year old crowd go stomp somewhere else and leave me to play my game peacefully. Still playing Jagged Alliance and Earth series over modern games. (Mad at Relic for butchering DoW2's potential and haven't seen any team decent based rts/tbs since SilentStormSentinels / Ufo:Afterlight (don't remember which came later)

Another way to balance the game would be using a system similar to Left For Dead's "Director" System. Depending on the Difficulty and amount of stuff you have, the game spawns less of your primary items and more of other items. For eg: You have 20 stims (if 20 is accepted a lot) and the game difficulty is insae? then the loot becomes 1 or 2 stims per encounter and some low quality food and water for the most part. Or in the reverse, if you are barely crawling to your destination, the game could help you by spawning a very damaged (?) opponent that you can dispatch easyly whom yields some urgently needed supplies. Wish folks at Obsidian could implement/add such a filtering system to the random encounter generation...

Heh, but it did an admirable job Twink! Now that they (Bethhesda "Soft"works) have left the game, all we need to do is to cut off all the Vanilla content and build our own with the biiig toolbox we have, just like Oblivion. (And fix the bugs...) You have to admit all of the graphical models in the game are at least good quality. We just have to fix animations, combat, story and missions (and scripts and triggers). Your typical B.Soft product in other words.

Hmm, I have to conced that they may be considered such a group as you have to save their bacon and then they become available for other actions. Then again I don't remember having a lot to do with them after that? Edit: After a quick refresher (Thanks Vault), I have "remembered" that there are about 6 or 7 actions you can do involving them after you save them. (and only 1 quest). Not that bad for a minor group but like most (all) of the other parts, I wish this had been developed more

After my initial bombardments on the topics, I have waited to see some bits coming out. However I only saw worse and worse DLCs and no info on NY. Now that the DLCs are (supposed to be) done, I thought we might get some snippets of info. (Thou I am not really sure about the end of DLCs for Fo3. They hstill have 100 points allowance on X-Brick. The pessimist in me says we will see one last bout of dead horse beating ) On to the meaty side of the game: Is there any info you can give us on the use of the Map? I really hope we will have a 2 layer map in this game; first layer being equal to the Gallout 3's general city map and second layer being a global map. If you use such a scheme, you can include distant locations like "The Pitt" in the game without too much trouble (or am I the only person who thought going from Capital Wasteland to Pittsburg via an underground mine track weird?). This would also cut down on the feeling of a crowded rush hour as you are travelling on the wasteland. After level 10 or 12 the vanilla Fallout 3 just shouted too many monsters too little space. Lastly this would enable us modders to add our own little towns and locations into the game without too much rips in the gameworld.

enterix: I am not 100% sure, but is there "any" group in FO3 that you can interact with (besides being a quest giver - reward giver). The quests were just just floating in their own seperate spheres and they were quite meaningless for giving a cohersive picture of the settlement they were at. The whole game (felt that it) lacked a skeleton. It was more like coloured post-its slapped on a human shape on the wall instead of a skeleton - tendon arrangement

As a Pc user, I would like to dump some of my pet hates here: Can we have a dedicated Keyboard and Mouse interface? I am really tired of playing with jurry rigged conversations (Yes I do know this is a single system resource/time sink for developers but as a Pc user I am tired of games asking me for a damn thumb-pad controls) Is there any chance of keyboard specific shortcuts/uses in the game like ability to type stuff into in game computers and books... Are we going to be stuck with "equal to consoles" options in graphics and sounds and gameplay which bypasses the strenghts of our system?

Mr Bond, James Bond may have been one of the first examples of Spy film genre but somewhere around the end of cold war, the series dried up / lost its magical touch that made you disregard the improbable-tech. Bourne was a real blast of fresh air as it managed to dump most of the useless holy(wood)-fu, ultra mega super duper gadgets and put some believability (sp?) into the genre

TrueNatural: It is easy to miss the implications of internet on the written words when you are constantly hammered by the Music and Movie and Game sectors' outcries about the net. However the roots of concepts like IP, Copy"right" and Digital"rights"managemet are all in the world of written materials. I thought it would give people a clearer wiev of how things statred and how things got so warped. As a bookworm, the explanation of how Copy"right" kills a book's availability was even new to me.

Crashgirl; people do understand what being a parent means. You put your organ into your wife and... well who cares about the rest. Just be thankful that you have at least a handle on the problems. Here we have clans with 6+ children per family as the clan patriach needs muscle (ie votes) to subvert the friggin system....

There has been a lot of debate on Drm issues. I recently read this chain of essays on Drm written by Eric Flint . I think he advocates some real points (instead of the usual you just want to skimp on paying / info wants to be free and other bull. we see on these debates) Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Now his arguments are more about Written materials and can be applied to Music but it does explain some of the basic misconceptions about the main issue of DRM Enjoy!

If you forget about the story, tactics is a really decent Team Based strategy game. The story gets too patriotic (We are the Brotherhood!) and Holywood for my taste at some points but overall; diverse objectives (saving hostages, going into dirty house to house fights, ambushes and Achtung! Panzer for a mission) make the game fun.

I am not sure, Hurlslot. Every major game that has been released in the last few years have a playtime of 8-10 hours. Just a week and weekend worth in other words. Also now that we have total voice-overs in the games, the amount of real content seems to shrink as well. Sure ME had a good bit of written background material but most of the time the background material is just a little piece of vid or voice recording nowadays... I just started playing Earth 2150 again; Persistent main base, ability to carry troops from 1 mission to other, unit experience, tunneling, ability to design your units from component parts, detailed command menu that allows you to construct your orders carefully. A mix of E-mails, propaganda and news channel vids and mission brifings to unreveal the story. And most importantly a 185 game day limit. You can win all your battles but if you don't manage to gather enough resources to build the ship then... you win all your battles and loose the war.... This is a 3-D strategy game released in 2000. Can you dispute that we have regressed (as far as rts concerned)?

Got my hands on a Earth "2150 triple pack" in a flea market. The game itself sucks a bit due to old and now horrible controls and Unit Ai problems but... The whole friggin campaign is better than all this crap we get past 2005 or so. You have a persistent main base. Your goal is to mine a lot of resources in mission maps and ship them to the main base to ship them to the orbit to finish the space ship in 185 game days. You also need to use those resources to research new Techs and build your army and base. Did I mention that the whole world is off its orbit and the whole place is frakked up after a nuclear war (and you will be very happy if you get 50k worth of materials in any ore field which are rare...and every computer player is after them like bloodhounds...) Also you can ship your units in a mission map back to base and use them in other missions as reinforcements... Units also gain Xp and can be refitted with better weapons.... The story is told with E-mails, propaganda videos and some cnn-like news channel reports. Sad to see new games becoming less complicated and creative than pre-historic games

Treecat Alert!

How? Do you wish to imply that the target audiance of comics are teenager male part of the population (and has been targeting for a wider age range as the teenagers of old get old )

Because with the new suits, the contest isn't based on your own hardware anymore. If someone was mad enough, s/he could probably have her suit modelled to fit over her body perfectly with laser mapping and CaT manufacture. The new suits create a very big advantage with lesser drag, muscle tightness, shark skin and other factors. Sure the human factor is still important but its a case of wording of the law vs spirit of the law. If it was possible to add motors to an athletes body, would it be illegal or would it be just another piece of high tech? The argument is to err on the side of human than the side of technology.

Who knows? Don't spend your energy on dead issues mate. Instead, help us pester Obsidian staff with new wars!