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KickStarter The Wayward Realms - upcoming Daggerfall-like RPG from original Elder Scrolls developers

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Codex Year of the Donut
do you really trust a lizard?
I wouldn't simply because they're the biggest threat in Tamriel.
Hist-imbued Argonians beat the shit out of the Daedra during the Oblivion crisis. Did they stop there? No, the Argonians chased them to Oblivion to beat the shit out of them there too. The Daedra feared the Argonians and closed the portals to keep them out.
 

Makabb

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What kind of quirks me is that we might possibly have the most revolutionary RPG to date and there is no news post on Codex front page about this :argh:
 

HarveyBirdman

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do you really trust a lizard?
I wouldn't simply because they're the biggest threat in Tamriel.
Hist-imbued Argonians beat the shit out of the Daedra during the Oblivion crisis. Did they stop there? No, the Argonians chased them to Oblivion to beat the shit out of them there too. The Daedra feared the Argonians and closed the portals to keep them out.
Maybe the greatest raw military threat, but Ald Aldmeris always sought to destroy Nirn itself.
Conversely, the Hist's objectives are unclear. The Hist seems like an evil and authoritarian regime that wants to conquer Nirn, but we don't have any indication that it wants to unmake existence itself.

Then again, maybe existence is evil, and Nirn is a prison. This is why the Mer aren't mere elves.
 
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Funposter

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Hist-imbued Argonians beat the shit out of the Daedra during the Oblivion crisis. Did they stop there? No, the Argonians chased them to Oblivion to beat the shit out of them there too. The Daedra feared the Argonians and closed the portals to keep them out.

anything written post-Knights of the Nine is just furry fanfic
 

Butter

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I thought Argonians were cool. They had some useful passives like immunity to paralysis and underwater breathing.
 

Makabb

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Some interesting tidbits from the interviews from their brainstorming

- the game plays around you, rather than you around it
- procedural storytelling is a realistic thing, the game will tell the story around your actions rather than being a predefined story like in a typical game.
- they want to have best of both worlds, procedural content together with hand crafted content
- npcs will lead their own lives and do their own things
- drive the story to what the player is doing (if you arrive in one place it will start one plotline, if you arrive at different place and do different thing it will start different plotline)
- physics ( destroy pillars, pick up stones, wood, throw them at enemies, enemies might die from collapsing stuff)
- the world will continue after you die, your character will be added to the current worlds legend and you might start a new character with the current world where you will learn about your old character or even possibly meet old comrades or descendants of your old character (possibility of having a family?)
- Julian says to make a serious game you need to code in c++, he likes to be challenged and considers this a very serious and ambitious challenge to accomplish
- Julian wants to have real substance and depth to it, add persistence where the game learns, put in learning algorithms and neural network, where the game adapts to how you act - 'It can be done'



Welp, if they can achieve even half of that, it will be groundbreaking stuff.
 

Max Heap

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- Julian says to make a serious game you need to code in c++, he likes to be challenged and considers this a very serious and ambitious challenge to accomplish

This is a major red flag. Mark my words.

The reason is not that C++ is unfit - but if you're highlighting the importance of such a basic thing as the programming language, the likelihood that you will actually incorporate frameworks necessary to push out a modern project is slimming down real fast.

It is one of the big sins of software engineering and one of the biggest issues with 80s/90s coders: They wanna do everything from scratch. But for a modern project you just can't do that. You have to use modern techniques, frameworks, assets and engines if necessary. And that is a completely different workflow, which pretty much throws these folks into cold water.

If Julian wants to use C++, they should just go with Unreal - which lets you deploy C++ components within the blueprint structure. But that already comes with its own bag of issues, cause, just writing C++ code ain't enough. You gotta know how to incorporate it properly with the rest of the engine.

That's why so many of these kickstarter projects by "old legends" turn out mediocre or outright bad. Because the project leads are just not used to modern techniques or don't know how to marry their outdated workflows with modern projects.

The AI stuff is questionable as well, but for different reasons.
 

Makabb

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You have to use modern techniques, frameworks, assets and engines if necessary

uuuhhh he said he will use modern techniques.

And if he will code his own engine just for this, more power to him, I wouldn't expect anything less.


You are talking about God Julianos here, the only person in the world that coded 6 million square mile play-space on 640kb of memory.
When Julianos says he can do it, he can do it.
 
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Max Heap

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And if he will code his own engine just for this, more power to him, I wouldn't expect anything less.

The likelihood that a small team of old programmers will produce an engine at the level of Unreal's maturity is near zero.
With a project this ambitious engine maturity will be a deciding factor sooner or later.

As for new techniques, they mostly talk about advances in AI/machine learning - many of which are completely unfit for games. Like that talk about neural networks.
I see no real reason why a neural network would be more fit to drive NPC decisions, rather than a (much faster) behavior tree. The diversity of inputs is relatively low, because the player's actions are all limited by the possibilities provided by a programmer. No real need for neural networks here.
The only thing that needs consideration are implied gamestates, where one action leads to another, which causes a reaction in NPC behaviour. Then you need some sort of backwards reasoning - which is a huge issue in (game) AI. But these are corner cases that require special consideration in the implementation of behaviour tree inputs. You can't solve that by throwing a neural network at it unless you are prepared for some funky outputs that don't make much sense either.

At best you can use these techniques with procedural world generation, but even then, I highly doubt the results will beat a simple deterministic approach.
Heuristic approaches will always create issues unless your training sets are so good and so vast that they diminish the likelihood of flawed outputs. But then you are playing at the level of google (whose machine learning algorithms also fail numerous times - just try reverse searching various images) - and I don't think these guys are quite at that level.

All of this tastes like buzzword bingo.
 

Molina

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Messages
363
Some interesting tidbits from the interviews from their brainstorming

- the game plays around you, rather than you around it
- procedural storytelling is a realistic thing, the game will tell the story around your actions rather than being a predefined story like in a typical game.
- they want to have best of both worlds, procedural content together with hand crafted content
- npcs will lead their own lives and do their own things
- drive the story to what the player is doing (if you arrive in one place it will start one plotline, if you arrive at different place and do different thing it will start different plotline)
- physics ( destroy pillars, pick up stones, wood, throw them at enemies, enemies might die from collapsing stuff)
- the world will continue after you die, your character will be added to the current worlds legend and you might start a new character with the current world where you will learn about your old character or even possibly meet old comrades or descendants of your old character (possibility of having a family?)
- Julian says to make a serious game you need to code in c++, he likes to be challenged and considers this a very serious and ambitious challenge to accomplish
- Julian wants to have real substance and depth to it, add persistence where the game learns, put in learning algorithms and neural network, where the game adapts to how you act - 'It can be done'



Welp, if they can achieve even half of that, it will be groundbreaking stuff.
Source ? In the discord?
 
Vatnik
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The reason is not that C++ is unfit - but if you're highlighting the importance of such a basic thing as the programming language, the likelihood that you will actually incorporate frameworks necessary to push out a modern project is slimming down real fast.
You fraudulently made it up. Nobody writes, for example, a gltf parser from scratch, they use available libraries such as tinygltf. You lied to the codex public. You're a sick man who sought attention with false claims. You should be banned from the codex and investigated.

- Julian says to make a serious game you need to code in c++, he likes to be challenged and considers this a very serious and ambitious challenge to accomplish
There's nothing challenging about writing a custom engine in 2019. This Julian fellow seems like a faggot. Tell him I said that.
 
Vatnik
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The likelihood that a small team of old programmers will produce an engine at the level of Unreal's maturity is near zero.
The likelihood of you knowing your ass from your head is near zero.

Having worked with Unreal for 5 years professionally, I'd write my own engine too for such a project. And it's not at all difficult as you imagine. Your experience with unreal probably ends with you playing Fortnite. Your experience writing custom engines doesn't even begin.

Your attention seeking days are over. I'm here to debunk all your bullshit, faggot.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The likelihood that a small team of old programmers will produce an engine at the level of Unreal's maturity is near zero.

An engine with Unreal complexity will be more of a hindrance to a small team of good programmers than an asset. Unreal is a huge engine that - unless you plan to use it as an overgrown Unity with fancy shaders - you need to have dedicated engine programmers to work with it.

Also comparing a bespoke engine with Unreal is misleading - no custom engine, not even those made by AAA studios, are comparable to Unreal. Unreal isn't made for any specific game type, it is a generic engine that tries to cover as many bases as possible, but a bespoke engine only needs to cover the aspects of the game you are trying to make. This simplifies things tremendously.

As an example, a game that has a procedurally generated world wont benefit from a world editor. So not only Unreal's world editor is unnecessary (and thus a bespoke engine wont need to implement it) but also a hindrance to any modifications that would need to be made to the way the engine represents the world to cater for that procedural generation (as a sidenote, this wouldn't be a problem if the editor was a separate tool, like it is in many bespoke engines, but Unreal ties everything together).

Repeat that for pretty much every other part of the game and engine.

Besides, there have been a lot of examples of games made by small teams using bespoke technology to disprove the myth that unless you are a AAA studio you should license a 3rd party engine or that it has anything to do with finishing the game or not. The caveat, of course, is having good programmers on the team. But a team of good programmers can make a good engine for most games - the engine wont be their bottleneck anyway as even for procedurally generated worlds, assets will be a bigger issue.
 
Vatnik
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Couldn't have said it better.

An example of why UE is as useless as a doormat, you're gonna need to generate landscape on the fly, right? Well, not only did unreal disallow runtime landscape modification back in around 4.17, but their landscape doesn't even allow caves, cause it's just a height map. Already got a major engine component that's useless for this game.
You're gonna need to write a voxel based terrain. And while you write that, it takes minutes to recompile the project in unreal (15 minutes when you got a big one), while the entire custom engine takes 5 seconds to recompile.
Unreal 0 : 1 Custom Engine, already.

I could sit here all day and think of all other examples like this one, and all of unreal's problems, and then I'd have a post so long you would age and die before you finish reading it.
 

Makabb

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Shitposter Bethestard
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And if he will code his own engine just for this, more power to him, I wouldn't expect anything less.

The likelihood that a small team of old programmers will produce an engine at the level of Unreal's maturity is near zero.
With a project this ambitious engine maturity will be a deciding factor sooner or later.

As for new techniques, they mostly talk about advances in AI/machine learning - many of which are completely unfit for games. Like that talk about neural networks.
I see no real reason why a neural network would be more fit to drive NPC decisions, rather than a (much faster) behavior tree. The diversity of inputs is relatively low, because the player's actions are all limited by the possibilities provided by a programmer. No real need for neural networks here.
The only thing that needs consideration are implied gamestates, where one action leads to another, which causes a reaction in NPC behaviour. Then you need some sort of backwards reasoning - which is a huge issue in (game) AI. But these are corner cases that require special consideration in the implementation of behaviour tree inputs. You can't solve that by throwing a neural network at it unless you are prepared for some funky outputs that don't make much sense either.

At best you can use these techniques with procedural world generation, but even then, I highly doubt the results will beat a simple deterministic approach.
Heuristic approaches will always create issues unless your training sets are so good and so vast that they diminish the likelihood of flawed outputs. But then you are playing at the level of google (whose machine learning algorithms also fail numerous times - just try reverse searching various images) - and I don't think these guys are quite at that level.

All of this tastes like buzzword bingo.

Yea when you will code a game like Daggerfall by yourself, then I will read your post, for now I'm sticking with what Julian is saying.


Source ? In the discord?

Nah it's from the indigo's interviews.


here's nothing challenging about writing a custom engine in 2019. This Julian fellow seems like a faggot. Tell him I said that.

Challenging is creating something that no one has ever done before, not the engine itself.
 

Makabb

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Interview with Ted !

OnceLost is currently in the preproduction stage with about a dozen additional “artists, designers, writers, coders, and producers,”

“nonlinear and branching endless quests, which evolve the world, like a great virtual gamemaster running a pen-and-paper campaign”

I heard a lot over the years from players who missed the scale, the nonlinearity, and the character customization that were all reduced as the series has progressed,

Given today’s technology, it seemed the time was right to put up or shut up, and take all we’ve learned—going from industry newbs to veterans—to this project.

We just think approaching an RPG with similar design pillars to the ones we had 25 years ago would make for a game lots of the younger players didn’t even know they were missing. The release of the beta for Daggerfall Unity has really sparked a lot of interest, and shown us that we might be onto something.

You want characters that make sense but aren’t necessarily predictable, because that’s boring. That’s a pretty important thing to grasp when designing storylines and AI, particularly in a dynamically created, non-scripted adventure.


:hype:





https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexka...eterson-on-his-new-rpg-studio-oncelost-games/
 

Max Heap

Arcane
Joined
Jul 21, 2011
Messages
617
The likelihood of you knowing your ass from your head is near zero.

Having worked with Unreal for 5 years professionally, I'd write my own engine too for such a project. And it's not at all difficult as you imagine. Your experience with unreal probably ends with you playing Fortnite. Your experience writing custom engines doesn't even begin.

Your attention seeking days are over. I'm here to debunk all your bullshit, faggot.

An engine with Unreal complexity will be more of a hindrance to a small team of good programmers than an asset. Unreal is a huge engine that - unless you plan to use it as an overgrown Unity with fancy shaders - you need to have dedicated engine programmers to work with it.

Also comparing a bespoke engine with Unreal is misleading - no custom engine, not even those made by AAA studios, are comparable to Unreal. Unreal isn't made for any specific game type, it is a generic engine that tries to cover as many bases as possible, but a bespoke engine only needs to cover the aspects of the game you are trying to make. This simplifies things tremendously.

As an example, a game that has a procedurally generated world wont benefit from a world editor. So not only Unreal's world editor is unnecessary (and thus a bespoke engine wont need to implement it) but also a hindrance to any modifications that would need to be made to the way the engine represents the world to cater for that procedural generation (as a sidenote, this wouldn't be a problem if the editor was a separate tool, like it is in many bespoke engines, but Unreal ties everything together).

Repeat that for pretty much every other part of the game and engine.

Besides, there have been a lot of examples of games made by small teams using bespoke technology to disprove the myth that unless you are a AAA studio you should license a 3rd party engine or that it has anything to do with finishing the game or not. The caveat, of course, is having good programmers on the team. But a team of good programmers can make a good engine for most games - the engine wont be their bottleneck anyway as even for procedurally generated worlds, assets will be a bigger issue.

Couldn't have said it better.

An example of why UE is as useless as a doormat, you're gonna need to generate landscape on the fly, right? Well, not only did unreal disallow runtime landscape modification back in around 4.17, but their landscape doesn't even allow caves, cause it's just a height map. Already got a major engine component that's useless for this game.
You're gonna need to write a voxel based terrain. And while you write that, it takes minutes to recompile the project in unreal (15 minutes when you got a big one), while the entire custom engine takes 5 seconds to recompile.
Unreal 0 : 1 Custom Engine, already.

I could sit here all day and think of all other examples like this one, and all of unreal's problems, and then I'd have a post so long you would age and die before you finish reading it.


What are you talking about? UE 4.22 supports runtime mesh modification perfectly fine.
Otherwise they probably wouldn't be able to sell this plugin:
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/slug/voxel-plugin



Obviously that's not done with the internal heightmap-based landscaping tool.
But why would you use a hammer when you need a wrench?


I'll say this much: The guy may be competent at his job - i don't even doubt that - but when I read this kinda buzzword bingo, combined with the "I want a revolutionary challenge" type of personality, I get the feeling that someone's out to feed his own ego rather than finish a solid product.
And then I get sceptical. And so should you. That's it.

Do we really need another Underworld Ascendant for you guys to finally understand this?
 

Makabb

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Do we really need another Underworld Ascendant for you guys to finally understand this?

Otherside didn't have a programmer from way back, only game designers/art. A programmer is probably the most important guy, because he is the one that makes the ideas into reality.

This dude wrote 90% of Arena and Daggerfall, it's a different situation here.
 

Makabb

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People from the daggerfall unity are helping them to make the game, it's nice that they are doing it but let's hope that will not degrade the quality of the game.
 

volklore

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Where did you see that ?
As far as I gather they do not have funding yet and probably won't until they get their 'prototype' out. So I guess at this point any help is welcome since it's largely unpaid. And as far as help is concerned, people who reverse-engineered daggerfall are probably pretty adequate help for this.
 

Makabb

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Where did you see that ?
As far as I gather they do not have funding yet and probably won't until they get their 'prototype' out. So I guess at this point any help is welcome since it's largely unpaid. And as far as help is concerned, people who reverse-engineered daggerfall are probably pretty adequate help for this.

Ted in interview said, so they got them from the Daggerfall unity thread where Indigo and Zaric are posting

https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewforum.php?f=8
 

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