Jump to content

Search the Community

Showing results for tags 'ui'.

  • Search By Tags

    Type tags separated by commas.
  • Search By Author

Content Type


Forums

  • Obsidian Community
    • Obsidian General
    • Computer and Console
    • Developers' Corner
    • Pen-and-Paper Gaming
    • Skeeter's Junkyard
    • Way Off-Topic
  • Pentiment
    • Pentiment: Announcements & News
    • Pentiment: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
    • Pentiment: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)
    • Pentiment: Technical Support (Spoiler Warning!)
  • The Outer Worlds 2
    • The Outer Worlds 2 Speculation
  • Avowed
    • Avowed Speculation
  • Grounded
    • Grounded: Announcements & News
    • Grounded: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
    • Grounded: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)
    • Grounded: Technical Support (Spoiler Warning!)
  • The Outer Worlds
    • The Outer Worlds: Announcements & News
    • The Outer Worlds: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
    • The Outer Worlds: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)
    • The Outer Worlds: Character Builds & Strategies (Spoiler Warning!)
    • The Outer Worlds: Technical Support (Spoiler Warning!)
  • Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
    • Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Announcements & News
    • Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
    • Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Stories (Spoiler Warning!)
    • Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning!)
    • Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Technical Support (Spoiler Warning!)
  • Pathfinder
    • Pathfinder Adventures: Announcements & News
    • Pathfinder Adventures: General Discussion (No Spoilers!)
    • Pathfinder Adventures: Characters Builds & Strategies (Spoiler Warning!)
    • Pathfinder Adventures: Technical Support (Spoiler Warning!)
  • Pillars of Eternity
    • Pillars of Eternity: Announcements & News
    • Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
    • Pillars of Eternity: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)
    • Pillars of Eternity: Characters Builds, Strategies & the Unity Engine (Spoiler Warning!)
    • Pillars of Eternity: Technical Support (Spoiler Warning!)
    • Pillars of Eternity: Backer Beta
  • Pillars of Eternity: Lords of the Eastern Reach
    • Lords of the Eastern Reach: Announcements & News
    • Lords of the Eastern Reach: Speculation & Discussion
    • Lords of the Eastern Reach: Kickstarter Q&A
  • Legacy (General Discussion)
    • Alpha Protocol
    • Dungeon Siege III
    • Neverwinter Nights 2
    • South Park
    • Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
  • Legacy (Archives)
    • Alpha Protocol
    • Armored Warfare
    • Dungeon Siege III
    • Fallout: New Vegas
    • Neverwinter Nights 2
    • South Park
    • Tyranny

Blogs

  • Chris Avellone's Blog
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 Blog
  • Joshin' Around!
  • Adam Brennecke's Blog
  • Chapmania
  • Pillars of Eternity Backer Site Blog
  • Pillars of Eternity Support Blog
  • Pathfinder Adventures Dev Blogs
  • Obsidian Marketing and Market Research Blog

Find results in...

Find results that contain...


Date Created

  • Start

    End


Last Updated

  • Start

    End


Filter by number of...

Joined

  • Start

    End


Group


MSN


Skype


Jabber


Yahoo


Website URL


Location


Xbox Gamertag


PSN Online ID


Steam


Interests

  1. Started a new game. Saved it and quit to the main Pillars of Eternity screen. When I hover over buttons such as New Game or Load, the cursor becomes a red circle with a line through it ("not allowed"). I can still click the buttons and they still work. And oddly enough the cursor is an arrow when hovering over any part of the menu box other than the buttons themselves! Tried taking a screenshot but couldn't get cursor to show in the screenshot.
  2. Maybe I'm blind, but after picking a few plants, I can't find them anywhere in my inventory. Bug, or am I not on the right screen? If it's the latter, the UI might need to be clarified a bit...i tried clicking the various filters in my inventory, cleared all filters...no shrubbewy.
  3. I'm excited to cast spells in PoE, but it took me a moment to figure out the Spell Grimiore. The UI could be maybe a bit more intuitive. Some observations about this screen: Clicking the spell-tier buttons on the right page affects what's displayed on the left page. I expected these buttons to affect what appeared to the right of them on the same (right) page. The top of the left page simply says "known spells", and I didn't even notice the "1st level" or "2nd level" specifier on the bottom. Users aren't trained to look for titles/descriptions in the bottom pane. UI text on right page, "In Grimoire" didn't make sense to me...I'm already in the grimoire.This screen might be more intuitive if the spell tiers/options were shown outside of the book, and by selecting a spell you move it into the corresponding level page in your book. Or, rename "In Grimoire" to "Ready", "Memorized", something like that. Better yet, have the grimoire represent the caster's known spells. Have page forward/back buttons to move among levels, rather than the un-book-like buttons currently on the right-hand page. Selecting a spell would move it into a separate "ready" or memorized" list, a la Baldur's Gate. Right-clicking a spell to get details made sense in the limited-resolution days of Baldur's Gate, but it feels too static here. Mousing over a spell in the spell pool should be enough to yield a description of the spell. This is less important but I was a bit frustrated trying to get descriptions--a non-Infinity-Engine-veteran might get discouraged when clicking a choice (un)memorizies it rather than yield information. (This can be remedied by making the UI flow more intuitive as suggested above). Thanks for reading, hope this feedback makes sense!
  4. Dear developers, dear community, after the first early beta ingame footage is online available (e.g. here: http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/07/30/pillars-of-eternity-video-josh-sawyer-on-character-creation-and-infinity-rpgs/), I noticed a small detail from the UI I'd like to discuss here. But before I'd like to thank the dev-team for the great work - what I've seen so far that’s the game I begged and backed for. So what is this post about? In the footage you can see, that on a selected hero the abilities/feats appear in a row above the hero pictures of the GUI. If more than one hero is selected no abilities/feats are shown. What do you think about having at least a set of 4 or 6 abilities/feats presented above each hero for quick selection (see the picture) if more than 1 hero is selected? Of course it’s possible to quick keyboard and mouse select hero and feat in a combat situation but I think it’ll improve handling for most players - including me. I don’t know how much work it would be to change – if possible and where users could drag and drop the abilities (inventory/character sheet) for the multiselect quick-slots or if it could be used for potions etc. too. Please note: This post is not about UI-style per se, how much I like it or how much BG-style it is and I’m not a native speaker so I apologize for the English.
  5. -------------------- [Description of the issue] Chanter UI acts very erratically and gets worse the longer the game is open; restarting fixes it. Specifically, when creating a sequence of chants, clicking on any chant on the left hand side will create a copy of an existing sequence, rather than creating a new one. Or sometimes an existing sequence will be deleted and replaced with 4 sequences, all blank, on the right hand side. [DETAILED list of steps to reproduce the issue AND what to look for] 1) Select Chanter PC (mine was a male amanua) 2) Open Chanter UI 3) Create new chant sequence (which for some reason is always called Sample Chant 2) - The chants I was using were, at level 1, the move speed chant, fire weapons chant, and damage aura chant; and at level 2, the fear chant. Bug occurred with any combination of these chants in any order). 4) Enter combat or run around for 3-5 minutes (the bug never seems to happen immediately upon starting the game) 5) Open Chanter UI again 6) Create a new chant sequence under the first one 7) The second chant sequence will become a copy of the first, and cannot be edited. Attempts to add or remove chants will cause it to revert to the copy. 8*) Sometimes when this happen, Chanter will become unable to chant at all, and the UI will say something like "sample chant 2 failed". [Expected behaviour] You should be able to edit chant sequences in the chant UI.
  6. A suggestion for the UI when in combat when there are many enemies and it gets really crowded. It would be helpful to get a UI bar with a roster of enemies so it is easier to aim and allows easier monitoring of specific enemies. Not sure if anyone else feels the need for it, but I feel it would make combat management easier. Thanks, keep it up.
  7. So the interface for making a prepared chant is baffling to me. How does this work? It seems I can endless add chants to the list. Any help is greatly appreciated.
  8. Very impressive, first off. Very awesome dialogue screen. By my count, the nine dialogue options boil down to this: - 3 regular responses - 5 stat responses - 1 multi-stat response (this blows my mind and makes me so, so happy) I'm going to assume that the three regulars all flow into the same reaction (plus Athletics), but what about the other five? We know that there will/can be up to twelve responses for one screen, but how many of those are just for flavor? Those five are all stat-based, so I'm a bit cautious. I'm going to assume Intelligence and Perception flow into one peaceful response. If I may, what is the ratio of Flavor responses vs. Actual ones?
  9. I caught the PC Gamer demo of PoE last night. As a whole the game looks absolutely fantastic. There was one thing, however, that stood out like a nasty chip marring the beauty of a masterfully cut gem: the inconsistent user interface. Now, I’ve been lurking this forum off and on since the Kickstarter campaign and I’ve seen many skirmishes of the skeuomorphic-minimalist UI holy war flare up and that is not the point of this post. Regardless of which side of that philosophic divide you fall I would assume you would desire a consistent interface. During the video I counted what I consider to be five different “interface styles” (for lack of better term), not counting character creation, etc. The first is the docked dialogue interface. It utilizes a heavy wooden style and is “docked” awkwardly to the bottom of the screen. It doesn’t feel like part of the game; it isn’t grounded in the interface pane like the Infinity Engine games’ dialogue boxes. The second is the floating inventory/trading screen. The third is the main combat screen. This interface appears to be striving for a minimalist approach with free floating panels and buttons. This runs counter to the other screens’ big heavy wooden windows. While I can see some wood in the buttons this screen looks closer to Neverwinter Nights wireframe style interface. The fourth “style” that I saw was the full screen, stone and paper based role playing screens. The fifth “style” that I noticed was the floating wooden looting window that pops up near the item you’re looting. I understand that Obsidian probably chose to do this to minimize mouse movement but given the dynamic positioning of this box from moment to moment it becomes inconsistent in and of itself. Each individual UI element looks well enough by itself but when they are all mixed together the game loses its visual identity. For example, everything in Baldur’s Gate was based in gray stone, Baldur’s Gate II had that light wood or leather (not sure what it was), Neverwinter had that gold wireframe. I did not get that sense of consistency from the PC Gamer Demo; wooden skuemorhpic buttons here, full screen stone there, metal filigree surrounding floating box down there, etc… I am not going to argue for or against whether or not the interface should be minimalist in nature so we can better see the paper dolls on the grid. But I would like to see a more consistent visual identity for the game especially since I am very optimistic for future sequels in which I hope they would also have their own unique designs.
  10. After recently viewing the gameplay demo (on Giant Bomb, shilling for my favourite games website: http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-ex-pillars-of-eternity/2300-9224/), I was left with a very positive impression in general. Amongst other things, I thought they'd done a good job of the UI: the look of the game gave me the feeling of heart from the Good 'ol Days, but with some of the interaction polish of modern games. I know there has been a lot of UI discussions, I just wanted to raise my voice to say we'd all be more pleased in the end if the UI gets the kind of attention to detail that makes you enjoy just using it, rather than worry more about whether a specific texture should be stone rather than wood. Make the animations tight, make the interactive elements snappy in their reactions, blow life into the little details without making them distracting, etc. cRPGs have a (somewhat deserved) reputation for having UIs more worried about style than usability. The current state of PoE actually seems like it might be bucking that trend, and I would love to see it happen P.S. not saying that style and atmosphere isn't important for the game either, there's a legitimate reason many cRPGs have that aforementioned skew, and I'm loving the feel imparted by wood and parchment in the UI now, but I feel that aspect has been well served. Doubtless there will be dissenting voices, which is why I'd like to say to the designers now: stick to your guns (or wands or flails or whatever), and buff'em to a brilliant shine
  11. Update by Brandon Adler, Producer Hello, everyone. Like everyone here at Obsidian, I hope you had a great holiday season and were able to gorge on lots of treats and good food. This week I am going to go over a bit about the new Backer Portal (please log in if you haven't already), give a general update about where we are in our production, and show off some of the cool things that are happening in the game. In our next update we will be taking a more detailed look at some of the classes in Eternity. Backer Info Just a reminder to all of our backers, if you have not done so already, please head to the Backer Portal and complete your order. All backers need to go through the process so they can receive their rewards - even those that only have digital goods. To start the process, click on "Manage My Pledge Now" and click on the "Select Reward" button on the pledge management screen. From here, you may select the tier you backed (or upgrade to a new tier), select additional add-ons, fill out any shipping information, and file your surveys. Also, please make sure you fill out your surveys as soon as you can. If you have an NPC, item, inn, or portrait the sooner you get the information to us, the sooner we can make sure it gets into the game. If you are having any issues, e-mail us at support@obsidian.net and we'll help you out quickly. Areas As most of you know, we finished up Od Nua (our mega-dungeon) in our last milestone. I have to say, I think it looks pretty amazing. Currently, the area team is working on our second big city, Twin Elms, and it is looking just as good. Here, take a look for yourself. Ancient Engwithan ruins near Twin Elms. Without getting into too much detail, the Area Designers are fleshing out the end of the game right now and everything is really coming together. The area in the screenshot above looks like the perfect place for a big fight, huh? Characters Our character team has been cranking out new creatures and equipment. We are almost completely through all of our A priority creatures. Soon we will be working on our B priority creatures and lots of equipment variations. One of the creatures that was just finished to Alpha quality is the Cean Gŵla. These banshee-like undead are the spirits of women who died under particularly tragic or traumatic circumstances. Take a look at the comparison images below. In-engine and concept comparison of the Cean Gŵla. UI Most of our UI has either been implemented or mocked up to an Alpha level. The interface that we would like to show you today is the character sheet, which shows character and party information. You can find lots of useful info on the sheet including various party statistics, your reputations with Eternity factions, and character stats. The character sheet has many useful player and party statistics. Features Features have been going into the game pretty regularly. We just recently moved to Unity 4.3 and, while this might not seem like a big deal, 4.3 has ushered in some long awaited features. Animation annotations, for example, were added to Unity. We can now call sound effects based on specific frames of animation. This makes things like footsteps possible. A majority of our spells and abilities are in-game and usable. Josh has started auditing them and requesting changes for gameplay balance purposes. Tim has been quite busy with all of the small edits. Strangely, one of our more minor features has gotten me the most excited. Just recently we have gotten the ability to set custom party formations and I am having a blast testing it out. Concepts Have you been wondering what some of the Pillars of Eternity gods look like? Wonder no more. Representations of the gods Galawain and Woedica. Above you will see the representations of Galawain and Woedica, gods in the Eternity pantheon. Woedica is known by many names including "The Exiled Queen," "The Burned Queen," "Oathbinder," and "The Strangler." Her domains include law, justice, oaths and promises, (rightful) rulership, hierarchies, memory, and vengeance. Priestesses of the Exiled Queen serve as lawyers and judges in towns and urban centers, and the most prominent among them are advisers to kings and lords. They are of particular importance in the Empire of Aedyr, where by tradition, business contracts always require their endorsement. Her devotees are typically found in the upper classes, but any conservative person who longs for a vanished past will find a place in her faith. “When Woedica takes back her throne” is a common saying amongst her followers, signifying a utopian future when society will be properly ordered once again, and she will take her rightful place as ruler of the gods. Galawain is patron of the hunt in all its forms, and he is honored by those whose occupations are concerned with pursuit and discovery. His faithful include frontiersmen, constables, treasure-seekers, explorers, and even scholars, many of whom wear his carved symbol – a dog’s head – around their wrist or neck. He is also protector of wild places and untamed wilderness, where the hunt manifests in its purest form as a daily struggle for survival. That's it for this update. Make sure you head over to our forums to let us know what you think of anything you see here.
  12. UI Version 2: What did Obsidian do? Hopefully not this! Another thread because I'm bored. Also another speculation. I have made another mockup UI based on what I think Obsidian would have done to achieve their goals, based on a couple of recent-ish statements. Objective #1: Use up less screen space overall. This is something that they stated they were going to do, make the UI smaller. This is something I wouldn't necessarily agree with unless it was trimming a little bit of vertical space that they could have spared from the original. In my opinion there is absolutely no point in not using up the total width of the screen for an IWD style UI as it allows you more space to make use of functionality (such as extra action bar buttons, quick item buttons etc). It is possible that this is exactly what they did. However the unfortunate fans of minimalistic UI's probably influenced this decision a little bit. (Assumed) Objective #2: Make portraits slightly larger In a recent thread Josh Sawyer posted the current portrait size in the main HUD - 73x86, which is slightly bigger than the version seen in UIv1. It may be that the portrait size is bigger but is cropped or shrunk by the UI to fit in the same tiny portrait windows featured in UIv1, but for this mockup I assumed they were bigger. Objective 3: Remove Dead Space Self explanatory. After shrinking the space, make use of available space in the UI. Less amounts of fancy pillars and superfluous art-y stuff like that. Worst Case Result: Vertical space cannot really be shrunk any more than this, unless the portrait size (73x86) or icon size (32x32) was made smaller. Room for status effects has, however disappeared. Not sure how they are going to be handled unless they make them tiny icons on the portraits or something. Horizontal space has been shrunk to only include necessary menu elements. It is possible that the menu size could be reduced even further and the left side of the UI with the portraits expanded a bit further to include some more action bar slots. I am not sure how things like skill use, guard interface, formation buttons and all of that are being handled in Eternity. This is however, exactly what I hope they HAVE NOT done regarding the UI for the game. You do not need to see the bits of the map to the sides of the UI because you will never ever be focusing down there or need to see characters beneath the UI height on the screen. Latest RockPaperSh*tGun article on the mega dungeon however was promising in that they've rejected the minimalists and kept the skeuomorphic, Baldur's Gate style, but I can't help but fear that we've lost some horizontal space that could be used. Hopefully this is not what was done for the second version!
  13. While this topic was mentioned before, and received the expected invective from ignorant elitist "REAL PC gamers...", I wanted to revisit the issue to see if the dev's have had any discussions related to this matter. In a (probably vain) attempt to head off the flamers arguments, I'll post a few ideas and caveats. Eternity is a PC game first and formost. I understand, and respect this. And as most (percentage?) players who backed this project will be using a keyboard & mouse setup, the UI must reflect this and be optimized for this set up. However, I rebuke any stance and idea that this precludes including a UI that enables users of a controller (360) from playing the game in a fashion that is most convienient for them. This isn't a one-or-the-other proposition. Both options can be fully enabled and optimized while not taking anything away from the other. This will of course require additional work and resources. But perhaps this is worth it. The problem I see is that we don't have solid numbers as to how many would choose to play this game with a controller if given the choice. No cost/benefit analysis has been done for this (as far as I know). The KB&M crowd are a vocal bunch. As is any group that belongs to a dying, at least diminishing, segment. This isn't up for debate, examples of this are everywhere. (This is NOT about PC games in general, just the use of KB&M). From the growing popularity of consoles, phones, tablets, and the soon-to-be "Steam Box", the time of the KB&M being the defacto-standard interface is fast approaching its end. For this reason, I believe, a strong argument can be made to spend the time to implement a UI for the controller centric crowd to future-proof the game now, and for future expansions/sequels. I've read the same statements made by the dev's how they were tired of building their games for consoles while ignoring the PC crowd. The KB&M crowd have used this statement as justification for closing debate on this issue. I consider this both premature, as the statement was made quite a while ago now, and taken out of context somewhat. Let me explain the latter: all of Obsidian's previous games have been funded by a publisher. They weren't free to make the decisions they wanted. As mentioned earlier, consoles being popular, publishers wished their game to be optimized for the console crowd first and formost. Nothing wrong with this in and of itself, however, publishers being what they are, they chose to ignore the, albeit smaller, PC segment entirely resulting in shody "ports" of games from the console to the PC. I view the dev's statements from the perspective that they were tired of comprisming the enjoyment of one segment of their fans for the benefit of another. NOT that they are somehow against console gamers entirely. It's from this perspective that I feel that debate on this subject shouldn't be shut down. Perhaps I'm wrong though. Perhaps the dev's do have an idiological problem with using controllers as an interface device and it's for this reason that they won't include any controller support. I sincerely hope this isn't the case, as it makes them no better than the publishers they complained about. In SHORT: 1 ) Could the dev's give some clarification on this issue. 2 ) If they won't include controller support, will they at least build the game to allow for modders to add controller support? I want everyone to happily enjoy the game with whatever interface device they feel most comfortable with. Is that asking too much?
  14. (I searched Ye Olde Forums and didn't find any mention of this particular topic nor did I see anything in the UI mockup screenshot to assuage my fears, so my apologies if this issue has been discussed already.) One thing that really bugged me as I started playing Shadowrun Returns is the lack of a game-specific cursor icon. In SRR, the mouse icon is your default arrow (at least in the OS X version) and, I may be alone in this, this tiny detail breaks some of the immersion for me. Therefore, my humble request for Kaz, or whoever is responsible for the final UI design, is to design a set of cursor icons for P:E along the lines of the old IE-style floating hand/gauntlet/other icons. If a gauntlet takes too much space or seems too unwieldy, something equally appropriate and stylized, e.g. something as simple as Starcraft's icons, would be nice. Another, smaller and unrelated, request would be to add a space between the dash and the character/creature name in the dialogue box. I.e. Osmaer- into Osmaer - . That's just me, though.
  15. I request that [continue] choices in dialogues (i.e. when there are no 1, 2, 3 choices) be hotkeyed by pressing 1 rather than enter, or some other key closer to the horizontal numericals. Using 1-2-3-4 etc in dialogue feels like smooth sailing. But then all of a sudden there's that [continue]-dialogue and you must either move your mouse and click the button, or move your hand all the way across the keyboard to press enter.
  16. Update 54 brought with it a work in progress mock up UI and rekindled the age old stylized vs. minimalist UI debate. Simply vote for your preference and feel free to elaborate. Personally I'm firmly in the minimalist camp, I prefer the UI to stay out of my way as much as possible. I want to see as much of the environment as I can on the screen.
  17. Update by Kazunori Aruga, Concept Artist, and Brandon Adler, you-know-what-I-do Hello, backers. This week we are profiling another talented Concept Artist on Eternity, Kaz Aruga. While Kaz wears many artist hats his largest contributions are area and UI concepts. Enjoy. Q: Hello, Kaz. What is your job on the Project Eternity team? Before I start I want to quickly thank all you awesome peeps who backed our game. I wouldn't be here working on my dream project if it weren't for you all, so thank you for making this a reality! I have two responsibilities on Project Eternity. The first is supplying the asset and environment teams with concept art. The second is producing art for the game's UI. I'm occasionally tasked with scripted interaction art and will start producing character portraits further down the road. Q: What are you working on this week? I've been tasked with inventory and character creation UI. *leaps away as a massive fireball of community UI rage engulfs the land* But seriously, I appreciated the feedback you all gave us for the action bar and conversation UI. I've taken notes and been implementing ideas that are in alignment with our design goals. As a side note, being a fan of the IE games and having a lot of experience playing them has proven very useful as it helps me identify what worked and what didn’t. I'm sure we all have fond memories of shuffling piles of arrows between characters. Q: What is your typical work day like on Project Eternity? My day usually starts by fighting off Robs and Polinas to get to the Keurig coffee machine in our room. Consuming the glorious bean drink allows me access to all two neurons in my head, which I then rub together as hard as I can to start making artwork. My day varies a lot from this point based on the task I'm on. For character and environment work a good chunk of time will be devoted to gathering reference and inspiration, or doing homework on a specific subject. I'll then do a rough sketch pass which gets reviewed by the leads and other artists. When I'm on scripted interaction art I work closely with our designers Bobby and Jorge, and for UI I interface with our project lead Josh and Brian who is our programming intern. Q: What are you most looking forward to on Project Eternity? Just the fact that we can put an IE inspired game on the market is enough to get me excited. It's been long overdue. I'm looking forward to seeing all the hard work we are putting in coming together as one complete package, and seeing reactions of people playing the game! Q: Which concept that you have done has been your favorite? Artists are typically never happy with their own work. Next question! I've enjoyed working on art for scripted interactions, and been pretty happy with the results. I've also been putting a lot of work into inventory UI recently and am happy with the results coming out of that. Q: What other projects have you worked on? Before this job I was up in San Francisco working as a texture artist on a television series called Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I've also done some matte painting work in the film industry. Q: What do you like to do when you aren't chained to your desk by your producer? My off time often includes episodes of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, a cold beer, and dual wielding our two resident cats Puddy Tat and Lil'Babs. They are the best. I also have an unhealthy and destructive relationship with Ramen. (No, not the vile instant noodles. How dare you call that Ramen!) Thankfully LA has an abundance of good shops to satisfying my craving. Q: Do you have a favorite concept artist? Here's a few that popped into my head. I'll link to their site and save you all a google search. Sergey Kolesov Thomas Pringle Daisuke “dice” Tsutsumi On the painting and illustration side.. Ashley Wood Jeremy Lipking Yanick "dusso" Dusseault Joseph Zbukvic Zdzislaw Beksinski And of course the greats from the past... John Singer Sargent Jean-Léon Gérôme The Wyeths Norman Rockwell J. C. Leyendecker Isaac Levitan Q: And where do you draw your inspiration from? Nature is a big one of course. I also think back on how blessed we are with powerful tools like Google image search. We don’t neglect traditional resources, but I honestly can't imagine working at our current pace without it. Q: What's your favorite Infinity Engine game? Why? BG1 for exploring the vast wilderness. I can still recall the music and hear the birds chirping in the distance. BG2 is a close 2nd for its story and companions. The only title I haven't finished is IWD2 which I am playing through currently, and I will say I'm enjoying the combat. Q: Existential question of the day: Who are we and why are we? We're just here, man. There's no why, everything just IS. You feel me? Q: Anything else you would like to share? Long live the glorious PC gaming master race. *lets out a nerdy war cry and bangs mouse and keyboard together* That's it for this week. Hope you guys enjoyed getting closer look into what Kaz does for us. See you guys in a couple weeks.
  18. Here are some suggestions for spellcasting in P:E. Please add ideas that you think would suit the game. First off, I'd like to see spells project their Area-of-Effect Marker on the ground, before you cast-confirm them, like in NWN2. Because I need to know if I'm about to barbecue my friends with this fireball spell as well as those pesky ice trolls. I understand if some folks would rather play it old school without the AoE marker, because learning how spells behave was always part of the appeal. So maybe just have it toggleable in the gameplay options? Some players might use it for a while, then voluntarily disable it later, or vice versa. This example is in NWN2/3D of course. I just mean project the marker onto the isometric background in P:E. Secondly, Buffing Spell Chains. I mentioned this in the Readied Actions post but will re-summarise it here. I wonder if it's possible to see a small extension to the spellbook UI where you can add a string of buffing spells to a list -- a spell chain -- order them however you see fit, and save them to that list so that when you anticipate a battle or the need to buff, you click the "spell chain" button on your main game UI for that character, who then begins casting in the order you specified. As long as you have all the spells in your current spell pool, it will cast all of them in sequence. If any are missing, it'll skip to the next one. This is not to be confused with Spell Sequencers, where you pre-cast a chain of spells into a robe or other magical accoutrement so that they all trigger instantaneously at a later command. I don't mean that. The purpose of the buff chain is to both save time and to ensure a level of consistency when you need to cast the same pattern of buffs many times over during gameplay. And of course, as you gain new spells, you simply adjust the spell chain as you see fit. Maybe there could be 2 or 3 optional spell chain buttons on the UI for different spell arrangements? And if I were to really push the boat out, it'd be cool if on the spellbook UI, it showed you spell stats like casting time and spell duration, so you could assign long-duration spells first, and short-duration spells last, for optimum efficiency. I imagine the UI would also require target settings for each spell, such as Caster, Centered on Party, Party Leader, etc. An example using IWD2 spell stats. Of course, you don't have to use it. You can keep buffing manually the way it's always been done. What are some spellcasting features you would like to see in Project Eternity?
  19. Please make sure there are hotkeys for everything. OK, maybe the design will necessitate having to use the mouse once in a while, but whenever possible, have there be a keypress for it too. Obviously, using a mouse for everything should and probably already will be doable as well, but for those of us who know how to use a keyboard, it's fantastic to have that choice. Thanks for reading!
  20. In BG2 there was an option to hide UI by pressing 'h'. The UI would comeback when you press 'h' again or pause the game. I really liked the way the game look like that as it gave me the feeling of the in-game cutscenes with Irenicus (importance?). It also provided a larger screen when exploring a city... Is there such a thing in the plans?
  21. I am currently doing my own playthrough of Icewind Dale 2 and I am noticing a few game mechanics (mostly UI) that I really think hold up and are superior to NWN2 (played Storm of Zethir recently). These mechanics actually make the playthrough much more relaxed and gives it a more tabletop feel IMO. RTS feel to the map controls. Scrolling on window edges and ability to scroll to places where you party is not. Party is not always "centered" on the map. (Camera follows you everywhere in NWN2) Minimap. You can double click on any point on the minimap and then click to have your party move there. Fixed view. Not only is developing for a fixed view less time consuming, I honestly dont find the moveable camera that useful in a party based game. When playing NWN2, I generally like to keep the camera at a tactical view and I hate when it changes orientations during transitions. What kinds of mechanics do you think are superior to perhaps modern iterations and would like to see again in PE?
  22. OK guys, I've thought about this a lot. I feel very comfortable with the old- school Baldur's Gate (1,2) UI, and I really don't like newfangled thin, wiry and transparent UIs. Since this is a game where we, the players, are supposed to give input and I feel this hasn't been mentioned I thought I would give it a go. Compare to Personally, I think that the old BG 2 UI has more charm with it's solid, ornamental look compared to the NWN UI with its thin, transparent, wiry frames. Hell, the NWN 2 looks so much better when you Baldur's Gate-ify it: One strength of the newer UIs is that you can have several windows at once on the screen. Personally though, I find that I never have any practical need for this. I would much more prefer to have an UI just like the original Baldur's Gate, but upsized to modern resolutions (like in the same way that you enlarge vector images...). Oh, and when I say that I like Baldur's Gate's UI, that could also mean a similar- looking UI, but with IWD's placements of the various shortcut buttons. Those are all details. What do you prefer?
  23. Hi there, I would like to say that a good/bad UI is quite important in a game. Much of the player frustration comes, at least in my case, in having to go through hell and back in order to find some piece of information, in order to find out where that bonus comes from or in order to decide which piece of equipment is actually better. So here are some of my thoughts: - when hovering the cursor over a stat please let us see a breakdown of the stat in some popup or something. For example: 85 Strength (70 Base, +1 Well Rested, + 14 Sword). - some diablo-style (just to save up words on the description) on equipment comparison. - being able to move entire stacks of potions for example, being able to sell one stack at a time or a portion of the stack (through a pop-up with arrows that accelerate on increment). - being able to quickly see which piece of equipment needs repairs or is broken - quick and easy access to resources (it's great to see health bars, but i'm really the kind of guy that would like to see the numbers also, something like 821/900 HP) - clearly described effects (instead of "Improved chance of stun" -> "+3% chance to stun", instead of "Throws a fireball and burns your enemy for a while after" -> "Throws a fireball that does 100 base damage + 50% damage per level, 15 base damage + 10% damage per level for 3 seconds, Range: 10 meters, AoE: 2.1 meters") or something like that ...will add more probably, i've got a bad case of cold (and it's my birthday to day goddamn!) and need to get some sleep now P.S. (DISCLAIMER) please treat those as opinions. Of course some people would not like to see that, other would love them and others would like something else entirely. But since we can have a game that's tailored towards our wishes then by all means those boards should be all about suggestions, polls and such.
×
×
  • Create New...