Sensuki

You can do Baldur's Gate Sized Portraits without having to have a Sidebar UI Here is a really dodgy mspaint job of it: Status effects could now be on the portrait like in BG/IWD Only thing is with this design I've lost the space for the Animal companion. You could remove a line of hotkeys I suppose - two lines of that is more than the original mockup.

I'd say that's a given as the Inventory screen will likely be equipment plus Shared Pack and you'll probably just be able to flick through party members with left and right buttons or something near the portrait.

I am pretty sure all menus will be full screen and not a box that appears in the game world.

There is, and it's something I've already talked to Adam and Kaz about. The statues, pillars, and space between the portraits can all be removed or minimized. quote link

I prefer Stone and/or wood textures myself. You guys are going "Against the Grain"

That's actually what I suggested in my edit post. The IWD2 action bar was fully customizable and I said that the wooden beams could be used to swap the placement of elements within the UI. The thing is the UI will likely be a pre-rendered image or images, not a 3D object.

Placing the thread in this forum you're probably not going to get many votes or views. Not necessarily a bad thing though. I am fine with the current IWD2 style with the pane across the bottom, although I wouldn't mind if they at least tried a BG2 style UI to see if they liked it. Even if just so the Portraits are bigger

That space is also where you can scroll through dialogue as well, which is why it is so wide. I stated this about misclicking before - most of the time misclicking is a result of mouse acceleration and/or input lag to the mouse input. If these things are eliminated you will develop muscle memory that significantly minimizes the risk of misclicking anything.

The problem is that for as many of you that want a minimalistic UI, there are just as many of us who want a UI like the mockup Kaz did or similar. Not only that but the game is going to be an Infinity Engine styled game, and thus an IE-inspired UI is what we will get. It's going to be one of those things where there's a clear divide between the fanbase on the subject and making Kaz and the programmers work on 2 UI's just to please everyone means that they have less time to work on other more important things such as getting more assets and content into the game.

My personal preference is the BG1-2/IWD1 style as that would work really well on a Widescreen setup, although I am afraid the devs probably don't share that view. We are not going to get a minimalistic UI IndiraLightfoot. Quote link Our interfaces are going to look like something based in the world, like the IE games. Sorry.

Here's my suggestion. I have removed most of the unused space, shifted the elements (I do like the Fallout Tactics style) around and decreased the size of the options menu as I think it was too big. Good for tablets but that space could be better used by other stuff. If you were going to have a customizable UI (can you do that with pre-rendered 2D?) you could use those wooden beams or whatever they're replaced with in the final UI and swap UI elements around with those or something.

You can avoid most UI misclicks by unticking "Enhanced Pointer Precision" in the Mouse settings if you're using Windows ... I think disabling Mouse accel is a bit more problematic on Mac though.

Ahh I was not expecting to see some UI art yet, that was a pleasant surprise. Nice to hear that you will be re-using creatures and tinting them to make a different creature - the IE games made very good use of this, able to get a few creatures out of the same model (Ghoul, Ghast, Lacedon and NPCs of that type etc). One thing I haven't heard brought back up again was the new method for generating interior areas, at first you were trying out Tiles, but then later stated that you were going to try a different approach to get more of an organic feel to the areas. I really like the art style of the mockup UI - it is very reminiscent of Icewind Dale 2 and it also looks easily scalable. The coloring is a good choice, obviously the final version will be different but I definitely like the light bar across the top and the darker masonry work in the middle with buttons being lighter again. The texturing of the combat/dialogue log is great, keep that window exactly as it is. I'd like to know more about what the colors in the Combat log is supposed to represent - obviously the light blue one is a PC and the red is probably an enemy - what colors are the yellow and green being reserved for ? Are party members going to be assigned different colors in the combat log/UI or are they reserved for NPCs and Followers or Summons ? I also like how the Ranger's animal companion is represented - that's a cool idea. Scripted event screen looks great as well. Issues/Potential Issues / Questions Are you planning on doing a different fullscreen UI for dialogue sequences? like this. I really like the menu buttoning and it's position in the middle of the UI. The buttons look great (obv the icons will be different). The statue work at the side also looks cool. These two elements combined seem to be sacrificing a bit of space that could be used by functional parts of the UI such as room for a couple more hotkey buttons to the left or some extra space for the combat log - something to think about anyway. I am fine with the current use of space as I really liked the IE games UI. Please move the select all button to the bottom right where the options button is for legacy purposes - cheers I assume the meter is the clock, but something could also be done with that to represent game speed or something. My other concern is the display of the buff icons under the player portraits - great that you got them in there, that was something that was missing from IWD2, however is that enough room? I can easily see status effects overflowing in the limited space underneath a portrait of that size, so if that's the space you want to keep you might have to limit the types of buffs displayed there. Another option would be to thin the bar across the top of the UI to just a few pixels and then bring the UI up a bit so you can have another line of buffs underneath each portrait. The UI design there (while obviously mockup) looks like it will rely on submenus for things like selecting spells from the Grimoire to cast/hotkey and whatnot - how are you looking at handling those in relation to that UI design ? Are you going to use the current UI space like the IE games or a popup menu or something? The light blue border around selected party members is currently a bit hard to see. Maybe one pixel wider? Keep up the good work guys (ps - crossing fingers for optional legacy selection coloring )

Will the words that make up the chants / roars be constantly repeated throughout combat or will they represented by text ? If the chants / roars are VO'd and sound as cool as the spell incantations from the BG / IWD games then that should be fine, I never got sick of hearing those. Repetitive environmental audio etc in games can be really annoying if it's not awesome, so I'm just gonna cross my fingers here. One of the differences between the BG and IWD games was that IWD focused a lot more on the different VO sets for the Player and less on the VO for the NPCs, do you know the direction you'll be going with that at this stage ?

I dunno if it's just me but the Trial reminded me of the Trial on Dantooine in SW:KotOR 1. I'm okay with those kind of events as long as they're not YOU MUST DO THIS TO PROGRESS. Would have been cooler if there were ways to circumvent the Trial altogether.

They're a different art style, sure, but they don't appear to be any less detailed than that orlan painting. They do to me, and it will probably take more time to make custom variations of them than the time it took to do the SRR ones. Note that P:E will have some pretty large size art assets - so the portraits for the 2560x1440 high res art assets will take some time. I'd prefer more original portraits than devoting artist time to making slight modifications to already completed portraits.

Shadowrun Portraits are a completely different art style. They're far more cartoony than the P:E portraits are going to be. We are getting portraits inspired by the Icewind Dale 1 & 2 art style. http://media.obsidian.net/eternity/media/updates/0040/orlan.jpg This is more indicative of the style of portrait that is going to be in the final game. So while the Shadowrun Returns portrait addons are cool, that kind of thing would not work for P:E as the LOD is a lot higher. I'd prefer to have more portraits than less portraits with 3 versions of each that have slight differences. You'll be able to import your own portraits anyway so.

We'll likely get to see what the Inventory looks like when Chris reveals the P:E Prototype/Vertical Slice at Rezzed at the end of June. IIRC once upon a time the Shared Pack was 12 items per character, that has probably changed now but wouldn't be surprised if it was around similar size.

Humble Store would be an option too. They take 5% which is pretty reasonable. You can sell the Linux version from your website with a Widget to the Humble Bundle store. People who choose linux could redeem their key via their Humble Bundle account and you'd be able to use a tarball installer which buyers would download through their Humble Bundle account. I recently used Humble Bundle for Grim Dawn and it was a very simple process, although that was Windows/Steam they support Mac and Linux as well. http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6593

How do you sheath a Pike btw? I think characters will always have their main weapon out tbh. From the gameplay video it seems equipped weapon out, unequipped weapon on the back (perhaps at the hip for small weapons who knows).

It doesn't matter that you think the feature would be cool. This is a IE-style RPG being made on a small budget with one dedicated gameplay programmer. This feature is pure scope creep in a project of this type. You seem to have ignored the point I made in my first post. To me it just sounds like a shìtty realism-induced mechanic in a game like this and would introduce a bunch of problems with the gameplay, some of which Hassat Hunter outlined in his post.

I didn't say I was against waypointing ?

Such a system did not exist in the Infinity Engine games, therefore it probably won't exist in P:E - is what I am getting at. Projectiles aside, I can't think of many AoE spells that wouldn't pass through a character Stinking Cloud ? yep, Fireball ? yep, Lightning Bolt ? yep, Horrid Wilting ? yep, Entangle ? yep etc

Didn't need it in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale so yes. Did I say I am against it? No. I am against action bars though and being able to queue abilities. Shift clicking to a max or two abilities wouldn't be too bad, but anything more feels lazy and more of a popamole consolized feature. Josh said something about wanting the combat in P:E to require more inputs - swapping weapons, ability use, repositioning etc etc I can micro 6 characters and followers/summons no problem, actually looking forward to it. I'm a bit of a combatfag not a storyfag so

Huh? As far as I am aware there are no such physics in the game, if you have a ranged weapon, you click within the selection circle of a target and the game rolls to hit. I don't think there's any pass through mechanics or anything like that, I actually asked about it ages ago and it was ignored. Any kind of physics system like this is outside of the "IE-feel" scope of the game.