Caerdon
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Posts posted by Caerdon
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You know what I'm talking about.
Now, it could be argued that even the very idea is flawed from the start, but this isn't what this thread is about. What this thread is about is this:
Why in the name of Wael does the entire spell level become per-encounter all at once?
This is an insanely large jump. Why not give us one per-encounter level 1 spell at, say, level 6, then one every level after that?
Obsidian pls.
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So... I haven't followed this thread much since the beginning, but I was alerted back to it by a bunch of likes I've gotten the past couple of days - and those likes are what make me feel a bit of a turncoat right now, but... oh well.
Let it never be said that I'm not man enough to admit it when I'm wrong.
Now, this isn't an issue I've ever had particularly strong feelings about, but the fact is I never liked the kind of pre-buffing BG2 especially allowed you to do (though I rarely did it myself), and I guess this largely explains my attitude towards it in PoE so far. However, Luckmann and PrimeJunta in particular have made some excellent points about how things are different in PoE, and hell, you guys are right. For numerous reasons, like the (soft) limits to resting, short buff durations, lack of save-or-die stuff etc. I don't see allowing pre-buffing in PoE lead to significant negative consequences. Would allowing it lead to significant positive consequences? Maybe not, but I guess no one likes arbitrary restrictions.
Thanks for showing me the error of my ways.
As you were.
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Syntax error: missing right parenthesis
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Come to think of it, can you create custom bios in this game?? I know I can add notes to my journal.
No. I asked for this during the early beta days, but no one else seemed to care. I might still be a little bitter about it.
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I think the game has a good variety of weapons. I like that all weapons have their own small quirks, even if they're sometimes quite small indeed - or just seem completely arbitrary (like the deflection bonus of hatchets, of all weapons).
I hope Obsidian keeps balancing the weapons, despite all the crying that will ensue. For example, bows could use a little buff, and estocs are disproportionately good with that DR bypass of theirs.
It doesn't matter if you have 1948483948 different weapons if only 12 of them are actually viable.
All the weapons are perfectly viable.
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The Living Lands
A frontier island area in the far north, a land of wild weather, strange beasts, and hundreds of difficult to reach valleys containing oddities never before seen (according to the people who find them) by mortals. It's a lawless land where communities band together, fall apart, and fight petty wars with each other constantly. Has a reputation for breeding oddballs and madmen. The racial mix in the area is extremely diverse but not necessarily harmonious. Dwarves, propelled by their desire to explore, are very common here, even among the mix.-
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I 100% agree with Zwiebelchen here. High INT just tends to make friendly fire irrelevant.
Manually adjustable area would totally satisfy the idea that "high intelligence allows you to more precisely target your spells".
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I'd rather see everything else brought up to par (including enemies - I want to love to hate them, ala shades) than continued nerfs to the stronger classes.
where my anime magick sword mans
I'm trying, I really am, but I just can't understand why balancing should ever be done like that. Why do things the hard way? Why not adjust the tiny subset that deviates from the mean instead of adjusting literally everything else to match the subset? The end result is the same: balance - so why multiply the amount of work?
It's less that I think that's the ideal way of balancing, and more that I think most of the classes (and enemies) are kinda boring. Ciphers are strong, but what's more important is that they're interesting (Chanters are as well, but not really in a way that works, IMO). I'd like to enjoy playing the other classes as much as I enjoy playing a Cipher.
Also, the original class pitches kinda made it sound like I was gonna get me some anime magic sword mans, and that didn't happen. Flames of Devotion is a good start, for instance, but I want paladins whose entire bodies ignite with sheer hot-blooded conviction, barbarians that howl out a cone of stone-shattering sonic disruption, and rangers that transform their animal companions into arrow to shoot at enemies. So where's my bear arrow? What's wrong with you, Josh Sawyer? HUH? WHATSWRONGWITHYOU?!??!!!?
Huh, I guess it's just a mattter of differing personalities. To me, OP classes are the epitome of boring.
And no, that's not the impression I got from the pitches - and I'm very, very happy we don't have much of that stuff. To me a more realistic style is infinitely more interesting - not that there shouldn't be magic, but magic should be something exceptional, otherwise it gets devalued.
Also, I've no idea what "mans" means.
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Fake lighting using normal maps is different from real lighting using vertices. The latter can handle self-shadows and ambient occlusion, for example.
But yeah, at least you're using the term pseudo 3D now, because that's correct. Eternity is 2.5D. The data in Unity is sourced from a true 3D scenery in Maya, but what's left is not really "fully functional 3D". There's not enough information to handle shadows, collision or 3D rotation, for example.
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I'd rather see everything else brought up to par (including enemies - I want to love to hate them, ala shades) than continued nerfs to the stronger classes.
where my anime magick sword mans
I'm trying, I really am, but I just can't understand why balancing should ever be done like that. Why do things the hard way? Why not adjust the tiny subset that deviates from the mean instead of adjusting literally everything else to match the subset? The end result is the same: balance - so why multiply the amount of work?
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It's not something Obsidian has any control over. GOG has to approve the update, which means it'll be somewhat slower to reach the consumers.. And unless GOG makes an auto updater themselves you won't see one, which I highly doubt they will because then it's effectively Steam and they are pretty anti-drm.
What does auto-updater have to do with DRM?
For some anti-DRM people any kind of conection to internet forced by game (and auto-updater is forcing such conection) is DRM-like device.
Ah, got it. Thanks!
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It's true that that the game has actual depth information for every pixel on screen, so if you want to, you can conceptually think of the whole thing as 3D scenery with "real depth", but that's not how the game handles it.
Which was my entire point. The GPU renders it as if it was real 3D geometry in lighting/occlusion because that's how normal/bump maps work.
You have a very strange understanding of concepts like "real depth", "real 3D geometry" and "fully-functional 3D scenery" - and of how normal maps work.
It's a goddamn texture, with fake lighting added using a normal map.
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It's not something Obsidian has any control over. GOG has to approve the update, which means it'll be somewhat slower to reach the consumers.. And unless GOG makes an auto updater themselves you won't see one, which I highly doubt they will because then it's effectively Steam and they are pretty anti-drm.
What does auto-updater have to do with DRM?
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The number of levels has nothing to do with how much you can customize your character.
This is simply a question of whether you want lots of relatively meaningless level-ups or a handful of more impactful level-ups. I prefer the latter. Those who are asking for 20+ levels clearly disagree.
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There is no such thing as layering. The "image" contains all z-depth and occlusion information just like a normal or bump map in 3D games. It's entirely 3D, just stored in a 2D file format. Your GPU reads the 2D-images as fully-functional 3D-scenery. There is no illusion of depth. What you see is real depth. Given some software, you could even see the landscape entirely in 3D by using hardware like the oculus rift. Every pixel has it's own z-position just like a vertex has in typical 3D games.
Where do you get this stuff? Seriously.
There's absolutely nothing special about this whole process. What we see in the game is nothing more than a single 2D layer in unity with some 3D objects (characters, props) on top of it. The other layers or channels or whatever you want to call them are there for stuff like dynamic lighting and object occlusion etc. The backgrounds we see are not handled as 3D scenery, that would be a ludicrous and totally unnecessary waste of GPU cycles. It's a plane with a texture, nothing more. That's the most sensible way - hell, the only sensible way - to implement this kind of stuff.
There's even an early dev video where you can actually see this, clear as day.
It's true that that the game has actual depth information for every pixel on screen, so if you want to, you can conceptually think of the whole thing as 3D scenery with "real depth", but that's not how the game handles it.
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Any key can be used as a hotkey, as long as it's not already bound to other stuff.
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Except for the part where they first come out as an extremely large 2D image.
They don't. I'm sorry, I mean no offence, but you don't understand the process.
First there is nothing but the 3D model of the level in Maya. That is rendered into several 2D layers (these are the extremely large 2D images you're talking about), which are then imported into Unity, which layers them together with a camera, 3D models of characters and props and spell effects and dynamic lighting and such, producing what we see on screen.
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Yes. It's extremely high definition 2D painted backgrounds that are split into layers, and then those layers are ran through a program that uses them to build 3D objects. Then the camera is moved to a point where the illusion of a flat plane is created and locked in.
Uhh... what?
Backgrounds aren't "painted" in any way. The entire levels are modeled in 3D, rendered, exported with additional information like occlusion, normal and depth maps, and finally digitally airbrushed a bit to make them a little more lively.
"As we mentioned previously, our beautiful backgrounds are rendered out of Maya as a 2D image. They are very large images, sometimes over several gigabytes of raw data, and before the images get into the game we run a program that compresses the data. Maya renders out the backgrounds in four layers or "passes": final, depth, normal, and albedo. These passes are combined together in Unity for per-pixel occlusion of 3D objects, and for real-time dynamic lighting. When we bring the backgrounds into the game, they look like a flat 2D plane, and when viewed in Unity's editor the whole world has an awkward skewed look to it. The illusion comes together only when an orthographic camera is placed at the perfect angle."
Emphasis mine.
https://eternity.obsidian.net/news/update--79-graphics-and-rendering-
So pretty much what I said, with just more detailed description of the workflow between different tools, and no mention of the manual enhancement phase (which is there, make no mistake).
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- Endurance/Health
Resting
Engagement
Multiple defenses that are targeted by different attacks/spells and affected by different status effects (there's great potential for some nice spell chaining)
Stash
The way attributes, skills, backgrounds etc. open dialogue options without guaranteeing any sort of success -
Scores are totally worthless, and scores from 0/1 to 10/100 are even more worthless.
If I had to give scores to games, I'd use the four star system:
* = bad
** = ok
*** = good
**** = great
That's more than enough granularity.
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Yes. It's extremely high definition 2D painted backgrounds that are split into layers, and then those layers are ran through a program that uses them to build 3D objects. Then the camera is moved to a point where the illusion of a flat plane is created and locked in.
Uhh... what?
Backgrounds aren't "painted" in any way. The entire levels are modeled in 3D, rendered, exported with additional information like occlusion, normal and depth maps, and finally digitally airbrushed a bit to make them a little more lively.
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Might makes totally sense if we simply assume that in the world of Eternity magic can be easily used to augment physical strength and to "charge" weapons and projectiles. That's it. Problem solved.
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Holy hell. We've got a weeaboo in here!
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Using Hunting Bow on a 0 DR enemy* is an optimal use of Hunting Bow, for sure. But is it actually better than a War Bow in that case ?
Yes, it definitely is.
polar skins for animal companions plz
in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
White coat of fur doesn't turn a brown bear into a polar bear, you know...