@\NightandtheShape/@

Thing about dual core systems and gaming is you often only use a single core.

:crazy:

We have, but you and others have not.

Do you like being intentionally thick? I don't believe that you for a second actually thought that any of us thought "permadeath" was just having people die. I'm sure you realize that we were talking about "permadeath" being permanent death regardless of the presence of ressurection spells. <_< <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The man has attained the next level of understanding about Magical Volo and his amazing Vologic.

Happens to me all the time. You just have to make a character you really like before you can pull it through. Take some time and create the character in your head before you play the game. Have a character concept, take it a bit beyond the RPing of the game. For example, if you want to have, say, a tiefling priest, you could create him such that he purpose in life is to fight and banish demons of his bloodline, so you make him a lawful neutral-aligned priest with the Protection and War domains, and give him fire resistance and will save bonuses, and shoot him towards warpriesting. Given the nature of the things he fights, he's never willing to compromise, and is always impatient, and acts as such. I find fleshing a character out like that that, instead of playing the character on the fly, helps to make one get "attached" to a character more easily It doesn't always work, since your planning doesn't really come out in the game very often, but it helps sometimes. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Heh, I kinda like my Neutral Evil Aasimar Barbarian/Druid... Which is admitantly an odd mix, lets just say he wishes the world was a colder place. His attitude, well he wants to kill the NPC's who are stopping him from advancing, but obviously he's too smart and wise to do so, he's frustrated, and just wants to find out where these shards are from, and if they'll be useful in allowing a comfortable life someplace cold away from cities... Some place upnorth, beyond the spine of the world. Hates just about everybody, and enjoies seeing conflict in his party, if only so he can laugh at how pathetic they are, they're about for entertainment, not for need...

Diablo II in hardcore. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Dungeon Hack (heh) had an iron man mode as well. I'm sure other games have done it as well. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> ToEE, JA2

"we're not making a game just for you and ten other angry guys with tastes that are narrower than a hallway in a camp of pygmy dwarves." - Josh Sawyer, apparently. If Sawyer really said what it says in your sig, Sawyer > U ALL! That's quality! HAHAHA!

I can think of a few games that had that manner of permadeath, but not in recent times... As for the other method I agree, it should be in, but I wouldn't call that permadeath, that's just death... But you can argue about specifics till the sun comes down, it won't change how I saw things.

Depends if I understood permadeath correctly, that means no save game unless you're leaving, quitting out of the game. If you mean when a character is dead, they're dead akin to BG/BG2 then that's kinda different in my view. The first WOULD effect sales, the second would not. You would actually be alienating a certain player demographic.

You could change the main module with the toolset if you so desired them so much... But really, we all know that you kill less enemies in PnP, and permadeath would effect sales.

He has that female thing about him, it's the way he whines... Bitches, and always thinks he's right even when he's 100% wrong.

.NET Framework 2.0 is pretty much a requiredment for most games, it's nothing evil, it's a bunch of good stuff that devs use.

HAHAHAHA..... Oerwinde just got pr0ned. Dark Raven.... you can have mine. I knew I'd seen a CD with MUSIC written upon it, MUSIC and ARTWORK. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I have the LE and it came with no soundtrack CD. Therefore I win. My artwork came in book format too. the north american LE got screwed. We did get the nicer box art though. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I wouldn't know or care... I also got an artbook in my CE. PR0NED!

HAHAHAHA..... Oerwinde just got pr0ned. Dark Raven.... you can have mine. I knew I'd seen a CD with MUSIC written upon it, MUSIC and ARTWORK.

I'm pretty sure they have...

There is a setting for that in the options menu under the gameplay tab I think. It's right on the bottom middle of that section I believe. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> OOOOO I hadn't poked around.

Is it possible for a dev to respond in regards to what is the potential issue causing slow fps? Where the bottleneck is? It's driving me bonkas.

**** IT!

WTF are you saying, I find that hard to believe because to be honest I don't see much going off that is worthwhile. In terms of the technology I see either bad code or bad decisions. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> When you have to integrate your code with existing (heterogeneous) codebases, achieving good performance is much more tricky than just "writing good code", you, as a programmer, should know that. I find your claim about that "the code is bad because nothing worthwhile is going on" to be especially surprising. You can't judge code quality until you see it yourself, because there is a lot of factors to consider. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> (My comments in no way reflect my opinion of NWN2 game, I think the game is awesome, but there are technical issues which Obsidian, with time, will I am sure smooth out... that said my opinion, is that there's been alot of hacking happening and not enough optermization) The entire graphical side was gutted and rewrote, atleast that is the impression I have been given from developer comments. It is not impossible, to implement a new render engine with minimal loss. heck the first thing i would have done is read the code base and made notes of how everything was working, potential pitfalls so to speak. Implementation of Dynamic Lighting, realtime soft-shadows, and bloom aren't exactly the most computationally expensive algorithms. My opinion is that there has been some bad coding happening somewhere to force such a huge jump is system specification - it's a time thing, not an ability thing. When you have someone saying "MAKE THIS WORK!", you make it work and hope you'll have time to make it work lovely later. The guys at obsidian probably now know the engine inside out, every quirk, and with time... We'll see it running smooth, but now... It's got parental issues.

and was considerably less graphics intensive. NWN had a lot of problems when it was first released, too. as a matter of fact, i'm having major issues running WCoC (premium module) even now (major stutters, with daggerford as well). NWN2 is hardly "graphically intensive"(That's in terms of the eventual result) when compared with other games from many many genres. but they still sit in memory, which is slow. RAS/CAS latency is a killer. Oh come on blaming the hardware for slowing down the ruleset is comical to me, you're not speaking to some n00b. We all KNOW that RAM is slow, but the ruleset is not something that needs to be scheduled to even run every frame, most of it only needs to be running when required, once a frame maybe twice. checking IS logic. Well i won't dispute that, checking is logic, I think it's dense to say that though especially when you consider that my comment was pretty straight forwards (seems I missed of out, general typo), but I'll expand and clarify. Basically, if the coder makes a check against the correct thing early enough he needs not commit to extra checks later, thus avoiding extra checks via GOOD LOGIC. Is that better? again, you don't know that without knowing what the code is actually doing. how much of the graphics features are truly offloaded to the GPU vs. the CPU is one in particular. something has to generate the data for the dynamic lighting and shadows and water reflections/refractions, for example, before handing it off to the GPU. it is impossible to tell what the bottleneck is unless you are actually using the library itself. I doubt I'll get to see the code, so I cannot say, but most should be offloaded onto the GPU. See that's what i can do, I can say how it SHOULD be, and if it's not like that i wanna know WHY! I'm not saying oh the bottleneck is this and this, but what i am saying is there is a bottleneck. certainly, but that doesn't mean it is poor code. again, remember, there is much more detail in what we see in NWN2 than a game like oblivion. how that is handled is at best, a guess by either you or me. bottlenecks are not always unavoidable. taks WTF are you saying, I find that hard to believe because to be honest I don't see much going off that is worthwhile. In terms of the technology I see either bad code or bad decisions.

Clean it, and replace fans + heatsinks. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Cleaned it up and put it through the cold test (running it out on the balcony in -5C) and its not a heat issue after all. His hardrive is severely fragged and he's got about 3 times as many processes running in win as he should have. I recommended defrag and a clean reinstall+patch of NWN2 otherwise we'll have to do a complete wipe. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> save time complete wipe now.

Clean it, and replace fans + heatsinks.

this is contrary to developer comments that i've seen. it is actually a pain with so many checks. checks result in many if/then statements, case statements, loops with branches, etc. this is time consuming. particularly when these checks have to access relatively large tables, which means memory accesses which are very slow (not every table fits into cache). also, the fact that it is mostly integer based does not change the fact that the CPU can only issue so many instructions per cycle. granted, most high-end CPUs are out of order, but that only helps a bit (high-end means anything intel, AMD or PowerPC). Doesn't smell write to me, the ruleset for the most part isn't exactly a world apart from NWN, which ran and systems with alot less power. I've never seen a table in D&D which I would think of as being large, but there are and have been methods for storing tables, and working with tables inside of code, sine table springs to mind, a technique often used to cheaply calculate sine values. Good logic can avoid alot checking aswell. What I mean by Balancing out is that the code under the hood somewhere is poor, it HAS to be poor to require such a high end machine. It's a simple fact. Somewhere there is a bottleneck in the code, it may be obscure, but it's there.

My machine has no issues at all.

perhaps, but neither of us are actually working with the engine itself to know exactly what it would take. the detail with this game is beyond anything i've seen with oblivion, and certainly the D&D rules implementation is hurting CPU performance, which means less help for the GPU. taks <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I dunno, I wasn't every really impressed with the engine. Ruleset Calculations are nothing, randomness CAN occasionally be expensive. All in all the D&D ruleset shouldn't be that painful, most of it is integer based, I've never seen it's innards, I suppose I could look as the ASM, but that wouldn't answer the question much and it'd waste alot of time. What i see, for the cost hardware wise, doesn't balance out!