Rokku

Regarding combat mechanics I wish there was some form of "Combat Mode" which activates when enemies turn agro or you land first hit. In this mode the game slows down to a more deliberate pace allowing time to assess troop positioning and gives a chance to use active skills. When combat is finished "Combat Mode" ends and the game pace goes back to explore mode. To be honest best option would be turn based like D: OS or Wasteland 2 but I also like RTWP so trying to figure out how to allow players time to take deliberate actions without a mad scrum of auto attacks or rapid pausing all the time.

Since combat doesn't give XP I believe instead it should tie on closer with the cycopedia and unlock buffs/benefits from enemies. E.g. After killing X number of wood beetles you now have a 5% bonus damage buff or increased chance of getting a rare crafting material/recipe from kills. This way you level up via quests but combat still feels rewarding.

I've noticed that the item icons are way too small in the paperdoll screen and inventory/stash. For some reason the character slots are in tiny boxes around a 3d model which makes it incredibly difficult to identify what items you have or enjoy the look/feel of new loot. This also is an issue for the inventory which has a single row of slots which just looks wrong and should be more grid based as well as the stash window which is so damn tiny and doesn't take advantage of real estate available. I believe the character inventory and stash should be visible in the same window with the top half showing character items and the bottom half stash. The paperdoll should have large item icons grouped together next to the paperdoll on the left instead of around it.

Insta death done right is like the boss fight in missing link dlc for deus ex HR. Much better than the grind em down battles in the original.

I would be so sad if PE Monk's didn't have some classic quivering palm or "Five Point Palm Exploding Heart" techniques in their arsenal....

My favourite part of necromancy in D&D was spells that gave a chance to instant kill enemies. Something about that risk/reward of either doing no damage or 1 shotting a huge monster is so appealing. I'd focus all my feats on just increasing the DC of my rolls

Please explain. Given the limitations of the human visual system there is no reason not to go lossy. You simply need to make sure not to go overboard, and no one will be able to tell the difference. Even if you were unable to see a major difference with your eyes using lossy compression it becomes an issue when you start lighting special effects. This might introduce artefacts that you can see...

Ohh I didn't know that my mistake. Yeah in that case its sounds pretty good I just wander what the compression ratio would be for PE style images.

The whole reason this has been raised as an issue is because of how distinct and unique the released image was. Tiling or fractal compression just doesn't make sense for hand crafted non repeating imagery. Sure maybe a rock here or a tree there but such props are only a minor component of most scenes and might result in single digit compression improvements.

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Cool I look forward to seeing what you come up with

Yeah I think the slide show style of fallout is a great approach that won't take too much time to implement. Just seeing how the various towns and people you meet are impacted by your decisions along the way would be great to see. You wouldn't want them to do too much dynamic in-game story variations and multiple end scenes as this would be another time consuming task to add over all the rest. I did like how NWN allowed you to kill the end boss multiple ways like just saying their secret name and force suicide as a nice way to mix things up based on what you did earlier.

I think the difference here is that if they are going for super high res unique backgrounds for every area of the game then the file size can't be compared to most other games. If you look at your typical FPS, even the latest ones like crysis, they are all made up of prebuilt assets and textures that are duplicated all over the place. This drastically reduces the size of the game as every tree is the same tree, every brick wall is the same texture, etc. Now if you think about PE then you realise that every screen will be a giant pre-rendered scene that is not a duplicate of another texture that can be reused and combine it with 2560x1440 resolution then the file size will be way more then most games out there. Now RAGE is the only other game I know that also uses alot unique textures of the most part but you still see duplicate doors, building walls, ground textures etc. The "unique" part of RAGE is that they can stamp additional details over the base texture to make it more unique, not the whole texture. But still RAGE is the closest so thats why I linked the texture tech they use earlier as it might be worth considering by Obsidian if they haven't already.

I found a video where google is talking about how games should do texture compression in the future. This was used in RAGE engine so its quite advanced. http://www.webpronews.com/google-talks-texture-compression-for-games-at-gdc-2012-03

In the latest update Josh mentioned issues with having high resolution maps in a game this size. Something like BG at 1080p would take multiple blu-ray's of capacity which is crazy. Now considering how PE is going to be 2560x1440 instead of 1920 x 1080 with hand crafted and pre-rendered maps resulting in pretty much unique textures most of the time it'll be even harder to manage. About the only thing they can do is find the best lossless texture compression tools available and see how much space they can save. Maybe something like openEXR can help (www.openEXR.com) I've heard they are an excellent lossless compression used by Industrial Light and Magic and is also supported by nvidia Cg. I think since the game wouldn't be too graphically demanding I think they are better off using CPU/GPU power doing compression/decompression streaming of high quality textures to both reduce the data size while staying high resolution.