David Gaider wrote...
There are several cons involved with having party members:
David Gaider wrote...
Bfler wrote...
What? In Skyrim I can run around with a little army of followers in a town, without a significant loss of performance or raise of memory usage and you aren't able to do the same in your game?
I'm not saying no game can do this, just that it's an issue that we have because of our choices-- choices which every game must make in terms of what it focuses on. A game like Skyrim does some things (like "moving through an environment") better because it does other things worse... there is no way to take its strengths without also taking its weaknesses.
Why? I don't know. Like I said before, I don't get it myself and thus I'm not the person to argue the point. I'm a writer, so when someone tells me about technical limitations or resources allocations that make it more challenging for story, I stare at them quizzically until they eventually just tell me I'll have to take their word for it. Some of these things are being made easier by the new engine, but naturally there are also some things which just won't go away.
Insofar as a larger party goes, it is possible to arrange a level so that you could conceivably fit an entire party in it. The visible area would have to be small (so line of sight blocked), it would need to be free of placeables and probably couldn't have a great deal of enemies... not unless they were very simple models ("jimmies", we call them, meaning they have low poly count and incredibly simple AI). So, for very specific purposes, it can be done... but across a whole game? That's much more problematic.
Modifié par Doctor Moustache, 01 novembre 2012 - 03:04 .
Guest_Trista Faux Hawke_*
David Gaider wrote...
* Memory budget: Party members are expensive, in terms of the active memory they must consume. Why? There are technical reasons which are, to be frank, completely beyond me as a writer. Something about their AI, their animations and/or their more detailed models. We need to balance the amount of memory they take up with the amount of memory the other models in an area (such as ambients or enemies) take up or which the level itself takes up. Having more of one means having less of the others.
Gibb_Shepard wrote...
Lovin' dem consoles right about now.
Trista Faux Hawke wrote...
These numbers are all wrong. Dwarves count as a half.
Just... LOL.
They'd only count for like a fifth or a quarter, and we can't have 4.2 or 4.25 party members, can we!
TheJediSaint wrote...
Gibb_Shepard wrote...
Lovin' dem consoles right about now.
As a life-long PC gamer, I think that's a bit unfair. Even people who play PC may not have rigs powerful enough to handle too much stuff on the screen. I mean, I have a pretty beefy rig, but games like SWTOR would start chugging if too may characters were on the screen.
Fast Jimmy wrote...
I don't have a problem with a party of four (I'd love a party of five or six, but that's not a hill I'm ready to die on) but what I'd really want is more sections like in the first assault on Denerim DA:O, where the entire group is fighting at once, even if they would be operating outside my control.
Sections like the Suicide Mission in ME2 would be great, as well. Times in the game where you can order certain party members to assume certain roles, which you lead a normal sized party in a coordinated effort/attack at the same time. This could expand the size of the 'party' to be all of your companions, while at the same time not overloading the console hard-limit of four playable characters on screen at once.
Bfler wrote...
Sanunes wrote...
Bfler wrote...
.....
What? In Skyrim I can run around with a little army of followers in a town, without a significant loss of performance or raise of memory usage and you aren't able to do the same in your game?
And in Origins with extra dog slot and Ranger specialisation you could say, that you have more than 3 other party members and there aren't any problems.
Only problem with more followers is the mentioned blocking of the PC in small areas.
Just out of curiosity, did you play on the PC or Console, for when Skyrim was first released on the consoles had major issues with lag and missing texutres and I would think memory management would have been part of the issue.
PC. I would never buy an Elder Scrolls game on console.
And yes, at release Skyrim had problems because of the 2GB limit, but there were unofficial and in the meantime also official fixes.
They have to design the game to run well on all kinds of PC's with many different variations of graphics cards. There are many people out there who want to be able to play the game even if they can't max everything out. The Xbox 360 and PS3 use very fast memory and the games are designed with this hardware in mind and scaled down accordingly. PC always have the benefit of higher resolutions and higher framerates, texture packs, and so forth.Gibb_Shepard wrote...
David Gaider wrote...
* Memory budget: Party members are expensive, in terms of the active memory they must consume. Why? There are technical reasons which are, to be frank, completely beyond me as a writer. Something about their AI, their animations and/or their more detailed models. We need to balance the amount of memory they take up with the amount of memory the other models in an area (such as ambients or enemies) take up or which the level itself takes up. Having more of one means having less of the others.
Lovin' dem consoles right about now.
Modifié par EpicBoot2daFace, 01 novembre 2012 - 09:14 .
Firky wrote...
Easy. Just go back to the Infinity Engine.
(I'll show myself out.)
*humorous intent*
Swing and a miss.Gibb_Shepard wrote...
What the balls are you talking about. 360 = 500mb of memory. The cheapest PC you can buy = 2gb. The issue is the lack of memory for animations.
The animations are limited due to the limited memory in the 360. No console warring, just making my disappointment about DA3 being hindered due to the consoles known.
EpicBoot2daFace wrote...
Swing and a miss.Gibb_Shepard wrote...
What the balls are you talking about. 360 = 500mb of memory. The cheapest PC you can buy = 2gb. The issue is the lack of memory for animations.
The animations are limited due to the limited memory in the 360. No console warring, just making my disappointment about DA3 being hindered due to the consoles known.
Fast Jimmy wrote...
I know this was said with humorous intent (because the text told me! LOL), but this, this, this.
Fancy new engines are great... until they limit the game. Cool cinematics are great... until they limit the game. Voiced main characters are great... until they limit the game.
It seems like more and more RPGs are hopping on the train of fancy technology and only realizing too late that the simplicity of other engines is VASTLY superior to making an incredibly deep RPG.
Instead... it seems like the highly cinematic JRPG model that caused nearly 75% of Asian RPG designers to go bankrupt in the past five years is, instead, OBVIOUSLY the route all other RPG developers should move to. Why didn't I see that?
Modifié par h0neanias, 01 novembre 2012 - 01:51 .
h0neanias wrote...
Fast Jimmy wrote...
I know this was said with humorous intent (because the text told me! LOL), but this, this, this.
Fancy new engines are great... until they limit the game. Cool cinematics are great... until they limit the game. Voiced main characters are great... until they limit the game.
It seems like more and more RPGs are hopping on the train of fancy technology and only realizing too late that the simplicity of other engines is VASTLY superior to making an incredibly deep RPG.
Instead... it seems like the highly cinematic JRPG model that caused nearly 75% of Asian RPG designers to go bankrupt in the past five years is, instead, OBVIOUSLY the route all other RPG developers should move to. Why didn't I see that?
My thoughts exactly. Sooner or later, linear progress leads you into a corner. Compare today's games with, say, Ultima 6. With all our technology and cost and huge teams, those old Ultimas allowed more interactivity than any RPG of today. How come? Why was it possible to do it in 1990 but not now? Are the new graphics so resource-consuming you can do less with them than 20 years ago? If so, something went terribly wrong in the biz.
Modifié par Imp of the Perverse, 01 novembre 2012 - 10:00 .
Fast Jimmy wrote...
Instead... it seems like the highly cinematic JRPG model that caused nearly 75% of Asian RPG designers to go bankrupt in the past five years is, instead, OBVIOUSLY the route all other RPG developers should move to. Why didn't I see that?
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