AwesomeOcelot

4K PC monitors won't be sub $1000 next year, maybe budget TVs will be. Under 1% is going to be using 4K PC monitors for gaming next year on the Steam hardware survey. 2560 x 1440 is going to the area of growth. High res screens on laptops are not a relatively cheap upgrade compared to CPU and GPU, you'd also need a significant GPU upgrade to run games on them, and their resolutions are 2560 x 1440 and 2880 x 1800, not 4K. 2560 x 1440 might overtake 1920 x 1080 in the next 5 years, but there will be few tears on running 1080p content on 1440p monitors. It's not a priority for a small budget game to have graphical fidelity to be future proof years from now when 10-20% might have 4K resolution monitors.

Been following the concept artist's deviantart account for years. The work they've done so far looks great. The gameplay concept could be good if it's executed well, I've liked the single player cooperative style puzzle gameplay ever since I played Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee.

It's a TV, it would make a terrible PC monitor, it's only 30hz, if I was spending that much 120hz would be more important to me. Also in terms of PPI it's not going to be different to a 24" monitor at 1080p, higher resolution in PC monitors doesn't mean 4K like in TV, it means higher pixel density than what we have now. For a PC monitor a 27" 1440p 60hz for half the price would make much more sense. It's going to take a while for mid range GPUs to render 4K at 60 frames, thus there's not enough demand for 4K PC monitors to be made.

Valve said they don't have the people to vet the games, they're not happy with Greenlight and plan to let any publisher/developer open their own store on Steam. They seem to just sell any game from a publisher (apparently even if they've never published a game and they're just a P.O. BOX front for a developer), any game that uses Source or Steamworks, and then vet as many others as they can. Greenlight just seems to be an extra layer so they can prioritize popular indie games, just an indicator for which games Valve should be vetting, the voting probably just works as relative to the other games on the queue before they get green lit.

I didn't want to go swimming in a FPS or a pressure suit, Rapture is designed so you don't have to go outside lumbering in a massive suit. I didn't like the segments where you go outside Rapture in Bioshock 2. I like flat sprawling maps, it's better than the endless corridors you get in most other FPS games these days.

Someone else suggested this, and yes you could do it, but it wouldn't look anywhere near as realistic as the shadows there now as what's happening with the 3D shadow casts is not a vector being skewed, light is coming from a different angle. Shadows should be in line with the quality of the rest of the graphics or they stick out, and "wrong" shadows are probably going to disturb people even more than shadows that don't move with the time of day. That's what I'm suggesting, the rocks are 2D as you can see from the level in Unity's editor, the water is 3D. As I said, you could render that out to 2D, but then you lose some flexibility with what you can do with objects and light dynamically because it's baked, for example having the 3D character step in it, having dynamic refraction and reflection.

That gets recruited to the FSB or crime syndicates.

Small teams have always been able to make impressive games graphically, look at iD or Crytek, but they're not that common and after initial success they inevitable want wages that match their talent. They have a parent company that's doing quite well, sure they can turn a profit from their games, but do we know that the expansion is funded by that? That's a rhetorical question right? Wages are way lower than North America, Western and Northern Europe. Of course there's a lot of talent from Eastern Europe that goes to Western Europe and North America.

Graphics is the largest part of the budget for development because for games with high fidelity by the standards of its time, that can be 70% of the team. In the past memory constraints meant that games were very procedural or relied on a small set of tiles. Voice acting and pre-rendered cutscenes can be very expensive as well, but there not more than graphics for the most expensive games out there, apart from maybe LA Noire if you include likeness and motion capture. Marketing isn't really tied to development, and I don't think there are reliable figures on it.

What I think he means is that they can't paint objects into the scene that have depth, apart from in places where no dynamic light and shadow will hit because they rely on information from the 3D model or maps derived from it. They haven't painted in any objects in video posted here, and that environment has had a ton of painting, and it looks absolutely great, so there's no need to worry.

I think you're right that they went chasing the largest market forgetting that there's a lot of competition. Eidos were looking for a game to match linear "cinematic" ****fests like Uncharted and open world wildlife slaughter simulators like Far Cry 3, and just leveraged Tomb Raider because it was spare. Maybe they were banking on keeping Tomb Raider fans, like they did when they slapped "Hitman" on a game that obviously wasn't Hitman. I'd like to know the respective budgets of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Tomb Raider 2013, because DX:HR sold over a million less and that wasn't deemed a failure, it's getting a WiiU port, and was a fairly unique game and one of the best of that year. Legend wasn't mediocre, it's one of the worst games I've ever played, Anniversary was great (being a remake of the best game in the series) apart from the QTE (unless you played it on PC, where it had many bugs), and Underworld was good (no QTE, a much better PC port). Looking at VGChartz Legend didn't sell well, Anniverary much better, and Underworld more again. In terms of brand only Mario beats Tomb Raider in 3rd person platforming, it's a name that can sell those games, and Crystal Dynamics were getting better and more profitable with each game. It could have been a profitable series, maybe the next game could have sold even more than Underworld.

It's not just the graphics, it's often the gameplay and the gimmicky control method that marks the Wii out as casual.

You're not going to get dynamic shadows moving with the light like in a real-time 3D game for the 2D scenery, there's certain tricks they can do, but it's really limited.

Saving the memory state tends to use more memory and you're saving all of it, which is fine for emulating devices that tend to have tiny amounts of memory like consoles from a previous generation (128MB at the top end), but even if the game runs comfortably using 768MB memory, you're going to want multiple saves, that's almost 4GB for 5 saves. Also with emulators that's not just saving the state of the game, that's saving the state of the whole system, which would mean you're running a game in a virtual machine, which is a larger task to code than the whole game itself.

1. Pre-production may have started before the KickStarter, they were in crunch for their latest release. 2. Yes, they don't have the money to extend the development. 3. I don't think Eschalon: Book 1 required the same amount of work or skill in terms of graphics. Eschalon: Book 1 doesn't have a port to a different architecture and interface. I don't know whether Eschalon: Book 1 has the same mod support. That's not true, there are roles where having more people working on one thing is not as efficient as one person working on one thing for longer.

Didn't both their games take over 2 years to develop?

It's a design choice, they decided to spend time on other things, save states are hard to implement.

Why would they assume that when they're under a licence that stipulates that Shadowrun Returns must be distributed under DRM? Microsoft Studios position on DRM doesn't make sense, of course negotiated suggests that HBS could have offered them something in return, and they could be looking for DLC to be the bigger revenue stream.

Still, what is actually happening in the mergers? What is being merged? Why does it matter that his dead body was at ground zero?

From memory of what? As far as I'm aware there's been no mention anywhere of asking for exemptions before the latest update, and that says nothing about during the Kickstarter. They had to have asked for the exemption before offering the DRM-free version, which was during the KickStarter.

No, they're talking about not going into future possible DLC. It doesn't matter when they asked for an exemption, from memory I think it was during the KickStarter, it only matters they they did ask, and that implies they knew the requirement at least at the same time as they announced there would be a DRM-free option.

I can say with certainty, without 3D information it would be impossible, an artist can take a 2D image and have a 3D model in their head to produce a shadow. It's possible a computer can also create a 3D model from a 2D image but that's just creating an extra step, Obsidian already have the 3D scene. You could do this individually for independent objects but if anything that would be more complicated, as light and shadows of the objects are probably going to interact with each other and other objects in the scene. It's further complicated with the scenes being heavily edited in 2D. The water is 3D model, like the characters, if you notice the level in unity, no water. My best guess is that they use a boolean operation on the water in an animation. They could render that out to 2D but they probably wouldn't.

It doesn't say they knew all along, though; I would expect that Microsoft contacted them after the kickstarter saying "what's all this about DRM-free versions of the game? You can't do that!" "But there's nothing about DRM in the contract!" "Ah, but [500 pages of legal mumbo jumbo]." "Oh... but we've already promised DRM-free to all our backers!" "Oh, alright, we'll let you fulfil the letter of that promise, but not a byte more." It does say that. It states that they asked for a exemption for the KickStarter rewards, implying they knew, and they knew the limits of the exemption.

True, which is why I said it might not be feasible. Also, what if you just had like 10 stages of shadow movement, instead of fluid 180-degree movement? That might still be too time-consuming and troublesome to do, but it would be a significantly smaller amount of information. *shrug* I don't claim expertise here. Only curiosity. If time doesn't really pass when you're in a map then you'd probably want 24 stages at each pole, and 12 at the equator. This means they'd have to set up a lighting model to render out 24 images at most, this would include angle, light level, atmospheric refraction. Why not also model the season, with the star's highest or lowest excursion, and what ever satellites the world has while they are at it? Seems like a lot of work, that would be cool, but not necessarily the best use of resources.

Regardless of what was written in contracts, they stated in the update that they knew this was a requirement, and that they had to go ask for an exemption for the KickStarter rewards. I don't see how this isn't deceit through omission, and of course malice by Microsoft Studios which is to be expected. They clearly are involved, I didn't mean they decided to be involved, but their corrupting influence is there nevertheless.