Game News Beamdog announce Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, with Chris Avellone onboard

[Grotesque]

Seriously, are we going to grudge someone for not finishing Arcanum Planescape: Torment? With that battle system and inventory system?

I love how he doesn't hooverhand.

in other words you love that he's not a retard

 

[abnaxus]

Who's Genese Davis?

 

[Irenaeus II]

Who's Genese Davis?

Some hot chick, apparently.

 

[Morality Games]

Arcanum LP clearly shows that Chris cannot be trusted.

Seriously, are we going to grudge someone for not finishing Arcanum? With that battle system and inventory system?

Just spam Harm real-time and watch things die. He'll get through it fast enough.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

Yeah, and run to town for mana elixists/reagents every five minutes. Learn how to make balanced swords -> give one to everyone -> kill everything super fast. Sword gets broken? No problem, just make another!

 

[Excidium II]

Better to just summon ogres and watch them clean up the house in real time

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

Yeah, but you need level 5 to get them.

 

[Irenaeus II]

Seems like there's lots of strategies available to beat the game, eh

 

[Roguey]

And he's not going to use any of them because he's bad at playing role playing games.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

It's not like you can discover them by other means than trial and error. You don't get exact stats so you don't know what's brok until you try it.

 

[Roguey]

He'll never, ever accidentally stumble into a good build, because, to shamelessly steal a post from badgame poster endrite,

i always find it surprising when a person who has presumably played RPGs before doesn't max out at least one combat tree. I dont mean to harsh on tt zop it's just completely alien to the way i play, the same thing happened when everyone whined about how Vampire Bloodlines was 'unwinnable' and it turns out they didn't put a single point into guns or melee. it's crazy to me

"I want to play the way I want to play," Chris Avellone after putting his only skill point into Charisma.

 

[C.H.A.R.L.I.E]

Better to just summon ogres and watch them clean up the house in real time

Then you wont get combat XP

 

[Tigranes]

Better to just summon ogres and watch them clean up the house in real time

Then you wont get combat XP

Yep. Having just replayed Arcanum, one huge thing that makes the early game a breeze is if your'e the one landing all the hits. If you start with Harm, you can just tell Virgil to Wait, and harm every enemy in the area yourself (with copious 1-hour rests in between). Cheesy, but my point is that gets you to Level 5 just after reaching Shrouded Hills, which is a massive leg up.

Of course, the right way to play is still a gunslinger technologist who orders Virgil to do all the killing for the first 10 hours, and must rely on not crit-failing the molotov throws to avoid being killed in the first 2 turns.

 

[FeelTheRads]

And yet it doesn't, because if you are going to scale BG1 assets to anything resembling a modern resolution, you are going to need a fucking microscope to play.

As I said, you have no clue of what an engine is.

Learn the difference between engine and assets, dumbshit, before telling others they don't know what an engine is.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Learn the difference between engine and assets, dumbshit, before telling others they don't know what an engine is.

I was talking *specifically* about "assets" in that quote, so I have no idea what sort of idiotic point you are trying to make, now.

 

[FeelTheRads]

No, you weren't.

The EE IE engine can support all sorts of resolutions.

And yet it doesn't, because if you are going to scale BG1 assets to anything resembling a modern resolution, you are going to need a fucking microscope to play.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

No, you weren't.

Yes, I was.
He said "you can increase resolution" and I pointed that in this specific scenario is virtually irrelevant, since they are going to build this "expansion pack" using assets from BG1,and doing so you'll end with microscopic sprites on screen.

I was conceding a point and explaining why it's irrelevant anyway, I never claimed some sort of "hard resolution lock" as an intrinsic limit of the IE, not even in that reply.

EDIT: Also, since we are pointing at laughable ignorant statements about engines and performances, do people who love to point how "IE games load faster tha PoE" actually think that it would still be the same with high resolution assets created to be visualized natively at 1440p (as for PoE)?

 

[Infinitron]

Learn the difference between engine and assets, dumbshit, before telling others they don't know what an engine is.

Hmmm. Looking at the gameplay footage in the OP video, one might think there's some upper limit on the asset quality they can put in the engine. It all looks pretty retro.

Although of course, they can't risk putting in stuff that looks radically different from the base game (even in the original games, the difference between monster models created for BG1 and the ones created from PS:T onward is already a bit jarring).

I wonder how good an Infinity Engine game could really look if they had the budget to dump all assets and create a new visual standard from scratch.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

When BG:EE came out they said they originally planned to redo the graphics from the (much higher quality) source assets and call it BG:HD. But then they discovered that Bioware had lost all the source art ("stored on a departmental drive and not a project drive"). Since then I think they decided it was too costly and time consuming to redo every animation so they rather worked with what they had and made a few graphical improvements where they could:

It doesn't have anything to do with copyright.

It does have everything to do with the number of frames per animation that would need to be redone. To put that in perspective, the werewolf standing animation alone has 115 frames. And that's just when the werewolf is standing still

The way that sprites work in BG:EE is different from the way animations work in most games. Typically, if you're using 3D sprites at all (instead of actual 3D models), you have your 3D model and you render frames based on that. That's how BG was originally created, and if we had had the original assets (the 3D models), we could have certainly touched them up in a way that would enhance them. As has been stated countless times, the source art (the 3D models) for the sprites were lost.

This means one of two things:

A) we create entirely new 3D models to replace all of the animations in the game from scratch, thus risking a deviating art style for the entire game that would alienate most if not all of our players; or
B we touch up every frame of every sprite by hand, which would take an enormous amount of time (meaning that no one would see the results for another year at least).

Both of these imperfect solutions would also require an overhaul (another one) of the entire engine to allow for higher-resolution sprites without them being physically larger in the space.

There are a lot of reasons why we're not redoing the sprites. Ultimately, it's a lot of resources to spend on something that has the potential to break the entire game, and that people wouldn't see until (possibly) years from now.

edit: re the last point, this was back in 2013 so I would guess the engine has possibly evolved a bit since.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Hmmm. Looking at the gameplay footage in the OP video, one might think there's some upper limit on the asset quality they can put in the engine. It all looks pretty retro.

I wonder how good an Infinity Engine game could really look if they had the budget to dump all assets and create a new visual standard from scratch.

While I don't have any hard evidence about this it's also entirely possible that, being as old as it is, there could be some severe technical limitations in the engine itself which would most likely need some heavy rework to be up to modern standards.

Things like how much memory you could dedicate to specific areas/tasks, how to distribute work on multithreaded processors, unexpected issues trying to visualize 3D assests over the 2D background if you want to do so, etc.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

While I don't have any hard evidence about this it's also entirely possible that, being as old as it is, there could be some severe technical limitations in the engine itself which would most likely need some heavy rework to be up to modern standards.

Things like how much memory you could dedicate to specific areas/tasks, how to distribute work on multithreaded processors, unexpected issues trying to visualize 3D assests over the 2D background if you want to do so, etc.

It's quite interesting what they said about this:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/190432/postmortem_overhaul_games_.php?print=1

We began work on the project almost two years from ship. At the start we planned to "ninja in, make some minor changes, replace the graphics system and ninja out." As we began to work with the code base, we found severe performance and stability issues with the engine. We traced some issues back to the core threading model of the Infinity engine.


Infinity was multi-threaded before there were processors capable of parallel code execution. As such, it was designed around a concept of threading that never really emerged. The main issue was that all of the threads shared the same set of data. The problem is all these threads were created and they all hit the same memory and as such, blocked each other, stalling all threads until the current one completed.


The code was also heavily laced with critical sections, which caused (in some cases) 70 percent of execution time spent in no-ops. Our long-term solution was to machete in and remove the threading, removing a couple hundred thousand lines of code from the game. The end result was more stable and had fewer performance irregularities. The "ninja-in" approach was tried in other areas, as well, and every time the end result was consistent. We always found a ton of complexity solving an era-specific problem that no longer applied. We continue to find roadblocks in the code and we're improving it as we go.


2. Intricate Code-Data Dependency


I have a development joke I often drop: "When a programmer believes he/she is being clever is when they create the greatest atrocities." The Infinity Engine is chock full of clever. For example: to render a character to the screen, the correct frame and orientation of a character sprite is first loaded out of a resource file using a very heavy resource-management system. The sprite is then color-mapped using a 256-color palette swap to enable player colors. Following the re-mapping, any number of further palette-manipulation code (stoneskin, anyone?) can step in and further change the actual data. Then the sprite is rendered against whatever potentially covering elements are nearby.


The final result is sent to the screen in 64x64 pixel tiles to be rendered. The entire system runs under a dynamic update system that flags 64x64 tiles as updated and renders them or, with no change, leaves the tile from the previous buffer. The volume of clever shifts and tweaks along the way make it nearly impossible to track down all the ways in which a simple sprite can be manipulated. In some cases, the data can reference many different .2da data files on how it can be manipulated, from equipment-changing animation frames to a data redirection to render a dwarf sprite instead of the default human. Complexity is par for the course in an RPG of this magnitude, but the intricate linking of assets and code really limited our ability to make the architectural improvements we wanted to make.

 

[Kz3r0]

and must rely on not crit-failing the molotov throws to avoid being killed in the first 2 turns.

That's easy, the stat check happens only if you target an enemy, throw the molotov/grenade on an empty square in the proximity of your enemies and you have only to fear to be in the area of effect of the explosion

 

[Roguey]

I thought Arcanum didn't have friendly fire, I remember Avellone getting all giddy when he noticed that in his LP (because he is bad at playing games).

 

[Rivmusique]

Hey Roguey , any thoughts on Avellone's video game skills?

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/190432/postmortem_overhaul_games_.php?print=1

I wonder why they didn't just take GemRB for the EE instead, if IE was so complicated and needed to be rewritten in so many places.