Jajo

Pre-rendered 2D has always been what they were aiming for in P:E. This is made by creating an area as a 3D model, render it from the desired perspective and then place it as a 2D background. IE games were made with the same process and decision to go 2D pre-rendered has been made clear during the kickstarter campaign. The thing about 3D is, it has a very wide spectrum of final look. This, unfortunately, greatly depends on the amount of resources and effort spent on the engine. 2D has a performance advantaga over 3D, because with pre-rendered backgrounds one does not have to worry about frame rate of the area model. With 3D, compromises have to be made between performace and richness of visual effects. Another advantage of 2D is also, that an artist can ammend the results of rendering engine on a scale of individual pixels. Such ammends are always easily done on a 2D image, but can be quite hard to do with real-time 3D effects. So, if 3D can look the same (or better) than what we've seen in this update, it doesn't mean, that it will come at the same cost. Going 2D can add extra work overall, but there are also considerable advantages to it.

Made my day. For me, this will make exploring in the game its own reward. If the shadows would have been moving with the sun, I'd declare it fake. Since the vertical slice has been made (to my knowledge), will we be seeing some game mechanics soon? I'm really interested in seeing the implied environment-aware decision screens in action. And not to mention flails.

On of the best updates ever. I'm now even more excited about this game. Heavy armour concept art is perfect.

YES!! this was a key reference image that I used. Again this drawing was exploratory, to contribute to the conversation of architectural style. It's not necessarily going to be in the game. There are others, and they are all color, but i didn't post them yet. Can you post the buildings location in Google maps?? Are there other buildings in your town like this, because yes! we do like Romanesque. I don't know the exact location of this particular building, but it's in Poreč, istrian peninsula in Croatia. Istira is full of such limestone houses. Full. Numerous costal towns there have old, well preserved and sometimes UNESCO protected town cores that are just beautiful like that.

These are some strange analogies, but ok. If i get this correctly, the reason behind players (shed visitors) aking for save scumming option to be removed is actually consideration towards developers (shed proprietors), who will supposedly mournfully look at the door while some people are climbing through the (quantum?) window, because the lock is sometimes stubborn and it's just easier and less frustrating to go through the (quantum??) window to enjoy the awesome shed that they've built. One I find much easier to understand is this: Should table tennis ball manufacturers cover their balls with laxatives to prevent people from playing beer pong? I'd also like to see some developer quotes supporting your claims of what is or what is not intentional. Save scumming is not a well guarded dirty little secret. It's as old as the games themselves and I'm sure that developers are well aware of it. Claiming that something so well known is not in the game by chioce is naive or intentinally misleading. The purpose of the delay is to delay the reload. The purpose of the minigame is to alleviate the frustration with the delay. I'm against them anyway, since I'm against this limiting players on the whole.

Roll seed locking negatively affects playstyle of some players and does not affect play style of other players. On average it affects play styles negatively. Is this then a good idea (please, don't answer this, it's a rhetorical question and I've read enough condescending and patronizing posts for today)? You started a discussion about a solution to a particular problem. How is discussing, whether the proposed solution is an even bigger problem, not on topic? For a solution to a problem, there first has to be a problem. What you're proposing is a solution for something, that is not self-evidently a problem. You're saying, that you want to understand the other side of the argument (It's simple - it's allowing people to play how they want), yet you don't provide your side of the argument at all. Why are you bothered about how other people are playing a single player game? Why even propose solutions for problems that do not affect you at all, but you know will affect some other people negatively?

This is the most important point in this thread. Simple pathfinding failures are easily solved by brute force : modern CPUs can do path refreshes much more frequently and effectively have no path length limit. Making the party move realisically requires algorithmic changes; using actual motion control / formation logic and treating character motion as a joint optimisation problem, instead of just individual A* on each character. I would have thought, that characters actually finding the path would have unquestionably been more important. I would also deem algorithms not taking a few seconds to determine the path to be more important than characters stepping out of the line. But that really is a personal preference from playing some of the old isometric RPGs in the last couple of months. Also, do not think, that old problems will go away by themselves just from brute forcing with younger CPUs. If you do, try to play some of the old games on a contemporary machine. Yes, they can increase the number of search nodes, but what's the point, if it takes a few seconds for the path to be calculated even now? Algorithmic changes are indeed in order, but they should not be done just (or mainly) to support formations.

If we knew the answer, would we play RPGs? Yes. Next question, please.

Oh, yes. I'm playing ToEE and I've been very surprised at how much the awful pathfinding is ruining the game for me. I unintentinally allow myself to be vexed by it to a point of resignation or quitting. But what can one do, when clicking one screen away often results in only 40% of the party finding it's way there.

NPCs will be 3D models. You want them to render 2D portraits of 3D models, so that they can then simulate them being 3D? I'm asking, because this makes no sense to me at all. BTW, this technology works well for cartoons, because most of the pixels in one area are of the same color, so pixel stretching is not visible. On a more detailed picture, it would look really bad.

Just to play devil's advocate...here, I'll give you one: [bluff] Don't make me whip out mah piece and pop a cap. (Don't have a piece) [intimidate] Don't make me whip out mah piece and pop a cap. (Has a piece, and might do it.) Now, I understand your perspective, and that is: Both of these are intimidating statements. However, many times, a bluff is intimidating. A bluff is deceit backed by the fear that what you're saying is true. Think of poker. If you "Bluff", you're working on your opponent's fear that you're not bluffing, and are, in fact, betting because you have a hand. Same deal with the above phrase. Just because a bluff provokes fear doesn't make it no longer a bluff. The defining attribute isn't the emotion the statement provokes or the method of delivery. It is simply the intent behind it. An effective bluff SHOULD sound exactly the same as a legitimate threat. That's what makes a bluff effective. These are not the same lines. The brackets at the end are different and crucial in this case. Even if you were bluffing by pulling out a fake gun or one loaded with blanks, this then wouldn't be a bluff check anymore. I'd say that a gun in hand gives a pretty good bonus to intimidate. If the engine is capable to display this without needed bracket then excellent! But then we're back to being able to discern the meaning from context, which is one of the main arguing points for [intimidate] & [bluff] tags being unneccesary. IE engine certainly wasn't capable of doing it. Threatening someone without any intention of carrying out the threat is also a bluff, but it's also intimidation. So what is then the difference between the two? You say, that the method of delivery is not is not the defining attribute, but I don't agree. It is THE defining attribute. It is the difference between letting people frighten themselves and people being frightened of you.

Yeah. Let's not try to find every possible situational meaning of every word in the thesaurus (source, btw?) and stick to most common contemporary uses, because otherwise everything is lost and meaningless. And what yu've said is a logical fallacy. Intimidating and bluffing being able to achieve the same end effect IS NOT any reason, why the same line of text can be used for both. The above is some hand waving, if I've ever seen one. Please, provide an example, where the same sentence, word for word, will achieve the same effect by either: - bluffing = deceiving someone into doing something. - intimidating = frighten someone into doing the same thing. I've been thinking about it for some time, but have yet come up with a believable example. EDIT: COMIC SAAAAANNNNSS!!!

Of course you can, but does it make sense to have ~30 talent "bushes" and "saplings" just so that you can say that tecnhincally you have talent trees? I'm agains deep and restrictive talent trees. Cherry picking from a big basket of talents (limited by prerequisites) offers much greater customization and that's what makes a single player game attractive to run again and again and again...

7.5? I'll try harder next time. Please, don't.

Because it's either RPGs or the OS, right? And by PRGs you mean RPGs of these days. Fortunately, P:E is not trying to capture the feeling of RPGs of these days. Because, I want RPGs to be more challenging. I want intelligent battles, not awesomebutton or duck shoot cover mechanics. I don't want hand holding or safety nets against failures; If you go to a bad place inexperienced or unprepared, you should die. Every time. On topic; Toggleable sounds good to me. I just hope the writers will make sure, that we'll be able to discern the intent from the text and context.

Asking for controller support in P:E is not asking for convenience, since it would be a nightmare to control this type of game with it. Get a cheap wireless mouse and keyboard. It will do more good for you, since your spectrum of games will then not be limited to only titles that support controllers. You may then even pick up some infinity engine games, you know, the ones P:E is trying to imitate.

I mean absolutely no offense, but if You're scared by virtual spiders so much, that You can't play a game, You should seek help from other professionals, not game developers. I wouldn't want to restrict developer's creativity based on anyone's phobias - Your or mine. After all, where do we stop then? I don't mind animal encounters, if they're done with some credibility (bears attacking when feeling threatened, wolf packs attacking when really really hungry, ...). I would like to see more variety in encounters that serve to present an environment as a dangerous wilderness, but I'm hard pressed to think of any significant animal threat, which's use doesn't border on cliche. Bison stampede perhaps? I do agree, however, that some fantastically enlarged animals have been overused (rats and spiders being the main offenders). Mainly because the parallel evlotution seems to always have effect just on them. Why no giant wasps, beavers, squrels, ...? F*** rats, I want carnivorous capybara mammoths!