nipsen

It's not like you have to have a "return to 1" dialogue setup either. It's just convenient and simple to have it when you program. Few steps from concept to code. From playing other Obsidian games, I know they hate the repeating dialogue as much as I do, though. Alpha Protocol with manually strung together nodes, that load with different situations depending on dialogue choices, that then can be manipulated again from other choices turning up depending on earlier scenarios. ..extreme amounts of work, lots of "lost" dialogue - but you achieve what you want, that something feels important and has consequences. On the downside, not all dialogue outcomes can be as obvious as they maybe should have been. And I know people who played this game, that didn't know how nwn and ME games work, who suspected they actually had no choices at all. Still - lots of writing works. But I kind of suspect that the reason this ends up as a solution over more economical ones, is that the engines people design tend to be a bit more specialised than they should be. Take the barkeep convo, for example. You go to the bar, and you could have just a few options initially. You could ask what's on tap, you could ask about a room, or ask about the guys in the corner, that sort of thing. Then as the conversation moves along, and you get a beer from the finest brewery in the nearest republican stronghold, you could ask about that town, and keep going about the local beer tasting bad, or amend it with how the taste of homebrew and honey has it's charm after all, or whatever. And now you could ask about the guys in the corner and get an amendment from the barkeep based on whether you like the republicans and the cities, or the breakoff faction out in the boonies. Same with the room, depending on what you say, or depending on what reputation is following around you like the massive silver sword hilt on your back, etc. If you asked before, you could get a neutral and innocent answer, if you asked afterwards, you could get a more pointed one. And then you wouldn't need to actually write extra threads of dialogue, just write more variants on the non-critical paths (which would be done after the convos are largely finished). But you would need to 1. set extra states that the existing dialogue tree is affected by. And 2. allow the shown dialogue to morph during the conversation. So if you plan for that..

In the sense that the combat system is built a bit like a gun made out of clay - that it doesn't really work, but at least gives off a loud bang before it breaks. No, don't want a fighting system like that. In the sense that creatures run around and past parties, before stopping and never moving again, making everything look either like Scooby Doo, or else like a replaying cut of the same boring fighting scene. Not really a fan. In the sense that the party dynamic is cut out, to make the controls work better, and to not make the programming so difficult - but that the fundamental NWN-system is still there, making the action stop and pause for no obvious reason.. not the best solution either. In the sense that the combat animations are made for a turn-based game with set turns, and then is forced on top of something that looks a bit like an action game - until you actually start to play it, and notice the counters and hit-registration still run on 3 second heartbeats... not great either. I'm pretty sure we don't have much to worry about, though. Dungeon Siege 3 was a very good attempt at meshing turn-based or paused combat with action controls. Enjoyed playing that a lot. ..also from a game-mechanical standpoint, even if I'm not that fond of real-time dungeon crawler games, or lol and stuff like that. And from what Sawyer says, it seems that interference state between minions is something they're looking at from an animation and ruleset standpoint. The defense stances and so on won't really work if it's not accurate and real time.. so.. I suspect they're going for something that is a bit slower/more compact (that more happens in a shorter time) than DS3, and is intended to be paused a lot - but still is real time, with combat and events and animation interference actually looking like realtime.

So are we looking at spell effects and animations of different kinds involving the book? That'd be.. ..um. I want the grimoire to suck blue strands of ether from the souls of my enemies, mount them on the ridge of the book, and play death metal on them. Just saying.

Ooh. Very close to seeing a serious and embarrassingly heartfelt proposal for marriage on the internet right there.

Not sure why I didn't notice how quotable Josh is before now: "It's unlikely to be ultra-complicated, but should make you think". (Also, didn't actually know Somethingawful still existed, so I'll be heading over there for a while now. Until later).

Well, yes and no. If you really dislike the mechanical variance that always feels arbitrary and illogical, more reactivity isn't really going to help.. you know.. The Oblivion and Skyrim dialogue are great examples. Everything is dynamic! And it's all completely boring! But what you can do with it is make the outside events move along in ways that make sense. And you can easily, and early when you write the story, fit in explanations for events that happened earlier into later events. That is valuable as well. I'm just saying that it won't really replace complex dialogue chains. (Or I don't think it should, at least.)

I think we're talking slightly at cross purposes here. I'm not saying that the dialogue won't be as interactive as PS:T. I'm saying that even if it is, the reputation system is unlikely to hold much depth. PS:T had very in-depth dialogue trees but in terms of reputation (in terms of Lawful/Chaotic/Good/Evil and faction rep) didn't have a substantial influence beyond the cosmetic. Yes, doors opened and closed but these were very limited in their scope. Even Fallout 2, which had probably the most extensive and flag-happy dialogue trees (and for some unfathomable reason gets glossed over when people are singing the praises of PS:T's dialogue), didn't have reputation affecting matters in the way that people like to dream about. I don't know. Just from my own experience as gamemaster, or writing stories for other gamemasters, I've always thought of a reputation or a faction-alignment system as a crutch. That someone who is too lazy to write more intricate dialogue with more branching, or scenarios that don't have enough conditions, will use to create short-cuts. "Oh, hello mr. [neutral effort +1 elf-lover], don't you belong with the [faction align] in the [north by degrees of hearth]. That it's a way to get away with writing generic dialogue. But. If you create scenarios where it makes sense that you would pick up a reputation for this and that - whether or not that is actually your real alignment - then I suppose it would actually give you more options to customize dialogue. You're seen from a distance while settling the debt with the local law-enforcement, after being caught for an insignificant theft after brokering a settlement between the cultists and the thieves guild. And any onlooker will know that you've stolen an artefact from the cultists, and probably returned it to law-enforcement. So now you could start to legitimately care about how you're seen and who you're seen with. Put up reasonable ways for people to logically recognize you as well between hubs that are connected in some way (which is really difficult with when you only have local, personal dialogue to go from - how does even the most complicated dialogue tree translate to a reasonable response from an external point of view?). Say, if you make too much noise in one hub, people might recognize you then, and it could trigger events that make the world respond to you, or move the story away. Making that difficult link between an interactive, sort of living, outside world. And between the player's actions from his perspective, suddenly easier to create believably. You could even cause cutscenes to actually make sense, right :D

Awesome. All hail, sir Josh of Sawyer.

That too is a good point. That because of the way "multicore" implementation is actually done, 99% of the time, on current hardware - we might be better off without it. See often that automatically threaded runs in games cause locks, even when executing optimally on extremely fast hardware, because one application has to wait for a critical point in another. Or the governing thread needs to wait longer than expected with no fallback, so the framerate and response drops. Maybe the real question could be whether they can add opencl runs or not for hit-detection, node-generation, ai-runs, animation correction, and so on. Where you're sort of forced to account for execution times from the beginning.

That's.. not what metacritic is supposed to do. What you get is a slice of selected reviews from selected sites, that then is amplified by similar user-reviews. Which again gives the site credit as a stable predictor for people who are interested in things like that. Just imagine what would happen to Metacritic's credibility if they suddenly started challenging every review score in every magazine, and kept having user scores that were completely different from the reviews. Actually, we've seen that a few times with "site abuse". :D .. I suppose reviews cannot be wrong when they're all wrong together.

What would be desirable would be to end up with a product that is funded ahead of launch. That see enough sales over time to sustain full development of another title over at least a couple of years. Since that would actually make Obsidian independent of publisher money. Which would put them in a situation where the company can take on publisher funded projects if they wish to make use of inactive studio efforts. While making the real games that pay the bills over time in a different context. So assuming that a hit like PoE can continue every year is probably not what they're going to set up if they were projecting sales targets.

Mm. Well. I'm willing to offer myself and my considerable experience as a beta-tester to Obsidian - for the mere pittance of 59.99$, including 15 USD in shipping. By all means, please consider this beta upgrade as an extra offer in the tier-upgrade system.

What you're smoking. We want it. You can buy it in the shop. Actually, this came from the mouth of a proud iPhone owner at a mobile and computer expo. I was talking about how supremely unclever it is that we rely on network protocols in mobile networks being hidden to the public, using proprietary function sets, in order to be considered secure. Rather than relying on actual verification systems that make the connection itself secure. This was a curious concept to me, I said, because there is no reason to rely on makeshift contrivances like complex proprietary function sets that will be a security threat if ever hacked - when we have already invented effective and cheap encryption and verification standards that securely can verify the clients without identifying them to everyone else. The wielder of the iPhone gasps and theatrically exclaims "yes, you're talking about that standard Apple invented a few years ago!". Sadly, I'm completely f'n serious, I assure you.

Oh, yeah. The entirely new authentification system that Apple invented in 2009. Indeed, we computer science people do know it so well.

In other words, you are generally speaking in favour of some sort of limitation on your product, whatever it may be. Because you believe it will stop unsolicited sales and theft. You have no real concern for the actual implementation of the limitation, or whether or not it's actually legal. It simply must be done because of brutes and proles who cannot be trusted to not steal the chair from under your bum. Or, to put it simply, you want to have drm in the release as a badge of honor for paying, real, customers. "It's an inconvenience, but I nevertheless feel superior about it!". The ones who do not are "internet hippies". ... Say - remind me again why I haven't moved to a cabin in the mountains with no electricity or contact with the outside world.

So.. no one, including Paradox, interested in whether or not the disc-version will be sold drm-free?

No offense, but you could all lay this to rest instantly if you simply stated that "Yes, we will release and facilitate a release for the kickstarter backers that will be activation and drm free. As per promise, if not in written statement - which we do not owe you, but we promise dearly anyway! So trust us!". Which I suppose is what you just did. And then added: "We will then release a drm and activation free release on quality disc production, with amazing bling, and in a beautiful non-standard sized box - to supplement the collectors. As well as those who wish to save themselves the 40Gb download. Of course, we will also supply various ways to appropriate the upcoming dlc, both digitally and on disc". If you did that, no one would ask a question about this again. By the way - thank you for allowing me to craft that statement for you. That will be fifty bucks, please.

Mm. I wondered about that a lot as well. Why wouldn't that character do some gesture in the game-event, in less detail than in the pre-renders maybe, when they've bothered making these huge cutscenes with the same models elsewhere. Until I tried making some mods in NWN, and it turns out that adding any kind of animation isn't just difficult in the first place - but also introduces a lot of scripting problems the engine just doesn't account for. Maybe the same problem as in Fallout:NV, with the framework. "Oops, there's no system for having three characters talking together". Probably the same thing. Just was never designed for any sort of interaction between the animation system, camera, independent events and the dialogue system to begin with. But I mean.. do designers really sit down and say things like "there's no need to have different dialogues than this to drive the game anyway", at the beginning of the project? Or is it just that the first prototype never gets replaced before the scripting of the dialogue starts..?

..Maybe as long as a cleric, druid and a monk can perform similar tasks as a fighter. Or a specialized fighter can have a similar role as a rogue, etc. I mean, it's not optimal, but I always played with things like that in iwd2 and bg. Using a druid to heal and put down slow and so on in case of swarms. That then would make the light fighter more useful than just a heavily armored fighter. Or using the druid to take care of fast fighters or out of range wizzards, while putting the cleric on heal, buff and damage types, and so on.

:D ..I'm starting to become a fan of custom-made trap dungeons again. Like the Vault sidequests in NV, or the temples in the Tomb Raider reroll. Because they're a way to put in a small consistent quest based on the setting, or inspired by it, without necessarily hanging it on the main character's opera-drama. Then again, I'm probably just thinking that because the main story-lines in a lot of games sound a bit like Jasper Forde reading his own books. There is something clever in here, probably - but all I can hear is the author adoring the sound of his voice. So let me guess.. they've decided that Project RED should be supported no matter what. And Totilo objectively feels they are basically promoting piracy. So now piracy is a good thing. Instead of something that happens when the service you offer for money isn't good enough.

Classic, that one. Review sites that become predictable - but not because they have writers who are consistent.

Just for the record, I do not see this is an inevitable consequences of animination improvement -- and, more to the point, I don't see this as a good thing. If you see this as progress, then I'd suggest that you should be looking at a different company. well.. imo... maybe it's a bit easy to let the game-mechanics mimic d&d dice-rolls. Which is an abstraction in the first place. Of people moving around seamlessly. Not of people running from square to square block, having their spells or actions interrupted by artificial constraints. I mean, there's no reason to remove turn-based gameplay, or letting actions play in time-slots. But maybe it shouldn't be a goal in itself to create a d&d paper ruleset, just with better graphics. I don't know.. but whenever I played rpgs, we always bent the ruleset a little bit. And what I imagined in my head wasn't characters running around actually obeying the ruleset in the first place.

yeah, the usual solution is just to add more updates per second (and add a queue system) until the most obvious problems disappear. See a lot of games in the unreal engine that just avoid the problem by removing the objects that actually move as well. Or create a fighting system that has literally no overworld interference - that when you see it from an abstract on the top level, it's still square blocks that run into each other on flat ground. That then the animation sequences fit into.. lots of work tends to go into that, connecting specific moves to the animation of the other characters. It's not something the framework really helps you with, but I know people have made good plugins to improve on it. The problem is the overhead and that you still run into the same problem as before, that you have paths that rely on out of date info. Maybe you could let the paths have curves, have characters obey order, and slip into line that way, etc. Probably lots of good ways to do it that look perfectly fine. But it's not easy to have that starting point and then add hit-detection or node-generation that isn't based on linear approximations. Always having squares like on a checker-board to work from. Or, you end up with having to rework everything from scratch. I don't know.. I suppose the most tempting thing to do would be to prepare an algorithm that executes in a.. reasonably instant amount of time. That's based on a vector for each character and the reach of the next few steps or so. That would make up some curve. And then create longer animation cycles adjusted from the existing splines they're made from anyway, and so on. It's probably not impossible to do that on an x86 platform either. And then... fantasizing completely here.. having a start for a fireball spell begin with a staff movement and a staff effect that comes naturally from the previous stances. Rather than ending in a rest state before executing the cast spell animation, and so on. This would also solve the milling around problem, since you could project formations and ..things.. in a way that would make sense, having the fighters take position up front right outside of the reach of the wizzard, having movement that doesn't actually have obstructions in the normal checker-board sense. .. could see bunches of beautiful solutions to that on the ps3. The animation and hit-detection in Infamous1, dragon-wings in Lair, animation interference in heavenly sword. The guy who makes Overgrowth has a pretty neat solution to this, by the way. See some neat trickery with OpenCL, other interesting things happen with shared memory on multicore arm processors ..and I kind of go around hoping that we'll see more and more solutions in "simple" games that use more imaginative ways to do pathfinding and animation interference. Probably will have to be coming along with less d&d dice-roll abstractions in rpgs, at least.

Yes.. agree with that. I just have a very bad feeling about the entire "Q&A team from Paradox" setup. And I don't see why Obsidian won't come out and say something specific about - for example - difficulty, approach to complex gameplay, approach to complex quests, approach to intricate multi-branched writing, interactive fiction.. I'm watching Sawyer's really good videos, though. And I'm not crying if the game isn't as difficult as IWD2. But I'm worried that gameplay rules that go beyond WoW and Diablo style hacking won't get the attention it should. That if they have something really clever in there with area effect spells that work in synergy with area/reach for stances for fighters, and so on. That wouldn't necessarily be discovered or used by players in the.. *cough*.. focus groups. Then this might convincingly translate into "let's release early instead of waiting for something we're uncertain will be fantastic". Just missing some attention to that part from Obsidian. Specially when they're talking about dlc and disc-releases now, before the game has a release date. ..you see what I'm worrying about here, yes? "Why should we both lose a whooping amount of dollars, waiting for a feature that 'practically no one*' wants anyway?". *according to numbers read out of a tophat.

It's kind of an interesting question what might be useful to program for multicore in a title like that. I mean, you could imagine that path-finding, node-generation for ai, non-immediate tasks.. and preloading, caching, and so on would be running separate threads. And that this would possibly be able to complete asynchronously without interfering with immediate tasks. ..that could be things like triggering effects, updating animation states (maybe dependent on terrain, sneak/detection, spots/looking towards target, aggressiveness), hit-detection (if any).. So given that they're a bit economical in the first place, and targeting relatively low powered rigs, they're probably: 1. Avoiding the expensive immediate calculations to keep cpu-usage low. 2. Making sure the game is not actually dependent on instant multicore runs. So maybe it'd be the difference between a 2 second pause once in a while, or a 0.1 second pause from a large mob ai run... you know, hidden behind a short "Graak kill human!" prompt. edit: As much as I like to hear myself talk, it would be interesting to hear from tech at Obsidian about this, though