coffeetable

Nooope (thankfully, IMO)

The Aliens RPG footage showed Obsidian had a new take on these kinds of things: http://youtu.be/BdVedBa0-mk?t=5m15s Having them not interrupt the flow of the game was a great idea IMO.

pretty sure obsidian have said they're from another game

I don't think there's been a redneck companion in any of the RPGs I've played, so I'm all for it.

The phrase you're looking for is bikeshedding.

Brandon - the spreadsheet shows that the first batch of Kickstarter NPCs is due to be done for Production 02 Milestone. But the questionnaires haven't gone out yet, have they? And wasn't the State of the Project update back in August at the end of the Production 01 Milestone?

Bumping this to say the new portraits are great, nice work!

Also, when it says that area work is "outsourced", who is it being outsourced to?

Great update! Why are the numbers on the left hand side of the spreadsheet blurred? Also, what do CC, CT, DK, EB, ES stand for?

Because I backed as much for an insight into game development as for the game itself: what's the distribution over time of the development budget? ie, how much does a month of production cost vs a month of vertical slice work vs a month of prototyping? (or what're the team numbers in each stage, if you'd rather not talk numbers)

Of course you can pull the alpha layer out. A bitmap is just an array with a cell for each pixel, and (for 32-bit colour) four bytes per cell (R, G, B and A). It's almost trivial to copy the RGB channels to a 24-bit image and the alpha to a separate 8-bit one. A naive approach of lossily compressing the colour channels (24 bits/pixel @ ~10:1) and losslessly compressing the alpha channel (8 bits/pixel @ ~2:1) only buys you a 5:1 compression ratio, but that's a mile better than losslessly compressing the whole thing. They're the hardest lines you'll see often in photographs, which are the domain we're talking about (as they're the closest common analogue to PE's backgrounds). JPEG was designed for photo compression, and in that job it does exceptionally well. I don't know why you're even arguing this, because the IE games all used Q = 60ish JPEG backgrounds and they were fine. I don't think you understand texture compression algorithms. And you don't understand compression algorithms as a whole either. Some algorithms rely on DFT, but there are many other types too. And why would the IWD palette matter? For one most algorithms compressing >24 bit colour are ignorant about how muted the palette is (it's how "noisy" the image is that matters), and for two every IE game used JPEG backgrounds and got 10:1 compression ratios too, I just chose the IWD image because it was posted earlier in the thread. The state of the art has advanced but everyone is still using JPEG anyway (because it's really good), the IE games used JPEG and got 10:1, and the IE games could use JPEG because backgrounds aren't textures.

This shouldn't be a problem when you're designing the game. If you've got data that couldn't endure JPEG compression, pull it out to it's own file and stick it through lossless compression. That said, a lot of the non-art render data should be perfectly amenable to lossy compression. Are we looking at the same link? The suspension bridge has the hardest lines, and I don't see any artifacts appear until Q = 70, and that's a 300kb JPEG compared to a 4.5Mb bitmap. e: Actually we know it's acceptable because the IWD image posted on the first page is a ~30Mb bitmap, but appeared on the game disk as a 4Mb JPEG. Texture compression is a different beast to photograph (which is for our intents and purposes what PE's backgrounds are) compression. Textures are much smaller for one, but the big difference is that you need random, fast access to any point in the image. I'm suspicious of a 23% reduction though. Any old texture compression alg should be able to get 2:1 at least. Are you comparing the compressed textures to losslessly compressed ones? Or ones that have simply been resaved in a lossless format?

A lossless compression format? There are loads, of which the most well known are probably PNG and lossless JPEG. They only manage 2:1 ratios though, so are only useful when the file is going to be edited somewhere down the line. If recipients are just looking at it, may as well use a lossy format with a high enough quality factor that no-one can tell.

Image data can easily be compressed at 10:1 without a noticeable drop in quality (see the great applets here, and keep in mind that the .bmp versions would be ~4.5Mb), so if an uncompressed level is ~1Gb, then ~100Mb/map doesn't seem out the question. As well as that, the low-res textures have about a quarter of the pixel count of the high-res ones, so they should be ~25Mb/map.

As an aside, the SA Games forum is public at the moment, so the source of these is here. Hit the ¿ by each post to skip to it's place in the full thread.

vote OP is an idiot 2013

This isn't entirely true. Yeah, as far as pure metals go steel is certainly superior, but there are piles of modern alloys and composite constructions that surpass bog standard steel in every way.

lmao - a person who has never designed a complex system for others to use

...actually the New Crobuzon trilogy should be required reading for everyone involved in fantasy fiction. Clockwork AI, dream****, The Malarial Queendom, Remade, handlingers, The Weaver, the Cacotopic stain, High Cromlech undead society, Scabmettlers, Cactacae, Armada, time-golems, Spiral Jacobs, the Iron Council. Mieville's so far beyond everyone else it beggars belief.

Your examples of original universes are ME and TES? Wow. e: Pick up something by Mieville sometime. Or Rajaniemi. Or Peter Watts, or Scott Lynch or Felix Gilman or hell even Pratchett or Herbert. If you've been so starved of good, creative genre fiction that Bioware and Bethesda are your go-to for originality, these guys are going to give you a spectacular ride.

So maybe I missed this, but what in the sweet fanny adams is Sawyerism? Is it anything more specific than "all the stuff Joshua E. Sawyer has ever said"?

What, like bad game design?

This thread has 177 members currently viewing out of 64,623 pledging. Hardly an adequate sampling. For a Bernoulli variable? Were the viewing members a uniform sample of the people pledging, 177 data points certainly would be adequate. Now while it's almost certainly non-uniform, it'll be skewed in favour of people unhappy with the proposed mechanics, as happy people don't make noise. Under that reasonable assumption, I feel comfortable saying that the fraction of backers dissatisfied is negligible.

Lord almighty you are insufferable.

Considering the slightly-Celtic theme Sawyer seems to be going with, as a big fan of Scottish folk music I'm going to take this opportunity to prod you towards some good, emotive, fiddlin'. Here's one of the crown jewels of what I'm talking about, Niel Gow's Lament for the Death of his Second Wife: http://grooveshark.c...fe/3pVUqw?src=5 It's such a simple lil' refrain, but when it doubles around 2:40, I get shivers. Though maybe that's just me. Backstory: Niel Gow was a 17th century musician, and composed a huge swathe of what's now the basis of Scottish dance music. After the passing of his wife Margaret Urquhart (*cough*), it was a long time before his was convinced to pick his instrument back up, and when he finally did this was the first thing to be played. e: and just because it came up while I was looking for that, now for something ~completely different~ http://grooveshark.c...ue/17wIU9?src=5 If your foot isn't tapping by 3:00, you should see a doctor about possible nerve damage.