Interview Bethesda engine can't handle ladders.

[Tails]

Dagerfall did have ladders in houses, but player need to click once on them to climb on top. Player couldn't climb on them, but walls were okey-dokey.

In STALKER, I believe.

No.

 

[baronjohn]

They could've just done it like BIS - include ladders but make AI unaware of them

 

[roll-a-die]

They do do that, hell they do it better than that because they make them portals which NPC's can go through. What Beth is talking about is not, climbing up a ladder specifically, but climbing REALTIME up a ladder. Which is infinitely harder, especially to make AI able to do it believably and not cheat when they do do it. Really the codex can be such retards sometimes.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

Please, Bethesda has trouble making their NPCs walk properly on the ground.

 

[deuxhero]

The AI spazs out if you jump on a rock. What's his point?

 

[roll-a-die]

The AI spazs out if you jump on a rock. What's his point?

The reason for that is the path finding doesn't work to well if you add a vertical axis. Add in that jumping is another hard thing to make NPC's do, it adds a whole new complexity to the path finding, making it have to recalculate routes every second or so, because it will see a possible route everywhere. SkyCaptain is actually working on making a viable jumping script for deadly reflex 6. Basically the problem is to prevent invalid paths and NPC teleporting or falling through the earth, the NPC is locked to what ever the V+- axis is at that location, to get around it you have to force a jump anim for the NPC and bump him up to the location of the PC or to the max height his acrobatics skill would allow. There's so many corner cases it's not even funny. Pathfinding was also mostly fixed in fallout 3 due to the addition of actual nav meshes rather than the crappy path's you had to work with in Oblivion.

Also the NPC's in deus ex, thief, and system shock couldn't jump, and spazed out when you went higher on a vertical plane than they were. Are you going to complain about those too?

 

[Andyman Messiah]

The AI spazs out if you jump on a rock. What's his point?

mods will fix everything

 

[roll-a-die]

The AI spazs out if you jump on a rock. What's his point?

mods will fix everything

Not really, just explaining why path finding sucks, and how it works to make it have something like jumping.

 

[Tramboi]

But if the programmer is a shit writer then you get Oblivion and FO3 dialogs.

Sadly Oblivion and FO3 have professional dedicated writers...

 

[Andyman Messiah]

The AI spazs out if you jump on a rock. What's his point?

mods will fix everything

Not really, just explaining why path finding sucks, and how it works to make it have something like jumping.

Yeah, I know. But still!

 

[roll-a-die]

But if the programmer is a shit writer then you get Oblivion and FO3 dialogs.

Sadly Oblivion and FO3 have professional dedicated writers...

Yep, it kinda makes it cthulhu esque when you think about it. These people are payed to write well, and they churn out shit, TYPO filled shit.

 

[SeriousDev]

It's serpendipity this news item came up just now.

I was just thinking of oblivion and imagining the conversations they had with their programmers.

Why isn't this shit done?

Making codes is hard!

What does the engine come with?

Well, it's first person, and you just sort of walk around. And there's speed tree. And you have a gun.

Brilliant! Replace that gun with a crossbow and sword and ship it. Next game!

 

[jiduthie]

I'm saying they don't need to be equally useful. Phrased it rather poorly. I'd be willing to take a less useful birthsign if it provided some unique form of gameplay.

This sounds like a feature. We've strayed off topic but my point was that features take to to implement and balance. That the developers of Oblivion did not fulfill this goal is neither surprising nor unexpected.

Blah blah blah... I talk a lot.

Cool, your design decision would have been to make alot of the higher level abilities of skilled spell caster available to a low level character via birthsigns. I don't understand how this would not require more balancing, and thus more man hours. If we were on the team we could do whatever we wanted. That doesn't make it desirable. The fact that the birthsign system as implemented was "easy" from a design/programming standpoint is not altered by your meanderings.


EditL Again, the fact that you want to make the birthsigns have more effect on gameplay is indicative that the dawn has not come upon you. Beth can spend no time on this element and have it be a talking point on their preview circuit. That their may be more clever schema's out there is to miss the point.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Don't worry, man. Mastermind likes to pretend he's very clever, but he's just a dumbfuck talking out of his ass.

 

[SeriousDev]

The AI spazs out if you jump on a rock. What's his point?

The reason for that is the path finding doesn't work to well if you add a vertical axis. Add in that jumping is another hard thing to make NPC's do, it adds a whole new complexity to the path finding, making it have to recalculate routes every second or so, because it will see a possible route everywhere. SkyCaptain is actually working on making a viable jumping script for deadly reflex 6. Basically the problem is to prevent invalid paths and NPC teleporting or falling through the earth, the NPC is locked to what ever the V+- axis is at that location, to get around it you have to force a jump anim for the NPC and bump him up to the location of the PC or to the max height his acrobatics skill would allow. There's so many corner cases it's not even funny. Pathfinding was also mostly fixed in fallout 3 due to the addition of actual nav meshes rather than the crappy path's you had to work with in Oblivion.

Also the NPC's in deus ex, thief, and system shock couldn't jump, and spazed out when you went higher on a vertical plane than they were. Are you going to complain about those too?

Bethesda has had FIFTEEN FUCKING YEARS to implement pathfinding.

Now let me tell you, I have pathfinded anything there is to be pathfinded. In 3 dimensions, 4 dimensions, and n dimensions, even for things you'd never thing of as using pathfinding. I will admit it's not easy but any competent programmer should be able to have that problem taken care of by now in a way that is not dependent on your engine at all.

 

[FeelTheRads]

We must understand Bethesda because some random modders can't fix their broken pathfinding.

 

[SeriousDev]

This is just the kind of topic that the codex doesn't do justice to.

Developer X doesn't include feature Y.

Everyone feels good because obviously developers are incompetent. Despite that we even have self-proclaimed "programmers" to describe why Y is so hard to implement.

Of course, it all misses the point.

Game designers can have fun with ladders. Programmers can find ways to implement ladders. The real question is how many man hours it takes to implement such a feature.

This is why we have producers. If it takes 40 man hours to implement feature Y, yet we could use the same amount of man hours to implement feature A and also have a shortcut to Y, then why wouldn't you want them to do that?

I dislike Bethesda games because they're overly simplistic, not because they haven't implemented ladders. Moreover, their sales tend to indicate that their man hours have been implemented wisely. Beth simply isn't going to go "oh shit, maybe if we did, uh, depth and stuff, we would make a lot of money." Whining about the implementation of ladders in Beth games is ineffectual and idiotic. How many of you, in your own jobs, would go "oh shit, I'm making the company money, time to change course!" When sales are good, whining on forums will not change design decisions.

I realise all of a sudden, I make this point about every six months, but yet here I am again. Who's the real tool?

It's pretty fucking obvious the artwork budget is at least ten times the programming budget.

Like most people I just want a game that works and has more to it than walking around and looking at speedtree and the physx. People like Pete and Todd will find a million reasons why it's so fucking hard to do features or have no bugs when the reality is it's dead easy, it just takes more or better programmers.

 

[jiduthie]

It's pretty fucking obvious the artwork budget is at least ten times the programming budget.

Like most people I just want a game that works and has more to it than walking around and looking at speedtree and the physx. People like Pete and Todd will find a million reasons why it's so fucking hard to do features or have no bugs when the reality is it's dead easy, it just takes more or better programmers.

Yes, it takes more of the assets most valuable to a developing team. Great, we've made progress. Now if only those games that employed lots of programmers and less artists actually made money! You know, like in the old days. We had alot of fun back then. No nonsense to get in our way. Like how our hobby made money or how we might pay those who contributed to it. Thats obviously a fools errand. We should spend more time shitting on those developers who don't quite cater to our needs, but get close enough to deserve derision.

 

[Mastermind]

This sounds like a feature. We've strayed off topic but my point was that features take to to implement and balance. That the developers of Oblivion did not fulfill this goal is neither surprising nor unexpected.

And my point is that this "feature" is already implemented (poorly) and implementing it properly is something just about any retard could do.

Cool, your design decision would have been to make alot of the higher level abilities of skilled spell caster available to a low level character via birthsigns.

They already are. Reflect Damage, for example, is not even available to a regular spellcaster if they don't take the tower sign (you can get it in SI though). The atronach provides you with enormous spell absorption, also a high level effect. Lover provides you with paralyze, also a... ah fuck it, you get the idea.

I don't understand how this would not require more balancing, and thus more man hours.

Why would making the signs useful require any balancing at all? There already is no real balance because most of the signs are pretty much useless. The only people who take them are newbies who end up butthurt because their +10 to strength from the warrior birthsign doesn't go over 100.

If we were on the team we could do whatever we wanted. That doesn't make it desirable. The fact that the birthsign system as implemented was "easy" from a design/programming standpoint is not altered by your meanderings.

Indeed. However, it would be just as easy to implement the system my way. There would literally be no downsides and the game would be better for it. That they didn't do me points to just one thing: they're fucking lazy assholes.

EditL Again, the fact that you want to make the birthsigns have more effect on gameplay is indicative that the dawn has not come upon you. Beth can spend no time on this element and have it be a talking point on their preview circuit. That their may be more clever schema's out there is to miss the point.

Beth can also spend no time on this element, have it a talking point on their preview circuit, and have the element be fucking useful. That's what you're not getting: it costs them nothing to do it. The same time they spent thinking up and implementing this system could have been spent thinking up and implementing a decent system.

 

[Mastermind]

Fallout writing has always been shit, you faggots just can't come to terms with it.

Yes, Fallout always had the retardation present in Fallout 3, I wonder why I haven't noticed idiocies like "have you seen my father, middle aged guy?".

Because it's hard to notice things when you have a massive cock lodged in your throat.

 

[SeriousDev]

It's pretty fucking obvious the artwork budget is at least ten times the programming budget.

Like most people I just want a game that works and has more to it than walking around and looking at speedtree and the physx. People like Pete and Todd will find a million reasons why it's so fucking hard to do features or have no bugs when the reality is it's dead easy, it just takes more or better programmers.

Yes, it takes more of the assets most valuable to a developing team. Great, we've made progress. Now if only those games that employed lots of programmers and less artists actually made money! You know, like in the old days. We had alot of fun back then. No nonsense to get in our way. Like how our hobby made money or how we might pay those who contributed to it. Thats obviously a fools errand. We should spend more time shitting on those developers who don't quite cater to our needs, but get close enough to deserve derision.

You're an idiot and a tool. It's not that those games didn't make money. they had far less of a budget in the old days and none of the greats went under due to lack of sales.

It's that it's cheaper to send some asshole out to make excuses, and assholes like you to make even more excuses. The difference in budget would be 5-10% more to make a solid game. They don't do it because they don't have to. If they can just shit into a bag and sell it they would.

Who gives a shit that a game has a skim of swords and flash of magic? I can wear a wizard hat while I play quake if that's all I want.

Yes we should complain, not just buy games because it's the closest to the thing we want even though it's nothing like what we want and we don't like it. It's not food. We don't have to have a fucking game at all, though there's certainly no reason not to have games that don't suck and someone who's in their 30s but not mentally challenged might enjoy playing.

People who are apologists don't help the situation. If you believe in market forces or if you truly believe they make a good product then it's all the more reason to shut your fucking piehole.

And yes, btw, I do know more much about making software than you.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Fallout writing has always been shit, you faggots just can't come to terms with it.

Yes, Fallout always had the retardation present in Fallout 3, I wonder why I haven't noticed idiocies like "have you seen my father, middle aged guy?".

Because it's hard to notice things when you have a massive cock lodged in your throat.

Jeez, dude, you awe me with your cleverness. Maybe you'll like to link me to a YouTube video again? That was so totally awesome when you did that. You owned me on the internet, man.

So tell me, why wasn't any of that "atrocious" writing from Fallout 1 or 2 made history like the one from Fallout 3? Can you quote ONE single line that is as bad as what Fallout 3 offers?

 

[Mastermind]

So tell me, why wasn't any of that "atrocious" writing from Fallout 1 or 2 made history like the one from Fallout 3?

Fallout 3 writing only "made history" in a place full of bitter geezerfags like the codex.

Can you quote ONE single line that is as bad as what Fallout 3 offers?

No. Because I can't quote a single line from Fallout, bad, or otherwise. I don't sleep with the game. I don't caress it and whisper sweet nothings in its ear. I don't furiously rub it on my cock. I beat Fallout 1 a few times so I can make fun of it. Fallout 2, I never got past the temple before I uninstalled it and never looked at it again. The only thing I remember about the dialogue is that it made me want to shoot whoever I was talking to in the head on the spot. In that respect, Beth got the spirit of Fallout down to a T.

 

[Drakron]

Sadly Oblivion and FO3 have professional dedicated writers...

You still have Todd Howard and his idiotic rules (like "no betrayal") and Emil Pagliarulo "joy of fatherhood" motif.

Also Fallout Lead Writer was Emil Pagliarulo, hardly a professional as I find no credits for Oblivion besides "Additional Writing" that does not really counts as its credits for the Daggerfall and Morrowind books.

When you have no freedom on the narrative you are not a writer and that is why both Oblivion and Fallout 3 are incoherent, the writers simply "phone it in".

And can you blame them? After all they are not even named on the credits list.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Fallout 3 writing only "made history" in a place full of bitter geezerfags like the codex.

Ah, yes, bitter geezerfags. I never heard that one.

Who would've guessed that the dumbshit troll is just another teenager bent on teaching the old guys what is what.