Pillars of Eternity Beta Discussion [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Seari]

Sensuki weren't you supposed to do a preview before release?

 

[Sensuki]

I was, yes. I got the flu during late January and then the new patch came out and it invalidated about half of the writing I did for review (as in they fixed a lot of the key issues I had written about). I don't think I'll bother doing one now, as I am focused on helping with feedback/bug reports for the game.

Between now and release, any free time I have at home will most likely be devoted to that. I've already clocked 50+ bug reports from the new version after under a week's time.

 

[ushas]

Yeah you are so efficient, I don't even manage to catch up to read all the reports.

Wouldn't you consider to do post-release preview? Would be great to read comments on PoE's progression from somebody who has been closely following it whole time.

 

[Sensuki]

Possibly, yes. I've written pieces about past versions and I've kept them.

Sean Dunny in reply to my statement that the 3D lighting system for PE is 'impractical'. His reply is not aimed at quite what I meant, but it gives some good info about it's pluses.

To be fair, writing off the system used as 'impractical' does it a bit of injustice. The height map also controls occlusion in Unity (and things like water rendering). If we didn't have this tool, we would have to build out the occlusion by hand using maps or geometry (or something along those lines). That would not be a time-saving option. Building those occluders back in the IE days was no easy task (thank the gods for Scott Everts) and trying to do it using the high resolution images that we have with high-poly objects would be a nightmare. It would easily be a full time job just to make those occlusion masks.

When you say that you don't care about the real time lighting or feel that it doesn't add much to the game, that's a fair opinion. It is incorrect, however to assume that by getting rid of the heightmap system that we have that it would be any kind of a time saver. If anything, real-time lighting affecting the background render is a byproduct of the occlusion system.

 

[ushas]

On a feeding note, lets make a gourmet character:

Godlike Ranger Old Valia Colonist
-> 20 Int (+50% duration) & 9 Survivality (+45% duration) at lvl 4

Now enjoy prebuffing lasting longer then 10 minutes:

Spoiler

((base 300 sec)*1.5)*1.45 = 652.50 sec duration

Spoiler

PS: yeah, it truly doesn't work like that. And I was so happy to find a nice synergy...

Also potions are probably after start combat only

 

[Sensuki]

That's probably a bug actually - it should be additive multipliers (reported it).

 

[J_C]

Hiring a freelancer wouldn't have been a strain on the budget, these people don't cost much at all.

Do you know what you are talking about? When making a game on shoestring budget (because lets not kid ourselves, 3,5 million is nothing for a project like this), EVERYTHING puts a strain on the budget. They already have paid programmers, hiring new ones means they have to pay more people. I assume inXile hired outsiders because they are a small company, and they didn't have enough programmers inhouse. When you have enough guys inhouse who do the work, why would you hire outsiders?

 

[aeonsim]

aeonsim
I've no team experience, that's for sure, so I'm not asserting things, I only question things.
- You say freelancers cost twice as much. Freelancers from europe cost less, not much, and they did employ (or was it inXile?) at least one guy from Italy who did something map related, so they do and can employ them without fears of different "code styles" (there aren't twenty ways to code things on Unity, so I'm kinda skeptical of that point entirely anyway... and stylistic guides... I hope you don't mean things like starting a new line before an accolade? because who cares about it when more important things are on the line)
- Their framework is very solid and clear, I've seen it and I've written mods for POE, you don't need to explain anything to a freelancer, just give him the code and say 'go'.
- Any code produced by a freelancer can be inspected by the in-house programmer and if some section is not sufficiently commented, you can always inquire about it, but I wouldn't even particularly worry about this type of situation - it would happen rarely and wouldn't waste much of anyone's time. It's still more time efficient than not having the functionality at all.
- As to where they'd find them - look how inXile did it. Whenever they needed some, they'd just post about it and they'd have people banging on their doors. It doesn't look like much of a problem.

Anyway, I do understand that some people would have irrational fears of this approach, and that's what I assumed their problem was. I see a problem and a possible solution, while they prefer to have no solution at all.

And my main concerns with poe lie in another field entirely anyway, bugs or not bugs, their game is too mediocre and too disappointing, too many unfulfilled and sometimes completely misleading promises.

For stylistic guidelines it's the way you write your code, it can be simple things like correctly indenting the code but it's also things like how you write your functions and code. There are always a dozen different ways to code something and a project will usually settle on one way and enforce it to make it easier and safer to work with and understand the code at a later point. Take for example the following scala fragments do you understand what they both do?

(for (e <- y if e%2 == 0) yield e).map(_ abs).sorted.head

var k = y(0)
for (e <- y){
val tmpAbs = e.abs
if (tmpAbs < k && k%2 == 0) k = e.abs
}
k

They of course do the same thing one however is written in a functional style and is a one liner, the second is written in an imperative style and most programmers will find it simpler to understand what it's doing even though it's 50% longer. If as usual you are writing in the imperative style and you hire an external contractor they could submit either both work perfectly and if your familiar with functional code the first is much quicker to write. However for a development team that writes imperative code it's a nightmare because it calls on entirely different language features than they are familiar with and is completely different from the rest of the code base. So the first thing you should do with a new developer is explain to them the style of code that's expected, and this for bigger projects can be an in house style guide of the things you can and can not do.

Freelancers/contractors except when going across boarders to areas with different pay rates usually cost a lot more for a very simple reason:
A permanent employee earns 90K and works 48 weeks a year for 40 hours a week so you can pay them ~46 dollars an hour.
A contractor/freelancer on a 6month contract who needs to earn 90K per year can't guarantee they'll find work after your contract ends so they'll either charge you $92 per hour to guarantee they make there needed income or if they're really well known and pretty sure they can get another contract they maybe kind and only charge you $70 per hour then worse case they don't find more work they still earned 2/3rds of there expected income and can probably make ends meet. Usually they'll charge the higher number and the shorter the contract the higher the hourly rate.

The alternative is to hire people somewhere where the cost of living is cheaper so they'll charge you less. However if your a US based company and your hire a contractor in Europe or Asia and you pay them (they won't work till they've got some money) and they don't deliver what you asked them to what do you do? You going to hire a lawyer in there country and sue them to get your money back? The lawyer costs more money and even if you won you may not get any money back. There are also communication issues, timing issues and various other problems.

You mentioned getting an in house developer to review the code, of course they're going to do that if they end up using a free lancer they need to catch examples like the one above or they'll have problems later down the road. So now the cost is contractor time + 10% overhead for the internal developer to review the code.

As for inXile, how late were they delivering the product and how many bugs did it have and still have... For a very small studio it may be a risk you have to take as you've no other options and not the space to employee more internal developers (they need desks and computers after all). But for a bigger studio it adds considerable risks to the development process and greater costs.

 

[ushas]

That's probably a bug actually - it should be additive multipliers (reported it).

Really, it should be additive? Because that would be neat. As I recall only survivality comes into the equation prolonging duration of consumables (+45% in this case). Int then separately influences abilities and scrolls. But I did only some basic tests on consumables, so can be pretty much wrong.

Nevertheless you are right, that it's a bug anyway. Thanks for the report, I will try to add some info there. As I think there are other bugs with durability of potions, but cannot access game now.

 

[Sensuki]

I haven't seen Obsidian use functional style code in Pillars of Eternity. The game might run a bit more optimally if they did though

Bester's mod code looks pretty much the same as Obsidian's code. There are differences in Obsidian's code depending on who worked on it. Developers like Roby Atadero and BMac have more modern style code (IMO) - the stuff they did looks very similar to stuff I learned doing Mobile Development in Java. Whereas Tim Cain's code usually looks quite different (he codes the 'game stuff' like abilities etc).

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

aeonsim

The alternative is to hire people somewhere where the cost of living is cheaper so they'll charge you less. However if your a US based company and your hire a contractor in Europe or Asia and you pay them (they won't work till they've got some money) and they don't deliver what you asked them to what do you do? You going to hire a lawyer in there country and sue them to get your money back? The lawyer costs more money and even if you won you may not get any money back. There are also communication issues, timing issues and various other problems.

This area I have some experience in - wife works as a freelance programmer. So what actually happens is - people check on her progress every day which only takes a couple of minutes, ask her to send over her work every 2-3 other days, so even if she decided to stop working altogether and keep getting paid, it wouldn't last more than 2 days max. You seem to invent problems where there are none in order to justify your approach.

Take for example the following scala fragments do you understand what they both do?

Does it take 20 pages of text to ask the freelancer to write the code in a clear way, using functional style? It takes a one line phrase. Again, you're inventing problems where there are none.

Upd:
Oh yeah, I just reread your post and noticed a phrase that made laugh really hard lol. You've got no experience with freelancers obviously.

(they won't work till they've got some money)

Yeah, they'd be like "I'm Vasya the freelancer and who are you, Obsidian, can I trust you guys?? I don't know you!! I had some bad experience in the past, so I only work 100% prepayment" lol.

What actually happens is: the freelancer works in chunks and the contractor pays in chunks AFTER receiving their work.
Unless it's the freelancer who has more reputation than you, but in this case you wouldn't have anything to worry about either.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

not using functional style*

 

[aeonsim]

aeonsim
Upd:
Oh yeah, I just reread your post and noticed a phrase that made laugh really hard lol. You've got no experience with freelancers obviously.

(they won't work till they've got some money)

Yeah, they'd be like "I'm Vasya the freelancer and who are you, Obsidian, can I trust you guys?? I don't know you!! I had some bad experience in the past, so I only work 100% prepayment" lol.

What actually happens is: the freelancer works in chunks and the contractor pays in chunks AFTER receiving their work.
Unless it's the freelancer who has more reputation than you, but in this case you wouldn't have anything to worry about either.

Admittedly the money up front probably isn't quite correct for many of the independent contractors I've worked with (they sign contracts for 6-12months at a time usually, and get paid fortnightly like everyone else) so I'm probably off there. But the other type of contractors I've worked with (International consulting firms) some of those want the initial payment first, especially if they're going to fly into the country and work with on site with you. That admittedly is a bit of a different world from a small freelancer so I could well be wrong in many cases but if your going to travel internationally your generally going to want something upfront.

As for the higher pay that is definitely true in NZ, the hourly rate for an independent contractor on a short term contract is often twice that of the internal charge for programmer time, I've seen enough project budgets to be certain of that. And chatting with friends who were earning about the same as I was they have then shifted to short term contracted web design and tripled their hourly rate (hell one mate then raised it another 50% because he was getting to much work for a while, then dropped it back later).
If your've moved to contracting you don't keep the same hourly rate as you did before unless your on exceeding long term contracts, in NZ at least you double it at least, as you can't count on full employment for a year. Because being paid the same rate you used by hour with half the amount of work in a year sucks.

As for style guides they do exist especially if your contributing to a large shared code base. I've had them described to me in some detail by friends pissed off that one of the people they'rd hired had stopped following the company one after first few months on the job (they'rd decided there own style was so much better than the corporate one) it was now causing a massive issue as they'rd left and the person bought in to make some changes found that the later code they'rd written was barely legible. The result of which all the project deadlines were thrown out of whack because the line the said 'it'll take Y time to implement the changes, to the code following the guidelines' was now 'it'll take KxY time to rewrite the code to the point where it can now be extended in the manner needed for the project'.
For one off throw away code they're not used but if you expect to use the game for multiple projects and come back to it (which would appear to be the plan with PoE) you have rules about how something can be written and you make people follow them.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

In Europe (or at least parts of it) if you want to pay your programmer 2k euro/month (net), it costs your company at least 6k with all the taxes. If this is also the case in NZ, then paying even more (say 3k) to a contractor costs less than having an in-house programmer. Anyway, this is not the type of freelancing I was talking about anyway - it doesn't make sense hiring people from your own country when there are countries with much lower salaries, it's just not efficient. (at least not in the case that we're discussing)

As for style guides, the story you told is interesting, but certainly doesn't have anything to do with c#, amirite? There are good/bad practices in c#, but corporate style guides that if you didn't follow would make something unreadable? Unlikely.

 

[tuluse]

This conversation is so ridiculous, why am I replying?

I think there would be significant moral and PR problems with spending KS money outsourcing programming to India.

 

[aeonsim]

So aside from all that your implied problems with the game are:

You feel they lied in the Kickstater pitch though something that doesn't seem to be the most common opinion, so it seems like you may have read to much into it.
You don't like (subjective) there UI design choices.
You don't like that they didn't immediately fix bugs you pointed out, yet know nothing about there internal schedule and are ignoring the fact they're fixing a huge number of other bugs, and seem to suggest they just magically find more programmers somewhere and the budget for them...
You don't like their design choices in combat and other areas.
You don't think the 88 updates they posted on a massive range of topics associated with the game were detailed enough (what did you want there source code, the written plots, storylines and all there internal documentation?).
You dislike the fact that some of the stuff they mentioned got dropped during the course of development, though NONE of it was as far as I'm aware a Core Goal or a funded stretch goal they promised to produce for the project.

Looking at your original post and follow up most of it seems to be personal preference, things that you personally decided were important or critical, or things individual developers have said but were never promised as part of the kickstarter goals. The result of this is your conclusion that they all lied to you and every one else rather than perhaps considering, that maybe just maybe, you read too much into things and built up a dream game in your own mind that could never be delivered and was far beyond the specific things that they promised.

Anyway lets go through the promises they made as goals during the main funding period and see how many they've hit as a reminder for us all:
$1.1M - IE inspired/Spiritual successor (note lead IWD2 dev), a game, new RPG system, Art, Characters, animation, lore, dialogue story -- Achieved, Beta
$1.4M - New Player Race, Class and Companion - Achieved, in beta
$1.6M - OSX/Linux Builds, increased story - Achieved, beta (and can't really tell for the second part)
$1.8M - New Race, Class Companion - Achieved, in beta
$2.0M - Player House - Achieved seen in streams
$2.2M - Region, fraction, Companion, plus translations - Achieved/unable to tell
$2.4M - Expert, Trial of Iron, Path of the Damned + Godlike - Achieved beta
$2.5M - Barbarian and Cipher - Achieved Beta
$2.6M - Adventurers hall/full party creation - Achieved Beta
$2.7M - Paladins & Chanters - Achieved Beta
$2.8M - George Ziets - He did some work, no idea if it was worth 100K, but he's been involved - Achieved
$3.0M - Stronghold - Achieved Seen in Stream
$3.5M - Second Big City - Apparently exists no idea how 'big' it is but it's there - probably achieved
$4.0M - Enhance the whole game - Nebulous can't really call either way - but they were willing to delay the game to fix bugs so - Pass

Mega-dungeon - - Achieved seen in streams

So they've pretty much done everything they promised us todo, there are a few things they discussed during the funding period that they've not ended up doing, but they never put those onto the list of official Stretch goals or adjusted the base game description to list them as core elements of the game. As such I'd say some individuals got over excited and discussed things that they'rd like to do but were never promoted to core elements which is less than ideal but I wouldn't say they've out and out lied to every one.

They may not have done these all in the manner you like but that isn't a lie or dishonest it's just reality rarely matches ones dreams.
As for the bits about them playing the IE games the core team that made the kickstater pitch certainly had members that had (and probably all of them) so they're truthful in that regard. Once they go to production though you grab who ever is available and set them to work. At that point it's somewhat less important and would have made some interesting problems if they'rd only used team member who had played them or blown an interesting hole in the budget if they'rd gotten all the team members to play one of the games when they started on the project.

As for me I'm going to go play some more of the beta, which I find fun (personal preference) and maybe track down a bug or two while I wait for the full game to come out in a month or so. So try to enjoy the what you consider to be a mediocre game by developers who you think or certainly implied you think lied to you, while I enjoy what I think will be a fun game that will do fairly well based on what I've seen of the Beta.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

This conversation is so ridiculous, why am I replying?

I think there would be significant moral and PR problems with spending KS money outsourcing programming to India.

How about writer/designers in Thailand?

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I think there would be significant moral and PR problems with spending KS money outsourcing programming to India.

I've literally no idea what you're taking about, what moral and pr problems??

 

[Athelas]

You know who extensively asks about rpg experience during interviews? Fargo. And Obsidian? They don't care either way, yeah it's a minor plus if you played something, but whatever.

You realize like half of InXile's new hires are ex-Obsidian employees?

 

[Semper]

it doesn't make sense hiring people from your own country when there are countries with much lower salaries, it's just not efficient.

I've literally no idea what you're taking about, what moral [...] problems??

the morale is very weak with this one.

 

[Athelas]

Just imagine the headlines: Sweatshops in India reach new inhuman lows as gifted but underprivileged youngsters are forced to slave away programming code for Obsidian's latest Kickstarted RPG.

 

[Sensuki]

Sean Dunny again

I don't mind answering questions or clearing up misconceptions or any of that. On a project like this - backed by the fans - I think it's important that you guys have your concerns addressed.

I generally avoid posting on forums or really anything else online, especially in a professional capacity, but it's not a bad thing to keep you all informed and maybe I can give some reasons that various decisions were made.

As for why we would make the game using 2d backgrounds instead of fully rendered 3d, there are a number of reasons. The project leads could better illustrate some of them, but the gist of it is that we're doing it this way because it captures the classic IE aesthetic. That's sort of the base reason behind it, but there are a number of corollaries to this. For one thing, this game is really, really big. To give an idea (although I know it's been discussed by Bobby and others), when we did our team-wide play week, I didn't make it past act II of the game. I wasn't rushing through or anything, but I also didn't do everything, I completely skipped the Stronghold and Od Nua, and I didn't pick up every quest. In addition to that, I already know the layout of most of the areas and where everything is located in relation to everything else. Even with all of that, 40 hours was not nearly enough time for me to finish the game.

As has been mentioned, we have a very small art team. There is no way we could have made environments of this size and scope with a team this small in this period of time in a traditional 3d workflow. Maybe if we heavily re-used assets and had a very limited, modular building style. But it certainly would not have had the same scope and variety that we have in the game.

There are going to be pros and cons to any development choice that is made, but I think for the results that we've got the benefits have far outweighed the negatives.

 

[Athelas]

For one thing, this game is really, really big. To give an idea (although I know it's been discussed by Bobby and others), when we did our team-wide play week, I didn't make it past act II of the game. I wasn't rushing through or anything, but I also didn't do everything, I completely skipped the Stronghold and Od Nua, and I didn't pick up every quest. In addition to that, I already know the layout of most of the areas and where everything is located in relation to everything else. Even with all of that, 40 hours was not nearly enough time for me to finish the game.

Translation: I hope you like your RPG's padded out with a shitload of filler content.

 

[tuluse]

Wait, are they defending the pre-rendered 2d backgrounds 2 years into the project? Wasn't it like one of the central tenants of the kickstarter?