Update #62: Production 01 - State of the Project

[Staglord]

The UI is A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.!!!

 

The font stands out and all that but the UI panel is pure art love it!

[Mico Selva]

Wait, I have found something that I don't quite understand:

I think Josh's description says it best: "Wichts are the bodies of children that were born without souls, grew to adolescence, and were then possessed by a malevolent lost soul or soul fragment that has been artificially inserted through animancy. This process arrests their physical development and transforms their outward appearance, leaving no doubt as to what they are."

How exactly are the children able to reach adolescence without having souls? How does exactly not having a soul affect an individual? Wouldn't that make someone unable to live or at least fit into a society (is it easy/hard/impossible to tell if someone is soulless)? Or is having a soul optional and if you happen to be lucky and not get possessed by anything, you can happily live your life without one?

Edited August 21, 2013 by Mico Selva

[Chilloutman]

Great update and I love most parts but I am little sad about one thing:

 

 

World Map

Eternity now has a fully functional world map. When the party enters a qualifying transition, the world map appears. Players can then select to travel to a location by selecting that icon on the map.

 

I was hoping for more Fallout/Arcanum/SoZ world map to promote non-combat skills for Ranger and Druid. I like much more exploring World Map then just clicking on icon of place to magically appear there. Well one can't have all dreams fullfiled in one game apparently

 

Anyway keep up the good work, all seems very promising

[IndiraLightfoot]

Chilloutman: Good point! Perhaps it will be like in DAO. You'll always run the risk of encounters while using the world map for longer travels?

[Chilloutman]

Chilloutman: Good point! Perhaps it will be like in DAO. You'll always run the risk of encounters while using the world map for longer travels?

 

That was possible in BG1 as well but its kinda meh boring.

[Archmage Silver]

Great update, thanks for the detailed information!

 

Re: UI. I like it, it's organic, and it doesn't really distract you, although I'd think about leaving the bottom part of the wood without nails, there are quite a few of them now. The nails in the corners could be replaced by carvings. As for the dialog itself... it's a bit heavy on the quotation marks right now IMO. You could use brackets, italics or equivalent for actions, descriptions etc., so you wouldn't have to use quotation marks for the actual character speech options.

 

Summary: Less nails, more carvings. Less quotation marks, cleaner & clearer dialog.

Edited August 21, 2013 by Archmage Silver

[IndiraLightfoot]

Yeah, and a bit contrived too, especially the generic mini-landscape where the encounter takes place, even that's a tradition that goes back to the Dragonlance CRPGs, at least.

 

Personally, I'd love to see no fast travel on the world map at all. Instead, there would be varied scripted encounters that even replace critters slain in some areas with new ones and even quest-related events (minor and major).

[curryinahurry]

@Chilloutman

 

I think that it was mentioned that overland exploration would be somewhere between BG & BG 2, but I'm holding out for an SOZ type solution or SOZ (or any type overland travel where skills help determine encounters in both number and type) with with quick travel options.

[Sensuki]

How exactly are the children able to reach adolescence without having souls? How does exactly not having a soul affect an individual? Wouldn't that make someone unable to live or at least fit into a society (is it easy/hard/impossible to tell if someone is soulless)? Or is having a soul optional and if you happen to be lucky and not get possessed by anything, you can happily live your life without one?

Something Awful is a step ahead here.

 

Most children who reach adolescence without souls do so because they are cared for by extremely patient parents who a) hope that someday it can be fixed or b) just can't bear to let one of their children die. Not all parents choose to do so.

Perhaps you can sell them for good coin too *shrug*.

Edited August 21, 2013 by Sensuki

[Mico Selva]

 

How exactly are the children able to reach adolescence without having souls? How does exactly not having a soul affect an individual? Wouldn't that make someone unable to live or at least fit into a society (is it easy/hard/impossible to tell if someone is soulless)? Or is having a soul optional and if you happen to be lucky and not get possessed by anything, you can happily live your life without one?

Something Awful is a step ahead here.

 

Most children who reach adolescence without souls do so because they are cared for by extremely patient parents who a) hope that someday it can be fixed or b) just can't bear to let one of their children die. Not all parents choose to do so.

Perhaps you can sell them for good coin too *shrug*.

 

If so, wichts should be extremely rare creatures, because the following must occur for them to appear:

1. a soulless child is born (I'm guessing this is pretty rare by itself)

2. is cared enough by his/her parents to survive until adolescence

3. is then possessed

 

I imagine such a chain of events does not occur very often.

[Merlkir]

 

What does this mean in regards to the sate of the vertical slice? Do you be on to production before or after the VS is finished?

 

The vertical slice is finished and has been for some time. We are in production right now.

 

 

In the past there's been talk of a video playthrough of the vertical slice (similar to what Shadowrun Returns did) being released soon.

Is that still coming, or has it been scrapped since you're quite far in production now?

Edited August 21, 2013 by Merlkir

[mstark]

Incredible feeling of nostalgia rushing over me as I read through the update, love (and hate) the IE feel of the dialog UI  . Curious as I, and many others, surely are about defiance bay and a demo of the fog of war, I'm glad to see that what most people seem to think is most important is the typography of the game.

Pretty much all points—regarding good typographic practices & monitor DPI discrepancies—that I worry about have been covered, re-covered, put into lists, and reiterated so many times in this thread that I don't feel I have much to add, other than my support for the suggestions. Beautiful as the scenery surely will be, the real beauty in the game will lie in its story, which we will be reading.

 

May I go so far as suggesting that you employ a freelancing (digital) typographer to take the reading experience to new, hitherto unseen heights in computer games? (Otherwise, a good primer: Thinking With Type)

 

I don't envy the job of manually kerning the font for all possible letter pairs (and for at least 3 different font sizes [normal, large, extra large]), and would suggest doing everything to avoid having to use bitmap fonts. Unless, of course, there's some other, greater, benefit to this in game design that I'm not aware of. You also can't leverage a system's font anti-aliasing capabilities, which will wreak havoc on the font in instances where the letter pixels don't line up properly with monitor pixels (when not playing on native resolutions, eg. up/down scaling).
 

 

One way or another, fonts should scale with resolution to some degree;

mstark will go mad if they don't, lol.

 

Havoc will be wreaked! Souls will be harvested! I must correct this suggestion, though. It's not the resolution it has to scale with, but the DPI density. A 13" and a 24" screen can have the same 1080p resolution, and a font size "optimized for 1080p" would look terribly small on one of them. PC screens nowadays range from DPI densities of 90dpi-275dpi, and the font sizes available to choose from should read comfortably across that entire range, regardless of the screen size/resolution.

Edited August 21, 2013 by mstark

[Sensuki]

I imagine such a chain of events does not occur very often.

But a wicht could have been around for a long, long time though - perhaps even since before Glanfath.

Edited August 21, 2013 by Sensuki

[Sensuki]

Is that still coming, or has it been scrapped since you're quite far in production now?

I think that they will wait until they have a further level of polish before showing anything. I think one thing that is important is to make sure that the game feels responsive. As per one of Josh's recent formspring responses, they aren't quite there yet.

[Sensuki]

NGUI only uses bitmap fonts, so we'll have to adjust the kerning and other errors by hand, but we're aware of it.

I found this but I'm not sure if it helps.

 

http://www.tasharen.com/forum/index.php?topic=2745.0

[Mico Selva]

 

I imagine such a chain of events does not occur very often.

But a wicht could have been around for a long, long time though - perhaps even since before Glanfath.

 

True, but I would still imagine wichts to be lone creatures (haunting ghost type) instead of a part of a pack/horde (zombie style). Granted, there is nothing about packs or hordes in the description, but they sure have a zombie-like appearance, and we all know how IE-style combat usually looks.

[Sensuki]

Yeah sometimes you fight a single ghoul, shock horror

[Endrosz]

 And I like the surrounding old-school wood texture. At first I thought I wanted stone, like the old BG series, but wood is actually "warmer" and more inviting than stone, in a way. Hard to describe. 

 

I felt the same! The stone-skinned (heh) UI concepts didn't appeal to me, the wood does. I recently played the original BG, and found that I didn't like the stone there either -- now. Nostalgia kind of cheats you in subtle ways.

 

Also, thanks for movie recommendation! Me and a good friend of mine now have an interesting film to look forward to.

[Grinsevent]

Hi Obsidian Team,

 

I regisered on this forum ages ago, but have courage to post here only now.

 

Everything I write may be biased, as I'm a French guy but :

 

- I do like the american accent you put in her mouth, it gives the same feeling as the atmosphere : dirty bar with a bad mouthed bartender

- For the UI and the dialogu, I'm not a pro, but the remarks make sense ... And I'm just a LaTeX user so... Like the text to look pretty well too. Furthermore, the jewel need both the gem (in your writers we trust) and the golden claws (the typo) to be awesome...

 

I'm really excited on the Stronghold part ... And hope it will allow us to :

- get familiar/mounts/Dragon Eggs/Griphin/Orcs gards/Animacy dark magic lab ... whatever to make it feel real

- Give us revenues (like the keep in BG2) and cost some too (Gards etc...)

- Make us able to use some teleporting stones  to defend it by ourselves

- Be something NOT necessary for the whole game BUT being the place where our 2nd and illimited inventory goes ...

 

Keep us informed !

[Jajo]

Excellent update! I really hope I'm going to have at least comparably as much fun with the stronghold as Tim is having.

 

Couple of comments:

1) What is a "rogue-like" fog of war? What is "rogue-like" anyway, for that matter and why is suddenly everybody using this term? have I been inadvertently living under a rock?

2) I think it would be better, if description text would be indicated differently (more distinguishable) in the dialogue UI (first line in the conversation). As it is now, it looks like the inn keeper is narrating his own description. Perhaps even the Inn keeper's name tag (Osmaer-) could be removed from such lines. It wouldn't make much sense to have it, if the line was describing several characters, for instance.

Edited August 21, 2013 by Jajo

[Starwars]

Excellent update! Good to hear everything is moving forward. I'm really looking forward to seeing the big cities especially.

[ryukenden]

Conversations

While we have been getting more and more Alpha UI into the game, I was particularly happy with how the conversation UI came out. Take a look for yourself, though. Even though this is still a work in progress, I think everyone did a great job. Let us know what you think of the conversation UI in our forums.

 

 

 

I'm looking forward to a screenshot with ui and character. Or better yet, a video similar to Update#49. 

 

I know the ui is work in progress and it hard to say without seeing the whole picture but maybe it feels TOO old fashion. I would like to see it be more slick, less bulkier, and definitely needs some warm vibrant colors into it. It currently looks dull. Well at least its functional. 

 

I would suggest you have a place for combat logs (if its useful for the game, like attack/ dice rolls, spellcasting). Maybe a tab or button. Since this game does have day/night interactions (like vampires shows up at night in BG2), It might be a good idea to have a clock somewhere.

Edited August 21, 2013 by ryukenden

[Sensuki]

Excellent update! I really hope I'm going to have at least comparably as much fun with the stronghold as Tim is having.

 

Couple of comments:

1) What is a "rogue-like" fog of war? What is "rogue-like" anyway, for that matter and why is suddenly everybody using this term? have I been inadvertently living under a rock?

I am not a roguelike player but I have recently been informed that FoW clearing in roguelikes takes into account facing as well as the casting of light, rather than a simple radius around party members blocked by walls.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4ngG8Eqvz80

Edited August 21, 2013 by Sensuki

[Kjaamor]

All sounds very nice, and the description of the stronghold sounds very encouraging (although there's always a need to temper excitement for such things).

 

UI needs a bit of tidying up, but that's in hand.

 

Only concerns are that the innkeeper seems to be using a hundred words when three would do, and the party responses could be rather more involved.

 

On another note, it's nice to see all these new-designed monsters, but I do hope that the fact that you're designing new things doesn't mean everything else is being left behind. Skuldr and Wichts are nice to see, but I hope that they'll be existing alongside Skeletons and Goblins and the like rather than in stead of them. Obviously both setting and licensing demand some variaton from the IE games, but it's nice to have a foundation of staples to build upon.

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

Excellent update! I really hope I'm going to have at least comparably as much fun with the stronghold as Tim is having.

 

Couple of comments:

1) What is a "rogue-like" fog of war? What is "rogue-like" anyway, for that matter and why is suddenly everybody using this term? have I been inadvertently living under a rock?

I am not a roguelike player but I have recently been informed that FoW clearing in roguelikes takes into account facing as well as the casting of light, rather than a simple radius around party members blocked by walls.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4ngG8Eqvz80

 

 

Hopefully, it will work very much like COH2's fog of war, and if it does, I'll be very happy indeed.