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Zeckul

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Everything posted by Zeckul

  1. Oh, that post wasn't for you. It was for whoever's reading. +1 for using sound logic and patience to clearly dismantle clichés and common fallacies.
  2. I've suggested it elsewhere but there's a great free library for multi-agent collision avoidance called RVO2, it's well optimised and it's been used successfully in commercial games (although you might need to contact the authors for that). It's available both in C++ and C#. It doesn't solve pathfinding (which is easy enough), but it solves the much tougher problem of multi-agent cooperation in tight spaces. Just something to look at if you haven't.
  3. Warcraft 3 was delayed time and again but it ended up being a resounding success. You can't generalize from Watchdogs that PoE will disappoint. It might actually be very good. We also some reasons to think that it will indeed be good, such as hands-on a beta that shows a lot of promise and the level of proven talent behind it. We also have good reasons to think that the delay is required to make the game really fun, such as hands-on a beta that has still a lot of serious issues with basic gameplay. Quality in software does exist and the existence of bugs even in what is considered high-quality software doesn't invalidate the notion. It's simply not true that "polish is bull****". It's all about the frequency and severity of the issues. Nobody wants to play a buggy game and it negatively impacts the review scores forever even if the game is later patched and becomes very good. Everyone wants PoE to be a success (as in, an actual released game that is successful), so while your diatribe makes for an entertaining read, the idea of keeping PoE in production indefinitely cannot be taken seriously.
  4. I trust Obsidian that it's for the best, but still... what a bummer. Hopefully Icewind Dale:EE comes out in the meantime so I have something valuable to play.
  5. I'm just not a fan of post-apocalyptic settings. It's bleak, depressing, it's not a world I'm eager to discover. I'm fine with very strange settings (i.e. Torment), but Fallout/Wasteland has never been my cup of tea.
  6. This will end up being a better RPG than Baldur's Gate. I can feel it. So many smart design decisions, such beautiful artwork, such good writing. Y'all rock Obsidian.
  7. In character creation, if you step through the screens using the Next button, you currently select your attributes before choosing your culture. However, your culture affects your attributes, which means that: 1) Getting a bonus from a specific culture is obscure and inexplicable when you've not selected a culture yet 2) Choosing the culture after fine-tuning your stats will change your stats and force you to fine-tune them again So it seems like the logical thing to do would simply be to select culture before attributes.
  8. It's nice to look at but I'm not sure how playable it is. Predictable movement speed is a lot more important in PoE due to RTwP combat, TToN can ignore subtle timing questions almost entirely.
  9. Would that have meant having NWN2 look like NWN1? I'm certainly glad they did replace the renderer if that was the case, NWN1 looked drab in comparison. Yes the NWN2 renderer was inefficient and it took a long time before machines could run this game fast enough, but then it aged a lot better than NWN1 did.
  10. dotPeek 1.1 and ILSpy boast that they can do this, but I haven't tried. Note that Unity code is likely compiled with the mono compiler rather than the "standard" one in Visual Studio, so it's likely that these tools fail because they're only designed to recognize the specific patterns emitted by one specific compiler.
  11. That's not really mangling, it's because decompilers are not that smart about some high-level C# features like iterator blocks and async methods, so they show you the transformed code rather than its original high-level form. The DebuggerHidden attributes already tells you that this is almost certainly compiler generated code. The name of this method suggests that it should be an async method, but it returns IEnumerator so I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps async is implemented using enumerators underneath. On that note, it's pretty nice that they are using such state-of-the-art features, it shows some high level of expertise with the language and hints that the code is probably of good quality.
  12. Certainly would not be happy about small content packs that don't change the game in any major way. I'd rather have the team focused on making new, even better RPGs, possibly an expansion to PoE but mainly its sequel. PoE is only the beginning.
  13. It entirely up to the specific god your worship, there are few universal rules. When you die you go to the Fugue plane and are judged by the current god of death (Kelemvor). If you are judged faithless you end up on the Wall of the Faithless (as illustrated in Mask of the Betrayer), it's not fun, you slowly dissolve and become part of it - meanwhile you could be stolen by a demon and be taken to the Abyss, which although more exciting is not necessarily preferable. If you are judged False (betrayed your god), it's eternal punishment, although the punishment varies depending on your judgement. Also:
  14. Also, in a setting like Forgotten Realms, morality is all relative to the deity you worship - it's just a matter of flavor whether you want to follow an "evil" or "good" or "neutral" one. Either way, if you're faithful enough you'll get a pleasant afterlife. In FR, heaven and hell isn't really a matter of doing good or evil, but of being faithful to your god or not. There's no basis for objective morality anyway - the closest to that would be Ao, but he doesn't actually do anything as far as I know.
  15. I don't subscribe to the idea that in some indefinite time in the past, people were very sure about heaven and hell, and now they're not really sure anymore because "science" or I don't know. Believers still believe and unbelievers still don't believe. Beliefs and behaviors haven't really changed. Believers still do plenty of evil despite fully believing in hell, and they're no different than 50, 100 or 1000 years ago in that regard. The thing is that human beings are amazingly oblivious about the long-term consequences of their actions. We could ask a similar question: why don't people save for their old days if they know they will need money then? Well, because it's a long time away. We're just not wired to prioritize long-term consequences. Hell also has a very intangible characteristic as no one alive has seen or experienced it. It's even more difficult to care about something essentially abstract in your mind. So, I don't think the question is what would happen if people were really *sure* of its existence, because we can already see that people are simply not rational enough to always or even most often take that into account. However in D&D, the presence of Gods is a lot more tangible, so it could indeed make an impression on people. How exactly would be an interesting question. I personally think that fantasy settings typically make for interesting and tense adventures, but day-to-day life for their inhabitants seems miserable and absurdly dangerous. Monsters everywhere, large-scale wars, arbitrary magic wreaking havoc, evil gods and demons roaming freely... At the same time, all the "gods" aren't "God" in the monotheistic sense of supreme beings, they're merely particularly powerful beings with the strange property of gaining power when people worship them - the best analogy in our world isn't really God but politicians. So people would live in constant fear and try to gather behind what they think is the most benevolent or otherwise advantageous deity. But if human nature is what it is here, they'd still pay way too little attention to the matter of their afterlife and some would certainly end up abandoned forever in some desolate place by their own negligence.
  16. You can visualize what is taking space on it with tools like WinDirStat. CCleaner is a good tool to reclaim space used by temporary installation files and whatnot. If you want a good guide on cleaning up your C drive then there's no better than Scott Hanselman's.
  17. As explained by Sawyer, the "whole party scouting" thing makes sense to me. This doesn't diminish the value of rogues, since they can be much better at it than the other members of the group. Using stealth during fights could be interesting of course, but that doesn't necessarily imply changing the current stealth mechanics (could be accomplished via an ability or something). The detection circles look like programmer art though, I would assume this will have some aesthetic value in the final game. Otherwise it feels like playing with some debug commands on. I personally was fine with fighters being so simple to play in the IE games. The tactical depth comes from managing 6 characters, not so much individual character flexibility. I am cautiously optimistic about combat eventually becoming fun to play in PoE, but I'm concerned that all this "flexibility" might translate in overwhelming micromanagement. What I did want in the IE games was more ways to customize my character progression. The level up screen too often had you just press "OK" without even making a single decision.
  18. There's a difference between wearing no armor and wearing no clothes.
  19. Perhaps, but the druid spells, man! Ain't no party like a druid party in IWD.
  20. No one should need to be using DirectDraw at this point. Open the config.exe and check OpenGL acceleration. Use the widescreen mod to set your resolution, ideally to something not too far from the original supported resolutions. 1280x720 seems like a good compromise for 16:9 screens; I used a custom resolution of 960x600 for my old 16:10 monitor. Only problem I ran into that way was that the game wouldn't scale to fit the monitor, but you can go in your driver options to force it to do so.
  21. Any scenario that involves forcefully closing the executable is unlikely to be supported.
  22. I certainly hope walking around naked doesn't give significant bonuses in the final game, I mean... come on! Who wants to command a party of nudists?
  23. Yes. But that's just one out of at least 30 different fights you've had so far in the game, and you can just walk around these guys if you find them too difficult (or you could buy 3 potions of explosion, but cheese is cheese ) Same goes for the ogrillions on the road to Nashkel, or the Ogre in Coast Way - all these fights are optional. For the most part areas in Baldur's Gate have small groups here and there that are easy to dispatch. PoE seems to combine the enemy density of IWD with the intricacy of high-level BG2 battles.
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