agris

What are the criteria that determines if an area is appropriate to outsource, versus creating in-house? Does OE have to provide the props for the outsourced area, or are the props generated by the contractor also, and available for use in other (non-outsourced) maps?

Great update, I would like to see more of this type. Brandon, did you ever try managing a project using Access combined with excel? Often times I've needed to construct matrices of experimental conditions (or whatever), and found that what I need is a 3D or 4D matrix (granted, sheets work for that pseudo 3rd dimension). I looked at access briefly, but ultimately decided that through proper groupings I could get it done in excel.

I fully support this idea Sensuki, and despite the vocal (minority) in this thread, do think it adds a less tangible element of difficulty and suspension of disbelief. The original Fallout 1/2 did this in a manner, with 'invisible' skill checks during dialogue and obfuscated skill checks (mostly lockpick). It was a good system though, if your lockpicks broke or your jammed the lock, your skill was too low. Much preferable to the systems of FO3 and FNV when it lists the required skills for performing a dialogue option. I know you're talking combat challenges, but I think the idea could be extended to _any_ 'skill target' (for lack of a better term). One of the best flavor mods for FNV removed the skill target text from dialogue... The counter argument for this up-front presentation of skill-dependent dialogue choices is that the player misses content if the dialogue option (and the skill check) aren't shown. This issue is resolved in a much more organic way though, by making the dialogue choice still an option but with the appropriate NPC response indicating a failed skill check. It is the NPC's response that indicates to the player their skill (which should be obvious based on the content of the dialogue and game mechanics) wasn't high enough to pull off the line. Sorry I've derailed this a bit, but I think this issue goes hand-in-hand with your combat one.

Isn't OGG vorbis open source and not system-intensive to decode? That's lossey, but still good. For lossless, uncompressed Microsoft wave PCM would be overkill. Maybe FLAC would work? I don't believe that's a proprietary format. And regarding the mp3 inferior quality claims: I think much of this has to do with default encoding parameters and the encoding codec itself. If you use an encoding codec that supports all the mp3 encoding flags, you can set a high VBR (120 to 360), remove the 16 kHz haircut (up it to 22.1k for example..), and the encoding of mp3s can be quite good (prove it to yourself with any frequency spectrum analyzer ala Adobe Audition, or just listen to it vs. the original). Oh and... I'm about to buy the S80i, I've been eying the Grado line for over 5 years. What broke on your RS-1s that you couldn't get fixed, the cone detach or driver explode?

Thanks for the update, the class sounds interesting. The melee-fueled magic is a cool idea, similar but different from a barbarian or monk who fuels his abilities based on the damage caused / received. Now, on to the nit-picking (sorry, inevitable). What is going on in that rock screen shot with the little white rectangular (flowers?) things? The green moss covering the top of the largest cairn stone blends in too much with the green grass background. I suggest giving the moss on the rock a brown/yellow tinge or gradient near the edge, to improve the contrast and make it look less homogeneous. That's it, I'm sure my random_internet_goon_critique_042 will drift into obscurity...

Interesting. I see a similarity in the pose, proportions, ears, hair, face, and clothing. It's probably just a coincidence, and my over-active sense of imagination.

Hey Lephys! Ok, maybe I'm failing at reading comprehension. Lets look again at what he said... So he splits casting durations (i.e. time to cast something) into 3 categories: immediate, short and long. These categorical stratifications are equal amongst all character classes (fighter, cleric, wizard, etc). I suppose this answers my question, except it begs the question: what percentage of a round (pardon the nomenclature) are immediate (this is obvious), short and long? You were right though, I was caught up on the use of duration and the answer to the question was right there. Now it's a matter of clarification.

So, is it known who drew the concept art for the Orlan Detective? It bears a remarkable similarity to a piece of art I saw in Kenzer & Co's HackJournal #7 recently... and whose attribution I can't decipher (initials read WR III?). For what it's worth, that piece of art is over 10 years old.

GameBanshee posted a new social roundup of comments, heavily weighted by JES, and there was one point that stuck out. And I quote: Am I crazy, or does JES misinterpret the question? It seems that they are asking about the length of time, on a fresh round, to cast / activate an ability. The answer seems to mingle durations (first sentence) and casting time (third sentence), and is not clear. So: will spells / abilities have discrete casting / activation times, or will they be grouped into categories based on the duration of the effect (which I think is what JES is getting at)? To be clear, I don't mean the duration of an effect. I'm asking about the time it takes for a character to 'cast' a spell / ability, after it has been selected, and a fresh round of combat has started (I don't know enough to say if rounds even make sense in this world.. I'm defaulting back to my IE understanding of combat time).

Kaz is working on the inventory UI. The icons below the portrait are "mine" (i.e. just placeholders) and represent (top) Stamina, Health, Main Hand Accuracy, Off-Hand Accuracy and (bottom) the four defenses: Deflection, Fortitude, Reflexes, and Psyche. Of course, it's still a work in progress. Cool, thanks. Heh, are the left and right hand icons L / R mittens?

Interesting, first 'shot' of the inventory. Was it public knowledge that PE was going to have inventory paperdolls? Also, wonder what the badges in the lower-left are.. abilities? Resists? Too bad my CSI image enhance technology is circa 1993...

I'd like to chime in and say I hope that traits will be conferred to my character based on my actions in the world, similar to Fallout 1/2 wherein you could become a Made Man, Child Killer, Grave Digger, Prizefighter, etc. It's a nice way to show that my actions have had a substantial effect on the makeup of my character, above and beyond filling the XP meter and coin purse. As for selectable traits, I'm fairly indifferent. I more like the background 'packages' that one can select, which give a balanced set of bonuses/maluses to the character but are fundamentally tied to the story of the background package.

Hey Mr. Sawyer, Fallout 2 had a great 'slaver' subgame. The world reacted to you (or really, that face tattoo) if you were a slaver, and it was an unique experience to play the game that way. Will the player be able to take part in the slave trade in PE, and will it be connected to the Stronghold at all? Both gameplay elements would, to my thinking, dovetail nicely (at least the underground prison part, and maybe even a slave rebellion event...).

That. Sounds. Amazing. There are so many cool things wrapped up into that- there's a ****ing dungeon underneath the stronghold! That in and of itself is an interesting predicament (burrow-based assault on the stronghold planned?). The prisoners concept is also a good one, and really incentivizes getting that prison setup asap. One question: will there be special 'bad' random encounters, for not upgrading the keep? I can imagine delaying the keep ugprades for a period, just to see some custom bad randoms. Maybe i'm weird in that way, but I bet some of the bad random encounters will be both funny and challenging.

@samm if you've setup your system with a ram drive, you can use mklink /J (a junction) to reroute all that cache bull**** onto the drive. Will be faster, and auto clears everytime you reboot your system. Works like a charm, no disk fragmentation, and SRR doesn't know the difference.

I think you have to step back and ask a more fundamental question: should failure be an option? All opinions regarding difficulty will fundamentally diverge depending on if you answer this yes or no. I think yes, but I don't think failure is one of the designed results of conflict resolution in PE, rather it's a sliding scale from ineffectual success to optimized success (i'm purposefully being vague here- think of it in terms of resources utilized). I think failure is necessary, because without failure there is no sense of success. So I hope the game will be hard, in that it makes us think and punches us in the kidneys when we don't. Man, what a **** post on my part haha

That's not true, all but one of each Haswell, Ivy Bridge, and Sandy Bridge Desktop i5's don't have hyperthreading, nearly all have 4 cores 4 threads. The three that have 2 cores 4 threads are the "T" 35W TDP low power CPUs. Oh ****, you're right. I was on the 'laptops' tab here and didn't even notice it. I'd still like to know if someone with an HT enabled i5 has the same audio problems.

Interesting then that disabling HT for your i7 didn't fix the problem. I wonder what other underlying CPU architecture would cause the sound stuttering. My i5 is an older gen (2500k) than the current i5s. One of the differences is that the older gen has 4 physical cores, no HT. New i5s all have 2 physical, 4 logical (i.e. hyperthreaded). I wonder if people with the current gen i5s have the audio stutter also.

@Sensuki and @samm I wanted to chime in to tell you both that I don't experience this issue with either EC or SRR. I'm on an i5 2500k and AMD 6900, and the game is installed on a mechanical HDD. Win 7 64, 16 gb ram. Based on the frame trace, is the current hypothesis that periods of low FPS induce the audio hiccups, and those low FPS periods are produced by the Unity 4 engine 'losing' the renderer? For what it's worth, I'm on catalyst 13.2 and using onboard Realtek ALC892 audio, including their sound driver panel, but with all 'features' (i.e. DSP) disabled. I've put over 100 hours combined into EC and SRR, and never had this issue so given the similarity of our systems, I wanted to chime in. I'm on an Asus P8 z68 v-pro (gen1). One thing I wonder about is- how much intel middle ware do you have installed? I.e. the intel chipset driver packages. I usually avoid those like the plague, and find that they introduce all sorts of I/O errors and slow downs on my system. I let windows install the drivers for my chipset (the z68), and avoid the intel bloatware. I've never had a good experience with a single system using that ****. Sensuki, you mentioned having access to a 7XXX ATI card. I'd be curious to know if you have the same audio problems with the 13.2 catalyst drivers, and all DSP effects disabled on your sound card (ideally, let windows manage the sound card and shut down any vendor specific sound panel).

Has there been any word regarding "affects all" (friendly fire) vs. "affects enemies" AOE? One of the great things about the spells in BG/IWD/BG2 was that friendly fire existed, and often a higher level version of an AOE spell would target enemies only. It setup a nice progression curve, and made you really pay attention to combatant positions when picking an 'affects all' or 'affects enemies' AOE spell.

@Ffordesoon and @Lephys So I wrote a nice little reply and then accidentally clicked back.. anyway, thanks for the thoughtful comments. There's a lot going on in this discussion in regards to nostalgia, expectations and making an homage to some of the most revered RPGs '99 - '01. I think I've said everything I needed to, but I agree with a lot of what you both aree saying (at least in regards to mechanics, and respecting that others didn't like how punishing aspects of the old games were). Still, I'm holding out hope for enough complexity in character creation to reward those who spend time delving into the details of the game. Hopefully most agree with that, as it doesn't have to punish those that don't bury the face in the manual (or wiki).

Gorth, I don't know what you want to do, but if you're maxing out the CPU load on this workstation, you're going to need to manage the CPU load before you can do anything else. If you want to play games that are 3D accelerated, the CPU load required for smooth play will depend on how modern the game is and some trial and error with custom CPU load scheduling will be required for smooth gameplay. If you're playing old, non GPU accelerated games, you can probably get by with a few CPU cycles per unit time but still, some trial and error will be required. Keep in mind tho, that if this machine is a dedicate compute / compile / render unit, your prolonged - X% performance hit that frees up resources for playing games will have a real impact on the amount of time it takes jobs to complete. Now, if you're talking about a MS office workstation interacting with access and opening multiple hundreds of MB excel files, that's a different deal. Play battlefield on that thing if you've got the GPU resources. What you're talking about sounds less like a workstation, and more like a dedicated render / compute unit. In my experience in academia, such workstations are used exclusively for their task (molecular dynamics simulations on SGI workstations, etc) and very poorly suited to the kind of multitasking that you're asking about.

Tale, Do you think that approach to character building was appropriate to IWD or BG1?

I haven't been involved with this conversation, but I'd like to chime in. I agree with this, and I feel as if it's a crucial point of contention between 'traditionalist' who want more of the 2.5e ability system and those that don't. One of the things that made IE games 'IE' games was, yes, the 2.5e ruleset, but wrapped into that was the possibility to make a ****ty character. Think of rolling up a character as combat (a contest of intellect with the rule system, lets say): do you think failure should be an option? If we're talking literally about combat, I would say yes. If we're talking figuratively about character builds, I would also say yes (but I realize others wouldn't). Why would I say yes? Why should failure (aka a **** char build) be an option? For the same reason it is in combat: to facilitate a rewarding experience. Without the possibility of failure, how can we feel successful? I think there is a satisfaction in the optimization problem that is presented in the 2.5e ability scores system. Understanding the threshold values between bonus/malus/neutral, what to nudge above the threshold and reap the benefit of higher bonuses, and what to leave in neutral +0 (or even negative mods) bonuses. Without decisions that matter, which implies we can make both good and bad decisions regarding character builds, an attribute system falls far short of the IE experience. To me, core to the IE experience was solving the optimization problem that was the 2.5e ability system. I don't expect PE to have the same system, but I did pledge with the expectation that I could fail at character creation, just as I could fail at combat. Or, to look at it the other way, that I could succeed spectacularly at creating a character. That feeling, of 'succeeding spectacularly', would not exist if I could not fail at the task as well. Sure, if all builds are viable, then I succeeded (by default) at making my character, but just like combat in which you can't lose, I'm not as satisfied by it. My post is riddled with personal preference, but I tried to articulate what is lost by moving to an 'everyone wins' character attribute system. I'm sure within it's design there are gradations of how well you built a character, but without the possibility to totally screw up, making a great character build just isn't as satisfying. It takes a certain mindset to appreciate the optimization problem presented by the old 2.5e attribute system, but it's a mindset that I took as part and parcel of the IE experience that Obsidian wanted to capture with PE. DISCLAIMER: I know we don't know specifics about this system, but I think it's important to discuss it. We seem to have a division amongst the fans: those who want the possibility to fail at building a character, and those that don't. For those of us who want failure as a possibility, I think that's because we appreciate the challenge in 'solving' a complicated problem, of working out an optimized result from a complex system of interdependent rules, and recognize that without failure as an option, success doesn't mean much.

I agree. While reading Update 60, my mind wandered to Omar and Bubbs from The Wire. I would be careful that your expectations don't get set too high though, as it's widely agreed that The Wire had some of the best character development of any filmed drama. Chris, can you comment on if the companion writers plan to include themes of addiction? Outcasts, addiction, redemption.. even characters who fall from grace precisely BECAUSE they associate with the PC (kinda like Dak'kon, but you really just get to debase him even further, he doesn't start in 'grace').. these are themes I've been looking for in RPG companions.