metiman
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Posts posted by metiman
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Predicting the future is...difficult. The next big thing in computer monitors may be OLED monitors. Personally I'm kind of waiting for that to upgrade my monitor. In that case resolution and/or PPI may not increase dramatically any time soon. Of course, eventually it is safe to assume that both PPI and screen size will increase dramatically. But this "eventually" may be more than just a single decade. Not everyone believes that the jump from CRTs to LCDs was progress. Particularly for gaming. Originally LCDs were adopted by most people just because they looked better on their desks and they were lighter to carry. But the market spoke and that was the end of CRTs. If I move my mouse pointer very quickly across my screen I see several of them. On a CRT I would just see one. There are LCD monitors that are better at fast motion, but few if any of those are S-IPS panels. Most are TFTs with their limiting viewing angles and other faults.
I would certainly be in favor of Obsidian trying to guess at what the most likely future resolution will be (maybe 3840x2400 (2x 24") or 3840x2160 (4k/2160p) or 5120x3200 (2x 30") or 7680x3420 (8k/4320p). Any of these choices would mean a lot more pixels than 1920x1200. If you assume 32 bits per pixel then you end up with 9,216,000 bytes or around 8.8 MB of storage for each screen of pixels you draw. 4K monitors are probably the most likely type. So 3840 x 2160 x 32 bpp would give you 31.64 MB of storage per screen or 3.6x the amount of storage. If they are worried about needing to deliver blurays instead of DVDs then they will need more than 3 times as many blurays if planning for 4K monitors. Of course the real unanswered question is whether planning for 4K displays would create more work for the artists. Presumably the point of all those pixels is to display something more detailed than you could otherwise. I've always wanted to see the kind of detailed drawings you see in concept art drawn in the actual game world, but that implies a certain photorealistic LoD that is supposed to be very expensive.
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I have always felt that stereoscopic 3D is the future. Eventually it will become just the standard way we view content just as mono 3D is now. When I was younger and before I started getting headache problems I played the occassional 3D game with shutter glasses and a fast CRT monitor. It was great. Depending on the settings it was either like a holographic projection into the room or like looking out a real window watching the game characters. In those days I was able to play for maybe 30-45 minutes before getting a headache. Now I'd probably instantly get a headache, but I don't own any CRT monitors anymore. Of course there are autostereoscopic LCD monitors and there are still some HMDs being made. Neither of those should cause headaches. Affordable HMDs are still too low resolution though and autostereoscopic monitors are expensive.
But this game is not 3D. Well at least the environments are supposed to be just bitmaps. Also the graphics are not going to be AAA photorealistic. Without photorealism at least to the level of Crysis 1 I don't think stereoscopic 3D projection is all that impressive. It just makes the fake looking character models look even more fake.
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metiman: Hehe, ouchie.
Well, I thought the game had more going for it than just the portraits. Great npc characters with interesting personalities that often clashed a bit with one another (I *love* lots of good colorful banter between the player character and npc party members, as well as among the npc party members themselves) was also a highlight.As to the main theme music of DA:O, I will say that I think the earlier part of the song is better, as it got just a little too "heavy generic fantasy" toward the end, but just a bit, mind you. You need some power and drive for music about an epic quest story in a game like that. But the early part of the song, ah...the mind and heart soar with imaginings of the adventures that await... *sigh*
Well up to 0:50 it's not too bad. Kind of Enya-ish. It might have worked if they had just left well enough alone, but it had to be EPIC. DId Inon Zur compose that? I don't think I've ever heard a single track of his that impressed me. It all tends to sound like Yet Another Epic Movie Soundtrack. Although there was one track posted in this thread that I liked, Jeremy Soule tends to have the same problem. It's like they are both just shooting for that one kind of sound and that's all they do. Sort of the musical equivalent of making license plates. I think both Justin and Casey are better than Jeremy Soule or Inon Zur.
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I wrote a few tracks inspired by RPGs and Project Eternity's campaign success, but I'm not sure it would be very appropriate to share them. I don't want anyone thinking I'm doing so to trump the future announced composer or Justin Bell's wonderful music for the Kickstarter video. If there is enough interest and it's not imposing then I'll post them. Otherwise, I'll just let them drift off into the nether regions of the internet.
Yes! Post them! Your music sounds awesome Casey, and it deserves to be heard.
@everyone reading. Please listen to this man's music. It's good stuff!
Well, with encouraging words like that how could I not?
Link here: http://caseyedwardsm...cteternitydemo/
These are just 3 quick examples I whipped up during my down time in-between projects to show some love for Project Eternity's fundraising success. I hope you guys enjoy it. If not, there's plenty more to sample at my website in the sig. below.
I quite liked Celestial Terrain. I absolutely loved Falling Into Darkness. Completely amazing. I would buy that track for sure. Enigmatic Visions was also very nice and seems like it would work in some game scenes. Was Falling Into Darkness composed for a project like a film perhaps?
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I think it's too generic and epic movie-ish. To me it sounds more Electronic Arts than Bioware. The Baldur's Gate 2 theme posted earlier in this thread OTOH was just brilliant. Didn't EA get anything right about that game? Oh yeah. The customized character portraits. Those were great.
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Do all jRPGs have absurdly large and heavy swords or do some use katanas? You would think they would be happy with the sword designs that they themselves (presumably) invented. A two handed slender, curved design has always seemed far better to me than the 1 handed cutlass that Europeans seemed to favor.
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Even North Korea.
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I do not care if it takes even 100 GB on my hard drive and it it distributed on 4 Blurays. Let's make it nice, space is cheap...
Well, what about the poor guys who only download the game...perhaps over a slow link?
By the way, does anyone know what the largest PC game to day is...and how big it is (in GBs, excluding expansions and optional "extras", just the core game) ?
And what about people who don't have an internet connection at all? And what about people who cannot afford a computer or who can only afford a netbook or Chinese tablet? Or who only have an 80286 cpu running DOS 5.0? At some point you have to strike a balance between excluding some people and lessening the experience for the rest. If you have a slow internet connection you can either just be patient even if downloading the game takes a month or spend the extra money for the boxed DVD or Bluray version.
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Is there some problem with distributing on both bluray for those of us who have bluray drives and multiple dual layer DVDs for people who don't? I don't mean shipping out both. I mean allowing us to choose which version we want. A very large game size is fine given todays hard drive sizes. I don't like when Microsoft thinks like that because an operating system has no need to take up a large portion of your hard drive, but for applications it's no problem at least for the end user. High resolution bitmaps take up a lot of space. That's just the way of things now. If the bitmaps are uncompressed you can certainly compress them but that's all you can do.
I'm assuming it's just a distribution cost issue. Either lots of dual layer DVDs or 1 or 2 blurays. For people with slower connections it might take weeks to download though. I suppose such people still have time to upgrade to the full boxed game if they have the money. Otherwise they just have to commit to weeks of downloading.
As far as compression, their bitmap formats are probably already compressed and even if they aren't compression isn't exactly new tech. I'm sure most of the devs are already familiar with the fact that bitmaps are compressible.
My monitor is only a 1600x1200 20". That's at least somewhat fewer pixels than 1920x1200. But I realize most people have either 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 24" monitors these days. It probably makes more sense to standardize on 1920x1200 bitmaps since that's the screen size that most people have. Although that does leave out people with 30" monitors. I want to get one of those one day too.
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Humans shouldn't be in the game at all. Humans are just so boring and unimaginative.
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I believe this is going to be one of those societies where women are not allowed clothing of any kind. Any female seen with clothes is sentenced to be hanged. Naked of course. As far as sex I haven't heard there is going to be any in the game. I certainly hope there won't be.
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Nicole really is kind of hot, at least for someone working for a game developer, but certain other chicks present were not. Did I just traumatize a whole bunch of feminazis in this thread?
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An example of a romance mini-game is any romance in BG2.
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Were you able to at least kill Dragon Age characters who hit on you or was that not allowed?
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Are you asking for romance minigames or romance as part of the main story?
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Only one of those was a IE game though. So are you saying you want the same sort of romances as were available in PS:T? If that's all you want then just go ahead and say it.
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How about optional scaling? So that you can choose to turn it off entirely or choose 5%, 10%, 20% scaling etc. Or even scale by area. If you know in advance that you want to get to an early area much later in the game you can let the game know this and it can scale up the encounter by doubling or tripling the number of enemies or by giving the enemy party a dragon on their side or something like that. The only valid excuse for scaling IMO is for replay value. So that you can choose different paths and still be sufficiently challenged by the later encounters. And of course scaling should never make things easier. Only more difficult. For me I think the first option would be the safest, but the second option could also be viable as long as it is optional.
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I'm still not entirely clear on what a "stronghold" actually is. It's not merely a house obviously. So presumably it is more than just a place to sleep to avoid the overpriced city inns.
If the idea is to introduce another sort of game mechanic then how about making some kind of RTS? Although I haven't played many RTS games the idea of building towns and gathering armies to battle against other towns could be interesting. Especially once you've finished the main story.
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Now that we don't have Raise Dead/Resurrection and limited healing looks like I'll be "save scumming" a lot, all over the place and all of the time.
Excellent. You, sir, have the right attitude. The less tedious and repetitive the gameplay the better. If you want to replay a section you already played you can always just load a previous save slot.
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It is good to know that Justin Sweet is the only competent artist in the world. I hadn't known that before, but now of course I see it. I suppose every other artist in the world should just give up. What's the point when they are so outshone by the absolute brilliance of the great Justin Sweet. Let us all bow down and pray. Personally I think this whole thread is disrespectful to Obsidian. Are they not competent to decide for themselves what digital artists to hire? I don't care what artists they use as long as they are good at what they do.
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I've never liked the raise dead mechanic, and I almost never used it. It's nice that the game won't be balanced around the use of it.
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Ironman mode is for hardcore players who think there is NEVER a good reason for saving during inopportune times in the game, I don't want to go that far. it shouldn't be one extreme or the other.
Can you give an example of what you consider to be a good reason for saving? If you had reason to believe that nearly every battle in the game was going to be challenging enough to kill half your party on your first attempt would it change your position at all?
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Isn't that the same argument that the pro-romance faction is making? That they like it? There are some arguments against it. For instance, some people feel that any minigame is a waste or resource. Not just romance minigames, but anything else that steals development time from the central game itself. There is also the argument about how unlikely it is that one (or more) of your few companions just happens to be your, uh, soul mate or whatever. It's a bit improbable. In terms of just wanting a shag I guess that would be dependent on charisma. Obviously every male party member is going to want to shag Fall-From-Grace or Kaelyn the Dove. An 18 or 20 charisma is kind of difficult to ignore.
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JFSOCC, you do realize that there is going to be an ironman mode, right? The whole point of it is for people like you who think saving ruins the challenge of the game. What problem do you have with ironman mode?
Well, I thought the game had more going for it than just the portraits. 
Play PE with a controller?
in Pillars of Eternity: Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning!)
Posted · Edited by metiman
Can't you just map keyboard and mouse functions to your xbox controller? Why not just use a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard. Or you could always go high tech and control the mouse cursor with the power of your mind.
As for growing up I think grown up people are not supposed to play computer games at all. And no, not console games either. Also laptops are a pathetic gaming platform. I've never owned a laptop. The closest thing I had was a portable Epson typewriter with a one line LCD display.