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AoD - brand new screens

obediah

Erudite
Joined
Jan 31, 2005
Messages
5,051
Vault Dweller said:
Jora said:
Just make it so that you don't have to accept the quests immediately after being told about them.
Sure

So, if the quest giver says "The Pirates will attack in 1 day. Save Us." You can select "I'll think about it", and delay the countdown from starting? I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's certainly much more friendly than starting the counter right away, but isn't it just as unbelievable as not having a timer at all?

If you fail to complete such a quest though, I can personally guarantee that the Sun won't explode killing everything on Earth. It's ok to fail, nobody likes overachievers. :lol:

If we were likeable people, we wouldn't waste our time here.

Taking away gameplay opportunities may be a realistic punishment for putting off a quest, but it just seems too harsh to me. Especially if the game is very open ended, and a person could stumble upon a quest that they are too weak for. Sure it's unrealistic to be able to come back after improving your place in life, but it's much more fun than just losing that gameplay and anything it might have opened up.

Any chance of getting a "wuss" checkbox in the options just for the completionists among us?
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
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Messages
28,024
obediah said:
So, if the quest giver says "The Pirates will attack in 1 day. Save Us." You can select "I'll think about it", and delay the countdown from starting?
No. First, there are no such quests. If the pirates attack in 1 day, there is nothing you can do except to get the fuck out of there as soon as humanly possible. Second, if such a quest was in the game, there would be an option to discuss what's expected from you and agree or disagree and thank them for the warning.

Timed quests aren't forced on you in the manner you described.

Especially if the game is very open ended, and a person could stumble upon a quest that they are too weak for.
Then you fail. Life goes on.
 

obediah

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Messages
5,051
Vault Dweller said:
obediah said:
So, if the quest giver says "The Pirates will attack in 1 day. Save Us." You can select "I'll think about it", and delay the countdown from starting?
No. First, there are no such quests. If the pirates attack in 1 day, there is nothing you can do except to get the fuck out of there as soon as humanly possible. Second, if such a quest was in the game, there would be an option to discuss what's expected from you and agree or disagree and thank them for the warning.

Timed quests aren't forced on you in the manner you described.

That's what I expected. I don't think we processed Jura's question the same way.

Especially if the game is very open ended, and a person could stumble upon a quest that they are too weak for.
Then you fail. Life goes on.

That seems a pretty terrible attitude for a game designer to have. Either that or we have very different opinions of what fun is. The tough love attitude works in short or repetitive games, but I think it will hinder your acceptance more than download size or system requirements.

Regardless, it looks like you have enough right for me to be eagerly wating for a demo.

It's a shame about the fixed resolution though, that's one thing I find completely inexcusable. Luckily, we're all used to taking it in the ass on this one, but come on the time has come, especially now that LCD's are so prevalent, varied in resolution, and horrible at rendering non-native resolutions.

EDIT: fixed a baby but confusing typo in the last paragraph.
 

Sheriff05

Liturgist
Joined
Sep 24, 2003
Messages
618
Location
Chicago
Vault Dweller said:
My apologies. The resolution is fixed at 800x600 to lower system req.

VD, please if there is anyway to make the game playable in a window, do it!!
I don't want to have to change monitors every time I want to play AoD
but I will if you make me :lol:
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
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Messages
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obediah said:
Then you fail. Life goes on.

That seems a pretty terrible attitude for a game designer to have. Either that or we have very different opinions of what fun is. The tough love attitude works in short or repetitive games, but I think it will hinder your acceptance more than download size or system requirements.
It's not the tough love attitude, it's a reference to the game design. You don't have to complete all the quests, failing doesn't break things, there are no "botched" quests - there are different outcomes, etc.

Regardless, it looks like you have enough right for me to be eagerly wating for a demo.
Cool. Appreciate the vote of confidence

It's a shame about the fixed resolution though, that's one thing I find completely inexcusable. Luckily, we're all used to taking it in the ass on this one, but come on the time has come, especially now that LCD's are so prevalent, varied and resolution, and horrible at rendering non-native resolutions.
Somehow I expect that most of the potential sales would come from people who don't have LCDs. I could be wrong though.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
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Messages
28,024
LlamaGod said:
The new graphics are pretty neat, I like the NPC/PC graphics alot.
Thanks a lot. The guys who worked on those would love to hear that.

Sheriff05 said:
VD, please if there is anyway to make the game playable in a window, do it!!
I don't want to have to change monitors every time I want to play AoD
but I will if you make me
We'll see what we can do. Can't promise, but we'll try.

Jora said:
When reading the FO3 design document for Denver, I was reminded of dumb dialogue and journal entries. Will they be in AoD?
The dumb dialogues were written for the first town, but were discarded later for various reasons. The journal and all kinda journal related fun stuff is in.
 

obediah

Erudite
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Jan 31, 2005
Messages
5,051
Vault Dweller said:
It's not the tough love attitude, it's a reference to the game design. You don't have to complete all the quests, failing doesn't break things, there are no "botched" quests - there are different outcomes, etc.

I'm skeptical but interested, I guess there's nothing more to say until I've gotten my hands on it.

Somehow I expect that most of the potential sales would come from people who don't have LCDs. I could be wrong though.

Well LCDs are just the latest and most definitive reason to make resolution adjustable. Text in 800x600 is going to look bad even on a big CRT. I have four monitors I could potentially play on, 3 are LCDs and all are 1600x1200 or higher. Luckily 800x600 goes into 1600x1200 evenly. The poor saps with 10x?? or 12x?? are going to have headaches to deal with.
 

Spazmo

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Location
Monkey Island
VD said:
The guys who worked on those would love to hear that.

"Guys"? How big has the team gotten?

And about the windowed mode--would it be that hard to do? It'd be pretty nice to be able to play AoD in a window.

And great work in general.
 

NeutralMilkHotel

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 14, 2004
Messages
389
Perhaps an obvious idea, but, if and when you get beta testers, you can ask them what they think of the timed quests. They will have a good feel of the game and design.
 

Saran

Scholar
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Messages
468
Location
Goatse Mans Anal Cavity
It looks fantastic, the only real problem that i had with the graphics was the lack of detail.

The Doors and gates in your first screenshot
(http://www.rpgcodex.com/screenshot.php?file=ageofdec/aod_dialogue.jpg), was nothing more than a hole in the wall, so im glad to see that one of the improvements was in the architecture, like everyone else here im really looking forward to this, especially considering the drought of decent immersive CRPG's at the moment.

Keep up the good work VD. :D
 

Jora

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I think the tavern looks a bit empty. It's hard to say who's the tavernkeeper and there doesn't seem to be a waitress at all. Maybe you should add some people and more variety in clothing (although I realize the place is for the elite outlaws)?

Speaking of taverns, I would love to get into a bar fight or two, like in Baldur's Gate. Helm & Cloack Inn, anyone?
 

Deathy

Liturgist
Joined
Jun 15, 2002
Messages
793
First of all, VD, I like the dialouge system shown in those screens. Will dialouge be that complex and skill based throughout the game, or have you just put that kind of complexity in for just the 'really important' npcs?

As for the rest of it, the graphics are acceptable, I haven't seen any animations, but I'm assuming Geneforge level graphics as a whole. That's fine, as long as you don't make one crucial mistake. One of my main gripes with Geneforge wasn't the way the graphics and animation were drawn, it was the fact that you couldn't run it in a window and/or change the resolution. (well, you could, actually, but you'd end up with the original 800x600 being shown in the middle, and black borders around the outside. It looks ridiculous when running at an LCD's native resolution.

I understand that you'd have to design changing of resolutions into your program from the beginning, what with interface scaling issues and so forth, so that is probably out of the question. What I would like to have, however, is a windowed mode. Depending on what API you're using, it could be as simple as just calling a ToggleFullScreen() type function, or something similarly easy. If it's about that easy, and doesn't break the game, I'd see no reason not to put it in, even as an unsupported reason. If it's harder, or you're not convinced to put it in for some reason, here's a couple of arguments for the windowed mode.

It's less intrusive. I play games at work. There isn't much worse than my manager coming in and spotting me. If I were running in full screen mode, it'd take a while, and a noisy resolution shift if I was using a CRT. I can shift back and forth between the program and a web page, IRC, IM and e-mail programs. I can use the clock on the taskbar to tell the time. I can tell when other things need my attention.

People use LCD monitors. They need to be able to run things in native resolutions or it really looks like arse. They need a windowed mode for this, or some other method of running a game with an 800x600 interface on their 1280x1024 monitor. Now, you may argue that the interpolation doesn't matter, since the game is not about the shiny graphics. I see a lot of text on those screenshots, and interpolation has the fun effect of making that text hard to read. I don't think you really want to exclude the people who run LCD monitors, especially since an indie game tends to get sales across a larger amount of time than the big named published crap. You might think that the majority of your market are running CRT monitors, but what about the future? Are you planning to sell the game next year, the year after? You've got to allow for that.

There's not too many reasons not to have a windowed mode, and if it is too hard to implement, that's fine, but if it's only going to take a couple hours to do, there's not much to be said for not doing it.
 

obediah

Erudite
Joined
Jan 31, 2005
Messages
5,051
Deathy said:
...They need a windowed mode for this, or some other method of running a game with an 800x600 interface on their 1280x1024 monitor. Now, you may argue that the interpolation doesn't matter, since the game is not about the shiny graphics. I see a lot of text on those screenshots, and interpolation has the fun effect of making that text hard to read....

If for some reason windowed mode doesn't happen, and people pop in to complain about the headaches from LCDs doing interpolation - I claim first beatdown on the fucktard that claims his LCD does it perfectly and we all must have crappy old LCDs - you know the kind that can't magically turn one pixel into .6342 pixels. God I hate those dumbasses.
 

Reklar

Liturgist
Joined
Jun 22, 2004
Messages
395
Location
Port Orchard, WA, USA
The screenshots look excellent, Vault Dweller, and the dialogue options even better. I will definitely be interested in playing (and paying for) this game when it's ready. What sort of system requirements are you looking at right now?

-Reklar
(a Fallout/RPG fan)
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
Spazmo said:
VD said:
The guys who worked on those would love to hear that.
"Guys"? How big has the team gotten?
7 people now

And about the windowed mode--would it be that hard to do? It'd be pretty nice to be able to play AoD in a window.
No clue. I'm the guy you blame for dialogues, story, gameplay mechanics, etc - non-programming parts.

And great work in general.
Merci beaucoup
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
Saran said:
It looks fantastic, the only real problem that i had with the graphics was the lack of detail.

The Doors and gates in your first screenshot
(http://www.rpgcodex.com/screenshot.php?file=ageofdec/aod_dialogue.jpg), was nothing more than a hole in the wall, so im glad to see that one of the improvements was in the architecture
The old stuff is gone completely. We have some very impressive stuff like ruins and the capital city that we'd show later.

like everyone else here im really looking forward to this, especially considering the drought of decent immersive CRPG's at the moment.

Keep up the good work VD. :D
Cool, thanks.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
Jora said:
I think the tavern looks a bit empty. It's hard to say who's the tavernkeeper and there doesn't seem to be a waitress at all. Maybe you should add some people and more variety in clothing (although I realize the place is for the elite unlaws)?
It's not finished yet. We don't have all the models yet including those for the shady characters, but I wanted to show something, to get some feedback, etc. It would look more tavern-ish when we are done with it.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
Deathy said:
First of all, VD, I like the dialouge system shown in those screens. Will dialouge be that complex and skill based throughout the game, or have you just put that kind of complexity in for just the 'really important' npcs?
That complex and skill-based. Those who have seen the dialogues for the starting town may attest to that.

I haven't seen any animations, but I'm assuming Geneforge level graphics as a whole.
A bit better plus a larger variety of models (each weapon type and armor class is visible).

What I would like to have, however, is a windowed mode. Depending on what API you're using, it could be as simple as just calling a ToggleFullScreen() type function, or something similarly easy. If it's about that easy, and doesn't break the game, I'd see no reason not to put it in, even as an unsupported reason. If it's harder, or you're not convinced to put it in for some reason, here's a couple of arguments for the windowed mode.
I'm convinced. We'll do our best, but I'd hate to make any promises until I know for sure.

Reklar said:
The screenshots look excellent, Vault Dweller, and the dialogue options even better. I will definitely be interested in playing (and paying for) this game when it's ready.
Thanks for the support.

What sort of system requirements are you looking at right now?
P2 300-400 for smooth animation and scrolling
 

Ismaul

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I really like the involving dialogue and the style of it. Seems like for once we won't be taken for dumb people. But it looks like you went for moron indicators anyways. :roll: :lol:

I appreciate your take on timed quests. Actually, before reading your reply, I was going to suggest just that. Not timed for main quests, timed for some small quests seems like the right way to do it.

Graphs look much better now. My only gripe is the dialogue screen. It's too flat. And since we're going to spend much time talking in the game, I guess it is very much worth it to put effort into it, even more than having different models for all weapons.

Low technology graphics in a game are very bearable (enjoyable?) if they are atmospheric. But interface isn't compromisable. It's the link between the player and the game world. Have an average dialogue interface coupled with good dialogue? The player won't enjoy it fully, and it might even make him tired of the game faster. Have an average character interface with a great system? Character creation will feel like something you have to do like in every rpg, a requirement. Unlike Fallout, which has IMO a perfect character interface, so much that when you see it you feel an urge to play around with every aspect of it, to experiment different combinations. Even the animation and the sound done when clicking on a button feels greatly satisfying. Arcanum didn't live up to this.

Another thing about the dialogue interface that might make it better. The way it is set up now, it cuts the player from the game by covering most of the screen, especially the PC and the NPC he is talking to. A way to go around that is showing portraits in the dialogue screen. Keeps the player much more in touch with who he is talking to and the character he is playing. Another way is the Fallout way (again. They did so many great things you don't realize until you analyze). Set up the dialogue screen so we can see the PC and the NPC. That way you can permit yourself to cover all the "game screen" except for the important part, the center of attention where the "action" is happening. Much better IMO.
 

Major_Blackhart

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This game is gonna kick major ass. Also, VD, with regards to specially built weapons, will they have some sort of special glimmer or something to them that way we can tell if an enemy has something like that, or so we can see ourselves equipped with it.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
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Messages
28,024
Major_Blackhart said:
Also, VD, with regards to specially built weapons, will they have some sort of special glimmer or something to them that way we can tell if an enemy has something like that, or so we can see ourselves equipped with it.
No, special effects won't be visible. It's relatively easy to do, but that would drive the download size up as each special effect would require a fully animated unique model (i.e. a guy with a glowing sword, a guy with a glowing hammer, etc). We already have many models and we are planning to add more, but each space is valuable and instead of adding the same guy with a glowing sword, we'd rather add a completely unique character or add more variety overall (different types of guards or different guards for different towns, etc)

Spazmo said:
How big is the download shaping up to be?
Trying to keep it at 50MB.

Ismaul said:
Graphs look much better now. My only gripe is the dialogue screen. It's too flat. And since we're going to spend much time talking in the game, I guess it is very much worth it to put effort into it, even more than having different models for all weapons.
What do you have in mind? You've already mentioned shadows. What else?

A way to go around that is showing portraits in the dialogue screen.
Portraits are planned, but as the last minute "after everything else is done" feature.

Set up the dialogue screen so we can see the PC and the NPC
Well, that was proposed in this thread, but didn't receive enough votes. Even you said "Well, I wouldn't really go for it. Arcanum symbols work better if you have limited resources."
 

Ismaul

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Here we go.
What about this?
The interface might be too small, you be the judge.

 

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