Eternity Pillars of Eternity + The White March Expansion Thread

[Gerrard]

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)

Okay then, I guess pre-rendered textures are not streamable either.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

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..

The dragon battles are the ones I didn't have the patience to ever beat, but I remember that back in days I also had problems with some bosses that never managed to complete like killing Diablo 1. But that never stopped me from enjoying the game.

Sent from my One using Tapatalk

 

[dukeofwhales]

It would require a different solution to what Roguey is talking about by streaming 3d worlds but presumably you could preload possible next locations into RAM during gameplay if you had code smart enough to determine which areas those would be (building interiors is obvious of course and maybe logical "next map" for selected quests if resources allowed). Wither Unity is able to do that without a significant performance hit (unlikely) is another question.

I've got 16GB of ram and 8GB of video memory, fill that shit up if it will cut back on load times.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

All the Unity RPGs have fucked up loading times. The difference with Pillars is that you're seeing loading screens because every building takes a loading screen, and seperate floors inside them too. Wasteland 2 took ages to load but at least after the load screen even the area size of Holywood was seamlesss.

 

[Prime Junta]

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)

I'm curious. Do you actually know something we don't, or are you talking out of your ass?

'Cuz in Pillars at least the background is just a textured 3D element (or several), just like in any full-3D game. It just happens to be completely flat, with the texture painted on it in perspective and the camera positioned so it looks like it's supposed to. Technically streaming those shouldn't be any different at all than streaming more complex terrain.

Moreover I can't see how streaming prerendered, tiled terrain in a fully 2D engine would be any harder than streaming 3D terrain. I can see how it would be easier though, as it's possible to tell exactly how the loaded terrain relates to the viewport. (In a 3D scene your camera angle determines how much terrain is visible, and once it drops low enough it'll go to infinity so you'll need to add more complications if you want to avoid pop-up.)

 

[Fry]

The people who made the game say it's a hard problem to fix, so...

What the "experts" here think isn't all that relevant.

 

[Prime Junta]

Oh it's clearly hard for Pillars. I just very much doubt the fact that it's prerendered 2D has anything to do with why it's hard.

 

[Roguey]

I'm curious. Do you actually know something we don't, or are you talking out of your ass?

'Cuz in Pillars at least the background is just a textured 3D element (or several), just like in any full-3D game. It just happens to be completely flat, with the texture painted on it in perspective and the camera positioned so it looks like it's supposed to. Technically streaming those shouldn't be any different at all than streaming more complex terrain.

Moreover I can't see how streaming prerendered, tiled terrain in a fully 2D engine would be any harder than streaming 3D terrain. I can see how it would be easier though, as it's possible to tell exactly how the loaded terrain relates to the viewport. (In a 3D scene your camera angle determines how much terrain is visible, and once it drops low enough it'll go to infinity so you'll need to add more complications if you want to avoid pop-up.)

I don't believe a thing can be done until I see it happen.

 

[Prime Junta]

I don't believe a thing can be done until I see it happen.

Uh... okay I guess.

Here's an asset streamer for Unity which claims to be able to handle 2D as well as 3D: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/36486

World streamer is a memory stream system. By using it you are able to stream whole your game from disc in any axis and space. You are able to create endless space game,2d platform , 3rd person or any kind of game you want, without loading screens during player movement. In few clicks your game is ready to be loaded from your disc! Now your scenes are as big as you want, without any limits. World streamer is also useful for architectural presentation or in every application that you need to use as low memory as possible.

(But really this is silly. In a 3D engine like Unity, a 2D background is just a flat, textured polygon. It makes no sense that it would be possible to stream it if it wasn't flat.)

 

[vortex]

Prime Junta ,it's prerendered. Imagine 3D characters running on flat 2D plane. It's not the same as full 3D. Sword Coast Legends use full 3D environment in Unity.
But, Poe2 is a long way ahead. So, Unity 6 in 2017 will hopefully improve in that regard.

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

It would be to long and costly to switch to some other engine.

 

[Prime Junta]

Prime Junta ,it's prerendered. Imagine 3D characters running on flat 2D plane. It's not the same as full 3D. Sword Coast Legends use full 3D environment in Unity.
But, Poe2 is a long way ahead. So, Unity 6 in 2017 will hopefully improve in that regard.

I know it's prerendered. Thing is, it's a prerendered texture which is slapped onto a flat polygon, just like you'd do when texturing regular 3D geometry. The characters and FX are 3D objects on it, and the camera is set to infinity. From the engine's POV it's just another polygon floating in space. You can see how it works here, skip to about 1:40:

 

[Sentinel]

Prime Junta ,it's prerendered. Imagine 3D characters running on flat 2D plane. It's not the same as full 3D. Sword Coast Legends use full 3D environment in Unity.
But, Poe2 is a long way ahead. So, Unity 6 in 2017 will hopefully improve in that regard.

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

It would be to long and costly to switch to some other engine.

PoE2 is being developed right now, even if Unity 6 came out this year (which it won't. Not this year, not 2017, not 2018) it wouldn't use it.

 

[Raggg]

They're using Unity 5 for PoE 2. Sawyer mentioned that Unity 5 lets them access animation data which will let them give better UI feedback for attack speed. Prime Junta is right about how POE backgrounds work. They're probably not one big plane/texture because then you have to render the entire background every frame, which would be bad. You could load just the chunk of the map that the camera starts at, and then load the rest of the map during gameplay, but this could lead to hitches when moving the camera or parts of the map being untextured until the texture loads. This is all assuming that loading the background is the most expensive part of scene loading though, which isn't necessarily true.

 

[Ent]

whats a good third level spell mastery option for aloth? I'm leaning towards minor blights

 

[Roguey]

I'd go for an at-will debuff myself but that's my playstyle.

 

[Prime Junta]

I go with Reveal Vulnerabilities.

 

[ilitarist]

The problem with PoE backgrounds and why is it slower than Witcher 3 is you have a single huge texture of insane quality and nothing saves you from using it all as it is the whole time. In real 3D games you can use smoke and mirrors by loading and unloading data. And you see less than you think. Also with Unity you have weak control over some inner workings of an engine.

If we all didn't switch to 3D in the end of 90's and didn't have whole processors dedicated to calculating specific problems of 3D calculating - Witcher 3 would be 100 times harder to render than PoE. But it doesn't use as much modern technologies as fully 3D games. A version of Pillars with fully 3D world would have a better performance, camera rotation... and less artistic vision.

 

[Ivan]

White March is mad expensive. Is it worth it at $15 for both?

 

[vortex]

White March is mad expensive. Is it worth it at $15 for both?

Solid yes.

 

[Prime Junta]

The problem with PoE backgrounds and why is it slower than Witcher 3 is you have a single huge texture of insane quality and nothing saves you from using it all as it is the whole time.

Except you could easily slice it into small chunks which you would then slap onto small polygons, which you would then stream.

 

[ilitarist]

The problem with PoE backgrounds and why is it slower than Witcher 3 is you have a single huge texture of insane quality and nothing saves you from using it all as it is the whole time.

Except you could easily slice it into small chunks which you would then slap onto small polygons, which you would then stream.

In typical first person game at any given moment you maybe see 2% of potentially available textures at any moment. But here in most locations camera could see half of the level, so you have to keep all the level loaded all the time - apart from equipable items that it.

But the biggest problem is still Unity, yeah. As I understand Obsidian doesn't have desire or experience to create their own engines and nowadays it's rather expensive endeavour.

 

[Infantry]

Dont care what the excuse with Pillars is, fact is, its shit. Its 2016. Figure something out.

I am using a decent SSD and have no issues with loading screens (a few seconds at most per load). As you said, "it's 2016"...get an SSD and quit bitching.

 

[Fry]

But the biggest problem is still Unity, yeah. As I understand Obsidian doesn't have desire or experience to create their own engines and nowadays it's rather expensive endeavour.

They already have their own engine. As I recall, Unity was selected for Pillars mostly because it doesn't require any middleware licensing and it has cross-platform support built in.

 

[StrongBelwas]

But the biggest problem is still Unity, yeah. As I understand Obsidian doesn't have desire or experience to create their own engines and nowadays it's rather expensive endeavour.

They already have their own engine. As I recall, Unity was selected for Pillars mostly because it doesn't require any middleware licensing and it has cross-platform support built in.

Feargus said that they can't afford to continue using Onyx and that they would just use third party engines in 2013.
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...and-the-future-of-obsidian-at-kri-2013.83284/
Can't recall them ever mentioning a new one.

 

[Sentinel]

Why would they be unable to use their own engine? Did they lose documentation or is there something else that could stop them?