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Merlkir

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Posts posted by Merlkir

    The new armor system and armor system ideas

    in Pillars of Eternity: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)

    Posted · Edited by Merlkir

    I won't vote in the poll, because I don't want to select any options in the 2nd and 3rd part, yet it requires me to do so.

     

    About weapons not accurately representing one type of damage - why not give them values from all three types?

     

    I suggested this before and I think it's still valid, though it was dismissed as too complicated. But!

     

    1) a warhammer (a proper one, not the giant fantasy mauls) or a poleaxe deal both piercing and blunt trauma.

    2) weapons could allow for different attacks with their parts - a sword blade deals slashing and piercing damage, while the pommel deals blunt. If you face a skeleton, you'd rather bash it with a pommel, or even hold the sword by the blade and use it as a hammer. Didn't Fallout have something like this?

     

    3*) Missiles or ranged weapons being limited to piercing is also not true. You can have blunt arrows, slingshots and a boomerang could be a slashing one (or some kind of rotating thrown blade, whatever). While we're at it, if you wanted to deal with heavy armour, why not use heavy bodkin arrows? You'd get a bit of blunt, a bit of piercing.

    • Like 2

    Character Expression

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    Sorry to say this but there's no nuance to those Spirit Engine 2 facial expressions, and they do not encompass what the player may be doing with his body or his tone of voice. All these things are easily expressed in text, and a whole legion of other options are available too. I would say why use something that limits one options, when text can easily and cheaply do far more?

     

    IIRC spirit engine 2 uses both these faces and description in the dialogue window. Which worked quite well. I thought.

    Combat animation?

    in Pillars of Eternity: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)

    Posted · Edited by Merlkir

    Not particularly, most of the combat taking place in any given RPG is unrealistic. Nobody's ever fought a lich or a warg or a dragon in real life, so what are they going to reference?

     

    But if you want it to be realistic, use motion capture. And motion capture isn't much use or economically viable for an isometric game where the characters are low-detail models or pixelated sprites. Besides, referencing a bunch of reenactors isn't primary source knowledge of how a given military's people fought in any given time or place, it's almost entirely guesswork based on very few manuscripts and awkwardly drawn medieval illustrations. There's a greater wealth of knowledge when it comes to the far East, but that's not this game's scope so far as I can tell.

     

     

    Almost everything you said is not true.

     

    1) Unrealistic foes: a lich has the shape of a person. A dead person, a person who can probably cast spells, but if he's attacking me with a sword or a spear, we have a pretty good idea of what that'll look like. sure he might be a lot stronger than a human, we can adjust for that. A dragon will move and fight depending on its design. Dragons used to be quite lizardlike, lately the common design draws from lions or dogs as well.

    Besides, despite having a few monsters which are entirely made up and for which we can only come up with vaguely similar reference, there's always lots of humanoids fighting with weapons. No reason to not do it right because of one beholder.

     

    2) Motion capture is a nice tool, sure. But it is not necessary. A good animator can animate this kind of motion well from video reference. Like the article mentions, Prince of Persia had rotoscoped animations of very low-res pixelated characters. And it looked very very good.

     

    3) HEMA people aren't primarily the type of "reenactors" you can just put aside as kids playing knights. They're often much much better at what they do than your precious Eastern "masters". Surprise, these guys haven't been killing people for generations either. The master-student way of preserving a martial art is not entirely reliable, in fact I'd prefer to read a fighting manual written by a master who was doing killing for a living, rather than to study under a master of uncertain mastery passed down from generation to generation. (quite possibly losing important bits of the art in the process)

    The fact is, what these HEMA guys do works very well. There's a lot of study material, experimenting and sparring. It's most definitely not "almost entirely guesswork".

     

    The article is pretty good.

    Od Nua and mini-game (Roguelike?)

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted · Edited by Merlkir

    I think you're going for a bit too small and oddly shaped needlessly unique tiles. The advantage of dungeons is that they're often quite geometric in shape, there's some kind of symmetry. The basic units are corridors and rooms. The way games like Skyrim handle tiles (because they do use tile sets, believe it or not) is exactly that - bits of corridors, doors, turns etc etc. And you can do multilevel tiling - tile bits of basic architecture together and then tile smaller items inside those tiles as another layer, to create unique looking content inside the large architectural pieces.

    And of course, tiles don't necessarily have to be square shaped, there's a whole field of geometry/math dealing with tile/pattern generation.

     

    By traditional design, a location has to be fitted into a square or a rectangle, which makes things easier, as we can divide those into a variety of shapes.

     

    Of couse, another way to do it would be procedural textures painted and blended inside of procedurally generated shapes, at least for the very basic architecture. That would work well for what you English speaking people call "organic" areas like woods, clay tunnels, swamps and so on.

     

    edit: so in your example, the basic land and water are generated, the bridge and statues are another lever of tiles over them, as are all the grass patches, bushes and so on. Of course blending them properly so that there aren't seams would be a bit of a challenge, but it can be done.

    Od Nua and mini-game (Roguelike?)

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    Also tell us how, exactly, they can create "a very simple roguelike minigame" that doesn't look ugly as sin?

     

    I said nothing about its looks. Roguelikes by their nature have a specific look. Duh, tiles. It CAN be done, they'll already have plenty of graphics assets, rendering them in tileable form is a matter of hours, days at most.

    If one decides to play a roguelike minigame, one does not expect it to look like the other locations in the whole game.

     

    If you weren't such a troll, you'd not keep making up stuff on top of "I was wondering whether (either in this game or in the expansion) it would be possible to consider leaving a "secret entrance" to levels below 15 that are randomly generated with increasing difficult monsters and sort of act like a "rogue-like" mini-game?".

    Because the answer to OP's idea is "Yes, it is entirely possible."

    Od Nua and mini-game (Roguelike?)

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    FFS. The point is - the guy explained what he wanted very clearly, there was no reason to bring up Diablo. And no, the graphical style allows for plenty of randomness and yes, I think they could do a very simple roguelike minigame extending the Endless Paths.

     

    Nobody asked for a Diablo clone, he clearly states his understanding of the adjustments that would have to be made to the graphics.

    Od Nua and mini-game (Roguelike?)

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    Erm. Merikir. I remember when Diablo came out. The buzz was all about "Dude, this is NetHack with cool graphics 'n shiznit." I played it. It was, sort of. I was a little disappointed because in terms of gameplay I thought it was actually closer to rogue than NetHack. It had scads of items, of course, but none of the really intricate and deep interactions with and between items, monsters, and the environment that make NetHack still one hell of a cool game to play.

     

    The guy said "like Roguelikes". Which pretty much sums up what he described in the longer post. Randomness, procedural generation, increasing difficulty towards infinity. Like Roguelikes.

     

    Dream came in, being his usual self, and posted "Couldn't you have just said Diablo? ".

     

    The thing is, even if the people at Blizzard were inspired by Roguelikes, Diablo isn't a typical Roguelike. As someone else pointed out - Diablo is only semi-random, it has a finite set of levels containing constant objects and quests.

     

    There is no reason why he should've likened it to Diablo rather than Roguelikes. Then again, Dream knows better, as always.

    Od Nua and mini-game (Roguelike?)

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    Roquelike are made from ASCI code which is easy to generate a random level. In PE is an isometric game with premade backgrounds. You cannot made a random level with predrawn background, you would end with the same level over and over again. The only thing you could change would be monsters I think. Not even traps as they would end up on a wall or something if they would appear random.

     

    This is not true. Some of the nicer Roguelikes actually have graphics tiles. There's no reason why those tiles couldn't be tileable prerendered assets. Hey, Diablo was made that way.

     

    It's an interesting idea, one that I'd see being done by a mod, or an expansion. Why not.

    Armour & weapon designs - a plea (part III).

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted

    Can we extend the plea to spears being useful for once? Or, being present in the game at all, you know. Swords, as Avellone seems to think, are kinda boring. If there's too many of them that is, I love swords. But spears, man!

     

    Now, for anyone who thinks a spear is only useful in formation, can't possible defend, or is easily overcome by getting close (or any other old forum nonsense):

     

    • Like 5

    Armour & weapon designs - a plea (part III).

    in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)

    Posted · Edited by Merlkir

    MEh. The golden one leaves your entire face exposed and has that big lion on top that not only weight a lot, but would also catch any blade you try to duck under.

     

    I can live with gaps for breating in my helmet - chances of a blade slipping trough are minimal, especialyl since the gaps are samll, and I need oxygen.

     

    The thing is - open face helmets had been used throughout history, very very commonly. More so than masked or fully closed helmets. So it seems ease of seeing around you is a good tradeoff for that specific lack of protection.

     

    Similarly, that helmet was made to be worn. The decoration wouldn't be my first choice either, but it had to be light enough to be worn (which is possible. I doubt the lion is solid metal). Plumes and helmet decorations have also been used for a long time, so it appears it's not that much of a disadvantage.

     

    So, yes, I'd prefer a real functional helmet over a poorly designed and poorly crafted fantasy one.

     

    edit: by gaps I mean primarily the gaps between the plates. There's no reason why a helmet's bowl should be made of overlapping segments with gaps between them, other than the armourer thinks it looks badass and cool, or if he can't make a single bowl. It's weak design and it's done purely for the jagged profile, I think.

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