Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[Roguey]

As i said at the very least, why are interiors separate not seamless like say in Divine Divinity so many years ago? Its main map is also times larger than those in PoE and it loads much much faster, and also still looks great.

Divine Divinity doesn't use prerendered backgrounds and uses an entirely different engine.

To my knowledge, there are no Unity engine games that handle load times significantly better than Pillars. The Shadowruns and Wasteland 2 do have a seamless transition into interiors, but at the expense of a noticeably longer initial load.

 

[adddeed]

Shadowrun initial loading is not longer, let alone noticeably longer. Its faster id say.

Divine Divinity uses prereendered backgrounds what do you mean? And yes of course its a different engine, thats why it isn't shit, and thats why Pillars should be more like it.

 

[Roguey]

Shadowrun initial loading is not longer, let alone noticeably longer. Its faster id say.

I tested it today myself. Shadowrun Returns's small maps took 10 seconds long, same as PoE. Berlin and Hong Kong's maps, which are larger, took about 25 seconds. A fresh PoE took 14 seconds.

Divine Divinity uses prereendered backgrounds what do you mean? And yes of course its a different engine, thats why it isn't shit, and thats why Pillars should be more like it.

Those are clearly tiles, not prerendered. No one's going to license Larian's ancient engine.

 

[Grunker]

Don't much care about a single, long load if I can play the entire area with out constant interruptions

 

[vortex]

Seamless level loading and transitions cost a lot of money to code into the engine.
I'm not sure if it can be made with 2D backgrounds at all but I don't expect it for PoE2.

Tech behind this is called Umbra occlusion culling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbra_(3D_technology_company) but is made for 3D.

Often, objects are so far away that they do not contribute significantly to the final render image. These objects are thrown away if their screen projection is too small.

Also, maybe 4 characters in party is not a bad thing because than means ~ 20% to 40%-ish better loading time.

 

[Dorateen]

I would take six characters and the longer loading times. Veteran players are used to swapping out floppies and and disks, so transitional screens aren't a big deal.

 

[Neanderthal]

I found loadin times in Dungeon Siege an U7 acceptable.

 

[Fry]

Seamless level loading and transitions cost a lot of money to code into the engine.
I'm not sure if it can be made with 2D backgrounds at all but I don't expect it for PoE2.

Me either.

Spoiler

 

[Prime Junta]

I'm sure it can be done with 2D backgrounds. Certainly in the Pillars case as the 2D backgrounds are actually 3D which just happen to be flat planes. No idea how easy or hard it would be given the engine they have, probably not easy or else I suppose they would already have attempted it.

 

[Grunker]

Veteran players are used to swapping out floppies and and disks

On a side note, thanks for giving us the perfect example of the difference between grognards and regular folk. I bet you and I switched out a comparable number of floppies and disks in our time. The only difference is you idolize it like it almost has a quality, and excuse long load times with "back in my day we used to switch disks!" As if that has anything to do with criticism of long load times today, even though the two are completely unrelated.

Disk swapping sucked. Now, constant loading times suck a little less. Maybe some day we'll be spared both. Here's to progress, huh

 

[Sacred82]

I found loadin times in Dungeon Siege an U7 acceptable.

on a 486/33 with 4 MB? No they weren't.

Playing U7 in an emulated environment I realized how small its world is. As a kid the loading times made it seem huge. You can walk from Trinsic to Paws probably in 1 minute while it used to take me about 5 (closer to 10 if you encountered a crocodile in the swamp)

 

[Delterius]

The only difference is you idolize it like it almost has a quality

I FUCKING LOVE FUCKING SWAPPING DISCS OH MY GOD ITS HEAVAN.

Wats goin on guise.

 

[Grunker]

almost
/ˈɔːlməʊst/
adverb
1. not quite

 

[Delterius]

idolize
transitive verb
to worship as a god; broadly : to love or admire to excess

example: "eh... it could be worse. I grew up under stalin"

 

[Prime Junta]

(did a quick bit of googling about this)

Dynamic terrain loading is certainly possible in Unity3D, there are several examples and demos floating around even on older versions of the engine.

I would surmise that the problem isn't so much with the terrain but with the objects associated with the terrain. Terrain is pretty simple, it's just a bunch of geometry where you need to make sure there's always a bit more in memory than what you're currently seeing, and unload/load as you move around it. Having to load and unload objects such as enemies, scripts associated with them etc. will make the problem a lot more complicated. Transitioning between maps makes it way simpler as you just unload everything associated with one map and load everything associated with another.

Put another way, the problems are similar to save/load, except you're doing it continuously and on the fly... and Pillars had MASSIVE problems with save/load, including pretty strange bugs that are popping up even now. If they attempted dynamic loading I would expect that sort of thing to appear all the time, as well as massive performance issues. I won't speculate as to the causes, but it does appear to be something pretty deep in the way they represent and process the data.

 

[Volrath]

Seamless level loading and transitions cost a lot of money to code into the engine.
I'm not sure if it can be made with 2D backgrounds at all but I don't expect it for PoE2.

Me either.

Spoiler

It's a very easy problem to fix. Don't use fucking Unity.

 

[Neanderthal]

I found loadin times in Dungeon Siege an U7 acceptable.

on a 486/33 with 4 MB? No they weren't.

Playing U7 in an emulated environment I realized how small its world is. As a kid the loading times made it seem huge. You can walk from Trinsic to Paws probably in 1 minute while it used to take me about 5 (closer to 10 if you encountered a crocodile in the swamp)

Invest in sarcasm detectorl.

 

[Sannom]

Sarcasm in short sentences doesn't work on the internet, everyone knows that.

 

[Neanderthal]

Really?

 

[Drakortha]

why am i always so bad at games? i couldnt for the life of me beat the sky dragon then I find a Youtube video of someone killing it in 3 minutes..

 

[Prime Junta]

why am i always so bad at games? i couldnt for the life of me beat the sky dragon then I find a Youtube video of someone killing it in 3 minutes..

IME there are three possible causes: lazy, inexperienced, or stupid. The first two are curable, the last one isn't.

 

[Drakortha]

why am i always so bad at games? i couldnt for the life of me beat the sky dragon then I find a Youtube video of someone killing it in 3 minutes..

IME there are three possible causes: lazy, inexperienced, or stupid. The first two are curable, the last one isn't.

probably the first and last.

 

[Bonerbill]

why am i always so bad at games? i couldnt for the life of me beat the sky dragon then I find a Youtube video of someone killing it in 3 minutes..

Pillars is a difficult game, despite what some of these elitists bragging on the forums think every game that comes out is too easy. The sky dragon can prove a challenge, but it isn't that difficult compared to the other dragons in the game.

 

[Gerrard]

You can't stream prerendered backgrounds.

Yeah, just like you can't stream pre-rendered video or music.

 

[Roguey]

Yeah, just like you can't stream pre-rendered video or music.

These things aren't comparable.

I'll wait while you make Baldur's Gate: Open World (which is hypothetically possible given that all the outdoor maps connect)