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Starglider

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About Starglider

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    Master of Golems of the Obsidian Order
    (2) Evoker

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  • Location
    London, United Kingdom
  • Interests
    Artificial Intelligence, GPU Compute, Game Development, Roleplaying, Dogs

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  1. Power consumption and price. I have an Acer Iconia Tab windows 7 tablet, battery life is fine, price was fine, the next generation will be better on both metrics. This is a PC game, it's supposed to run on real computers, not overgrown cellphones and stuff you got free with your breakfast cereal.
  2. Sure but that's trivial on modern CPUs. The old IE games only had single-path problems due to lack of adequate CPU power. The problem that doesn't go away even with infinite CPU power is trying to fit multiple characters through a small gap. Naive single-entity pathing algorithms just do not handle this well even with hacks to try and fudge it. Most modern pathing problems are caused by characters blocking each other and screwing up the pathing, not due to inability to path through the static environment. I don't have this problem but then I play on watercooled overclocked bleeding edge machines. Note that the old engines were single threaded, whereas a new engine should use easily use four or more cores for game logic calculations.
  3. If you are going to have classes, then there should be multiclassing, because the idea that once you chose a career you can learn nothing outside of that career is utterly stupid and unrealistic. Real humans can pick up a huge variety of skills in often surprising combinations. Dividing your attention makes you less well trained in any particular skill, but that is a choice for the individual to make. A mage being physically unable to practice fencing due to game designer fiat is a massive suspension of disbelief breaker.
  4. 2D backgrounds also take a substantial amount of technology risk out of the development plan, which is a good thing given the fairly tight budget and schedule.
  5. I like having a combat-useless but scouting-excellent shapechange for this (for Druids or Mages). Bird, bat, fox, something like that.
  6. Level disparity is not the issue so much as numbers/weaponry disparity. Random street thugs aren't going to be able to judge the difference between a 3rd level fighter and a 15th level fighter (in D&D terms). However two toughs with daggers aren't going to jump six adventurers with longswords, plate mail and obvious magical abilities. I am perfectly happy to have a gang of 20 thugs attack my late-game party and die within five seconds, because that's a credible mistake for them to make. However I wouldn't expect it to happen more than once per area.
  7. After playing a game for 40+ hours I like to feel I've achieved something significant, even if there were major sacrifices made to reach the ultimate goal.
  8. This is the most important point in this thread. Simple pathfinding failures are easily solved by brute force : modern CPUs can do path refreshes much more frequently and effectively have no path length limit. Making the party move realisically requires algorithmic changes; using actual motion control / formation logic and treating character motion as a joint optimisation problem, instead of just individual A* on each character.
  9. Dev time is probably fairly low but the amount of QA needed would be huge. I would just leave some hooks in there so that it can be modded in easily by the community, that way we can have co-op functionality but Obsidian don't need to support it.
  10. QA is the easiest bit of the team to scale. If you underestimated, you can either draft more testers or just outsource it to the many many global companies who provide contract software QA. I wouldn't be concerned about allocation at this stage.
  11. Infinity engine games had no concept of height, but PE will definitely be modelling areas as 3D spaces (albeit prerendered). As such I would like to see holding higher ground as a meaingful choice in outdoor areas : also shooting down into enemy groups should be easier than trying to hit enemies standing up on battlements.
  12. A mundane and believable backdrop makes the fantasy elements all the more impressive. This even holds for out-there settings like Planescape; the slums and slum dwellers felt authentic and grounded the wild and wonderful elements in reality.
  13. Enemies that you can't normally beat are fine, but I don't see the harm in making it just possible for the hard-core mini-maxers to defeat the impossible encounter with hours and hours of research, failed attempts and grinding. It gives them lots of fun so why not? Encounters that must be unwinnable for story reasons probably shouldn't even have the option to start combat, or if you do it's instant cutscene death as in Lothar / PST.
  14. The primary advantage of agile is coping with constantly changing requirements. This is less important on a video game where you basically have a spec up front, which you design, implement, integrate and test. The later part is usually more chaotic with features being added and dropped as the deadline looms, but still I would say it is much more waterfall than a typical business software consulting project where the client doesn't really know what they want. I have used many flavours of agile in enterprise software development but my Xbox 360 game (linked in my signature) was written with a purely waterfall process.
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