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I've been thinking that part of the problem with specialist wizards is a lack of role definition, so I created a spreadsheet breaking down wizard spells by school for reference purposes. Maybe it'll be of use to someone.

Last weekend I've made a quick and dirty Developer tracker for my own use. It looks like it's working okayish, so I'm releasing it to you guys: http://poedevtracker.net I was using this one before, but was not satisfied with it. Mine automatically tracks past, current and future developers, so for example I won't miss posts from BMac any more. There's also better quote display and you can configure your timezone. May be useful to some of you.

I'm reading from the loading screen tip that events at strongholds, namely tax collection and generation of ingredients occur after completion of quests. Well, if this is the case, won't that mean there is a finite number of resources to be harvested? And are the completion of quests tied to adventures which can bring in some gold and items? Or is it such that after completing x amount of quests, certain events are triggered, and hence forth they are triggered infinitely after x days have passed? To my understanding, tax collection is also bugged that we don't get money but if bandits come and conduct a raid, we have to pay for damages (One way tax! That's how you run a kingdom!). Was this fixed in 1.03? Cause last I checked, mobs don't respawn - short of the ones that raid the stronghold. The devs want us to concentrate on the stories and dialog, but from a resource point of view how do I break PoE's economy in a legit manner so I can finish all my upgrades and get some enchanting going?

Hi guys, I thought everyone could benefit from sharing their secret list of resources to keep in touch with PoE community and official news. The more informed, the better. Here's mine: Obsidian forum Obsidian forum Dev Tracker Something Awful PoE thread. Josh Sawyer is "rope kid". I do not know if any other Obsidian devs are posting on it. Something Awful "Josh Tracker" Youtube search ordered by most recent Rpg Codex forum Josh Sawyer's Tumblr Google alert with the term "pillars of eternity". Triggers a lot during events such as Gamescom or after official announcements. My current "process" is as follows: all the relevant links are bookmarked in a folder in my browser and whenever I feel like it, I just middle-click on it to open them all at once. I was considering adding Twitter searches to the mix but there is a lot of noise. If you guys have other interesting resources or different ways to keep informed, don't hesitate to share.

Hi again guys! So, after the cooldown thread(s), I thought I should breach the subject of what bothers me about them more broadly, instead of focusing in a simple mechanic or implementation. You see, one of the reason I dislike seeing PE move away from the importance of resting isn't that resting was well used in BG. Or IWD, or PS:T, or any of those titles. It is because I think it is a bit of a missed opportunity. By the way, I know we are getting resting after all, and that is great news, but I think resting can be made more interesting, by seizing an opportunity lost by these previous titles. Mr. Gygax used to say that tracking time in the dungeon was critically important. Things didn't stay static when you retreated or moved away. The reason resting is important is because few dungeons were supposed to be cleaned by the characters, much less so in a single go. I think I made myself clear how I think time could be an important resource in other threads. How I think quests and encounters can respond t the party taking too long by changing and complicating. But time is not the only long term resource that can be used. There are many resources you guys can use to keep track of the party in the longer game, and give us players though choices to decide on. Here is a small enumeration: Money. Gold is a joke in many RPGs, and the infinity engine isn't much of an exception. People will usually complain the reason for this is that there is little control of how much money you can make in the game, but I think the real problem is that there is little options of where to use it. Give the players interesting possibilities during the game. Give him opportunities during quests that will make people try to actually build up money. Make sure a player has enough things to do with his gold he is very unlikely to be able to do everything he wants to. Fame. Reputation is something Obsidian did well in the past. But still, your reputation is something that is hardly "at stake", and very rarely something you can use to do things. Fame has mostly opened doors in other games, like New Vegas. But it could be built upon. Make certain options easier or harder to achieve depending on how well known you are. Having a reputation of being a merciless killer can make threatening others easier, but it can also mean people won't trust a more pacific deal you might propose sometime, or that people who you have helped fear you just as much as the people you delivered them from. Power. XP doesn't need to be a straight jacked formula. Give people incentives to both accumulate a lot of it and to try to avoid getting more of it than they need. Also, I always loved the level draining idea of undeads. Maybe they shouldn't be able to rain it directly like in D&D... Maybe they could drain a set XP amount instead (though this makes them less scary). But still, it was interesting that they made undeads scary in D&D by allowing them to hit where it hurts most for the players. Also, you can have not so long term resource, but ones that still last more than one battle like: Spell memorizations. This one seems to be, thankfully, in! Selecting what spells to bring in to a dungeon and how to use them. I would, of course, like it more if this aspect was more emphasized, but at least it is there, right now. The thing about spell memorization is that you want to make it a hard choice, to know what to bring to a dungeon and the how and when of its use. Stamina. Fighting all day in heavy armor, trudging through group after group of hostiles isn't easy. Everyone needs to rest eventually, and having trouble doing this can be a great source of conflict and tension. Also, knowing when to use your reserves of energy and when to take a more calm, if slower, approach can be fun. This really would work best if time is an actual resource too. Logistics. I think there is little hope of seeing this kind of concern here, but I thought I should bring it up anyway. Part of the fun in old D&D was planning an expedition to somewhere barren and dangerous. You brought in people to help you, vehicles to bring back all that loot with you, materials to renovate safe areas of the dungeon, people to put there so it would remain safe, food for everyone, climbing gear, and a lot more. I think it would be nice to at least have some use for old favorites, like door spikes, chalk, torches and food. Specially if, rather than simply being limitations, these things can actually be used intelligently. Like burning a jelly type of monster with lantern oil, but them not having enough to go around in the dark for much longer. Have the orcs in the dungeon be willing to trade the PCs for their rations, possibly paying a good price for anything that isn't yet more mushrooms. We also have long and medium term resources that, rather than being universal, are situational. there is a whole lot of stuff here that frequently isn't ever used in CRPGs. Time. I've talked enough about it, but make it matter! Make it matter in timed quests, in encounters that change, in combats that have consequences according to how early or late they end, etc. How time will affect each part of the game depends on that specific part. For some things, time matters little. To others, it is of essence. Reactions. Most CRPGs have character reactions to your PCs scripted in. So and so is a villain, and will try to rob you bling. So and so will be a stalwart helper, no matter who you are. It would be more interesting if reactions were more up to the situation at hand. I think Obsidian has done some nice work here, Raul and Dog come to mind here as examples of companions who will change a lot depending to how you treat them. But at the same time, I think this could be nice if it was done to smaller NPCs in some simpler ways. For example, any dragon might attack you on sight if you use dragon scale armor, while goblins who would otherwise attack you might welcome you if you have the head of a bugbear visible anywhere in your person. Likewise, allow this to be used as a resource. If the goblins like you, use their good will to get a favor that will solve a quest in a different way than if you had just slaughtered everyone. Many, many more. In a certain quest, the number of votes you have in a council might be crucial to the next quest. Manage to get enough votes and you will get to coordinate an attack. Don't and they will put a bumbling fool in charge, who will cause the death of several NPCs. In another quest, a cemetery may be haunted by troubled souls. Problem is that, in the coming equinox, they will be able to wreck chaos into the living world. So maybe you want to calm them down, so when the equinox arrives, nothing bad will happen. But then again, maybe you want them to suffer. It is the perfect opportunity to get a new necromancy spell! Maybe putting the souls to rest may cause problems to people you like in the city, or take away one of your contacts to jail. So, I exposed all kinds of different resources here. What is the point of it all? My point is that you can make a game really interesting if you take these various resources and tie in them to the resolution of conflicts in the game. Don't have conflicts be binary! Or worse, unary (as failure in most RPGs mean you need to reload). Instead, make conflicts where you can use these resources to solve, or at least work on. Make it so that doing things differently lead to different outcomes. Bribing the orcs to leave instead of exterminating them doesn't mean you just lost money. Your reputation may be changed in a lasting way by choosing such path. Likewise, the orcs are still live out there. Maybe they would even look forward working with you! On the other hand, maybe the city up north, the direction they fled to, won't like that you didn't end them when you had the chance. All things I am talking about here I have seen in some manner in Obsidian's games. Mask of the Betrayer had a lot of this stuff. So did New Vegas. But frequently, it is done as part of a larger, more static, story line. I really would like to see as more part of the little things going on. Because, being so tied to the storyline, those things don't seem to be using resources. It feels more like I am just advancing the quest. Like they are the absolute exception and not the rule. I think it would maybe pay out to have more of these interesting choices to small things, like side quests and little encounters. The repercussions, of course, would need to be less drastic. But it would, I think, go a long way making the game feel more like the result of your actions rather than an arbitrary story written by someone else.

Clearly not every one wants the same game. Some want the game to be painfully hard. Others would like something more equivalent to the old IE games. Some want healing, money, and magical gear to be super rare, and recovery from injuries to be a protracted and dangerous challenge. Others don't. I wonder how it would work if the relative availability of healing, money, and powerful gear were tied to difficulty level. I hate using improved AI to define difficulty because I don't want to fight idiots, and folks who want a hard game seem not to like the traditional increase/decrease health, increase/decrease damage model. Having more options for healing and having money and magical equipment more plentiful on Normal would make the game less difficult than it would be on settings where resources were tighter. Players on every setting would retain control of how they allocate resources, with those decisions obviously being more difficult the scarcer things are. If such a system were implemented, I'd like Normal to be roughly equivalent to BG I. I'd be fine if an achievement or a printable card were used to recognize the accomplishments of those who overcame greater adversity.

Hi all, First of all, sorry for my bad English. I'm big fan of your games for a long long time. And I'm playing cRPG since I can remember. You are company I like the most in this industry since your name is next to all my favorite games. Your games are great and sometimes full of bugs but you can't make good and complex cRPG without few of them. My second favorite company, CD Projekt RED also make lot of them and yet they don't stop fixing what they can. Anyway, I'm programmer. But for some reasons I ended up as webdeveloper. Mostly I work with SQL, PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS and stuff. Nothing fancy. Some time ago I decided to learn something new. I did some work in C++, Java etc but I decide to learn something different, something new. So I ended up learning semi-new technology - Node.js (started 2010 if I remember). In short, it's V8 Javascript engine that work on server side. It's also event based (like Javascript) and I wanted to do something cool with it. Since I learn about it I decide to get to know it better and make some project with it. So I started playing around and I decide to make small RPG game. What I wanted to create is game that: ~ load fast ~ not require installation of a client ~ or any other "plugin" (like Quake Live that is advert as Quake in browser but you still need download few hundreds megabytes of "browser plugin") ~ not require extra plugins like Java, Flash or Silverlight So I created proof of concept. I dig some 2d sprites and created sprite animation test. I put it here: http://nodegame.dariuszp.pl/ (look using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox only right now) Since I started with Node.js, after 12 hours of learning and work I made proof of concept, small online "game" in browser that right now work only under Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox but with socket.io library it will work under new versions of Internet Explorer as soon as I convert some part of code to be compatible with it. http://alphang.dariuszp.pl/ All you can do is to sign in (just open URL and type your name, accept only letters and "_" ), move around and talk with other people that joined (hit enter, type, hit enter again to confirm, pain in the a** because I didn't include chat history). Right now I'm working on proper game (or engine to be more precise) when I have some free time and I want to make it open source so I will post source on github at some point under LGPLv3 license. But I did hit a wall with something. I'm a programmer. I have no talent for graphic. Sprite I used to animate players I dig from http://vxresource.wordpress.com/ . I tried to ask around about graphic and animated sprites but it's hard to find anyone that do something like that. So I came here to ask few questions. QUESTIONS ~ how much graphic designers (or 2d animators) take for this kind of graphic ? I'm talking about sprites with animations and static elements. As example for that alphang project I used this sprite: This one have 8 characters. Each have 4 animations, 3 frames per animation. I'm thinking that for my project I will need around 50 frames, 5 frames per animation. And those will be ~ move north ~ move south ~ move east ~ move west ~ attack north ~ attack south ~ attack east ~ attack west ~ die ~ wave Style more realistic but size like here, so 32px width and 48px height. Fire format - PNG, optimal for this kind of job and for websites as whole. ~ where I can find people that do this kind of thing ? So I could order stuff like that. I need to but it since I want to include it and distribute with the engine for free and if someone use it, I don't want them to have problems with copyrights or something. That's why I don't want to use something I dig on the internet. On that websites they say you only need to post author of the graphic you use but you can never be sure. ~ are there any sites with already made resources that are under proper categories and stuff ? Something like stock photos but with 2d resources for games. I'm talking about places when you can but this kind of graphic and do whatever you want with it, adding it to engine and giving away for free included (so full license except reselling of course) Any graphic designer, animator or someone like that who could point me somewhere ? So I could see how much money I will need to spend to create my project ? We are talking about around 20 human characters + 10 animals and around 100 static elements (walls, chairs, ground, env inside and outside). It's not much but it's just to create engine and working demo that contain few maps etc.