1027 réponses à ce sujet

[Zanallen]

DuskWarden wrote...

All's I was doing was correcting you. Since there was no blood mage/shapeshifter enhancing armour in Origins, why does it matter that the Robes of Posession don't have those properties?

Because Yrkoon was offering armor similar to the Robes of Possession as a compromise between people who want unique looks for their companions and people who want DA:O armor customization back? I was explaining how it works for one, maybe two, Morrigan builds while being mediocre for others. Therefore, it isn't actually a compromise, but is instead being gimped for liking an iconic look.

[In Exile]

DuskWarden wrote...
Eh? The robes of posession are great for a cold spell focussed Morrigan? Combine with Winters Breath and the Ashen Gloves (or whatever the +20% cold ones were) and that was a pretty great end game set up. How could you not just do the same thing with warriors? Heck, I basically used Cailan's Armour set as an 'iconic' armour set for Alistair.

What if I want a bloodmage Morrigain who uses a lot of CCC? Then I want to find things that bost HP, like the reaper's vestements.

But suddenly I can't, so you can have the clothes of boob morphing?

And at that, Reaper's Vestments outclass Morrigian's gear by a ridiculous amount.

And what if I want Alistair to be anti-mage? The Knight Commander's Plate amour gives you 40%+ magic resistance. 

[Wulfram]

vania z wrote...

Maconbar wrote...

why would the companion's class matter?

Because you cant put rogues armor on mage in dragon age 2? 

Yes you can.  With the right stats, anyway.  And excluding a few with specific restrictions.

[In Exile]

DuskWarden wrote...
There is no blood magic enhancing armour in Origins, so I don't know where you got that from, there's only an amulet and a belt. And there is definitely nothing in the game to enhance the Shapeshifter spec, so again, whats the problem there? 

Yes, there absolutely is. The Reaper's Vestements that give you a huge bonus to constitution (read: the mana pool of the bloodmage). That's a huge difference, and the +6 was something like 30 HPs. 

[vania z]

Wulfram wrote...

Yes you can.  With the right stats, anyway.  And excluding a few with specific restrictions.

Sorry, forgot that there are almost no class restrictions. 
You are right. 
_______________
PS BTW, why almost everyone keeps whole lot of quotes inside a quote? 

Modifié par vania z, 30 août 2011 - 04:48 .

[Zanallen]

vania z wrote...

Studied it for year closely and check on new technology rather regulary. 

Then why do you assume that it is easy to pair armor meshes to a myriad of different models? Especially with models of the quality that we have today?

[Fallstar]

In Exile wrote...

DuskWarden wrote...
Eh? The robes of posession are great for a cold spell focussed Morrigan? Combine with Winters Breath and the Ashen Gloves (or whatever the +20% cold ones were) and that was a pretty great end game set up. How could you not just do the same thing with warriors? Heck, I basically used Cailan's Armour set as an 'iconic' armour set for Alistair.

What if I want a bloodmage Morrigain who uses a lot of CCC? Then I want to find things that bost HP, like the reaper's vestements.

But suddenly I can't, so you can have the clothes of boob morphing?

And at that, Reaper's Vestments outclass Morrigian's gear by a ridiculous amount.

And what if I want Alistair to be anti-mage? The Knight Commander's Plate amour gives you 40%+ magic resistance. 

Sure, I agree with the Knight Commanders plate thing. But under Mike's proposals, yu would be able to obtain that property whilst  still haveing the unique look. Also, what does CCC mean in Origins? Did you mean CC, or are you referring to cross class comboes in future games? Or close crowd control?  

[In Exile]

Filament wrote...
Animation rigs aren't model specific.  I understand that tattoos are, like, really super omg important for some people, but I couldn't care less about them. They could still just as well make characters with unique proportions.

How is that an answer? You keep saying you don't care, but how does that in any way address a concern? I'd be like Laidlaw saying he doesn't care that it bothers you the armour you equip doesn't correspond with the visual. 

[In Exile]

DuskWarden wrote...
Sure, I agree with the Knight Commanders plate thing. But under Mike's proposals, yu would be able to obtain that property whilst  still haveing the unique look. 

Oh, I know. I support Mike's proposal. For me, it's not even a compromise. It's the feature I've always wanted. 

Also, what does CCC mean in Origins? Did you mean CC, or are you referring to cross class comboes in future games? Or close crowd control?  

Bad typo. I meant CC, as in crowd control. Paralyze etc. work on the basis of spellpower (I believe, I can't recall the tooltips) but so does blood magic, and you get great CC as a mage by throwing in BM and with BM enabled you need to pump CON. 

[Serpieri Nei]

Yrkoon wrote...

Nerevar-as wrote...

Is it that hard to do skins for each body type and armor? I´m asking because I don´t know if cinematic approach makes things that harder or BW is just taking the easy route with things such as this or not allowing any alteration to body types as in NWN2.

Apparently its really hard.   And refusing to do it will apparently ****** everyone off  (Isabela's breasts will shrink to the same size as Bethany's if you put mage armor on her (for example)

Although, strangely,  I remember putting Cailan's plate on Oghren and it magically  resized itself to fit his dwarf height.  Then I took it off him and put it on sten and it grew to fit him too.

It's very doable, it was done in origins and it's even done in games/MMO's that have body sliders.

[Zanallen]

DuskWarden wrote...

Sure, I agree with the Knight Commanders plate thing. But under Mike's proposals, yu would be able to obtain that property whilst  still haveing the unique look. Also, what does CCC mean in Origins? Did you mean CC, or are you referring to cross class comboes in future games? Or close crowd control?  

And that is why you shouldn't jump into arguments without reading them first. We are arguing FOR Mike's idea. Yrkoon is arguing against.

[vania z]

Zanallen wrote...


Then why do you assume that it is easy to pair armor meshes to a myriad of different models? Especially with models of the quality that we have today?

It will be hard to keep all the curves of the body, but it is not difficult to adapt to different body sizes with similiar proportions. But no real metal armor follows every curve. For that you need latex leather armor, which can be done using body mesh reskin, no new meshes required. 

[In Exile]

Serpieri Nei wrote...
It's very doable, it was done in origins and it's even done in games/MMO's that have body sliders.

Which games that have body sliders? 

And remind me when DA has the sales or monthly returns of an MMO. 

[ipgd]

Serpieri Nei wrote...

It's very doable, it was done in origins and it's even done in games/MMO's that have body sliders.

Glad to see people still love to post without reading any of the replies in the thread.

[Yrkoon]

hoorayforicecream wrote...

Yrkoon wrote...

Then a reasonable compromise, would be the Morrigan method.  Iconic gear  for a companion would conform with the  specific body style  of that companion....  THEN, give the rest of us the option to swap out that gear, with the full understanding that the companion's  unique body shape will revert back to Generic human/generic elf/genericdwarf, if we decide to put other armor on that companion.

I don't at all see the problem with this.    unless your side disapproves of the rest of us  changing  what our companions look like in our own game?

If you do this, you lock out the possibility of designing around unique physical attributes, and having characters remark on things that make no sense. I'll go back to my one-armed swordsman as the example. Let's say they decide to add a one-armed swordsman as a follower. You can't use generic human armor with him, because the generic models have both arms. So you need to do special meshes just for him. If you lock him into only One-Armed-Armors, then you've got another problem - now he can't wear any other armor at all, and it's the DA2 no-customization problem all over again.

It may fly for just one character out of seven, but what if they want to experiment with more visual character designs? I created a list in a previous post of visual body types that are not at all unheard of in fantasy games, but none of them would conform to the generic body tech without requiring a new body mesh.

All right.  I'm gonna ask a question now, for any programmer who can answer.  Suppose you're putting out an RPG with 8 unique companions  (one guy has skeletal arms, another only has one arm, one has Huge ******, another has glowing tattoos  etc.

 You want to give the player the ability to equip those characters with whatever gear you wish.   So yes, You need tons of new meshes to make that happen all nice and accurate-like.  Question: what are we looking at here, cost and time wise?  is it really so budget breaking/ time killing impossible?   Or is it, in fact,  very p[ossible, and no different than, say,   deciding to  hand craft 100 unique maps rather than simply re-using  5 maps 20 times and expecing the gamer to understand how "expensive" it is to make computer games?

Modifié par Yrkoon, 30 août 2011 - 05:01 .

[ipgd]

vania z wrote...

It will be hard to keep all the curves of the body, but it is not difficult to adapt to different body sizes with similiar proportions. But no real metal armor follows every curve. For that you need latex leather armor, which can be done using body mesh reskin, no new meshes required. 

DAO's models are too high poly for that. The leather armors aren't handled like base body reskins. Unless you're suggesting that DA should regress to NWN-era graphics in order to make the models simplistic enough for an algorithm like this to be feasible, in which case...

[vania z]

Yrkoon wrote...

All right.  I'm gonna ask a question now, for any programmer who can answer.  Suppose you're putting out an RPG with 8 unique companions  (one guy has skeletal arms, another only has one arm, one has Huge ******, another has glowing tattoos  etc.

 You want to give the player the ability to equip those characters with whatever gear you wish.   So yes, You need tons of new meshes to make that happen all nice and accurate-like.  Question: what are we looking at here, cost and time wise?  is it really so budget breeaking/ time killing impossible? 

Tattooes and missing limbs are quite easy. It was already done in NWN. Adapting meshes to fit perfectly different models is difficult. 

[vania z]

ipgd wrote...

DAO's models are too high poly for that. The leather armors aren't handled like base body reskins. Unless you're suggesting that DA should regress to NWN-era graphics in order to make the models simplistic enough for an algorithm like this to be feasible, in which case...

Number of polys is not exactly the issue. 

[ipgd]

Yrkoon wrote...

All right.  I'm gonna ask a question now, for any programmer who can answer.  Suppose you're putting out an RPG with 8 unique companions  (one guy has skeletal arms, another only has one arm, one has Huge ******, another has glowing tattoos  etc.

 You want to give the player the ability to equip those characters with whatever gear you wish.   So yes, You need tons of new meshes to make that happen all nice and accurate-like.  Question: what are we looking at here, cost and time wise?  is it really so budget breeaking/ time killing impossible? 

No, it's not impossible at all. It's just a mountain of menial busywork, and developers operate under set time and budget constraints. If they increase the resources spent in this area, they would necessarily have to pull it from some other area -- and what do you propose they cut? Should they take artists off desiging environments and enemy models? Should they take money away from the writers? Should they miss their deadlines?

It's completely possible for them to do this but the rest of the game would have to suffer for it. And I'd really they not expend so many resources on something like this, personally.

[hoorayforicecream]

vania z wrote...

So, you are sayng that in NWN they made 24 models for each armor and in Evil Islands they had, well, hundreds of meshes, since you could tweak height and width of player model? 

They didn't have to make unique meshes for each one; they made a handful of new models for each slot, then retextured them. If memory serves (it *has* been 9 years), NWN had a scaling system that was absolute. You could make things bigger or smaller, but they never changed their proportions. That's not what people are asking for though; you can't just take an elf and make him 1.5 times bigger in each direction and call it a human, not unless every companion uses the same rig. But then again, it was also 9 years ago. You needed maybe 30-50 people on a team back then to push out a AAA game, and you had results that looked like this:



Nowadays you're looking at 2-4x that for a AAA title, because the amount of detail has increased several times in the intervening years. What used to be cost-effective 9 years ago is no longer so today.

[In Exile]

Yrkoon wrote...
 You want to give the player the ability to equip those characters with whatever gear you wish.   So yes, You need tons of new meshes to make that happen all nice and accurate-like.  Question: what are we looking at here, cost and time wise?  is it really so budget breeaking/ time killing impossible? 

You're thinking about it wrong.

What the real cost here is this:

1) You need [/i]time[/i]. Whatever time your animators, designers, etc. spend on making custom armour for each party NPC is time they don't spend making it for all the other NPCs in game. And if the assets aren't all of equal quality, people will complain (why does the party look so much higher res. than random NPCs, like those alien elfs people like posting?). 

2) There is the opportunity cost. At what point is the armour enough? Do you just retexture? Do you make new meshes? How much does each mesh vary? Do you have light, heavy and medium?

3) How long does it take to test each variant with cinematics? How much time does that take away from other projects?

4) How long does it all take? Could it impact release? Might it create bugs? Does it affect level design, or camera work?

That's the cost. Not making the mesh. Making the game,

Filament wrote...
Because I think it's a sacrifice worth making. I don't care that other people care about it. Just like they don't care that I would like visual customization and should just suck it up and deal with it.

And again, by "it" I mean tattoos, not those other elements of iconic looks that wouldn't be lost.

Then why have the debate at all, if you're not going to take someone seriously?

Tatoos are just textures. That's not the issue. The mesh are issues. And while animation meshes are recycled... you still have to actually test that they look good and don't clip.

Of course, this is in response to the compromise of having both iconic looks and lots of universal templates. That's when it gets prohibitive. 

[Serpieri Nei]

In Exile wrote...

Serpieri Nei wrote...
It's very doable, it was done in origins and it's even done in games/MMO's that have body sliders.

Which games that have body sliders? 

And remind me when DA has the sales or monthly returns of an MMO. 

Two Worlds II

You think every MMO is making the money Blizzard is.

Oh wait, you have a slight point there - DA2 is selling badly.

Modifié par Serpieri Nei, 30 août 2011 - 05:07 .

[Elhanan]

The Blight hurt the Thedasian economy so much that only nobility have a ready change of clothing. No?

I like the idea being offered here, but also am wondering that one of the better moments in DAO was in the quest Captured! when the Warden could be rescued by the party in disguise. Will the art team lose this function in storytelling? Thanks!

[In Exile]

Serpieri Nei wrote...
Two Worlds II

You mean the game without NPCs, with only a human only character? Yes, that's entirely comparable to a party based game. 

You think every MMO is making the money Blizzard is. 

It doesn't have anything to do with profit. It has to do with your raw break-even point.

If most MMOs make 0 profit, but have an operating budget of 90 million, that makes it different than an SP game with an operating budget of 40 million.

Oh wait, you have a slight point there - DA2 is selling badly.

You know what else is selling badly? Bottled urine. I find it weird how there's no market for that. Isn't it great to make statements that are totally unrelated to a discussion?