centurionofprix

That isn't cheating. TTO and Trias are different kinds of being from the Nameless One. The argument as it relates to NWN2 is about teleportation spells, which aren't abilities exclusively possessed by Jerro, and the way teleportation is used to decide crucial events in the plot while the player for some reason cannot use it (or use the other spells named above to prevent it). Or even attempt to use it. The writing in these scenes doesn't make sense at all, while TTO's shadows certainly do.

Sorry, I misremembered. In any case, many of the left-aligned UIs do prevent the eleven-to-five direction by having the quick buttons below the portraits rather than to the right of the screen, and avoid leaving a great deal of distance between the buttons and right-aligned portraits, as well as the aesthetic problem of only covering part of the bottom of the screen. The latter problem seems to be present in Sawyer's suggestion of a right-aligned vertical bar with log box on the bottom.

Sawyer also said he wants the quick buttons close to the portraits while avoiding the (apparently) uncomfortable mouse movement of two to five o'clock. And I think he wanted the dialogue box on the right side for readablity. Portraits on the left seems to fulfill these criteria while distributing some of the wide bottom bar in a vertical way so as not to ruin visibility in the twelve-six direction in the already narrow widescreen viewport.

That looks good; it's the best take on the floating interface IMO. If they should go with that style, I'd like to see it done like yours. Still, part of the bottom of the map is always obscured, whereas with a solid UI, (I imagine) the bottom bar can be made to extend over the edge of the map. Not really. A few asides, first... LoL and Dota are not strategy RPG's. They are Moba games, which is a dumb name for Multiplayer Action Game. They are designed to be fast and brutal, not slow and tactical. True, but isn't seeing more of the map at a glance even more important given the fast pace of these games? You have time to look around in P:E. I ninja edited Starcraft 2 into the post; it also has a (gigantic) solid UI, and it's a purely strategy game, without even a pause function. Crucially, the professional reviewers didn't tear these UIs apart, or that of the slow and tactical Armored Princess, as you suggested they would with P:E. Does this mean competitive players, or the professional reviewers to whom you alluded earlier, or now merely the few who happen to agree with your design sensibilities?

True. I think the IE interface was that way for many of us here. Remarkably easy to use, as well as aesthetic. I've never liked floating UIs or found them more effective, personally. Most of the people who funded the game disagree. The solid UI isn't bad by their preferences. The Enemy Unkown interface looks ugly and tasteless to me. The HP floaters would detract from the aesthetics even more in PE than in EU. All that information is readily available in classic IE-style interfaces as well. Incidentally, the gamebanshee review, which probably is more representative of the sensibilities of PE fans than is the mainstream gaming press, noted the lack of customizable quick buttons: http://www.gamebanshee.com/reviews/109853-xcom-enemy-unknown-review/page-5.html King's Bounty: Armored Princess was another recently well-received tactical game with a solid UI, and I haven't seen anyone complain about the interface. Googling it, even competitive games like the Starcraft, LoL and DotA sequels optimized for multiplayer efficiency still rock the solid look: It seems to me you're framing an idiosyncratic preference in universal terms here.

Perhaps, but isn't that a legitimate reason as well?

http://www.templ.net/pics-weapons/143-sword/143-hilt2-v.jpg http://www.templ.net/pics-weapons/143-sword/143-hilt-v.jpg http://www.templ.net/pics-weapons/143-sword/143-main-v.jpg Oh man. Thanks for pointing him out. That stuff is outrageous! Here's a later design I think would fit P:E. The schiavona:

nonononono. no. Aside from ruining the tactical gameplay, these solutions tend to hurt "immersion" as well by blending obviously 'game' elements with the setting/in-character aspect. But perhaps health/stamina could be visible as floating numbers above the characters and in a corner of the screen at the stroke of a button (TAB for example) if one chose to play with the UI disabled.

...

Yeah. I tried to find a picture of an original piece with the pattern welding still visible. Bit tricky as it happens. The hilt inlays were too gorgeous not to post, however, so you have to imagine the combination of the pattern welded blade with the hilt. AFAIK the steel wasn't special aside from its purity and the terrific craftsmanship of the weapons themselves.

If you really think that weapon that can easily cut off a leg - the body part where the strongest bones in the human body are located- can't cut or damage a wooden shaft twice the thickness of your thumb......then you really have no clue about the density and strength of wood. Perhaps you are underestimating the toughness of wood. One can't really draw a cut on a polearm like one does on flesh, either. The steel langets with which many polearm shafts were reinforced are also apt to mangle a sword that insists on bashing them. Still, the crucial thing is that a competent person with a polearm will not simply hold the weapon there to be struck, but manouver around one's attack (to go under and around an overhead blow aimed at the weapon is a trifle) and take the opportunity to stick one from the comfort of distance while one is trying to chase their weapon. A beat to push the polearm aside is possible, though still very difficult against a vigilant opponent with backwards and lateral movement at his disposal. Landing a full blow is a still different thing. In terms of "blunt" impact, which you mentioned as another cause of breakage in the part to which I was replying. Several discuss fighting against polearms with swords, but I haven't seen any that depict cutting polearms as a viable tactic. Off the top of my head, Silver talks about it, and gives a considerable advantage to a long quarterstaff/bill without mentioning cutting or breaking. Fiore and Gladiatoria have some plates on sword against spear, but no cutting or breaking the polearm with the sword is depicted AFAIK. If destroying the polearm was a potentially effective tactic, one would imagine it to be mentioned (unless you have an example?). Assuming the change in inertia is great enough, not caused by the presence of metal langets, and the person holds the polearm in place for a full blow to hit it in the first place. Generating a lot of cutting power with a six foot sword in a tightly packed pike formation seems like a tricky proposal. Hacking attacks with the Katzbalger would (intuitively, FWIW) seem more suited to the task of cutting (requiring a fast movement) rather than pushing aside the pikes if that indeed was the Doppelsöldner's task. Since they chose to use the two-handed sword in that tightly packed situation, while presumably not beheading their own soldiers, not getting their swords tangled up in the pikes, and not getting skewered by the several ranks of pikemen on the other side, I imagine their job was slightly different from dealing full blows against the pikes - perhaps knocking/pushing the pikes around with the hooks on the ricasso, or attacking the flank of the pike formation where there is space for the full blows of the two-hander, or guarding the ensign as DiGrassi is quoted as writing in one of the discussions linked earlier.

In a single-player game which the players aren't necessarily approaching from a multiplayer-optimized setup, having buttons as well as keyboard shortcuts for the menus doesn't hurt. With LoL or such, it can be assumed one will use the keyboard for a competitive edge, but in a slower-paced tactical single player game, having the option is alright. Sometimes one lounges about in a comfortable position and can't reach the keyboard, or due to some other similar scenario prefers to have buttons on the UI. I personally like having buttons readily available IE-style rather than opening up in menus, and, going by the poll in the technical forum, most posters here have the same preference, Making the entire UI disappear at a keystroke would be neat, however, as well as the option to use quick-keys extensively rather than UI buttons for those who like it. Perhaps the entire game could be playable with the GUI hidden by using quick-keys for actions, TAB to show floating HP/stamina information and so forth.

Most of the time one comes to remember the characters' stats, so the bars become informative. I do hope that PE will show each character's HP/stamina in floating numbers at a keystroke, however (TAB for example). A slightly more refined version of the above mock-up, since I can't edit the post anymore. Sorry to spam the image.

A left-aligned vertical bar. There's still distance between the topmost portraits and the action buttons, but the viewport has a bit more space in the north-south direction. (The photoshopping is atrocious.) ALL CAPS: I'D LOVE TO SEE THE DIALOGUE/COMBAT LOG FREELY EXPANDABLE AS HIGH AS THE PLAYER LIKES.

What about having portraits and the menu buttons in a left side vertical bar, action buttons left bottom corner, and the log bottom right? Space a plenty for quick buttons, and one wouldn't have to go from one edge of the screen to the other to reach the portraits/action buttons.

Many of the proposed mock-ups (other than Sensuki's) use more screen real-estate than the original. In different ways, though. The widescreen view with a thick horizontal bar becomes very narrow in the north-south direction. It seems, intuitively, that this would affect visibility while exploring, even if it takes less screen space in absolute measurements.

Folding/pattern welding does have the advantage of spreading any impurities evenly across the blade when working with inconsistent steel, as the Japanese and early middle ages Europeans did. Incidentally, smiths from both cultures also developed means of combinging the beneficial qualities of hard but brittle and soft but resilient steels, the Japanese through differential heat treating and the Europeans by welding harder edges onto a softer spine. It's a good look on Viking swords: (I've seen it speculated that wootz actually has the advantage of microserrations naturally forming along the edge of the blade, making it (theoretically) better at cutting light targets than ordinary steel. Whether this is true, and whether it would make any practical difference with weapons so outrageously good at carving up flesh to begin with, I don't know.) At the same time, it turns out that some surviving historical pieces compare favourably to the best of modern reproductions, if not in terms of metallurgy, then in the qualities of handling, thinness and construction. There is a mystique to the historical process yet.

Our armors do have sex-based variants because we want people to be able to tell female characters from male characters. IRL, such armors are almost never shaped significantly differently, just sized and proportioned differently. Even our most cutting edge contemporary female body armor outwardly doesn't look much different from the male versions. In PE, they will be shaped differently to help the silhouettes read differently. Cadegund's concept reflects this as does the godlike concept Polina developed. It almost assuredly is not what an armorer would do IRL, but it helps distinguish the characters. It's the same reason why we marginally increased the size of war hammer heads. At the realistic size and proportions, they don't clearly read as war hammers, so a small amount of exaggeration was required. BUT HOW WILL YOU TELL FEMALE CHARACTERS APART FROM EACH OTHER BRO

Hope so. I like the vertical bars in curryinahurry's version -a lot of space for quick buttons etc. in the horizontal bar- but the floating menus I'd prefer not to have in P:E. fwiw

I like the general aesthetic a lot, but perhaps the portraits could be moved to a vertical bar on the right, BG-style. The widescreen resolution seems to beg for it (and gets very narrow because of the horizontal bar). This would also release space for more action/item quick buttons on the bottom horizontal bar. The bone and obsidian idea above is very cool as well, if it could be done tastefully.

True, but properly seasoned wood is tougher than greenwood. You're TOTALLY underestimating mass inertia. I don't even know what "mass inertia" is! In any case, it doesn't prevent an axe from being used to fell an entire tree, for example. Again, the axe example isn't quite equivalent to combat polearms, but since it was brought up, I imagine repeated full blows to a (near) dead stop against a tree to be more strenuous in terms of impact than anything encountered in a fight. Cutting flesh and living bone is a completely different enterprise from cutting seasoned wood. More so with seasoned wood in the hands of someone who is trying to skewer/whack you with it and not to allow their weapon to get knocked around. A number of treatises on fencing with swords and polearms, written when the weapons were still used in combat, survive to this day. Many discuss fighting against polearms with swords, but I don't think there is one that presents cutting the polearm as a viable tactic. If the considerable difficulty of fighting polearms would be so easily solved, or even potentially solved in this manner, one would expect them to mention it. The precise role of the Doppelsöldner with two-handed sword in fighting pikemen is debated (see the links below - there are even some experiments). If the aim was to cut the pikes, why do you reckon they used big zweihänders in the thick of the combat between tightly packed pike lines? A weapon more manouverable and able to pick up speed in small spaces (like the Katzbalger they also carried, incidentally) would be better for hacking at pike shafts, and would even allow them to wield shields or bucklers for protection from the pikes. That they broke the lines of pikemen rather than the actual pikes seems more plausible, and suggests some interesting uses for those hooks they put in front of the ricasso on Zweihänders and not on other swords. http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=16442&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 http://www.swordforum.com/forums/showthread.php?29225-Zweihander Breaking pikes (if it be possible) is a bit of an exception anyway in comparison to other polearms, because they were very long and often also tapered towards the point to make them more wieldy. It doesn't follow that you can break an eight foot quarterstaff or bill if you can break a twenty-foot pike when its wielder is stuck in place in formation. To make the experiment more enlightening, give the staff to someone who knows how to use it and have him manouver around your blow and whack you upside the head every time you try. Edit: Cunty sniping aside, as Jarmo writes, you really should go for it if you do get your hands on some seasoned ash or such, and don't mind potentially ruining your sword. But you ought to do the other experiment as well, and see how readily you can make full blows against someone holding the polearm in a combat posture, and especially one who sticks you with the weapon when you're busy trying to knock it around. The movement to go under and around an overhead blow aimed at the weapon is very small.

The type of wood matters, as does the fact that wood (like bone) is much easier to cut when it's alive. The crucial thing, however, is that while a tree will politely wait to be cut down, one will be slain very quickly by a competent fighter with a polearm if one tries to fight his weapon. He'll evade the attempt and stick one without ever being threatened himself. (As for whether it would be easier with a great sword - would it, actually? A machete has a lot of weight behind the cutting surface. A sword is usually much lighter in the blade towards the point. I'm not sure of the physics of it, but the machete might even have the advantage at cutting small trees - it's all equally hopeless against actual polearms though.) This happens, but it's because the heavy head carries a great deal of momentum while the rest of the axe is very suddenly stopped against the completely unyielding surface of the log at a single point along the shaft. The physical event of another weapon hitting the shaft of the axe when there is some give to both weapons and when the angle of the impact isn't perfectly perpendicular (which it won't be unless the other combatant co-operates to bash his weapon together with yours at the ideal angle for some reason...) simply isn't the same; the brief moment when the head of the axe wants to keep going with all its momentum while the rest of the weapon comes to a sudden dead stop, and the sudden force this exerts on the shaft, just don't occur. (this description of the physics of the thing is NOT scientific, as you may have gathered, but I hope the point makes sense) You also do not wield a weapon with a shaft three times longer and a head 50% heavier with overhead swings, holding it by the furthest point of the shaft. No frickin way mahn. A two-handed sword weighs two and a half to six pounds, or a little more for the very large ones, and most of that weight is not near the point. It will not break a decent polearm in this fashion - more likely that the sword itself would be damaged (assuming that the person with the polearm would allow this scenario to happen in the first place).

I don't think Sawyer is talking about the number of quests in general, rather than the fact that they were all concentrated in Athkatla. The city overflows with things to do whle the approach to other areas is more linear. Chapter 2 does kind of work nonetheless, imo, because of the idea of raising money to follow Irenicus; you're still working for a sensible goal as you roam the land looking for things to do. It's not the greatest plot, but it does the job. The money is raised rather too easily though. I want to disagree about this idea; you would still have to remember which NPCs were going to offer you quests, and morevoer, you would have to go back to get those quests when you were done with your current ones. It would be an artificial and frustrating restriction, as well as requiring mind reading from the NPCs to work in character.

I'm having MCA plays Arcanum withdrawal.