Lephys

Even ugly, "evil" things have to feed their young. u_u Elsewise, they go extinct, and there's nothing to stop you from getting to treasure chests and/or complete quests. Except pretty things that can feed their young, apparently.

A) It's not difficult at all, given that the game informs you that the spell Fireburst doesn't travel through obstacles, to say "Hmm, I should probably target the Mage with this if I REALLLLY want him to die, instead of targeting a point 10 feet away from him and hoping he gets hit by the blast simply because he's within the radius." Or, you know, "Maybe I should use Noxious Cloud instead, to make sure I kill the Mage?", or "Maybe I should just cast True Strike on my Ranger, and have him fire a Vital Shot at the Mage, to make sure he dies, instead of trying to use an AOE spell." This is a tactical dilemma that exists regardless of the way AOE abilities are or aren't handled. B) I'm not arguing that all spells/abilities always get 100% blocked just because someone's standing in front of them. That's applying over-simplification to the idea of more in-depth spell/ability handling. And, as for the Halfling, many games already abstract characters/creatures into Small, Medium, and Large physical archetypes. Thus, a Halfling could easily be tagged as a Small character, and an Elf could be a Medium character. Thus, all the game has to do is say "Hmm... spell struck Small character? Only stop further directional damage against other Small characters." In which case, the fact that the Medium or Large character was standing behind the Halfling would result in even less deflection/stoppage of the spell's actual effect striking that character. I already mentioned the idea of a jet of flame probably damaging someone behind someone else, just not quite to the full extent. For example, perhaps the person in front (the "blocker") takes full fire damage AND is ignited, suffering further burn damage-over-time until extinguished (a common status effect in RPGs). The person behind them still gets burned as the flames flow tightly around them, but they take less damage, AS WELL AS failing to be ignited, since its more the nearby extreme heat that's damaging them and not the direct "impact" of the fire itself. In the case of the shrapnel... Like I said, Small character got hit? Any other characters along that same path who are larger than small take damage still. Small characters further along that path are fully missed by the shrapnel. Come on, now... if the simple matter of a character blocking another character from damage from something was problematic, then large shields would be problematic. "Wait, you're saying that it struck my shield, so the person standing behind the shield was unharmed? NOW EVERYONE'S JUST GONNA STAND BEHIND SHIELDS ALL DAY!" I also already mentioned the ludicrous amount of timing involved in ALWAYS having your characters scattered enough to use abilities effectively without striking each other in the backs, then ALWAYS having them back in a row behind some effect-resistant tank whenever a directional ability goes off. Seeing as how, A) I'm sure all AOE/directional abilities don't just absolutely kill everything instantly, and B) all that constant use of obstacle-mechanics to shield your party from every single attack via constant relocation and positional alignment is time NOT spent actually combating the enemy to any great effect, I'd say that there's a perfectly good trade-off there. The more time you spend making sure shrapnel never hits anyone but your tank, the longer it takes you to kill the thing throwing the shrapnel bombs, and the more shrapnel bombs he gets to throw. Not to mention what all the other enemies are doing, which is most likely not standing around and allowing you to line your whole party up behind your tank every 7 seconds.

^ My mistake.

^ Yeah, with MaleShep, there's a CRAPTON of dialogue buildup and trust and whatnot before she even expresses any kind of romantic interest. And, even then, it's all awkward, like she feels silly about it. She FINALLY brings up simply the idea of it, as long as you keep expressing interest in her (which, MaleShep's lines are somewhat lacking a lot, haha. I think FemShep got all the attention in development, ). Even when you get to "the scene," she's still all like "I... I dunno, maybe this is silly," and is noticeably EXTREMELY nervous. You kind of have to re-assure her, at which point she sort of throws inhibition to the wind and pounces, as if she knew if she didn't do that she'd just sit there stammering the whole time and it would never happen. Of course, that's the same time she pulls her mask off and tosses it across the room. So... for a Quarian, it's kind of all-or-nothing at that point, anyway, haha. If you can't romance her as Femshep, and she says that, then that is pretty weird. Of course, sharing suits/environments with someone is also a huge form of trust for Quarians, so maybe it was just poorly written to come across as sexually suggestive rather than merely Quarian culture? I'm not sure. We'd have to ask the Bioware team. I could decide better if I'd played through as Femshep. But, yeah, they hate having to be in their enviro-suits all the time, anyway, and long to experience plenty of things other than sex with other individuals. So, they actually "share suits" (since all the Quarians have suits to share), even if that sometimes means that they simply de-suit (or break suit containment) in the same room/space/environment so that they can spend some suit-free time together, not necessarily getting it on. So, it could've been that she was trying to tell Femshep "I trust you so much and value your friendship to the point of going through the trouble of adjusting to the environment beyond my suit just so we can talk face to face and do awesome, suit-free things together! 8D." *shrug* Annnnnnywho. We're getting a bit off-topic. I apologize for that, as I kind of grabbed the wheel and veered us off the road toward some context. I'm very much with you on the visual storytelling thing. That's part of what goes into character design. Obviously you want to avoid huge cliches, but the overly haughty character should visually convey haughtiness. The careful, disciplined character should visually convey care and discipline. And, like you said, you can always through contrasting flaws in there. Like, maybe the careful disciplined character is always unkempt, or the overly haughty character wears some really simple piece of jewelry because of who it belonged to. Etc.

Very true. But, obviously, it would be equally as silly for flying/floating enemies to be affected by your earthquake. Also, forget just spells for the moment, and imagine some kind of shrapnel bomb (like a Rogue specialty or something). Imagine if a shrapnel bomb goes off, and it the shrapnel just goes through 5 enemies and hits a 6th, simply because it damages everything equally within a 10-foot radius. That would also be silly. Or, an acid bomb. Acid exploding outward from a central point isn't going to travel around a person, then reconverge behind them to strike someone standing directly behind that person (I don't mean 3 inches behind their back. I simply mean that, directionally, they are directly in between the front person and the blast source point, whether they're 2 feet back or 15 feet back. The acid/shrapnel is only ever going to keep spreading from the origin point of the blast, unless the bomb is David Beckham). It's a matter of intelligently handling spells and abilities according to their nature, rather than overly simplifying them all to "AOE -- they affect this area, no matter what, all in the exact same way." Also, many of the examples made in this thread were regarding a person blocking an effect from hitting another person. But, if a rock formation roughly the size of a person would stop/divert something and shield someone, then why wouldn't a steel-armor-wearing whole person mass? Anything that would be stopped by a rock should also be stopped by an armored person (with the exception of knockback from force, like I mentioned, since a rock is anchored to the environment and a person is not).

They're going to have things such as the Defender modal skill, as it stands, which allows the Fighter to engage 2 additional enemies (so 3 instead of 1 with a newbie character), at the cost of some offensive effectiveness. Personally, I like the style of that -- as something that actually changes how you're actively dealing with combat and how enemies can deal with it as well -- over modal abilities that simply raise and lower damage/effectiveness numbers. Not that there's not room for both types in the game, but I just think it's good to have a nice range of both, rather than focusing too much on dragging damage/defense/resistance sliders up and down as the only means of altered modality for characters.

I dunno... it's kinda like a can-opener (the kind that taps a little triangle flap out of the top of the can). Plate's pretty strong, but if you strike it correctly, at a single point, I'm sure it can be punctured rather easily. That's kind of what blunt things do to it, only in overkill form. Instead of focusing all the force of the length of the sword on the point with a thrust, it just focuses all the mass/weight and force of the weapon's strike into a dense form, forgoing the precision of a puncture with the brute force of armor crushing/destructuralization. Somewhat. I think. Of course, with no weapon were you probably going to think "Hmm... I'll just not even try to go for openings between armor components, and instead will focus all my attack efforts directly on the most deflective parts of the armor! 8D" Hehe. BUT, I think some weapons were actually intended to puncture plate rather than relying solely on openings between pieces.

In her defense, one would think it normal for a race of immune-system-wrecked lifeforms to lead pretty sparse love-lives, and people are generally timid about things with which they are unfamiliar. Especially when you like your own commander and feel awkward about THAT on top of it. Just because cliche = "tee-hee, I'm a virgin" doesn't mean that "tee-hee, I'm a virgin" always = cliche.

I didn't mean to say your intentions were to shut down discussion. I was just trying to point out that voicing a bunch of purely speculative doubt, though we all are human and feel the need to do it sometimes, doesn't really contribute to the discussion at all. That was more directed at anyone who feels the need to jump in to tell everyone how much they think a food system will suck without even addressing a specific implementation of food system. I acknowledge that you're actually providing constructive feedback as to what to maybe not do (and even what maybe TO do), so I'm definitely not trying to say that you, personally, are failing to be constructive here. I think the important thing, though, to take from the "Look at how it's been so troublesome in the past" is a set of clues on how to not make it troublesome. I agree that something as simple as in-depth hunger-o-meters do not need to be constantly micromanaged throughout the game. Manual eating is one of those silly things, since nomming some trail rations can be done whilst traveling, so it would be preposterous for the character to say "I'm super starving, and time's moving at about 1-hour per second for the player during this world-map fast travel, but I'd better just wait 'til he issues a manual 'eat some food' command, at the cost of my own starvation and death." But, I think we can have our cake and not have to decide precisely when to eat it, too.

No, I addressed the point you made in your first post, and you simply believe that my doing so was insufficient, apparently (or you didn't read my post well enough to realize that I addressed it). To re-iterate, this isn't a "feature" that we're proposing adding. It's simply a certain method of handling forces and mechanics that are already in the game. I already pointed that out with the ranged-attack-missing-and-striking-someone-else example. Which leads me to believe that, perhaps, you simply ignored that. Hassat Hunter pointed out concerns with arbitrarily making all major AOE spells detect collisions, then stop (then goes on to point out that, apparently, if you allow abilities to be able to be used either effectively or ineffectively, this is a problem, because the AI is always going to try to use them effectively? *Shrug*). However, this is moot, since the only ones that would be affected are those that produce projectile-like effects that explode/radiate outward from a central point. There are plenty of AOE spells and abilities that don't do this. A summoned lightning storm, striking from above in a given radius, is obviously not going to care about whether or not it can go through people, as it has bird's-eye access to all heads within it's strike-ability circle. Nor will a circle of burning floor. In many RPGs, even when an ability that does something like this SHOULD only strike one foe in a given path, it continues on through the foe, magically, to strike all within a radius, no matter what. All the OP is suggesting is that we have a wee bit more detail in the handling of AOE spells, in that some of them actually only strike one thing. I hardly think that's reasonable, OR problematic. Unless you're suggesting that variety amongst spell function/utility is a bad thing? Every single AOE spell being "anything in this circle just-plain gets hurt. End of story." is pretty dull. And AGX: If you can go an entire dragon fight with half your party hiding directly behind the other half of your party, without hindering your offensive capabilities/effectiveness, then methinks what you fought was actually just some kind of flame trap turret and not a friggin' dragon. Hint: your tanks probably don't have armor of backhand resistance, OR tail-slap resistance. And, I don't know what's worse; having your tank swatted out of the way and your squishy left behind, human-shieldless, or having your squishy maintain his positioning relative to the tank as they both smash against a nearby wall. Not to mention that a jet of flame might actually still burn someone standing behind someone else (as, if I'm not mistaken, fire will actually sort of flow "around" things, pseudo-rejoining on the other side, kind of like airflow trying to equalize as it goes around an airplane wing). But, one would think that, when a jet of flame is forcibly propelled in a given direction, and it strikes something approximately as wide and tall as yourself, directly in front of you, that you'd take far less direct burn damage than that you-sized obstacle that's blocking the jet of flame from directly hitting you.

My point with the various distinctions was that, if the game's going to account for some form of "this is what you do if you want to voluntarily threaten people," I'd rather it be more accurate than simply "OMG, you drew weapons! The people you're about to help fight off an invasion now assume that you suddenly want to kill them! If you just wanted to help with the invasion, then you OBVIOUSLY should've left all your weapons sheathed until 'combat started,' THEN unsheathed them at a disadvantage to the enemy." Like you said: This isn't 1998. If they're not going to handle things of that nature at all, really, via player choices and character actions (such as drawing your weapons during a dialogue as opposed to not), then obviously they don't need to pay attention to the finer distinctions of weapon interactions. I'm hardly demanding a 4-tiered system be in the game no matter what.

It's quite possible she's supposed to be wearing a bit of leather as opposed to just cloth. As far as video game numbers-abstraction goes, this would be very light armor, if that is the case. Not to mention, since this thread is "Armour & Weapon Designs," and that 3-pic post was accompanied by absolutely no text, I would have to point out that it's highly possible the point of that pic is the weapon design, rather than "armor." In other words, whether or not that's technically armor is a distant cousin to the actual point.

Last time I checked, people who expect other people to subject themselves to forcible sex do not, themselves, welcome sex to be forced upon them. Just like serial killers don't welcome being murdered.

That's a pretty darn good basic mechanic if you ask me, Nonek. Something I'd point out needs some extra attention is the keep times on the different foodstuffs, and how that works into the game in its entirety/relates to the rarity/cost of different foods as compared to their benefits and the likelihood of keeping them for that long, etc. Another thing I'd like to suggest (that isn't really necessarily an addition to your proposal, but also isn't necessarily exclusive from it) is a good selection of meals when resting at an inn/tavern. I know in a lot of games, there's been this kind of "If I can just stand outside on the street and 'rest' for 8 hours, why would I pay 10 silver for rooms at the inn?". Well, maybe you get a complimentary breakfast with the room rental. This, by itself, doesn't cause worries of micromanagement of ration supplies (as you simply acquire and eat the meal at the same time), and seems to fit as a basic differentiation between resting in the woods and resting in an actual bed. Also, on this note, I think it was always irksome when you do something like eating a meal, and you gain some bonus effect from that for something like "8 hours," when, statistically, you're EXTREMELY likely to hit a world map after that and travel for 72 in-game hours to some cave or other town. The odds of actually getting to use any bonus from the foodstuff, within 8 hours, are pretty slim in such a case. So, maybe they should provide a mildly abstracted bonus for longer, but one that diminishes over time? Maybe it lasts 48 hours, total, but after 24 hours, it's half as effective, for example. You know, "You ate really well yesterday, so you've still got a good bit of heartiness to you, but that'll be gone by tonight if you keep eating basic rations." I think the idea would be plenty realistic, even if the duration/specifics were somewhat abstracted. Just some thoughts.

A notion that seems equally silly to me. It's a good thing no one backed such a notion. What seems even sillier than, though, is the notion that, if you have no idea who the assassin is or what he looks like, you will somehow have the advantage via strategic, manual tactics and placement. "Man, it's a good thing I had my Warrior stand just to the left of the door, instead of just to the right of the door, because now I can even BETTER stop the guy who may-or-may-not come through that door at all, and whose appearance I know nothing of! 8D" I'm not seeing anything suggesting the usefulness of extreme, tactical detail in this situation, which is precisely part of my point. If there WERE a reason to need tactical precision in a "pick some places to keep an eye out, because we have no idea where this assassin will be" situation, then I'd be worried about it. Sorry. That's absolutely true. The room might be the entire universe, so there might, in fact, be infinite possibilities for placement. u_u Heyyyy, I thought I was the one who was supposed to use the Latin-named argument fallacies! You're stealing my job, man! You say "I need to have EXTREME tactical precision for this extremely menial plan," and I point out why, in a very specific instance, you actually don't benefit from the tactical precision. So, you now ask "Oh, so everything should just be scripted?!" Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying, apparently. You would know better then I would, it would seem. -___- If something has a reason to be scripted and doesn't really benefit from full tactical control, then CLEARLY that leads us to "All things should be scripted and will never benefit from full tactical control." I'm glad you picked up on that without me having to explain it. That would've been troublesome. u_u Well... it seems you called me out on that one, too, as I quite specifically stated that I wanted no more than 2 placement options, u_u. I mean, if we had 7,352 placement options, infinite would STILL be better, and super beneficial. It's not like there's a feasibility threshold or anything. Silly me. Ignoring the fact that I was being sarcastic, who's left to notice you when the whole courtyard's dead and/or exploded? . Hell, you can place the dynamite at a point of architecturally strategic advantage, and just light a 2 minute fuse, and be LONG gone by the time it goes off, and the entire courtyard is buried in rubble. Seems better than "A poisoned bolt! Clearly someone fired this bolt seconds ago, and is within a respectable range of here! START SEARCHING!" A) Why are you wearing a robe? If you're the head priest of the town, then maybe he won't think anything's up. If you're normally walking about in "adventuring attire," and suddenly you're wearing a big loose robe, that seems a little odd. Also, if he planned this assassination specifically during your conversation with Lord Blargle, don't you think he'd know at least a LITTLE bit about you? B) You still didn't explain why he wouldn't simply aim for the head (unless you're wearing secret helmets under your... I dunno... head robes?), OR why he wouldn't simply use a bolt specifically designed to pierce armor. And if the crossbow is so inaccurate, why would he even try in the first place? If goes for your general torso mass because he can't be sure to hit your head or neck, then how does he know he's not gonna just hit your shoulder and/or miss your vital organs all-together? Seems like a pretty sketchy assassin. Maybe that's just me, *shrug* Splendid hypothesis. I'd love to read your scientific method writeup on that sometime. My constant need to clarify about every sentence I type is actual evidence that you may be failing to read what I'm actually typing in the first place before responding. If you can produce evidence that I'm completely failing to address your words, I'd very much like to know of such evidence, so that I may correct such inadvertent neglect.

Well, if we don't put anything in P:E that didn't exist in the IE games, then we'd basically just have an exact remake of the IE games, wouldn't we? That wouldn't be a very exciting way of doing things. And, having slightly more intricate AOE spells doesn't exactly oppose the IE-feel of the game, any more than having richer dialogues or better-quality graphics does. That's all I'm getting at, here. Honestly, you'd think a fireball (or cone of fire-jet) would, at the very least, do lessened damage to in-a-row enemies. I mean, fire is physics-based, magic or no. So, if I'm just magically creating fire, and directing toward you, then someone standing right behind you isn't really going to get hit with fire. The fire isn't going to pass through you. Now, if the spell simply creates and maintains some sort of ring of fire and, and simply expands outwards in a given radius (like a nova effect), then the fire isn't actually just being launched in an outward fashion and wouldn't be stopped by collisions. It's basically attacking everything from the sides at that point, and the circle would simply reform the second an entity wasn't breaking the "beam," so to speak. That's why, for the most part, I would say it would need to be limited to projectile-type effects. Things that are created, then propelled in a direction. This would be pretty interesting with things like fireballs and other-such explosions. Maybe if you have a big cluster of 10 enemies, and you hurl an explosive fireball into the center of them, it severely burns AND forcibly strikes the ones exposed directly to the blast, knocking them outward and into the 2nd "layer" of enemies, who don't get as burned, but who still suffer from the physical blow (and are possibly, in-turn, knocked into other enemies in their path of travel). This supports the kind of spell utility variance I'd like to see, too. Maybe certain enemies are VERY susceptible to fire (like the Cean Gula from the most recent update, what with her dried, rotting "corpse" and her remnants of cloth attire), but aren't very susceptible to force (maybe the Cean Gula kind of floats/hovers, so she can't really be "knocked back/down" very easily, as some force is already suspending her in-place above the ground? *shrug). So, if you had 7 of these clustered in such a way that only 3 were directly exposed to an AOE blast, you'd want to probably use something else (like a wall of flames, etc,) to produce a greater effect upon the group of foes. However, if they were more spread out but still close together, and you could get 6 of them directly with the blast of fire, maybe you'd ignite those 6 to GREAT effect, so fireball would be a wise choice. Similarly, if you faced enemies who were immune to fire, even, but who were VERY susceptible to force (maybe they are crystalline enemies?), then, even though you'd think "Fireball" wouldn't work against fire-immune enemies, you could still use it to crack the enemies and perhaps shatter them outright, and/or cause their limbs to break off, etc. This could also be enhanced by having ability-progression dynamic options, such as "more intense fire damage/longer ignition duration/larger radius" options as your Wizard levels, alongside "greater force/more focused force" options. So, two Wizards with the same Fireball spell could actually use it predominantly in DRASTICALLY different ways.

Well, for realism's sake, I'm curious to know if there are ANY fighting styles during that era (even if lesser-used) and/or styles of armor design that support the idea of assymetrical armor.

So we implement food, if we can make it fun. That and "I don't think we should implement food because it probably won't be fun" don't really go together. That's like saying, "I think it's possible to do this well, but I don't think this can be done well." So, all I ask is, if you (any given poster) don't think food can be done well, and you just plucked that opinion out of the sky, then it's not really doing any good in this thread, unfortunately. The only response you're going to get is "Why not?," because we, as humans, naturally like for things to be based in reason. That's why others in this thread are breaking mental sweats trying to evaluate possibilities for a good, fun food system. Even if you're saying "here's ways in which it objectively causes problems," that's useful, constructive information. I just don't understand why people are so adamant about other people not even TRYING to come up with a feasible, potential system. You might as well be saying "I highly doubt your abilities, and it irks me that you're taking the time to attempt something I don't want to take the time to attempt." I'm not telling anyone "Yes, there SHOULD be a food system in, no matter how it's implemented, and if you don't want one, you're WRONG!". So, we're basically in agreement. IF it can be made fun and not troublesome or detrimental to design time/resources, it would be nice in the game. The only thing anyone's in disagreement on is basically bets. "I bet a food system isn't going to be well-designed, so I don't want it to even be attempted." And that's a silly thing to argue about. Isn't it? Why don't we just pool our resources in an effort to evaluate, as best we can, the possibilities for creating an actually-fun food system in a game like P:E? If we can't do it, and Obsidian can't do it, then obviously we're not going to have to worry about a crappy food system being in the game, because of that "if it's good" condition. And if we CAN do it, then awesome! We figured out how to make a food system fun and interesting when other games have failed. As I said, you can totally frown upon food systems in general, and STILL contribute to the discussion of whether or not it's possible to make a good one, simply by pointing out objective ways in which prior food systems caused problems in games. We can put that stuff on the "Don't do" list, and keep on brainstorming with anything not on that list, and see what we come up with.

Haha. There's not a single true method of RPG design, true... but there is a line between valid and invalid. For example, an RPG "shouldn't" (*gasp*, I used that word again!) be devoid of dialogues and choices. Such a game would fall outside the realm of RPG (as, obviously, some games are RPGs, and some games are not, so something must differentiate them). Also, you can bend my words all you want, but suggesting that a time limit makes the game become a "race" for a while is not the same thing as the gameplay itself mimicking that of a racing game. If it did so, then stopping to pick up items and/or talk to people at all would be bad (as, in a racing game, the ideal effective method of success is to never stop moving forward). If story and dialogues and choices and exploration all become obstacles in the greater goal of your forward progress, then the game becomes self-defeating. Also, I said an RPG (as in the entire game) should not resemble a racing game (as in the entire game), AND even pointed out that I'm fine with situational rushes and time limits for things. So I'm not even sure why you tried to act as though having a portion of the game require you to hurry being valid somehow contradicts what I said. *Les shrugs*

It has nothing to do with realism, actually. Plenty of perfectly illogical things happen in reality. Like video games being made with unlimited limitations implemented within them. If I were never born and never formed any brainwaves whatsoever, it would not change the fact that an unlimited limit is illogical. It seems an awful lot as if you're suggesting that anything that can simply be moderated by the player's own willpower has no reason to be moderated by the game. Maybe, by default, we should just have unlimited hitpoints, and there should be a "Fail Combat" button. That way, your party's health limit is in control of the player. When they've taken as many hits as you feel would kill them, you simply click "Fail Combat," and that character dies. Or, let's have an option for whether or not enemies actually attack you, because that limits your ability to progress through the game (it's what causes you to lose HP, and therefore what causes resting to even be a topic of discussion in this very thread). So, boom. Efficiency. Maybe some people want to play their game without ever getting attacked. That should be an option. Because... who needs limits? It's just two opinions versus one another: Limits are good, and limits are bad. Everyone should be happy, no matter what. That is where your line of reasoning leads. And that's why "everyone should just get to choose how they play the game, in all aspects" needs to be tempered with at least one more criteria. At the very least, logic. Implementing an unrestricted limitation is, quite literally, a waste of time. That's all I'm saying. Again, if you want the option of "I always just heal back up to full whenever I survive combat," I'm actually not against that (although it seems a bit silly not to attach such an option to the Easy spectrum of the difficulty settings, *shrug*). I'm against a button that must be clicked before that occurs, but that can always be clicked the second you've survived combat and are no longer partaking in it. There's no need for convolution in player control.

Well, while I don't have any specific dev quote to cite for this specific scenario, I'm pretty sure if Enemy A is directly between yourself and Enemy B, and you fire an arrow at Enemy B without moving first, you at least have a chance of inadvertently striking Enemy A. At the very least, the very existence of ground-targeted spells/abilities (as opposed to entity-targeted ones) means that the game is fully capable of simply aiming a projectile (even if it's a cone or wave) in a given direction, then detecting whether or not it strikes anything at any given location. I don't know what kind of engine mechanics are involved there, but it doesn't seem very complex, as I've seen that in oodles of games that are plenty old. In other words, I may be mistaken, but I don't believe this would require anything that isn't already in the game. I could be wrong.

I didn't say you were against it, either. I just wanted to understand why you thought basic waypoints were such a trivial, insignificant implement. Also, movement-queuing (waypoints) and action/ability-queuing are completely separate things, for what it's worth. Although, they can both be pretty useful. I understand your desire not to use ability-queuing, and your perspective of it being lazy. However, if "just use all your abilities back-to-back in rapid succession!" is actually not a mediocre strategy, and no amount of timing or real-time adaptation produces any huge benefit to your party's combat effectiveness, then I'd say the game has some more potent issues at play. So, with that in mind, I say LET people queue as many commands as they want. If you want to give your character 7-straight-minutes-worth of orders, have fun cancelling 6-minutes-worth of those over and over, and continuously re-issuing such a huge queue. Also, as much as I support your "I like to just manual handle all the commands real-time" stance, basic command queuing isn't so much about that as it is about not having to hyper-manage the group just to prevent people from standing around doing nothing (or performing highly inefficient behaviors). At it's most basic, I don't see wanting to be able to tell your Ranger to pick 3 different targets with 3 different abilities, in succession, and not wanting to have to wait for each arrow to leave the bow just to issue the next command, as being particularly lazy. It's not as if manually firing off those abilities would've required manual aiming or some other player-precision that the command queue is taking care of without player input. If timing was required, then one-or-more of your Ranger's arrows are going to strike obstacles, or be otherwise lessened in effectiveness. So, again I say, if someone just wants to queue everything up and never micromanage in the slightest, then let them deal with the consequences. If there weren't any consequences, I'd be a little upset about it.

Thanks! I couldn't find the thread, and mistakenly thought it was the update thread. When I couldn't find the post in that thread, I just thought I was imagining things. 8P

Thanks, guys! Jousting! I KNEW I remembered some form of asymmetrical armor design. Of course, that's pretty specialized, and I knew nothing regarding actual on-foot combat. And yeah, that's just what I was thinking. If you're wielding a weapon, even with both hands, you're going to typically have a right-handed or left-handed stance, unless you're just an UBER ambidexterous BAMF. So, it's a tradeoff... less armor, for less bulk and movement-inhibition. Interesting.

You don't think that, in a tactical-combat-laden RPG, being able to send a character from point A to point B by any other means than via straight line is "that necessary."? I'll agree that it isn't literally necessary, as you can move people in a more complex fashion with only simple, direct movement commands to deal with. But... is it really necessary to deal with such restraints with something as simple as "I want you to go on the other side of this pit of spikes, but I want you to go around the pit of spikes rather than running into it"? As opposed to, "Okay, I want you to first go over here, and I'll just twiddle my thumbs for 7 seconds while you make your way far enough so that a clear path to my intended destination for you actually opens up. Then, I'll issue you yet a second movement command, after having waited for your position to change, to get you where I want you to go. Now, I'll do that with 5 other people, while we're all dying to swords and sorcery. u_u"