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mstark

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Everything posted by mstark

  1. mstark
    Not a fan of instant jumps or "quick travel". Just design areas to minimize pointless backtracking. Bladur's Gate 2 did this fairly well, compared to the original BG. You'd still have backtracking through small quest areas, eg. enter, finish objective, backtrack, exit. But for large areas you'd usually progress through them, then exit at another location of the map, and you never really had a reason to walk back through the same area. I suppose BG2 had quick travel in the sense that you could jump between all major quest hub areas, but there wasn't any other way to get there (you couldn't just walk), and adding all the filler area in between areas would be quite pointless for a map as large as the one in BG2. Even areas where you had to walk back and forth quite a big (eg. Underdark) I didn't mind it so much, it set a nice pace for the game. At least when you had boots of speed . When only 1 or 2 characters in the party had boots of speed, I'd use them to run around areas to do everything needed... I can't remember if it was possible to get 6 haste items in BG2, or if you needed ToB for the 6th one. I suppose my memories might be a bit rose tinted, I can't imagine I much enjoyed backtracking to the Thieves Guild every 7 (in-game) days to send my thieves out on new missions... but such problems would be relatively easy to solve, for example by making me able to control the Thieves Guild remotely through an interface.
  2. mstark
    BG2 becomes playable once you have acquired boots of speed for each party member.
  3. mstark
    Being a big fan of the early Commandos games I understand your post very well, and I also believe that the basic elements that makes stealth challenging and fun in that game can be implemented in PE. As you said, it's a fairly straight forward system using A: line-of-sight cone and B: sound radius. Together with mechanics such as alerting people within X radius when detecting something, it becomes an advanced system that's rather easy to implement. There is no advanced AI in Commandos, yet the system worked incredibly well for creating an exciting experience, it was a simple system that created very dynamic gameplay. To throw around some ideas: The part of the cone you could avoid by crawling in Commandos could be the part you can stand undetected in while in Stealth Mode in PE. Stealth Mode could also reduce your movement sound radius to 0, so that you can approach enemies from behind without alerting them. Maybe when you approach an enemy from behind, before you attempt to backstab them, you must roll an extra sound check to make sure the target doesn't hear you and turns around. It creates a more dynamic environment within which enemies can be placed. If enemies are placed within line of sight of each other, that particular area would be very hard to approach with stealth. Maybe you can enter the area while in stealth, but the enemy would detect a companion that suddenly falls over due to a dagger in their back. This would place everyone in the area on alert, but they wouldn't know where to look for your party if your rogue sneaks away undetected. No rolls required, just literally staying out of sight once enemies start running around. Commandos had a lot of awesome moments like these. You could snipe an enemy from far away, but that could change the patrolling patterns of all the enemies on the entire map, making it a lot harder to complete your main objective. Anyway, I'm all in favor for a system that removes the dice roll from stealth, and requires you to actually manually control your character to stay out of sight.
  4. mstark
    Very much in favor of a system like this . Now just add some interesting effects at the very top end, and the very bottom end, that are incredibly rare, but spice up gameplay similarly to how a well designed legendary item can once it shows up.
  5. mstark
    All new isometric games make pretty good use of it, but as you say it's mostly to make garbage fly around. Diablo 3 & Torchlight 2 are worth a mention in this regard.
  6. mstark
    Dyrwood's Gate: Shadows of Telaneir
  7. mstark
    Didn't mean to imply sprite based animations are crappy.
  8. mstark
    Love the idea of weapons/equipment reacting to enemies nearby! That idea absolutely deserves its own thread, Osvir . There's tons of potential in that idea!
  9. mstark
    I believe they'll use some form of physics engine, if they don't, it means hand making all 3D animations, incl. flapping capes, deaths, things breaking, etc. With decent physics, a lot of it can be real time generated without looking crap. I don't mind whichever way they decide to go, but to me it seems likely to include some form of physics. It means allowing dead bodies to literally go flying when you throw a fireball on it :D.
  10. mstark
    Thanks for making it abundantly clear what the intention of the team is, this is exactly what I've been asking/arguing for . Could you clarify whether we get to choose which set to use, and if it can be toggled on the fly during gameplay? Or will the game check the resolution of the monitor and choose for us when we install? Would be nice to have manual control over it!
  11. mstark
    For anyone not understanding what this thread is about, this post by Sawyer shows it very clearly: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63020-project-eternity-update-36-off-to-our-elfhomes-but-first/page__st__160#entry1293137 I'm glad the team is taking exactly the route I outlines in the first post for producing high/low resolution assets that'll scale better to different DPI screens .
  12. mstark
    Fair enough. I only brought it up because I didn't think it would be that much more work to edit the 30720x17280 image, it may be 4 times as large, but it will contain the same stones and trees as the 15360x8640 one, just in higher detail. You could make edits to it at 50% the zoom, and it would seem like a similar amount of work. (I work with high res imagery myself, back and forth between retina/non-retina screens). If it involves more than this, I fully agree it's not worth spending the effort doing it for the quite minimal return it will have. I only think it could be consider if you could figure out a way of making it happen fairly painlessly, since retina-like screens of all sizes are popping up everywhere at the moment, and it's giving PE a chance to shine above all other by being the first to support it . The problem with the Steam numbers is that it doesn't tell you what physical size the 1920x1080 screens are. Yes, it's very likely that 95% are around 100ppi 22-24" and maybe 5% are 150ppi 15", but in the future maybe this number will be made up of a larger part of 200ppi 1080p 10" screens (as they entered the market a few months ago). Apart from educated guesses, there's no way to tell from the Steam numbers how large the monitors carrying these resolutions actually are. The retina assets wouldn't just target the (fictive) 27" 5120x2880, but it would make the game enjoyable on all screens of similar pixel density, regardless of their physical size in inches (13" 2560x1600, 15" 2880x1800, 10.6" 1920x1080 ... sorry, repeating myself). That said, if it will take serious amounts of development time away from the game to pull this off, which I was hoping it wouldn't, then it's fully understandable if you won't look into it. Either way, it sounds like the 110ppi target you're going for (27" 2560x1440) will allow the game to be playable without becoming too tiny on a 220ppi monitor at native resolution (please do not include any pixel doubling in the engine for these screens, I beg you ! ).
  13. mstark
    If you intend for PE's characters and UI to be similarly sized on a 13" 1280x720 as they were on a 15" 640x480 screen, then I suppose yes: BG scaled well from a 50PPI 640x480 15" to a 100PPI 1280x1024 17" (and 110PPI 2560x1440 27"), the characters would appear 2" tall on the former and 1" tall on the latter due to double the pixel density. If PE's characters are roughly 2" tall on a 110PPI 1280x720 13" I can see it scaling well to a 220PPI 2560x1440 13" (or a 5120x2880 27" for that matter) , where they would appear 1" tall. The jump in pixel density is about the same. I suppose I was under the assumption that the characters would be roughly 1" on regular, 110PPI monitors, making them far too tiny on high density 220PPI ones. This depends entirely on the physical size of the monitors in question (their pixel density). To round off, if you think pixel doubling is an acceptable way of dealing with high pixel density screens I'm not going to argue any more, my eyes think differently, but that's just me .
  14. mstark
    Still not sure I understand. I must be getting some of this wrong (sorry, English isn't my native language): You mentioned the assets will be rendered at two different target resolutions, making me believe one will look good at normal DPI screens of any size/resolution and the other will be for high DPI screens? Or are they for some other purpose? I don't understand why pixel doubling has to happen if there is a set of assets rendered to retina screen resolutions. The pixel density of retina screens is roughly 2x that of normal screens, and your high resolution renders are 2x that of your target low res. My personal opinion is that the difference is noticeable on high DPI (retina) screens, when you compare a pixel doubled image next to one that was rendered at the actual resolution. The effect is similar to looking at a pixel doubled image on a 'regular' screen beside a non-doubled one. It will look just as fuzzy, just a higher definition of fuzzy If your in-game areas are planned to be 20k x 20k pixels, is it infeasible to render them at 40k x 40k, and then downsampling them back to 20k? I realize this quadruples rendering times, but it might also save time since you can downscale images with virtually no loss from these source files. That way you have one set of assets that doesn't have to be pixel doubled for retina screens, and the downsampled set(s) would be for regular screens. If there's a definite no to this happening I'll let go and stop campaigning for it at any given opportunity. For what it's worth I'll still love the dev team just as much for making this game reality Thanks for the replies, and to everyone: I'm truly sorry to those who are annoyed by me going on and on about this, it's just... I believe the game could really benefit from it. It would simply look astoundingly good on these screens. You really have to see it to believe it, I guess.
  15. mstark
    1280/16=720/9=80 1366/16=85.375 768/9=85.333 The definition of 16:9 is 1.77:1, both 1280/720 and 1366/768 actually round up closer to 1.78:1 (1.77777777778 and 1.77864583333 respectively), but that doesn't stop either of them from being considered 16:9, aka 1.77:1. Josh has written they're going to be supporting retina displays that implicitly suggests they're supporting high PPI screens, although there's no detail about how broad support this will be, only 2560x1440 is mentioned in regards to high PPI. The graphic shows they're going to be supporting a wide range of resolution from 1280x720 to 2880x1800 at standard PPI 90-120. Yeah, I know he didn't specifically say the "target high resolution" will be intended for retina displays, but it's, I think, the only interpretation that makes sense of the following quotes: I interpret this as meaning that the "target low resolution" and "higher resolution" will both display the exact same scene, only one is twice the resolution of the other, eg. the high resolution ones will be meant for "retina", as it will display the same size on a "retina" screen as the low res one would on a normal screen. If the interpretation is correct, this means they're rendering the scenes to scale well to monitors around "normal" PPI (~100), and 2x "normal" PPI (~200), but leaving all PPIs in between these ranges untargeted, leaving, say, 150PPI monitors having to awkwardly choose between the low res (ant farm) or high res (too large) assets. (I'm not really worried about this, but I thought it should be brought up ) But I might be completely wrong. I'm not sure what to make of the statement "With resolutions above "mere" Retina displays, we will zoom out, which should allow the backgrounds to scale into outer space (close enough, anyway).", where he's speaking about resolutions even higher than Retina (4k?). The graphic gives a hint of how it works, and can just as well be interpreted as showing what would happen at a "retina" PPI, it's all down to the physical size of the screens.
  16. mstark
    Though you're trolling me I'm happy to say that it's unlikely they'll lock the frames to game speed in the way IE did. You'll likely be able to reach whatever FPS your GPU is capable of and still have the game run normally. IE's sprite based animations were only generated at 30 fps, and forcing the game to run at a higher FPS resulted in speeding it up.
  17. mstark
    1366x768 is, like 1280x720, 16:9. I own a 13" 1600x900 laptop, I could rattle off the names of a number of popular 13" ones with this resolution, but you're right that they are not really aimed at gamers (that would be 15" 1080p), they're productivity tools. But then, many IE/PE fans seem to be in their mid twenties, and will likely be using computers for productivity as much as gaming . Honestly, looking at resolution really doesn't make much sense. DPI/PPI is what matters. 1920*1080 can be had at 11", 13", 15", 22", 24", etc. and will look different on each one screen. The UI needs to scale to a set of DPI ranges, rather than making it look good at a particular "ideal" resolution, because that resolution will appear on both 11", 15" and 30" screens. And that is exactly what the devs seem to be doing, which I'm very happy about . They've taken today's "ideal" as their standard, and, in addition to this, also render assets at twice that resolution to account for higher DPI screens... at least that's how I understood Sawyer's post. As for aspect ratio, it makes sense to design it for 16:9 right now... but generally speaking it's always bad to design for any current standard. They change. Often. The UI designs, if possible, should be flexible enough to work on 6:4, 16:9, or even 21:9 (cinema aspect ratio), at varying pixel densities. That would be future proof . That "future" proofing I just mentioned is based on what screens are already on the market today, and the direction the industry is currently going in.
  18. mstark
    For those worrying about this game not supporting 4k resolution, I just posted something in the update thread that should make it fairly clear what I believe Sawyer tried to say in his post. It's assumptions for now, hoping to get it confirmed. Either way: it'll all depend on the DPI of said 4k screen, but it does sound like the second set of assets that Sawyer mentioned, rendered at twice the resolution, will indeed be tailored to scale well to 24" screens at 4k (~185dpi).
  19. mstark
    Mr. Sawyer, on rendering the artwork in two different scales, let me get this straight: First of all, it sounds like you've got the functionality for selecting different sets of high/low resolution graphical assets implemented and working, that is awesome. Can these be toggled on the fly? Secondly, for the initial release of the game I gather you are currently planning to generate one set of "regular screen resolution" assets that'll scale well to regular DPI ranges, 100-120dpi, or 13" 1280x720 to 24" 1920x1080. You're referring to this resolution as a "1280x720" resolution. You are also generating a set of assets at 2x the resolution, referred to as "2560x1440". These, I assume, would make the in game scale similarly to the above mentioned "regular" set when seen on Hi-DPI/retina, 200-240dpi, or 13" 2560x1440 to 24" 3840x2160, is this correct? If this is correct, then people worrying about this game not scaling well to 4k needn't worry any more: it most certainly will. However, I feel I should point out that these two sets are only accounting for screen DPIs in the range of 100-120 and 200-240, which leaves quite a large "black hole": all monitors with 130-190dpi, and there are a lot of laptops in this range currently on the market (far more than there are Hi-DPI/"retina" ones). On these monitors, the "regular" resolution is going to look too tiny, while the high DPI assets are going to look too large. Have you considered creating a third set of assets at 1.5x the resolution of the regular one? It would cover this middle ground very well, formed by fairly common 13" 1600x900 to 15" 1920x1080 screens. You did mention something about "downsampling" the "2560x1440" assets to 1080p, which I suppose might be the missing 1.5x set I just mentioned. Thank you yet again for this update, you guys are doing a fantastic job at figuring out excellent solutions to all the issues we've been fighting about here on the forums
  20. mstark
    I really liked the system with black for unexplored parts of the map (IMO, a basic functionality that should be in a top-down exploration RPG), and FoW for line of sight. Yes, it's annoying that this means you don't always get to see the entire artwork that the map makes up, and maybe there should be a way of "unlocking" maps to remove all black, impossible to reach, parts of it in order to see it in full once you've "completed" the area. The black serves as an excellent reference point for where I've yet to go, I very much enjoyed arriving in a new area with a completely black map, and walking around to paint it out .
  21. mstark
    Quick, burn it! Burn it with fire! That said (and done), no, allow me to go wherever I want if I've discovered the area, even if it's earlier than the devs expected me to find it. Was that "too inexperienced to do this" in IWD really an XP block? Isn't it something to do with not having finished a particular quest in order to gain access? Too long since I played it...
  22. mstark
    ^There are easier ways than the rogue trick to get endless amounts of money within the first hour of playing BG2, but I'd consider all of those tricks bugs that need patching, not bad economy design. If such loopholes are discovered early on in PE I believe they will be patched rather quickly. I agree that the D&D pick pocket system didn't really work in IE.
  23. mstark
    I'm thinking I'd like damage types to be more "flavour" than a strictly necessary strategic consideration. Say, crushing gets a bonus against heavy armour, but unless the encounter is especially challenging, requiring me to consider every single minor advantage I can possibly get, I'd be fine simply bashing away with my longsword. That said, I'm well confident you devs will strike a good balance! Maybe weapon switching will be necessary in higher difficulties/challenge modes in order to take on different encounters, while lower difficulties have less dependence on damage types
  24. mstark
    I'm in love. To people worrying/confused about "black bars" on aspect ratios different to 16:9: stop worrying. It won't happen, you'll simply see more 'vertical' terrain. Same way as the IE games work
  25. mstark
    Going back to IE/BG, it's fairly "realistic" that your hero grows rich, considering the amount of exploring/adventuring done. In BG2, if you don't do more than 1-3 side quests + the main quest line, you have barely enough money to buy the many magical 20-40k items available in Athkatla. If you do everything, however, you should have around 300-400k by the end of the game, easily enough to buy near enough everything (though the gear you will have looted by then will be far better anyway). In ToB it kinda goes insane though, I ended up with 1.2 million and nothing to spend it on. I still quite enjoyed being that epicly rich, and, considering it was the final game in a long running series, what better place to allow you to have that feeling? BG2, IMO, is a well designed game in this regard. If you complete 50% of it, you can just about afford to buy most merchant items, and they may be better than what you've looted so far, but if you complete 100% of it money stops being an issue, without any grinding involved, just exploration of unique & enjoyable content.
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