Adam at Work

[J.E. Sawyer]

I'm a bit concerned with how much work there is still do and only about 8 months to do it in. Pre-Alpha > Alpha > Beta > Full game shipped. Novella, Almanac, Physical Tier rewards, printing Books, etc. It seems like a short time to do all this. Have you been sourcing suppliers for the physical tier rewards as well? eg. looking into what InXile is doing?

 

Fulfillment/distribution of physical goods has been on our radar from the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign.  As game developers, we'd rather not be a fulfillment house.  We've seen other companies nobly struggle with order fulfillment and practically drown in their own success, so we've been talking to other companies about that for a while.  Even if we could technically handle it ourselves, it would be an inefficient use of money.  We assume our backers want us fixing bugs and polishing content instead of packing boxes and printing out shipping labels.

[Amentep]

Now I have visions of die-hard RPG fans dusting their shipping labels to see if they can identify which developer's fingerprints are on it...

 

[Inertia]

In the update Chris Avellone wrote about companions he mentioned that characters of the same class could some how synergize their abilities are you able to elaborate on this @ all?

[Chaos Theory]

Is a pistol considered a primary weapon in this game, or would that be more of a situational-use weapon?  Would you handicap your character too much if you chose skills allowing you the use of both a pistol for ranged, and a melee weapon for CC?  Is that even possible?

Edited March 12, 2014 by Chaos Theory

[J.E. Sawyer]

Pistols can be primary weapons.  They are the fastest-reloading but least damaging firearms.

[Gfted1]

Do spells scale in power with level? I assume no since, afaik, spells eventually go from per day, to per encounter, to at will. Also increasing in power would seem a bit OP.

[khalil]

Pistols can be primary weapons.  They are the fastest-reloading but least damaging firearms.

Other question.

Can we get firearm/melee weapons? The obvious implementation of this is bayonets, but several Renaissance gunsmiths thought nailing guns onto maces or whatever would be cool, and thus created things that neither worked as guns nor as maces.

[Lephys]

Do spells scale in power with level? I assume no since, afaik, spells eventually go from per day, to per encounter, to at will. Also increasing in power would seem a bit OP.

I second this question, because it's a darned good question.

 

As for the rest, you could still have them scale a bit. I mean, if a PewPewLezzerBeam spell does 5 damage at the start of the game, and 20 hours in, almost everything has at least 4 armor and that spell still only does 5 damage, it's kinda moot that it's now at-will as compared to the per-rest that it once was. It could just scale at a lesser rate than other spells.

 

Basically, it can scale only to stay not-useless, but not scale so much that its damage X its at-will usage rate = OP.

[J.E. Sawyer]

Do spells scale in power with level? I assume no since, afaik, spells eventually go from per day, to per encounter, to at will. Also increasing in power would seem a bit OP.

 

They do not.

[J.E. Sawyer]

Other question.

Can we get firearm/melee weapons? The obvious implementation of this is bayonets, but several Renaissance gunsmiths thought nailing guns onto maces or whatever would be cool, and thus created things that neither worked as guns nor as maces.

 

I like the cinematic idea of Sharpe's Eagle-style smacking or stabbing folks with rifles but there are a lot of interface/implementation problems with it.  Sorry.

[Auxilius]

Will the ending be shown with vignettes like for FNV?

 

Otherwise, I can think of good questions that are not related to the release date. And the grumpiest avatar ever.

[Stun]

 

Other question.

Can we get firearm/melee weapons? The obvious implementation of this is bayonets, but several Renaissance gunsmiths thought nailing guns onto maces or whatever would be cool, and thus created things that neither worked as guns nor as maces.

 

I like the cinematic idea of Sharpe's Eagle-style smacking or stabbing folks with rifles but there are a lot of interface/implementation problems with it.  Sorry.

 

Really? Do the problems specifically stem from the fact that it's a gun? Because in the IE games you had stuff like magical throwing hammers/axes that you could choose to wield as melee weapons or ranged weapons depending on which option you clicked on in the weapon's "abilities" screen.

 

 

Anyway, I have a question. Is Unarmed combat included in one of the categories that fighters can specialize in?

Edited March 12, 2014 by Stun

[Falkon Swiftblade]

what are the chances we can have battles in areas like in marshes where water covers our feet and on beaches with waves coming in? I figure you guys can pre render it if it's too processor heavy, but stuff like that is fun and immersive.

[BruceVC]

I am enjoying this new trend we are seeing on some websites where the developers are prepared to answer certain questions directly through threads like this. It really allows you to identify with people on a personal level and expeditiously get relevant feedback , yes you can argue that PoE is fan funded so there is a greater expectation from fans of more interaction but many KS campaigns just rely on KS updates to get there message across. So good effort Obsidian

 

Of course I imagine the negative to this type of communication is the deluge of questions a particular person may receive and maybe how people expect an answer. But I think this has  been managed well

[HardRains]

 

This is sort of a dumb question because i have no idea about programming, but since you're a programmer and answering questions...

About 2 years ago i read on a different forum that C# might replace C++ in popularity soon for working on more processor heavy software. Coincidentally I read recently that Unity uses C#, so i'm wondering do you think that that might be the case as well, and if it is what do you think is the reason for it?

 

I haven't read that. If I had to speculate on why someone would say that, I could think of a few reasons. First, C# has some fancy multithreaded things like concurrent collections and parallel loops that are built in and don't require a library. It's pretty easy to make your program take advantage of multicore/cpu machines. Secondly, C#, like Java, uses a runtime framework that theoretically can run better on a variety of hardware.

 

Line-for-line C++ is always faster than C#.

 

 

C++ is not faster than C#. They're languages. Code compiled to native CPU machine language is faster than run-time compiled byte code.

[Lephys]

C++ is not faster than C#. They're languages. Code compiled to native CPU machine language is faster than run-time compiled byte code.

One road isn't "faster" than another road of the same length, either. They're roads. But, when you're always accounting for roughly the same amount of traffic in an area whenever you take a trip to your destination (such as having to go to work, during business-hour traffic), people often say "Route X is always faster."

 

What they really mean is, "with all the factors you're going to have to deal with in both routes, Route X typically has factor values that allow you to get to your destination sooner than if you had taken the other route."

[HardRains]

 

C++ is not faster than C#. They're languages. Code compiled to native CPU machine language is faster than run-time compiled byte code.

One road isn't "faster" than another road of the same length, either. They're roads. But, when you're always accounting for roughly the same amount of traffic in an area whenever you take a trip to your destination (such as having to go to work, during business-hour traffic), people often say "Route X is always faster."

 

What they really mean is, "with all the factors you're going to have to deal with in both routes, Route X typically has factor values that allow you to get to your destination sooner than if you had taken the other route."

 

 

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. A program compiled to native CPU instructions is always faster than the same program compiled to byte code. The programming language is irrelevant. BASIC, Lua, C#, C, Java, Fortran, C++ -- it doesn't matter what it's written in if the end result is an executable in native CPU instructions. The BASIC compiler I used in college produced executables every bit as fast as the C compiler I used.

 

Anyway, glad to bump the post, there's a lot of good information from the devs here...

[Lephys]

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove.

Likewise.

[Elerond]

 

 

C++ is not faster than C#. They're languages. Code compiled to native CPU machine language is faster than run-time compiled byte code.

One road isn't "faster" than another road of the same length, either. They're roads. But, when you're always accounting for roughly the same amount of traffic in an area whenever you take a trip to your destination (such as having to go to work, during business-hour traffic), people often say "Route X is always faster."

 

What they really mean is, "with all the factors you're going to have to deal with in both routes, Route X typically has factor values that allow you to get to your destination sooner than if you had taken the other route."

 

 

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. A program compiled to native CPU instructions is always faster than the same program compiled to byte code. The programming language is irrelevant. BASIC, Lua, C#, C, Java, Fortran, C++ -- it doesn't matter what it's written in if the end result is an executable in native CPU instructions. The BASIC compiler I used in college produced executables every bit as fast as the C compiler I used.

 

Anyway, glad to bump the post, there's a lot of good information from the devs here...

 

 

Some native code compilers produce faster (better optimized)  code than some other native code compilers, and efficiency difference between compilers only rises when complexity of compiled code rises. As popular programming languages have more compilers and more money put in researching and developing said compilers, they usually have usually compilers that produce faster running code. Although programming languages aren't equal in way they are designed, for example C++ is designed to be more high level programming language than C and therefore programmer using it needs to know less about hardware that will run code than what C programmer, but this also means that its compilers can't always produce as highly optimized binary as what C compilers can produce, which mean that in most times code that is written with C runs faster than code that is written C++, but C++ code is easier to move to another platform/processor/chip than what C code.

 

So at the end it matters what programming language you use, even if code is compiled to binary, as there is differences between what languages are designed to do and how optimized compilers there is for platform that you are writing code for.  

[rjshae]

This, and some languages are more efficient at shooting your foot off than others...

[BillyCorgan]

It's really cool to read this Topic.

Tx.

[Carados]

Pistols can be primary weapons.  They are the fastest-reloading but least damaging firearms.

 

Can pistols be dual wielded?