AwesomeOcelot

Steam doesn't stop that either, most DRM only stops casual copying, not torrents from scene release groups. It's easy enough, but the infrastructure and software is already available on Steam, it's something they don't need to worry about. The backer website is easy enough, but look how long it takes developers to get them up, they've got a lot on their plates.

I always assumed developers chose steam only because a) Steam pushes updates automatically which is important in a beta, and b) Early Access gives developers some extra money.

Journey wasn't made by a female developer, producers aren't designers or content creators. Portal on the other hand is an indie game with a female developer, Kim Swift. For games like Super Meat Boy, Braid, Fez, Quacamelee, World of Goo, Castle Crashers, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Limbo, FTL, Minecraft... some of these games were designed by one person with contracted art/sound assets and that requires a programmer that's going to build an engine, the others are small groups (2 or 3 people) of geeky friends including a programmer. While there's a lack of female programmers, especially ones capable of writing game engines, the only reason why there's no more female artists and designers making indie games is that they're not forming the social connections needed, and many of the artists of the mentioned games grew up loving games and dreaming of designing their own, which were designed and played primarily by other males. In larger studios roles might be significantly more distanced from games, so concept artists, composers, producers, musicians, they're important to the development of the game but they're doing jobs that might not be significantly different to work on other media. This isn't unique to games, there's lots of creative activities that are very one gender dominated, people have groups a bunch of them into what's called the "feminine arts". Even if a male would be very good and interested in one of those, they're not necessarily going to have the social connections or feel comfortable doing it, it's not necessarily even going to be considered by them. Things like that can change significantly, there have been periods where significant portions of males wore make-up for instance, that would mean some of them acquiring the skills and enjoying the art of it.

The Guacamelee! developer also made Tales from Space: When Mutant Blobs Attack, both top 10 games in the year they were released IMHO. I'd get a pad that supports xinput or find a way to support it in software, so many games use it now.

a) This person has never heard of the phrase "self censorship". b) Anyone using the phrase "people of colour" is an idiot, apparently doesn't even have the excuse of being American. c) Virtual boobs of fictional characters in video games are not "oppressing" anyone. d) I was lied to, there is no discussion in this article only a buzzword laden rant about some bull**** on social media sites.

I think distortions such as a ripple effect would look worse than what's currently there. If you start animating trees then you're obliged to simulate the wind because with detail comes expectation, it's more apparent with detail that there's a loop and you'd notice more that the physics is simplistic. Right now they're trying to suggest subtle movement of a 2D image, they probably could refine that a bit, but if they start adding detail people will notice the flaws more. It would be possible to animate all objects in the scene, but I don't think it would be an easy task, and there would definitely be performance hit. I don't think being a frame behind matters so much. it's more about the frame rate, and it wouldn't be so bad if that fluctuates as long as it's at a conformable minimum. The problem with an average is what is the range is wide? Showing the animation at 45fps when the game was 30fps and it's now 60fps.

With overlapping trees, many trees, and prerendered shadows it would be complicated, and simulating wind may require more than 10 second loops Wouldn't you just be dropping or padding frames? Just push frames. If deltaTime is faster than the animation framerate pad by repeating frames in proportion, if deltaTime is slower drop frames. No averages involved.

You can create a lucky gambler character, or an unlucky gambler character, that's a feature, also it's not entirely useless. You can create a character from the standpoint of "what would be useful in the outside world", it's completely valid.

Yes, yes it does. Only if you lack imagination. They send a moron out to get killed if you create a character with low INT, the overseer has specific dialogue for this occasion. There are many reasons for being chosen, they're not all about being the most capable.

What frame rate is that axe animation? 12 or 15? Mixing frame rates could be problematic, it needs to be tested. My prediction is that this problem is much less the higher the frame rate of the animation, the closer it is to the frequency of the monitor/frame rate of the engine. So if you have a 120Hz monitor, and your running the game at 120fps, a 60fps 2D prerendered animation wouldn't be too bad, it certainly wouldn't be as bad as that axe. I think we disagree about terminology. A film reel is frame based 2D animation, but it's also one long static image that's being offset. So we don't disagree it's being offset, but that makes it animation, not static. It's also being manipulated by 3D real-time effects, there's actually at least two copies of the animation with transparency (I don't see warping). Yet the underlying animation is still pre-rendered, it's still 2D.

My perspective is your not creating a character to be good at the world that you're about to enter that you know nothing about, you're creating a character from the limited back story of being raised in a vault, hopefully one that makes sense. The game doesn't punish you for tagging skills that are better in the late game, you can drop points in other skills. Outdoorsman could have been more important e.g. Fallout 2, they probably didn't want to punish exploration too much, but this wouldn't change the fact that some skills are going to be far more useful than others, and I'm fine with that.

You don't need to lock FPS for pre-rendered 2D animation. 2D animation includes pre-rendered 2D animation. The 2D animation, if it's frame/sprite based, has to have a frame rate, but with frame padding that doesn't mean you have to lock the frame rate of the engine. You can find 2D pre-rendered animation in 3D engines that are not frame locked. The waterfall seen in Update #49 is 2D animation as you can clearly see from that screen shot, it's just not part of the background render. Both the background and the waterfall are 3D objects in the engine, you can't say one is 2D and one is 3D. Another reason they may not have animated entire trees is how much file space that would require.

That's not true, you don't need to lock FPS for 2D animation. Developers also lock FPS for 3D animation and physics. The waterfall seen in Update #49 is 2D animation, and I'm assuming also the moving foliage in that scene given what Josh says about it. I'm not sure why they haven't animated the entire scene, although it might be because of the work that would be involved throughout the entire game.

That is an awful way to build a game world. They could have made the the game suck but they chose not to. You should not have a clue, that's the point, you're living the vault for the first time. It's not non-viable.

There's good reason why science is more valuable and barter is less valuable in the Fallout world. Someone who doesn't understand the difference between "not viable as a main weapon" and useless I guess is a million miles away from being able to comprehend why in context some skills are more useful than others. Also we've gone from "non-viable as a main weapon" to "non-viable", it's getting hard to keep track of these goal posts. There's a very good reason that energy weapons are rare and expensive in the Fallout world compared to small arms, it doesn't take a genius to figure it out. It would destroy the Fallout world if energy weapons were plentiful. I don't understand why it's necessary for you to have energy weapons at the start or why it's game breaking if you choose it as a tagged skill. The game doesn't reward you for tagging energy weapons and pump all your points in it in the 1st 3 levels, but then it shouldn't reward you for stupidity. If you just really like energy weapons, tough ****, that's like complaining the game doesn't have a lightsaber. Why would the intro movie tell about the state of energy weapons? Didn't you listen to it? The vault dwellers don't know about the outside world. If the intro told you about it that would be really bad game design.

It's from one generation before the HD Graphics came into play, It's DX10 not DX11, possibly because the chipset was released before DX11. it's integrated into the chipset not the CPU like HD Graphics, comes under the previous Intel brand GMA. I doubt they're using integrated graphics though, because any GPU from a chipset that supports that CPU is way way below minimum specs for Dungeon Siege 3, benchmarks show games with lower min specs than DS3 run at 18-20fps with the highest GPU from that range, that's at 800x600 with everything set to low.

Skills aren't balanced, that's the beauty of them, games don't need to be balanced in that way, that's stupid. There's no point using arguments from authority with me, no one has to be right just because they work for Obsidian. Apparently Tim Cain and the staff of Troika beat you as a child or something, because you have a lot of irrational hatred. I don't care about your lack of taste and sense. You don't need pre-knowledge to get energy weapons in Fallout in the 1/3 of the game, Harry carries one, there's one in the Necropolis sewers, and the Gun Runners sell them. Also we've suddenly gone from "useless" to "not a viable main weapon" and from the first 1/3 of the game to "early", perhaps there's some more goal posts you want to move. This is how it should be, energy weapons are rare, expensive, and harder to find ammo for, if you want to have a combat orientated character in the early game, you're not going to rely on energy weapons. Fallout 2 was the same, but went further as small arms and big guns were also rarer in the early game, and that wasn't developed by Tim Cain. A lot of other games fail at creating a coherent world, the energy weapon situation in Fallout is part of that, some gamers just don't appreciate the finer things in life and don't have the necessary qualities to appreciate a good game.

Yes, we're going to have to wait until beta to get an accurate impression of the type of system needed, and that also assumes that the game will be optimised well by the time it is released. Since they did say they had it running on a Windows 8 tablet that does suggest that the GPU should not be a concern, but some of those tablets have a lot more powerful CPU than a E5700 which is in line in performance with the stated minimum specs for Dungeon Siege 3. It's not guaranteed that the minimum specs will be less or equal to Dungeon Siege 3's.

I love that you can create a non-viable character because it's a consequence of having interesting and varied skills that are specific and limited in their benefits, it's great game design because games don't have to cater to idiots and the lowest common denominator. I love that in Fallout violence and power aren't the only answer, but it's a lot easier with them. Energy weapons aren't useless for the first 2/3s of the game, you don't know what you're talking about. Most of the weapons in Fallout are easy to come by.

That's nonsense, any gamer shifts their focus and while essential immediate data is best placed centre screen, in games where you control the camera, there's a lot of data that's not like that. That's not optimal, you don't need all the elements in your focus, and there are obvious other uses such as picture in picture, split-screen. That chart only applies to peasants, Pillars of Eternity isn't going to be played by them. Gaming at a desk, your monitor is 2-3' away. At 12" people can see at least 500ppi. Only if you have a rare medical condition where you can't move your eyes. The focus point on the action can be determined by the player.

As long as we can build larger displays we'll want higher resolution, 32K displays built into the windows of our homes. In terms of pixels per inch we've reached that point on phones, I've had a 445 ppi phone for 7 months now, I don't think increasing pixel density will make any difference to it. Frequency, refresh rate, since our eyes don't see in frames there may be a lot more room to improve after 120hz. Blacks and colour, OLED is meant to be much better.

Correction: What I said about the MacBook pro is wrong, they might as well use native resolution. There's no evidence for that, it's just pointless speculation. They could do two paint over passes for each resolution asset and it would look better but I doubt they will because the benefits aren't worth the cost, they'll just downsample the painted 2560x1440 backgrounds.

It was my understanding they were going for 2560x1440 native resolution for background art (as opposed to 4K)? Yes, they're going to tile the background beyond 2560x1440 as you can see by the image in coffeetable's post, which is from a post by Josh Sawyer a while ago. Hi AwesomeOcelot, I'm afraid I missed Josh's post. You wouldn't happen to have a handy link to the thread where he made it, would you? I would like to learn more about this tiling of the backdrops—does that mean there will be not need for upscaling beyond 2560x1440 (i.e. the picture won't shrink and/or become more blurry)? You are correct, there won't be upscaling beyond 2560x1440, you'll just see more background. Josh posted the image and explained what will happen, it was an extension of the main update 36 that went into great length about this. Important parts: People who play 1920x1080 get to choose to downsample 2560x1440 or to use the 1280x720 backgrounds tiled so they see 1/3 more of the area. People playing from 1280x720 to 1920x1080 get the 1280x720 backgrounds tiled. People playing from the 2560x1440 to 4096x2304 will get the 2560x1440 backgrounds tiled. Upscaling when working correctly shouldn't make things more blurry than they would be on a lower resolution monitor. A 21" 2560x1440 monitor should be able to display the same 1280x720 image as a 21" 1280x720 monitor. So anything beyond 2560x1440 shouldn't look any worse than playing at 2560x1440, which by today's standard, with most people playing below that, is great. If you have a high PPI monitor the image will shrink if the game is run at native resolution. People using high PPI displays like the 13.3" 2560x1600 MacBook Pro may want to upscale from a 1440x900 resolution because the image will be tiny at native resolutions, people with a Dell UltraSharp 23.8" 3840x2160 monitor may want to upscale from 2560x1440, people with a 32" 3840x2160 would want to play the game at 3840x2160. I think this solution is fine and I wouldn't expect Obsidian, or any other developer, to support very high PPI screens because a) it would cost a lot, take way more time, and the backgrounds for the game would be 3 times the size in bits, and b) very few gamers have them.

It was my understanding they were going for 2560x1440 native resolution for background art (as opposed to 4K)? Yes, they're going to tile the background beyond 2560x1440 as you can see by the image in coffeetable's post, which is from a post by Josh Sawyer a while ago.

I have a HTPC connected to a plasma, this makes a hell of a lot of sense when you have a HTPC. It plays some games, but it's Haswell i3 integrated GPU, it's a fanless build. If I want to play a local co-op game or let someone play games, I'd rather they do it on the TV with plenty of seating than at my desk. It's not feasible for me to connect my PC to my TV unless I start creating many holes and getting HDMI to cat6/cat5e adapters. Then what about the input? I can't go around moving my PC all the time, thing weighs a tonne and is well connected. "Gaming" laptops make a lot less sense than streaming.