Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity [BETA RELEASED, GO TO THE NEW THREAD]

[SwiftCrack]

Oh lawd he wants a minimap?

 

[Surf Solar]

Jagged Alliance 2 had a minimap too showing units or items in the FoV. Why not?

 

[Trent Oster]

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I don't know why, but this UI doesn't really inspire me. I would say the art designs is a more autere Roman themed one ( as in Medieval Roman). I would have prefered something Gothic themed (as in medieval Gothic OFC) or similar to designs around the meny in BG2 (somehow Celtic/Norse inspired) :

 

[LeJosh]

Because JA2 isn't an RPG?

Plus an ordinary map menu is fine for note taking etc., no need for a mini one.

 

[Surf Solar]

Because JA2 isn't an RPG?

Oh no you didn't!

 

[Infinitron]

The IE games have "macro-maps" on a separate screen instead of minimaps. I guess those are more immersive.

 

[Semper]

I don't know about others, but I usually selected characters by clicking on them or dragging a box around them in the game world. Using the portrait to select them was a backup to that for me.

because of the sprite based pcs in the infinity engine it was difficult to differentiate between party members, especially if they wore similar equipment. plus they all had have the same green ring to select. imo in this case portrait selection was far superior. project eternity supports different colored rings and 3d models which should improve the recognizability of the pcs a lot.

 

[Zed]

I would love an UI with "the black hound aesthetics".
something along these lines.
(I couldn't be arsed working more on it, fucking fiddly as hell )

 

[Kem0sabe]

Because JA2 isn't an RPG?

Plus an ordinary map menu is fine for note taking etc., no need for a mini one.

 

[Jvegi]

Ok, seriously, fuck you JS, you self indulgent fuck. It better be just a work in progress placeholder. If you don't have an update, don't put one up.

They could've just used this old piece

 

[Tigranes]

Yeah, some of the 'concerns' blow my mind. "HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT HAVING HOTKEYS?" What do you think? "HEY, WHAT ABOUT A MORE MODERN INTERFACE?" What does 'modern' mean anyway?

I am thinking of one alternative design, though. Given that in contrast to IE games we will now have things like Wounds and possibly Current Chant / Chant Duration that we need to keep on top of as well as buffs and status effects, and given that the weakest part of the IE UI was selecting abilities and spells from a nested horizontal list, maybe a design where you have the list of portraits, let's say on the left or right side vertically. You hover over one portrait, and slides out (to left or right) a list of key information and commands, basically like a Windows Start menu (e.g. Wounds, currently equipped item, available actions - the kind of things you'd find in a character menu in Wizardry 8); then if you were to select spells and abilities, you would have a large pane of available spells similar to NWN2's Quickcast menu. This basically ensures the UI is not huge, it reduces mouse-move time Sawyer mentioned, and it gives an efficient character-sensitive way of using abilities better than a radial menu or a horizontal nested menu.

This design could easily retain the current aesthetic, make the UI smaller and more useable. You can still have portraits and the combat/dialogue log there as the most prominent 'fixed' aspects of the UI. The key difference is that you don't click on a character, click on Spells, then find a spell in a horizontal menu, etc; you hover over a portrait to see his accumulated Wounds etc, select special abilities, then select from a menu large enough to show all of them.

 

[Kirtai]

Mostly we've been talking about the use of space at the default resolutions and how they scale. The two most common resolutions (according to Steam stats) players play at are 1336x768 (almost always laptops) and 1920x1080. Our two UI "base" resolutions will be built for 1280x720 and 1920x1080 with the ability to scale up.

I hope "scale up" includes proper handling of 16:10.

 

[Volrath]

Ok, seriously, fuck you JS, you self indulgent fuck. It better be just a work in progress placeholder. If you don't have an update, don't put one up.

They could've just used this old piece

This still looks a million times better then anything I've seen so far. It's just clean... functional... simple...

 

[Trent Oster]

I would love an UI with "the black hound aesthetics".
something along these lines.
(I couldn't be arsed working more on it, fucking fiddly as hell )

View attachment 1565

Based UI.

Especially the side bar, and the bottom right corner.
They should adopt those intricate lines style in PE as well.

 

[Sensuki]

Here's my attempt to get BG sized portraits into the current UI style

 

[Mangoose]

Dungeon Siege has a good interface for real time party control IMO

Perhaps see if there could be any influence drawn from RTSes:

 

[Arkeus]

Lephys, on 24 May 2013 - 11:10 PM, said:

If armor can't hint at torso structure, then hair can't be allowed to give your enemy advantages. Seasoned danger-handlers simply wouldn't allow it, just as seasoned armor-makers wouldn't allow minor breastplate variance.
​

Our armors do have sex-based variants because we want people to be able to tell female characters from male characters. IRL, such armors are almost never shaped significantly differently, just sized and proportioned differently. Even our most cutting edge contemporary female body armor outwardly doesn't look much different from the male versions. In PE, they will be shaped differently to help the silhouettes read differently. Cadegund's concept reflects this as does the godlike concept Polina developed. It almost assuredly is not what an armorer would do IRL, but it helps distinguish the characters. It's the same reason why we marginally increased the size of war hammer heads. At the realistic size and proportions, they don't clearly read as war hammers, so a small amount of exaggeration was required.

 

[Sannom]

BG2 has an 800x600 mode.

Surf has to be wrong though because there is no way the IWD UI is worse than PST's.

I'm pretty sure I only played BG2 in 1024x768. That message about the game becoming too resource-intensive was cute.

This still looks a million times better then anything I've seen so far. It's just clean... functional... simple...

Not really functional to me, too much wasted space, the portraits could easily go on the bottom line and the menu buttons could take a lot less space.

Best thing in that screenshot is to keep the dialogue window all to itself above the rest.

 

[BobtheTree]

lol, I found the image where they clearly pulled from Icewind Dale II UI elements. Same exact symbols on the bar above the character portraits. YOU CAN'T FOOL ME, OBSIDIAN!

[Source]

I should also note this is the third image that comes up when I Google image searched "Icewind Dale II" and the first image that has UI elements.

 

[Arkeus]

I am amused at the ranger Pet:

 

[Rake]

I would love an UI with "the black hound aesthetics".
something along these lines.
(I couldn't be arsed working more on it, fucking fiddly as hell )
View attachment 1565

Post it on Obsidian forum.

 

[Trent Oster]

I would love an UI with "the black hound aesthetics".
something along these lines.
(I couldn't be arsed working more on it, fucking fiddly as hell )
View attachment 1565

Post it on Obsidian forum.

 

[DraQ]

Good answer.

There are games where this type of approach might work, but like I said, actions like "diving behind a corner" sound like they could end up as an arcadey mess in an Infinity Engine-like game. I think the idea here is that your party should have a bit more staying power on the battlefield and should not be constantly scurrying away from fatal attacks.

Well, that proves again that IE-like RTWP sucks.

When you employ instakill mechanics in game with limited character pool you usually reduce the options and therefore trivialize the choice.

That can be extended to any sort of mechanics that can kill characters off.

Btw I'm just wondering what sort of gameplay choice doesn't get translated into mathematical problem.

That's the wrong question. The right question is "what kind of choice isn't helped by translating it into mathemathical problem?"

Well, as I see it you should design the mechanics so that they don't need to be overridden. If you design your game around HP and then want to have mechanic that allows for hitting vital spots of enemies and instantly killing them, overriding the more general HP mechanic then I think you should either redo the general mechanic for handling character death (HP) so that it is able to handle such things as body part damage, vital organ damage etc. or don't introduce too concrete mechanics built on very abstract mechanics (HP is an extremely abstract mechanic).

I would say that the abstraction level of the game should be consistent. If you're using several abstract mechanics and a couple of very concrete mechanics then you'll most likely run into cases where and an abstract mechanic interacts with a more concrete one and the way the abstract mechanic handles some stuff just doesn't make any sense on the level of detail the more concrete mechanic uses.

The problem with HPs isn't that they are abstract, but that they are wrong.
A right abstraction may be quite distant from detailed simulation but should produce similar outcomes. This sort of abstraction is only problem if you mix it with concrete mechanics, or need for concrete mechanics (for example need to control and observe aspects well below abstraction's level of detail).

The problem with HPs is that the results they produce are completely off the wall.

Generally I agree with not using bad mechanics in the first place, but there is something in HPs that makes them irresistible to both the developers and gaming crowd, and if I was forced to make use of a shitty mechanics I'd at least make sure to limit the amount of harm it causes by overriding it to hell and back.

 

[Juggie]

That's the wrong question. The right question is "what kind of choice isn't helped by translating it into mathemathical problem?"

I'm not quite sure what you mean, because that seems to be the same thing I wrote. You translate the choice into mathematical problem as it is good for modeling shit and finding solutions. But with enough understanding of the gameplay mechanics I think that any gameplay choice can be translated into mathematical problem and depending on how well you translate it helps you in choosing the optimal solution. In pretty much any game you can translate costs of choices and the expected value of the outcomes. The only way I can come up with to prevent this is not giving the player enough info to make well informed decisions, but that doesn't feel like a good solution to me.

 

[DraQ]

You are all faggots.

And GUI can be pretty/ornate/artistic/whatever without taking up a lot of space and not using it.

That's the wrong question. The right question is "what kind of choice isn't helped by translating it into mathemathical problem?"

I'm not quite sure what you mean, because that seems to be the same thing I wrote. You translate the choice into mathematical problem as it is good for modeling shit and finding solutions. But with enough understanding of the gameplay mechanics I think that any gameplay choice can be translated into mathematical problem and depending on how well you translate it helps you in choosing the optimal solution.

Nope. There are problems that can't really be helped this way, because they don't have exact solutions that can be found in sensible amount of time.

For example you can see battle as tree of events branching from start with each possible outcome being a leaf. If the tree is large and branches a lot (that's one of the major points of random mechanics, BTW), you can't really explore it all and find optimal choices in those branching points that depend on your choices. All you can do is formulate your tactics as set of rules you use when navigating the tree, but it's mere heuristics, not an exact solution. Applying math doesn't help here. OTOH doing a lot of math on HPs, APs and whatever doesn't really make this tactical tree any more complex and tactical decisions more difficult. All it proves is that you can count at primary school level.