CatatonicMan

[Description of the issue] When in a merchant menu, accessing another UI overlay (character sheet, inventory) causes a rather awful looking mishmash. [steps to Reproduce] Get any character. Go to a store or shop and open the buy/sell UI overlay. Open a different overlay (inventory, character sheet) by hotkey. Witness the horribleness. [Expected Behaviour] Either one overlay should dominate the other, or user overlays should be inaccessible during a purchase. [Other Remarks / Comments]

I was fiddling around with intelligence and how it affects AoE size, and I came up with some suggestions that would make them generally better. 1 - Spell casting range All spells - AoE included - have a casting range, but that range is never displayed in the game world when casting. It would be beneficial to have a visual indicator if you can cast a spell from where you currently are, or of where you will have to move to cast a spell on a location. 2 - Adjustable AoE One of the benefits of intelligence is increased area of effect. It turns out that this can be a rather big problem at higher levels. Here's an image: This is a 20 Int wizard casting Dazzling Lights. The wizard is at his maximum casting range for the spell, which just so happens to be in the area of effect of the spell. Casting this spell will cause the wizard to dazzle himself. Needless to say, this is rather undesirable. On top of this, the huge AoE of some spells at high intelligence will tend to make them difficult to use in constrained spaces without, say, torching your buddies. As long as friendly fire is enabled (and it should stay enabled, personally), the player needs a way to have high intelligence without it ending up being detrimental. Making the AoE spells have a reducible range would help quite a bit. If this would unbalance spells from a tactical standpoint, then it might be enough to allow the player to cast spells at an effectively reduced intelligence (i,e., keep AoE and duration coupled).

[Description of the issue] When right clicking on a user portrait to get to the character screen, the click is also registered as a world action. [steps to Reproduce] Load default settings, create a character, start the game. Place the UI such that a character portrait is over something that would react to a click. Right click on the portrait. Observe that the character performs an action alongside the UI opening up the character screen. [Expected Behaviour] Portraits should not allow a right click to fall through to the world. [Other Remarks / Comments] Only appears to be a problem with the character portraits and right click. Other UI elements work as expected.

I don't think culture/race needs to have anything more than minor attribute bonuses, but that assumes that the story will take care of the rest. If you're a death godlike, I expect the game world to treat you like a death godlike.

[Description of the issue] By double clicking on an item to unequip it will cause it to be duplicated instead. The attached image demonstrates this quite well: [steps to Reproduce] Start game with default settings. Create a new character. Doesn't seem to matter what kind. Open inventory, choose a character, and double click on an equipped item. The item will appear to unequip properly. Switch to another character and then switch back (or close and open the inventory and choose the character again). Notice how the unequipped item is still equipped, and is also still in the inventory. Repeat as desired, with any character and any item, for unlimited items. [Expected Behaviour] Items should unequip properly when double clicked and should not duplicate themselves. [Other Remarks / Comments] Should help combat the disappearing item bug for the moment. Unlimited spellbooks ahoy.

Ow, that hurt my English. I think the word you're looking for is "albeit", not "all be it"

I like minimaps. It'd be nice if we could get an optional one on the hud. Disregard this if there's already a minimap feature that I missed.

I've been testing the beta on my desktop, which has a large 1440p monitor. This is fine, but it's rather large compared to the monitors many people are using. To do some comparison testing and see how the game scaled on different display sizes, I decided to install the beta on my laptop, which only has a 768p screen. What I found was rather surprising (though it probably shouldn't have been): the game doesn't actually do any scaling on the game space. Below is an overlay of the 768p screen on the 1440p screen (the red border is not part of the smaller screen). Note that I didn't scale these at all - the overlay was pixel perfect. As a sidenote, the forum seems to be downscaling and compressing these images, so they'll be smaller than they'd normally be. Screen comparison, 768p on 1440p, fully zoomed in: Screen comparison, 768p on 1440p, fully zoomed out: This next screenshot does involve a bit of scaling. I matched the fully zoomed in 768p image with the fully zoomed out 1440p image: Finally, this screenshot shows all the levels of zoom together. The yellow is the 768p screen (zoomed in and out), and the red (and picture border) is the 1440p screen (again, zoomed in and out). Yes, the zoomed out 768p screen is smaller than the zoomed in 1440p screen with respect to field of view. The obvious consequence of this is that the higher the resolution that you play on, the further out the game appears to be. At present, the built-in zoom only covers a fraction of this resolution-based zoom. I'd like to request that the zoom levels be increased to allow for higher resolution screens to get closer to the action.

Not necessarily. For example, a lie that works in the short term might be obviously false in the long term. Also, betraying one person to another person would make a deceitful nature rather obvious to at least one of the involved parties.

The game is going to be a train wreck merely because the XP system isn't to your taste? Are you really going there?

It doesn't have to be that; that was just an example. It could be XP for exploring the area that contains the mobs, or by having the mobs be attacking a random distressed person you might be inclined to save, or having their eyeballs be part of a recipe for some important item, or a dozen other things. The important thing is that there be something that puts the mobs in a place or context where they become an obstacle to overcome on the way to a quest reward. Mobs that exist without an XP umbrella are at best ingredient dispensers.

The thing is, you don't need per-kill XP to make killing random mobs rewarding. Someone could have a need for lion pelts, for example. Returning, say, 10 lion pelts would reward you with credits and XP. That way you are rewarded for killing mobs without the need for each to vomit XP. Plus, if the bounty is a one-shot, there's no need to worry about the player over-leveling through grind.

Personally, I'm thinking the main problem isn't that XP is quest based, but that not everything falls under the umbrella of a quest. For example, consider a game structured by discrete levels. Everything/anything done in a given level would be captured in the end-of-level reward, whatever that may be. Since everything in the game is in one level or another, everything a player does in the entire game is rewarded. This transfers quite well to a single dungeon in an open world game. Deal with the evil wizard in his evil tower, and get the reward. It doesn't matter how you deal with him, which allows a player freedom to achieve their goal without worrying about getting shafted in resources. The problem we have now arises because some areas aren't covered by a quest umbrella. Wandering around on the world map or random dungeons killing dudes ends up being wasted effort because there's no quest attached to it.

Save files are located in: %appdata%\..\LocalLow\Obsidian Entertainment\Pillars of Eternity\Saves\

It's a beta. I'm not sure what everyone is getting so apoplectic about.

Technically you could do both if it was necessary. Have a unified inventory for handling the combined backpack where "who has what" doesn't matter, and a second....view mode, say, that keeps track of who is holding what.

If you drag the foreign currency into the main characters inventory, it gets converted to copper.

Right now there's a memory leak on loading saved games. If you repeatedly load saved games, the memory footprint of the game will climb. When it gets too high, the game crashes. You might have a different issue, but that's the one I've noticed.

As a side note, you can also click on the timepiece in the bottom center of the HUD to change the game speed.

NOTE: The forum prevents me from uploading a .7z file, so I have changed the extension to .bmp. If you want to look at the crash dump, change the extension back to .7z. [Description of the issue] Loading of saved games, both normal and quick, results in a memory leak that will eventually cause a crash. [steps to Reproduce] Start a new game, default character, default settings. Resolution for me is 2560x1440. Save/quicksave the game as soon as it is loaded. Note the memory usage in Task Manager (or Process Explorer). Repeatedly load/quickload the game, noting how the memory footprint increases by 80 to 120 MB per load (more or less). The first load is usually a large jump in memory footprint. After around 15 loads (around 3400 MB total memory footprint) the game will no longer quicksave. The quicksave button will cause the shadows to shift, but nothing else. On the 16th load, the game fails to load and generates a crash dump (see attached file). [Expected Behaviour] Loading should use a constant amount of memory. [Other Remarks / Comments] Saving seems to have no affect on the memory footprint. Quitting to the main menu and loading a game from there does not reduce the memory footprint. 2014-08-19_174932.bmp

From my testing, I'm thinking that this bug is entirely due to saving and loading. I started a new game, and the first thing I did was a quick save and quick load. Immediately noticed that the BB_Wizard lost his grimoire.

V-Sync always introduces at least a single frame of lag, since it requires at least double buffering to function. Some games render multiple frames in advance, which only compounds the problem. Further, some games have seemingly terrible implementations of V-Sync that cause inexcusable amounts of lag. Add to that the tendency for V-Sync to cause extreme variations in FPS, and you get some serious issues.

I totally forgot about this, and was just reminded when doing some bug reports. Might as well do it now. I'd like my name to be "Imaginary Friend of the Obsidian Order". Don't know if you need verification of purchase or anything, but it shows up in my backer portal so I assume it's all good.

Yeah, I reported that issue as well. Don't think it's related to this one, though.

NOTE: The forum won't allow me to upload .savegame files, so I changed the extension from .savegame to .bmp. Change it back to .savegame if you want to test out this bug. [Description of the issue] When moving items in the inventory, items will sometimes disappear, end up in the wrong slot, or stack on top of other items. [steps to Reproduce] 1 - Load the attached save. 2 - Try to fill up the inventory on the first, third, or fourth character. 3 - On the third and fourth character, when you fill up 8 or 9 slots, moving an item into the final slot(s) should cause the item to vanish. 4 - The first character will instead drop the item down to the equivalent slot on the second character, which can cause item stacking. [Expected Behaviour] Items should never stack over each other or disappear. [Other Remarks / Comments] Doesn't seem to work on a new game, so there's probably something up with the save and/or the save/load functionality. bugged_save.bmp