Frenetic Pony

Now that I think about it: There's another way to go, get rid of resting almost altogether. Lift some of PE's restrictions on healing stuff and you could make the game work without resting almost altogether, bypassing the entire debate. Imagine a system where you had to apply bandages/etc. to heal. For which you needed time and etc. Obviously you'd need to spend inventory resources to heal, you'd need to be out of combat, you'd be restricted to what you could do. But you wouldn't even encounter any thematic problems of "you can't rest here, this is the middle of a dungeon!" Have different levels of injury, different levels of healing items you'd need to use, maybe a "medicine" skill you could up for one of your party members. It's that "no healing medicine" thing that's really restricting this to "you have to rest!" to get your health back up. If you DIDN'T have to rest, then who cares right?

The only other thing I can think of is "Screw it, no casual resting whatsoever!" And just basically disallow it at all, with no health regen or anything. Which probably isn't going to work at all.

So, here's a question to all of you: What are good consequences to resting? I'll go through some, and why they don't work: Random encounters: "Oh no, a few monsters, lol, I'll just rest again." Can't rest in this area: "I'll just backtrack till I can." Resting costs money: Why? If you want a thematic reason you might as well go with something that makes more sense to cost money than running out of... uhh, what? Sleep. You can't run out of sleep. Timed Quests: Most players "DIE DIE DIE!" A hyperbole, but you pretty much never, ever see timed stuff in games, even over the course of decades, for very very good reasons. They don't work unless it's a very immediate "escape this area or you die" ala the end of Halo. It screws up all difficulty balancing, it forces all players to play in the same way when the strength of games is that you can often play them in completely different ways, and can produce some of the most frustrating portions in gaming history. They don't work. What is needed is a cost tradefoff that makes sense lore wise. As I've stated, "injuries" debuffs that need some sort of item/a hospital/etc. are the only thing that really makes sense thematically, and that people are proven to be willing to tradeoff without cheating around it. This is a problem going back for decades in game design, and so far as I know this is the best solution proven to work, while most every other suggestion in this thread has indeed already been tried and been shown to be ineffective or too frustrating in one way or another. You can indeed include resting, only in "safe" areas, if it's that important. It's a tradeoff between lore and taking little extra steps to do things, a tradeoff that can and has been made in plenty of games. The regenerating health in Skyrim is rather stupid compared to their previous "rest" system, trading off too much lore and immersion for the sake of a little streamlining. PE doesn't have to do that. But it shouldn't go "super hardcore" just for the sake of it, trying to do something that's been shown to not work again and again and again just for the sake of that little extra bit of believability.

I know there's doubt, but I've tried playing Path of Exile, an action RPG under active development. Huge chapters have been added, new gameplay mechanics, etc. And yet, its worked. Its "play before it's done!" model has done well, and that's a game much closer to PE than Kerbal or Minecraft. Sure, it's not a perfect fit. But I'm not suggesting there be another "pay" scale at all. Just, if it's possible to just let people play a few months before the game is actually done. Maybe it's not. Maybe the entire game really would have to be too close to being "complete" to actually make such a thing work for its intended purpose. But then again, maybe there is some way to make it work.

Thanks for that interview! But one of the things I'm saying is that, League and Dota get sooooo far, with Dota 2 especially have so many unique heroes and abilities, just on their relative simplicity alone. What's the point of all that extra complication, really? Making it as easy and clear to understand as possible, and being clever about how you construct things might give better results than twirling yourself, and players, around in circles with ever more complex systems. Of course DOTA is a different game, a different genre than PE. Timed cooldowns might not be the best thing, weapons will actually be weapons instead of just adding damage to an attack or something. But I still think there's lessons to be learned, especially in making sure everything's as visually represented and clear as possible. I'm imagining mousing over a weapon in the inventory, and instantly getting the changes in damage and all other stats compared to your current weapon. Same with every other item.

KSP's appeal has nothing to do with the "Pre-Release" state and more to do with the fact that the rocket simulator is just THAT fun, in its sandboxy way. It's also a totally different kind of game. Uhm, it was one example of a growing pool of "pre-release access" games. I said nothing about why Kerbal was fun, I was just pointing out that this was successful for them, and could be for project Eternity. Also, Lephys WHY would you be iffy? I mean, there are reasons I can imagine why. But what are they exactly?

If I'd ask all the developers on Project Eternity to do one thing, it would be to go and play Dota 2, and really look at how combat works and is represented in that game. It's an isometric, overhead, somewhat tactical game with RPG elements. And yet it and it's other fantastically similar kindred have a vast appeal, to the point of being the larget hardcore games in history, combined they may have as many active users as Angry Birds does (a series with over a billion downloads!). And yet they sacrifice exactly zero in terms of gameplay complexity, and have been called rather intimidating to get into. I'd say there's any number of things that Project Eternity could learn from these in terms of how combat could be built and represented. Here are my own observations: The stats are very direct. You can look at "how often do I attack, how much damage do I do, how much health do I have, how much health regen do I get?" and all of that directly on your screen at any time. The way items and stats affect these thing is also incredibly clear and direct. Want to know what "Strength" does exactly, and how much you get per level, and how much you have? Just hover your mouse over it right there on games main screen. The items descriptions are pretty much, in as clear terms as possible "This give you X bonus damage, Y health, and has Z ability." Absolutely everything from abilities to items to stats is made as easy to understand and look at as possible. There's no inventory screen, no stats screen, to understand what is what you look at it, or look at it and hover your mouse over it for half a second to see and explanation pop up. This is WONDERFUL. There's all these interconnecting things, all this complexity, and yet none of it is hidden or arcane or archaic. It's all right there as plain as can be made possible. And I'd love to see nothing less in Project Eternity. The other thing I've noted is how combat works. Everything is as visually represented as possible. That means, you get a critical hit? You see that you get one via a red amount of damage you did appearing over the enemies head. You know you just got one, you know how much damage you did, it's not hidden, it's got a visual impact. Another example is a an area of effect "slow" debuff against enemies. It's represented as an ability via a floating symbol, and an area on the ground that turns to frost. So the player knows, at all times, what the area of affect is, that it's on, and the frost effect goes onto enemies when it works, so the player know who its affecting and that it's affecting them. Just like with the stats, it's very visual, very direct, and as clear as possible as to what is going on and what is happening, and that's fantastic. No stats to look at, no things to puzzle out, it's made clear to you what happening. The other thing to note with the combat is how geometric it is. Many of the abilities in these games are centered around movement, and line of sight, and area of affect, and how far away the effect gets. There's a lot of abilities centered around trapping enemies where they are, or slowing them, or otherwise making it so they can't retreat. There's all manner of variations on area of affect size, versus a target ability, versus etc. The point of which means to take the exact position and grouping of all enemies and allies into immediate and very impactful effect. The game gets a lot of mileage out making just positioning and movement speed matter a whole lot. The other design feature of abilities is how they stack up with each other. You take, for example, and ability that grants a large "Critical hit" multiplier with a low chance FOR a critical hit. A smart player can say to themselves "hmm, alright, it then behooves me to combine that with trying to hit as fast and often as possible." While another ability might be give a critical hit chance far more often, but with a far lower multiplier. The same smart player would then say "It's now in my interest to get a large amount of base damage, to take advantage of that often occurring critical hit." Things like that appear in many abilities, as they could appear in many (abilities/feats/skills) in Project Eternity. Things that work well, but work best when correctly put together with other considerations, giving players the clear incentive to take a bit of time to really consider how they're building their character.

So, Kickstarters is a relatively new thing, and of course PE has done that. But another relatively new thing for games is Pre-Release access. Take for example, Kerbal Space Program. You can buy the game, now, and you get access to what is essentially an alpha now. The "campaign" isn't even playable yet, the parts (it's a rocket building simulator) aren't all in place, the game code isn't finished. And yet a larger portion of its publicity is coming from the fact that you can buy and play the game right away. I don't see why Project Eternity couldn't do something fairly similar. An initial proposal would be something along the lines of: Move up "early beta access" backers to an alpha build being available too them. Not feature complete, very early, probably not something you might even have fun playing all the time (lots of bugs occur during this phase, things you should be able to do but can't cause they aren't in yet, etc.) Obsidian gets early feedback on how things are going, backers get their early access, and... At a later stage, say a couple months before the game is done, but is in a fairly playable state, everyone gets access. Keeping in mind that the game ISN'T done, and is advertised heavily as such, why not? It's worked for Minecraft, and Kerbal, and a growing number of games. It means more money for development before the game is done, more publicity, and early access for everyone!

Errr... there are always options to turn off gore? Yeah. That's solved. The only thing not solved is if it would be worth it to enough fans to create such things in the first place. Someone make a poll, otherwise I'm pretty sure there's no reason to continue the argument.

Ok... here's the solution I'd like to see: Don't worry about resting spots so much. As long as you're out of battle and far enough away from danger just let people rest wherever. Don't even have random enemies spawned if you're not "safe". That didn't work in Icewind Dale 2, me and my co-op partner did it anyway, and after the enemies were killed we just rested again and repeated until at full health. It just took up time and made no functional difference in the end. What does make a functional difference is, as other games like Fallout and Dragon Age have done, permanent injuries (debuffs) that can't be healed by resting. You'll need to go spend money on healer or use items that cost money to get rid of them. Players will happily trade not reloading to just use items, because they know they'll be able to get more. It's not as punishing as trading an item to rest at all, its easier to square lore wise. But it's still a tradeoff, because those items are essentially money that could be used on other things. You're still making the tradeoff of having taken too much damage having consequences, but you're not frustrating players or having them try to cheat around the game by (usually) getting them into a situation where they can't advance because they've no "item X" available and no health, at which point they'll just backtrack the entire way, spend and hour to get that money and items, just to come back to doing what they're really after (frustrating) or they'll just reload a bunch of times, or they'll quit.

To add to this, The reduced/increased fog of war vision during night/day is actually done in DOTA 2, which looks and would work very much like Project Eternity in terms of fog of war distance, camera placement, etc. I've played 230 hours of this game and only noticed it yesterday. I might not have ever noticed if the very concept weren't brought up in this thread. It's definitely there too, it's not like it isn't a decently sizable change. But it's impact is so utterly little, even on such an intensely competitive game, that you barely notice it. I know it sounds sort of cool in concept, but this is nigh as close as possible of an actual game doing exactly what's proposed that's already out, and its effect is almost nothing.

Spawning different NPC's with a few routine animations, each depending on the time of day, would definitely be nice. BG2 did it well. From advice I remember from Ubisoft and the Assassin's Creed guys (who should have more experience with this than anyone save the GTA guys) it's not so much important for specific AI "routines" and individuals, at least if you can't follow them around. Instead it's better to just have them doing some 30 second animation and different NPCs wandering around during different times.

Fable 2 is one of my top five games of all time! I think enjoyment of it really depended on how you wanted to play it. If you were just going through the quests like any other RPG, straight to the finish, I can see it not being great. If you wandered around, finding all the things you could do, buying all the houses, collecting all the dyes and clothes and etc. Making sure to get all the treasure, getting a spouse and kids, then it was absolutely wonderful. But yes, they sorta screwed up the fame thing, automatically making you famous no matter what you did. And the zombie hordes of NPC's that loved you were hilarious. They'd follow you into your house while you were drunk and trying to sleep with some random NPC, and just stand there right next to the bed.

They do two different things, or at least PhysX is often used for shiny FX while bullet doesn't have any of that built in (so far as I know). Regardless there are some things that could be done with how the game is set up technically. I could see collision being done, fairly cheaply even. There are issues with missing info, right now unless you can "See it" on the screen, the game doesn't know that anything's there. Things might fall through an invisible hole in the ground a lot. But there are ways around that, another texture. Could flip a single 1 bit texture off some already stored one, use it only for collision, store an extra layer under that bridge or something. In fact, using "screenspace collision" is a thing in some games. You could definitely get ragdolls, use physics for cool spell effects, even have things like bouncing sparks from a fireball, or explosive stuff. It would take a bit of work, but I'd say would be worth it to get a bunch of goblins ragdolling all over the place after getting exploded by a fireball. BTW, Tress FX, c'mon you're so zoomed out from your characters anyway that it's not going to make much of a difference really.

It does sort of. I've always wondered whether you could get a separate "fame" integer, that would indicated how likely people are to know your reputation otherwise, which could be more complicated. EG a not famous "Criminal evil dude" wouldn't get nearly as much hate and attention from guards as a famous "criminal evil dude". Make fame a thing you can decide whether to have, and have consequences for that decision.

Plus your individual party members are going to adjust to the darkness at different rates, depending on where they are situated and their movement. Would you adjust it to the character with the best sight, the worst, or take an average? It's probably much easier just to track the vision effects on the individual character portraits instead of in the area panel, and easier to play that way as well. I can confirm that from a technical standpoint it's basically unworkable, or would look really really weird if you threw a hacky thing together to even try.

You COULD have darkness affect how far you see into the fog of war and/or how well your guys check for hidden stuff (traps/hidden passages/etc.) Not sure how interesting it would really be. To make it fun you'd have to come up with some actual interesting mechanic for it. It's interesting in Dragon's Dogma because you suddenly miss a lot of stuff in the night, and the game looks dramatically different in the night, so instead of just going "oh there's a chest" or "it's this way!" During the day, everything is very black, so you need to find your way in the dark. The map can suck, so finding your way through a complex place, that would be easy during the day "oh, this way goes up this cliff that has no way down" becomes getting lost in the dark at night. Not sure that's going to translate too PE though, with it's overhead view, the way places are designed, a probably far more reliabel map, and the fact that unlike a third person game your vision is already restricted to very close to you much of the time anyway (I assume). I can just picture going through a place at night and maybe being more frustrated than interested. But maybe it would work out differently. It might work if the fog of war vision is farther than most games during the day by a nice amount, but quite a bit shorter than most during the night. Like you might walk into an ambush at night that you'd have seen from far away during the day.

I liked Aeries, always had her in my party Oh, I hate gruff, rough, amoral characters that suddenly turn out to be sympathetic generic do gooders. Roland from King's the Dark Tower (he was so friggen COOL in the first book!) Or Michael Sullivan's Riyria series. Way to go from badass thieves that can at least semi legitimately joke about selling a girl into slavery to a pair of shining white generi-knights. Ugh. The "transformation" of almost any character from interesting and unique to generi-hero #1114339 would probably be awfully boring. Fortunately I doubt with Avellone that's not likely. What is likely though is some inhamanly odd character from a David Lynch movie . Like his stories sometimes but man, most of the time his characters can often go off into nutter land and not in an entertaining way ala Jack Sparrow/Tyler Durden/Etc.

If you want... What you're seeing is a fixed view of a sort of 3d representation of the scene. They've stored not just all the colors of what you're seeing, like a picture, but all the information from that view that a 3d game would have. The "depth" or how far away everything is from the camera, the color of the textures (albedo), the "normal" or rather direction each pixel is facing, a texture that controls how rough/shiny something is (gloss/spec/whatever map) etc. It's all stored in a texture (rather textureS), so it's still 2d and easy to run and can't be moved around really. But you can still do much the same things, such as changing around the lighting, as you could with any 3d game. Heck the lighting direction could be changed, from the sun too, but not the shadows from static stuff. Not that it couldn't work, I can think of a hack to make it work fine, but it would still up the requirements and require development time that could be spent on other stuff. Hope that helps! I'm not sure how technical to get since this is a public forum and I hope I explained it enough for most anyone reading : /

Ok, I lied. A shadow map caching: http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com/2008/12/cached-shadow-maps.html like scheme should work well for point lights casting dynamic shadows. Since the scene representation is just a g-buffer you'll have to stick with statically placed lights casting shadows, but it should work well enough, and you're only doing reading out character depths anyway. Oh, and why isn't the water reflective? Yeah, you'd need some sort of really basic skydome. Doesn't Unity come with something easily doable? You just store the flipped camera perspective in the same manner as the background, and done! With a real camera perspective for dynamic stuff obviously. Downrezed, or full rez for high end machines, because why not? You can even do the same trick for reflective floors. Smooth tiled stuff, ice, marble, whatever. To get a rougher looking reflective floor you can generate mip-maps of the reflection texture and select the right mip-map that corresponds to the roughness. EG http://bit.ly/12Km59C Though a marble floor WOULD look good with screenspace subsurface scattering as well: http://www.iryoku.com/screen-space-subsurface-scattering . As would fur on animals, plant material (leaves/grass) and etc. Maybe all that stuff would be too small on screen to have much of an impact though. Lastly, soft particles! That's being done right? I didn't see any clipping in the waterfall stuff. Yay soft particles! And lit particles, including shadows, but I digress.

Oh, and guys, expect the shadows from everything to cast onto characters, and tree shadows moving and etc. shouldn't be hard. It's all just stored in a 2d texture like the background is. Contact hardening shadows! You've got them stored, the evaluation shoudn't be hard, there's well documented stuff from Microsoft and Crytek and etc. Also, the dynamic shadows from point lights... huh. Uhhh, per object shadow maps, store the areas to be shadowed in the background in a separate channel... anyway, I'm shutting up now, for good, I mean it this time.

Cloud shadows! Duh, an easy hack. Scroll a cloud texture along your sun/moonlight shadow map channel and you're done. Good for altering weather. Speaking of which, assuming the trees and grass (and banners and such) are stored in separate textutures from the main background right? Just to alter their animation timing for it to get more/less windy. Also, god rays! Everyone likes godrays. Just remember to have their color be based on primary sun/moonlight color, because I remember playing a (fairly recent?) game that didn't do that right and it was just "c'mon!". Too many ideas, I know. Basic atmospheric scattering for altering fog in areas? Ok I'll shut up now.

Keep trying to think about it... and there's just too much hackiness in getting shadows changing position to work. Would still love to see them animated, seems easy enough. I'm also not sure how well an HDR implementation would work with such a static view. I mean even with dynamic light... just storing luminance in a bigger range and blooming based on that will probably be enough. Still, other ideas always come to mind. Screen space chromatic dispersion? Should be easy enough, you've got depth and everything, so why not? Good for water and fireballs and such.I assume z-map is going on, so SSAO would be welcome, and Unity has it built in, so that rocks. The main thing that could be done is Unity's lightprobes to work with the day/night transition so you could get lightbounce onto characters.... use the probes to store only raw texture albedo from areas hit directly by directional light, then alter the directional light and the probes output by the same color! You could also store the access to the sky dome in the probes, and in a texture channel for the background, and have the artists change the sky color at will, you'd get the same sky color done accurately on dynamic objects and the background at little cost. The only other things I can think of aren't universal, but neat. I'd always go for more universal stuff first, such as SSAO and using the probes for global illumination, as they apply to every scene equally and you get the most bang for your time. But still, it's neat stuff to do. EG a wet shader for when it's raining: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B2iEzxzGlkkZWXNrOURDcFJXbzg&usp=sharing . Fog particles and etc. drifting along, snow textures applied for dynamic snow/lighting. Anyway, looks great now regardless! As for particle lighting, energy preserving wrapped diffuse: http://blog.stevemcauley.com/2011/12/03/energy-conserving-wrapped-diffuse/ . Could be useful for this and other particles (need cool spell FX after all). Is it set up so Unity's probes automatically apply to their particles as well? Oh, and this thread has a pair of fairly easy area light hacks: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/640573-area-lights-forward-and-deferred/ Can't imagine what the big plane area light would be used for in a medievalish fantasy game, but the spherical area light hack http://imdoingitwrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/light-attenuation/ is really easy and simple, and could be used for campfires and spells and, whatever else.

Very cool! Though I do have some notes, of course I do. A nice trick on selling mucky/muddy water is shadows on a water surface with shadowing dependent on depth fog. And while I see some bloom, I still say a good HDR implementation is worth it. But really, it looks very very nice, yay! Could go with... ahh it's been a while! A trick where normal maps receive shadows according to the normal map and not the geometry normal, but with the view so drawn out it wouldn't even be that noticeable. Would also love to see the shadows for everything be dynamic, you know, change primary lighting direction and all that, but the scene in question works without that. I'd say the most noticeable thing was the lack of proper lighting on the particles near the waterfall really. Not sure what was going on there. Great work though!

I would... love to see this! Make money from the pirates. You are never, ever going to stop pirates in the end. There are private MMO servers for pirates for carps sake. There has never, ever been a DRM that somebody hasn't cracked yet. You could run games only on the cloud and never give anyone the actual data and some bored hacker would figure out a way to pirate it eventually. Might as try to have them give you money if you can.