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Arcanum Journey to the center of Arcanum concept pitch

Self-Ejected

Drog Black Tooth

Self-Ejected
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
2,636
Now is the time to ask the question I wanted to ask so many years ago.

TimCain, why does the release version of the game have sprite mirroring with no in-game option to disable it, even though the art assets still have all 8 rotations? That's a waste of a couple hundred MB. Enough to include playable female gnomes/halflings. Eventually, when dicking around the code in a debugger I was able to find the flag which disables sprite mirroring. There was no noticeable performance impact, so I have sprite mirroring disabled in both my unofficial patch and the high resolution patch.
 
Self-Ejected

Drog Black Tooth

Self-Ejected
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
2,636
You people are my best buddies. Seriously, I wish my relatives remembered this much about me after so long.

Or maybe it was not just Wyrmlord who kept .txts with thread links on various forum members.
 

TimCain

Obsidian Entertainment
Developer
Joined
Dec 6, 2002
Messages
37
Location
Irvine, CA
why does the release version of the game have sprite mirroring with no in-game option to disable it, even though the art assets still have all 8 rotations? That's a waste of a couple hundred MB. Enough to include playable female gnomes/halflings.

We added sprite mirroring to reduce video memory usage. We only loaded the first five rotations and then mirrored the middle three, which saved vram. We left the art on disk with the intention of adding an option later to disable mirroring, but other fixes took priority in the patches.

We never made female gnome or halfling art because we didn't have artist time, not because we didn't have disk space.
 
Self-Ejected

Drog Black Tooth

Self-Ejected
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
2,636
It's cool to live in this new age where you can ask Tim Cain a question and he nonchalantly responds.

TimCain, if I can argue this point some more, I'd like to note that you already had a female gnome model and another one for female halfling (used by NPCs), both in plain clothing, with dagger/pistol animations. Seeing that all the models pretty much use the same skeletons/animations, this was "only" the question of making armored varieties. Guess you were really strapped for time.
 

Ninjerk

Arcane
Joined
Jul 10, 2013
Messages
14,323
I wonder if TimCain still has backups with art assets? I remember there being some discussion about licenses still being held by a publisher, but code being owned by Tim.
 
Joined
Dec 12, 2013
Messages
4,229
I have no such document in my archives, but I will admit my archives are not complete. I lost some files in a hard drive failure in 2004 or 2005.

[Persuasion] What would happen if another hard disk failure wiped the rest of remaining files? It happened to me once and I lost many of my old photos. Maybe it would be prudent to store them somewhere where time and accidents won't get them. That would be Codex.
 
Self-Ejected

Drog Black Tooth

Self-Ejected
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
2,636
[Persuasion] What would happen if another hard disk failure wiped the rest of remaining files? It happened to me once and I lost many of my old photos. Maybe it would be prudent to store them somewhere where time and accidents won't get them. That would be Codex.
I'd wager a guess and say that Tim Cain being a tech nut probably has all his important stuff stashed somewhere in the cloud, probably in password protected RAR files. That's AES 128 encryption.

That's what I do with my stuff, anyway.
 

Neanderthal

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2015
Messages
3,626
Location
Granbretan
Got to say, since the man is here himself: Well done on the switcheroo with Arronax, signposted throughout the game and so obvious in hindsight, but I genuinely was oblivious until I found Arronax. Few games that get one over on me like that, especially when its so well hinted at.
 

kaizoku

Arcane
Joined
Feb 18, 2006
Messages
4,129
TimCain

- what went wrong with Pillars of Eternity?

- why did MCA left?



And thanks for all the amazing games you've put out there.
 

curry

Arcane
Joined
Jan 10, 2011
Messages
4,010
Location
Cooking in the lab
I have three or four treatments for JttCoA, and they are all different. One I remember writing, and it is full of game system ideas, for skills and attribute changes. Another is written from the basis of using the Tribes engine instead of Source. Neither of those went to publishers either. We just wrote them as a "what if?" scenario to toss around during design meetings.
Can you upload them for our amusement?
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
Tim Cain, Chris Avellone, Colin McComb, Kevin Saunders and George Ziets have all made the journey down from the mountain to speak to the unwashed Codex masses.

Who are we missing? Boyarsky, Anderson? We need to collect all the RPG incline there has ever been and trap it somehow.

Would be nice to get some of the other Interplay guys who have worked on Obsidian games like Scott Everts and Brian Menze. And New Vegas alumni like John Gonzalez and Travis Stout. Imagine what they could do if they could make another Fallout game. But I digress...
 

DavidBVal

4 Dimension Games
Patron
Developer
Joined
Aug 27, 2015
Messages
2,994
Location
Madrid
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Pathfinder: Wrath
So this was authentic, I stand corrected. My apologies, Drog.

Fucking awesome place.
 

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