If it took him this long to find out about this game, it is no wonder it takes him as long to get from first few posts in the topic where people ask if it is turn based to page 2 where other people say it is not turn based
Its a synchronized we-go turn-based system where turns follow an automatic self-successive > than planck unit of time.
Dude, it says so right in the title.
First signs of proper round-based combat from Owlcat's forums.
TheMetaphysician said:Originally Posted by Perpetual Nothing
To TheMetaphysician: We are currently experimenting with it. It is very simple with paladin – he can just use his lay on hands in the middle of a full attack and not bat an eye. More than that – he uses it on himself, so he will never need to go anywhere to do that. So this can be done by just paladin casting lay on hands on himself between attacks or even during one (if we will remove the animation from it and only leave the FX). But magus is more complex cause at the start of a full attack you need to know whether is casting this round or not – he gets -2 to attack and cannot use his natural attacks on the round he did cast a spell.
So currently the system I envision here is somewhat like this - if magus casts a spell and then attacks he will attack immediately and will fit all his attacks into the round duration, suffering the -2 to attacks and so on. If he didn’t cast a spell this round and you give a command to cast a spell in the middle of an attack, and he does not need to go anywhere to cast this spell – he will wait until the attack ends and a new round begins, then he will cast a spell and continue his attack. If he needs to go somewhere to cast a spell – he will interrupt the attack and will go there. I should point out that actual realization is a fair bit more complex than this (there are far more cases to consider) and may change later due to playtests and feedback on it.
Very cool. This makes me realize that the mechanics of this game are going to be importantly different from other RTWP games like Baldur's Gate/NWN etc. -- which is cool, because it is a new system to learn. I'm excited to see what you guys end up with.
Harrim: The Frailty of Life
Posted by Berserkerkitten
Pathfinders! Today we introduce another one of your future companions: a brooding dwarf cleric called Harrim.
In the world of Golarion, religion is not a topic for abstract philosophical discussions, but a matter of life and death. Various deities directly interfere with the lives of mortals — some change them for the better, some for worse, and some just make them... Stranger.
During his life in the Five Kings Mountains, Harrim aspired to follow Torag, the Dwarven god of craft. Unfortunately, no matter how much he studied the holy books, he failed to meet the crucial requirement for a cleric of Torag: he never learned to make anything with his hands. It was worse than just regular clumsiness: Harrim couldn't forge a single nail or carve a wooden spoon to save his life. Some dwarves ridiculed him, others suggested that Torag must have cursed him — and this was what Harrim himself eventually believed.
Betrayed and forsaken by the god he was ready to dedicate his whole life to, Harrim went into exile, searching for some other purpose in life. He found it when he met a traveling cult of one of Golarion's most obscure deities — Groetus, the god of the End Times. A colossal skull-shaped moon looming over Purgatory, Groetus is waiting for the day when Pharasma, the goddess of death, won't be able to contain him anymore, so he can go to the Material plane and put an end to it. This fateful day is nowhere near — it would take aeons for Groetus to become free — but it's inevitable, and comes closer with each passing second. Groetus is patient, and so are his worshippers — hiding in shadows, listening to their god's faint whispers, meditating over their own mortality, and frailty of life.
It is said that the worshippers of Groetus slowly sink into madness. Harrim dismisses such slanderous rumors. The way he talks and acts might seem eccentric, but it has nothing to do with so-called insanity — he just delves deeper into the fundamental truths, understanding the world's nature and the inevitability of its demise... He's happy to explain his religion's teachings — though he rarely finds anyone willing to listen.
Harrim's philosophy hasn't made him a passive observer. He's always ready to use his god's power to heal his allies or bring punishment upon their enemies — though after the battle expect him to say something about the perishable nature of all mortals. He embraces the fact that death will eventually take everyone, but he doesn't hurry to meet it — so he has trained to wear heavy armor and wield a shield. Despite Harrim’s bleak philosophy, he’ll save your life more than once during the many battles that await you in the Stolen Lands.
Should you rely on Harrim's help in ruling your realm, you will benefit from his wisdom and charisma. A calm, level-headed man, Harrim is surprisingly good at making well-considered decisions, as well as talking to people — that is, until he starts rambling about the End of Days.
Dev response: Magus Archetypes
You may have missed this one: our mechanics designer has created a massive forum post, where he discusses all the archetypes our community has suggested for the Magus. He talks about which of them may work well with the game, which of them might be complicated to implement, how and why certain archetypes would or wouldn't work and much more! If you'd like to learn more about the thought process that goes into our class design, come on over to the forums and have a chat with us!
Hail to the kings!
Owlcats
Going with the flow - The water in Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Posted by Berserkerkitten
Dear Pathfinders,
Today's update is all about water rendering in our game. Water is the most complicated rendering object from a technical point of view. To make the magic happen we use various subsystems of the game engine and thoroughly prepare both procedural and baked textures. Besides, we need a combination of programming skills, the abilities of our technical artists, lots of patience and a bit of luck. For our update, let's not dwell on trivial things, such as calculations of water lighting. Instead we are going to tell you about the difference between water rendering and rendering of regular geometry. Let's dive right in!
Density
Perfectly clear water is usually almost colorless, and only if its layer becomes thicker, it gets a bluish shade. However, there are only a few places on Earth, where you can find such clear water in a natural environment, e.g. Blue Lake in New Zealand. In most cases, water contains tiny particles of other substances, which can color it into various shades. This effect is especially noticeable in rivers and streams, where running water carries more of such particles.
However, water color depends not only on particles of other substances, but also on some other parameters, and the most relevant for us is density. To make things easier, we'll make the assumption that the water color depends on depth (layer thickness) multiplied by density. In shallow water it becomes easier to see what's beneath, and in deeper places we can see more color of the water itself. The density is adjusted by our artists, and as for the depth, we calculate it via shader, using z-buffer.
Reflect or refract?
Actually, we need both reflection AND refraction. The hard part is this: while rendering water surfaces, we need to prepare two textures - one with the reflections, and another with all the objects that are located underwater. If we approach this problem bluntly, we can just render all the objects located underwater to the refraction texture, and all the objects located above the water to the reflection texture, adding a mirror camera matrix. If we choose this approach, we'll need to draw each object 3 times: 1. to the refraction texture, 2. to the reflection texture and 3. to the screen.
However, after giving this some thought, we came up with a better solution. We moved the water textures in the rendering queue, so they are rendered after all the other objects. When the other objects are drawn, the we draw the water, so we just copy everything we've drawn before on the screen to the new texture and use it as a refraction texture. This way, we have fewer objects to draw. We can't do this with the reflections, though, so we render all the objects to a separate texture. At this stage another question appears: should we calculate the light for these objects? We decided it consumes too many resources, especially when taking into account the minimal hardware requirements for our game. That's why we draw all the reflections in monochrome, and artists can adjust the colors later.
Distortion is adjusted by artists as well, but this parameter, just like density, depends on depth, so we again turn to the z-buffer to calculate proper distortion.
Twice in the same river
So, now we can set the water color, reflection, and refraction. The only thing left to do is to make water flow.
In the first iteration, we animated texture coordinates of bump-textures. If this animation is done right, we can also adjust water for lakes and ponds.
In Pathfinder, there are lots of locations with rivers and streams. We wanted the player to see that water curves around the stones and readily flows through all the turns of a watercourse. To do that, we used flow maps. They contain encoded vectors of flow direction. Artists can draw these flow maps by themselves, which gives them more opportunities to control the looks of the flow.
What else should we add…
What we have now, looks rather good already, but still not good enough - something's missing.
Right! Foam!
To draw foam, we use 4-channel texture, where each channel contains a foam texture with different density. While rendering, we once again use z-buffer to estimate water depth, and in the locations with minimal depth (usually near the shore) we add foam. Less depth means increased foam density.
But if we use depth as our only reference, sometimes we can't show the foam everywhere our artists want to see it. That's why we added a special mask to one of the channels of the flow map. This mask determines, where the foam will be shown, regardless the depth. This helps to highlight the spots with stronger flow.
Combined together, it looks like this
What if I want to walk in there?
This part of the content is still under construction, so we'll describe this process, using examples and imagination. ☺
In previous updates you may have noticed our characters can already interact with grass. To establish this kind of interaction, we draw special textures, which are projected on the location from above. When a character moves, he leaves a trail in this texture. Then, when we render grass, we take information from this texture and animate the grass, if it happens to grow under the character's trail.
Interaction with water works the same way.
Let's kill all the things and dump the bodies in the water!
Yeah, about that... killing people underwater is less subtle than you may think, because the blood shows up in the water. We run actual fluid simulation and make the blood flow downstream.
And that concludes today's update. We hope you've enjoyed it! If you have any questions or comments - feel free to leave them on our forum, and we'll be happy to answer!
Hail to the kings!
Owlcats
Non-game image sources: https://collections.yandex.ru/card/570508316635180020da4ed9/
http://zapal.ru/pivo-s-pogruzheniem/
