AwesomeOcelot

Borderlands 2 is a good example of how adding co op to a single player orientated game is a pointless waste of time, but even then because of the differences between it and Project Eternity, it's not nearly as bad as Project Eternity co op would be. Not to mention the complexities you have to account for in scripting when you have two or more people interacting with the environment. There are a variety of incredible co op games, please play Portal 2, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, and Orcs Must Die 2, they are some of the best games ever made, and they are geared towards cooperative play. We get it, you want to play with your friends, go play co op focused games and other multiplayer games. There will be times when you cannot play with your friends, and these are the times for single player games. Every game does not need tacked on multiplayer.

Xpadder doesn't magically turn a mouse driven interface into a gamepad driven interface. It's useful for a lot of keyboard or old DirectX gamepad controlled games. It allows for analogue stick control of the cursor but no one in their right mind would play games with it, analogue sticks do not make good mouse replacements.

GOG keep their installer up to date, but you can get the updates from the developer that work on the GOG versions so you don't need to download the whole thing again.

Here, I've got an idea. Lets talk about other games that have awesome atmospheric sounds! What games really stood out to you in this regard? Why? I don't much care for ambient sounds that aren't part of the soundtrack. When Adam was streaming his Icewind Dale 2 playthrough, I found the sound of the docks to get very annoying, also as pure ambience if it's not connected to anything I see it creates a dissonance that is distracting, that's also the case if I'm seeing something that should be making a sound but isn't. Generally this means I hate crowd and chatter ambience, but really like wind and ocean ambience. Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, if you just consider the hub themes, it's a master class for atmosphere. They've got sweeping, brustling sounds, that I associate with urban environments and night time, and creeping sounds, you've got dissonance and cacophonous sounds. Santa Monica is sleepy, slow. Down town is oppressive, faster paced. Hollywood is calm, melancholic. Chinatown is rhythmically more ordered, steadier paced, with a clash of styles as Chinese sounds are introduced. World of Goo, Diablo II, Prince of Persia: Sands of TIme, Bastion, Fallout 1 & 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Half-Life 2, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, these build atmosphere well. You can either literally create atmosphere by using or recreating (through proxies) sounds that exist in the setting, using existing culture and associations, and the emotive side of sound. A lot of the atmospheric sounds I like are in the form of sound tracks with industrial elements.

You compile software into instructions for the processor, you need an operating system (OS) to give those instructions meaningful context to be able to do anything, but the instructions themselves are sent to the processor as you compiled them whichever OS you use. So you can make a program using just pure x86 instructions, on the same computer running both Linux and Windows, the OS won't execute them without you interfacing with the kernel, but after that those instructions are sent to the processor in each case. ARM and x86 use different instructions, you can't throw x86 instructions at an ARM processor, also there's features that aren't present in both. Even though they're very closely related, AMD64 (x86-64) compiled programs will not run on x86 processors, that's why you get different compiles of Windows and Linux for each of these, AMD64 is backwards compatible with x86.

Using different kernels doesn't matter to this, you don't compile the game for the kernel, you compile it for the processor. You can compile software for Windows Server 2008 (Windows NT 6.0 like Windows Vista), but for AMD64, x86, or IA-64. Obviously you have to develop software with the features of each kernel in mind, like the differences in OpenGL extensions. Does Windows RT use a different kernel than Windows 8? I don't think so, that's not what's been reported. A good example of how this works are virtual machines like the Java VM, they exist because you can't run the same code on different architectures without compiling them to the different architectures.

You are wrong about this. Windows has versions that support ARM (WinCE, WinRT), so does OSX. You can't take the Linux kernel, compiled for x86, or a x86 version of Ubuntu, and run it on an ARM based device. They're different architectures with different instructions, you'd need to compile the game for ARM, but there's a variety of differences between the Tegra 3 hardware and a typical PC that would need to be accounted for in the software.

It's not something that can and likely will be done by the fan base. PE is being developed for the x86 platform, OUYA is ARM based. The Tegra 3 GPU has a limited feature set, if PE uses OpenGL extensions that the OUYA doesn't support they'll have to be replaced. The OUYA has 1GB of shared memory, a PC version of PE will probably require at least 2GB. The only way this is getting ported is if they release the source, or they do it themselves. They're two entirely different set ups for me, different rooms. My desktop case is steel, four of the components cost more than the OUYA, it's heavy and has 8 leads going into it. The OUYA is cheap, low power, and small.

OUYA has twice the RAM of the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Project Eternity will support lower resolutions than 2560x1440 on the PC, probably as low as 1280x720. 3D textures and water will lose detail compared to a PC version. Games like Project Eternity don't require as much memory as FPS games, Infinity Engine games didn't consume a lot of graphic memory, the backgrounds themselves wouldn't consume a lot of graphic memory. OUYA supports keyboard and mouse.

From my experience most backers are very understanding. A KickStarter game failed recently and only 2 people wanted their money back. The delivery date is clearly stated as an estimate. Obsidian can't just arbitrarily cut stretch goals, but if they make an honest attempt and fail then people would not be justified in pursuing action. The spirit of Infinity Engine games is entirely up to Obsidian. Obsidian have been very clever with their stretch goals, 15 levels of a dungeon seems a lot, but the levels can be as big or small as they want, there's a lot of room for maneuver for Obsidian.

I suggested this in another thread. The problem is that the OUYA has 8GB of capacity, but hopefully there will be a solution to that when we know more details about it. It really depends on the fidelity they decide on, because obviously the OUYA is not going to be able to handle the 3D and animation that a PC can, but since this game is 2.5D, it's not going to be that intensive. I'm pretty sure I heard some comments from Obsidian that they don't want to the game to require that much PC power. They're probably already going to be supporting 720p for PC, they're already supporting Linux, Unity supports Android. If they have scalable graphics that mean an Intel HD Graphics 4000 would play it at 1080p, then it's not much of a stretch for a OUYA to play it at 720p. They'd just need to port the 3D assets and animations to something the Tegra 3 can handle, which if you've seen the demo graphics is quite impressive. If they do it for Project Eternity, and the OUYA is a success, then having the capacity to make squad based RPGs driven by mouse+kb on a platform that's only $100, and is only going to get cheaper, is an exciting proposition. This is not what I got a OUYA for, when I got it I was thinking about 2D platformers, which I play a lot, but having a generation of isometric/oblique RPGs would be incredible for me. I still have a working ZX Spectrum, retro demake Project Eternity!

and let's not forget that there would be nothing in the game to use 3D vision on, since 70% or more of what is in the screen will be 2D where do people come up with these weird ideas that even an idiot can see that they make no sense? Yeah, converting 2D images to 3D; what idiot would try something like that? We're amused. As has already been written in this thread, not the same thing, the game is going to rendered from the cavalier oblique perspective. You don't have any depth to convert 2D to 3D, where as 2D films of 3D graphics or reality have depth.

I can't think of an isometric RPG that has come on 6 CDs, Baldur's Gate comes on 5 CDs, Baldur's Gate II 4CDs, Diablo II 4CDs, Icewind Dale 2CDs, Icewind Dale II 2CDs, Arcanum 2CDs, Planescape: Torment 1CD, Diablo 1CD.

The game allows you to pause as much as you want. The designers already have to take that into account, but as PE is not an action game nor an RTS clicking faster or more precisely should make no difference. You could play PE with a crappy trackpad and still give your party as many commands per game time as anyone with a high precision gaming mouse. I'm really not sure how you think this "changes the options for play style". It matters to the pace and flow of the game, the designers don't have to take pausing all the time into account, it obviously makes a difference even to things like how long the game takes to play.

PC gamers aren't average consumers, HDTV's aren't PC monitors, the average consumer has been able to afford one for a longer than last year if you're talking about US, France, Germany, and the UK.

Packing has a purpose, all games should be packing the content of their games. It's a very minor inconvenience for modders. Most game engines can run files unpacked, so you should only have to do it once.

Another approach is fractals. I know they have fractal-based systems for generating terrain. Somebody must have done comparable work with fractal texture generation. That may be useful for generating consistent, non-repeating terrain patterns, such as grasslands or desert sand. Basically trading disk memory for CPU load. Fractal-based, non-repeating? I thought fractals were about a pattern repeating itself so it looks the same close up or far away. It's the way nature repeats itself, so it makes sense to have fractal patterns in tile systems of nature.

I have 2 Xbox 360 pads I use on my PC, I've been using gamepads on computers for over 10 years, joysticks for over 20. Most of my gaming has been on PC, although I have had 3 consoles. Wanting to use a pad or sit on the couch has nothing to do with how old you are, or how long you can spend playing games. I have no idea how anybody thinks it's a good idea to play a squad based RPG, RTS, or FPS on a game pad, it's ridiculous. Designing these games for gamepads makes them significantly worse.

It wasn't a tiling system in the same way Fallout or Diablo are tiling systems. In either system, there's support for as many different detail items as Obsidian want to make. They've already committed to a large world, so they have to work to what ever quality they can to get there. Time and man hours are a concern, regardless of how unique or how much quality you want.

I think you are completely missing the point. The game is not going to use tiles, but that does not mean that they have to do every area from scratch - there will be reusable resources. The can re-use things like trees and such as animated "placeables". Alse, when the build the model for each area, they can re-use components - walls, buildings, statues, etc that they have used elsewhere - place them in the model and render them from different angles than they did before. There are numerous other (and better) ways to re-use resources than to use tiles. No, you're completely missing the point of the advantages of tile based systems. You'd have animated placeables in a tile based system. You also reuse assets from one tile to create another. It still takes more work to create these backgrounds than a tile based system. If they had to rotate a 3D model, they'd have to render the scene, paint over it, create pathing and lighting maps. Unlike a tile based system, with these systems you can't just drop in a building, a bridge, that's already rendered, already painted, already has pathing and lighting maps.

What point was that? Games released later take advantage of newer technology. It's only a fair comparison if they're released around the same time. If Blizzard had made Diablo 2 around the time of Icewind Dale 2 it would have looked much better. Games with tiles like Diablo 2 do that, each chapter has different tile sets and a completely different environment, plus many different smaller areas with even more different looks, and also unique rooms and objects. Each area can have unique tile sets, and that still uses less space and requires less work than creating every area. a) We can't have fully hand crafted areas at the quality of that screen shot with the amount of time and size of the team. b) Because tiles are way more efficient, more time can be spent on all the other aspects. It's also flexible how much repetition there is.

This isn't Icewind Dale, considering it's 3.5 years younger and three times the file size, I think Fallout stands up to it well, but a fairer comparison, a tile based expansion that came out the same month, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction looked amazing when I bought it near launch. We don't know how long it took to make just one screen in the style they've decided, and that's without objects, pathing, lighting etc... but I'm going to go with days. How many screens, 1440p, make up the world? Likely thousands. It's not as if you can't have full maps fully pre-rendered in a tile based system, you can have the rare and unique large tile for special places, but I just don't think they have the time or team that can use the same techniques as Icewind Dale to create an entire world in the way they have done that screen shot.

Forgive my ignorance in such matters, but I'm not too sure that reusing objects is the same as using tiles. It sounds like you're descibing prerendered sceneries with a few objects rendered onto them, which would do very little to reduce their aggregate size. What I had imagined was texture tiling such as was used in NWN. This would reduce memory impact from game maps, but would also be much less pretty without a GPU powerhouse of a computer to run on. Edit: Sorry Frisk, you're right, this topic is really losing traction. No, I was referring to tiles, but more in line with Fallout's style. Rendering 2D objects on top of scenes without tiles would reduce the file size requirements quite a bit, but it wouldn't reduce the work load involved in creating, pathing, and lighting scenes like tiles would.

Not to mention that we're all expecting there to be environmental effects and day/night maps. Well, that's too bad, because it won't be an Infinity Engine spiritual successor otherwise, so they'll just have to try anyway. The game won't be tile-based. Although it might have repeated assets (trees, etc) You're wrong, it doesn't have to have complete prerendered backgrounds to be an Infinity Engine spiritual successor, other people could say the same about not using D&D, and yet they're not going to build the mechanics around D&D then hope that they can get the rights some how. If the scale of the world is as they say, it's completely impractical to design in 3D, render, then hand paint every square inch of the world, it would take them 5 years and a much larger team, it's just not going to happen. Yes, you wouldn't necessarily want to do the statues and the waterfalls with tiles, but making the bridges and general scenery tiles would allow for their reuse in other areas, that is not only the best way but it's the only way. It also allows them to reuse all the assets not shown in that background, the pathing map, the lighting map, etc...

I got Psychonauts working with a 360 pad (I had been using an original Xbox pad but I switched to Win7) using Autohotkey only for them to update it soon after to give full support.