Author Topic: A Valley Without Wind Pre-Alpha #10 -- Overworld Maps, Soft Focus, and NPCs  (Read 22000 times)

Offline x4000

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See, it's the "horribly atrophied" descriptor that really makes me laugh.  This is clearly very important to you, and we'll see what happens, but I just don't see this as the major visual fidelity issue that you do.
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Offline tigersfan

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... but I just don't see this as the major visual fidelity issue that you do.

Nor do I.

Offline Zhaine

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It's something I've often thought would be an improvement while watching the videos, but watching the videos isn't playing the game. And it certainly wasn't a game changer, more of an occasional "hmm, that would be nice" kinda thing.

Is it something that would be a massive pain to add later if you get the game to 1.0 without it? Or is it the sort of anytime feature that wont require a lot of - what was the phrase you used to describe going back and adding multi-player to minecraft? - refiguring?

Offline x4000

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Is it something that would be a massive pain to add later if you get the game to 1.0 without it? Or is it the sort of anytime feature that wont require a lot of - what was the phrase you used to describe going back and adding multi-player to minecraft? - refiguring?

It's definitely not -- it will be as easy to add it later as it would be to do it now, which is one good thing.  We'd have to refactor only a dozen or so lines of code, if even that much, and then it's all a matter of rendering out the new poses, post-processing them, putting them into sprite dictionaries, making shadows for them, and so on.  I keep all the original poser files for each character, so any time I have to add more stances or animations for them that's not that difficult in the grand scheme.

Just this week I went back and added single-frame rapid animations for magic and physical attacks to the characters and enemies (that will be shown in the next video series), so I can definitely attest that this won't be any harder later than it is now.
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Offline superking

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See, it's the "horribly atrophied" descriptor that really makes me laugh.  This is clearly very important to you, and we'll see what happens, but I just don't see this as the major visual fidelity issue that you do.

Actually I'm especially not big on visuals- my most played games are probably dwarf fortress & nethack atm- I just think that with your choice of art-style and perspective (which I do like), it would look nicer. It does mean basically twice as much art work on all 60 of the characters though, and since I assume you decided 60 because it was a manageable number in the time you have assigned it probably isn't an attractive option

Offline x4000

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That sums it up pretty well, really.

One thing that has just made it a bit easier to contemplate is that I managed to make some changes to get the character images loading faster (it was taking about 1.5s per character, now down to about 0.5s), which makes the loading speed question less of an issue.  We shall see. :)
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Offline Zhaine

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Hah, refactor, that was it :)

Well it seems sensible to me to maybe get to Beta and then see what people think having actually played. . .

Offline x4000

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Yep, that might be what happens, we'll just see how it feels in the interim. :)
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Offline Nalgas

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As you say, it's not a big difference for higher end machines (Definitely just downloaded Dragon Age from Steam yesterday. 24 GB download ftw) but on lower end machines I could see the loading being more of an issue.

Heh.  I just got that this week.  That was a fun exercise in patience at 100k/s, although it seems that it blatantly lies about the amount you actually have to download.  That number is the amount of space it takes on disk, but the download appears to be compressed, so it ended up taking only 40 hours instead of 70.

Funny that you mention it in a thread about graphics, though.  Something that really jumps out at me repeatedly about DA:O is how the character models and textures are fairly high detail, while some of the background objects could almost be straight out of Minecraft.  That may sound like an exaggeration, but this is with every setting in the game maxed out.  Is that guy even from the same game as the gate he's standing in front of?  I'd rather have the characters be half as detailed as they are if it meant they could make the rest of the world three times higher quality so they actually fit in together with each other.  The game itself is mostly fun, but it's visually very jarring at times because of stuff like that.  Even the fan-made higher quality texture packs only look slightly less awful next to the characters, and not actually good.

To get vaguely back on topic, hooray for the attempts to make AVWW not be like that and it getting visually more coherent as time goes by and things are improved to mesh better with each other.

Offline tootboot

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I'm also someone that just became a fan of the company, thought I haven't gotten around to buying AI War yet.  I'm just very impressed with the level of support you've given that game over the past two years which greatly increases my interest in it.You might to promote a little more on social networking sites, I noticed the company only has like 4 fans and I was the 4th.

I also think 8-directional sprites would improve the visual look of the game fairly significantly.  Gameplay Versus Graphics, go for Gameplay.  Load/Download time versus Graphics, Graphics every time.  Presentation does make a difference, I initially passed on AI War on based on the graphics.  I see a lot of people pass on trying Roguelikes that don't have tilesets available.

I think AVWW has pretty good potential to be a breakout hit at least as large as AI War and maybe larger since since procedurally-generated sandbox worlds seem to be on the verge of becoming their own genre with Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress becoming Cult Classics, and that Terraria game coming out soon.  A lot of the complaints I see about those games are the slow pace of updates, or that the updates don't affect gameplay much in the case of DF.

I do have a question or two though, how do you plan to avoid falling into the Oblivion trap?  In the places where I hang out, Morrowind is very highly regarded and Oblivion isn't thought of nearly as well, with a common sentiment being that you need to install tons of mods to make it fun.  A lot of people attribute this to Morrowind having a ton of little handcrafted little interesting places, whereas Oblivion was more procedurally generated or at least cut and pasted areas.  I quickly lost interest in exploring the 'dungeons' in Oblivion when I found out most of them had the same layout, the same monsters, and the same loot.  I guess I'm kinda worried about that happening here with the civilization level sounding somewhat like the level scaling.  Are there going to be out-of-depth style areas?  A game with a uniformly dangerous world isn't as interesting as one where you can luck upon a powerful item early or stumble into the wrong area and die.  Obviously those things can't happen too often, but in the right amounts they provide significant spice.  A game world based on the real world isn't necessarily fun, but it seems more 'real' to think that really bad or good things can happen no matter where you are, and that helps a game become more interesting.

When you say in the promotional material that you only need to generate one world, how does that work?  Does the game generate more areas than it's feasible to explore, or does it generate additional areas when you've explored most of them, or what?  Only generating one world and playing it for as long as I'm still interested in playing the game sounds questionable to me, like it would eventually get boring and that I'd want to generate a different world with different characteristics after a few weeks.  If you look at something like Dwarf Fortress, I don't think people keep playing the same fortress for very long periods of time even though there's a lot of randomness and detail.  Maybe I'd get bored with the default world after a few weeks and want to play a desert world, or a low tech world, or a high magic world, or whatever.

Lastly, what does the largest settlement size look like, roughly?

On an unrelated note, you might to promote a little more on social networking sites, I noticed the company only has like 4 fans on Facebook and I was the 4th.

Offline superking

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yeah, morrowind was the undisputeable king. With the right mods (infinite view distance/ advanced lighting/ morrowind comes alive/ draconis voice or give your orders/ adventurers 3.0 / magicka regen / high res weapons / better bodies/ emmas heads/ non-scaling monsters (& all the content adding ones) you could get it looking and playing puurfect  ;D

Offline x4000

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I'm also someone that just became a fan of the company, thought I haven't gotten around to buying AI War yet.  I'm just very impressed with the level of support you've given that game over the past two years which greatly increases my interest in it.You might to promote a little more on social networking sites, I noticed the company only has like 4 fans and I was the 4th.

Many thanks for the kind words, and welcome to the forums!  In terms of Facebook, I'm really not sure how to promote there aside from advertising with them. And advertising with them has been a profound waste of money in the past. ;) I'm not really sure what other techniques folks use.

I think AVWW has pretty good potential to be a breakout hit at least as large as AI War and maybe larger since since procedurally-generated sandbox worlds seem to be on the verge of becoming their own genre with Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress becoming Cult Classics, and that Terraria game coming out soon.  A lot of the complaints I see about those games are the slow pace of updates, or that the updates don't affect gameplay much in the case of DF.

Can't argue with much of that, though the idea that Minecraft is a cult classic makes me laugh a bit.  With 2 million copies sold and counting, there's nothing cult about that game!

I do have a question or two though, how do you plan to avoid falling into the Oblivion trap?  In the places where I hang out, Morrowind is very highly regarded and Oblivion isn't thought of nearly as well, with a common sentiment being that you need to install tons of mods to make it fun.  A lot of people attribute this to Morrowind having a ton of little handcrafted little interesting places, whereas Oblivion was more procedurally generated or at least cut and pasted areas.  I quickly lost interest in exploring the 'dungeons' in Oblivion when I found out most of them had the same layout, the same monsters, and the same loot.  I guess I'm kinda worried about that happening here with the civilization level sounding somewhat like the level scaling.

Having never played Morrowind or Obliviion, I can't speak to those specific examples. But I certainly get what you're driving at.  I have played Fallout 3, and a fair bit of Fallout 2, and I felt the same sort of difference there. I've written about the answers to all these questions at length other places, but to answer them again in brief: I think the biggest challenge facing Fallout 3 and Obliviion was that they were huge worlds in 3D. Every asset in those games had to be hand crafted, and that takes a long time per asset.  With a 2D game like AVWW, the biggest strength of the 2D is that creating new assets is incredibly cheap and quick.

Check out what I've written about chunk scripting, etc, elswhere for the longer-form answer.  The game itself will be supporting player-created scripts for randomized stuff, and we'll be wrapping many of those back into the game itself, as well as creating more of them ourselves. Is there a point after which you'll start seeing repetition?  Of course.  That's just unavoidable with any game, procedural or no.  What procedural techniques allow is for greatly extending the world beyond the hand-crafting capabilities of the staff.  In the case of 2D, it works much better than in 3D.  If this is anywhere popular like AI War, we'll be able to do a ton of post release free DLC and paid expansions that will keep this growing for years.

I don't think civilization level is what you think it is; it's like your character level in other games, but applied to all characters in multiplayer, and all NPCs.  It's more to do with perma-death.  There IS some level scaling (the world increases at 33% of the rate that you do), but that's simply to keep the older areas from becoming completely stale.  You'll still kick major butt in them when you go back there.

Are there going to be out-of-depth style areas?  A game with a uniformly dangerous world isn't as interesting as one where you can luck upon a powerful item early or stumble into the wrong area and die.  Obviously those things can't happen too often, but in the right amounts they provide significant spice.  A game world based on the real world isn't necessarily fun, but it seems more 'real' to think that really bad or good things can happen no matter where you are, and that helps a game become more interesting.

You'll want to check out some of the stuff about regions, etc -- the game is full of different levels of difficulties, and you can set your own pace through them.  There's no lucking into powerful items early, but if you want to accept the risks of a more dangerous region in return for a more powerful item, you can at any time; it's about daring, not luck, to get powerful stuff early.

When you say in the promotional material that you only need to generate one world, how does that work?  Does the game generate more areas than it's feasible to explore, or does it generate additional areas when you've explored most of them, or what?  Only generating one world and playing it for as long as I'm still interested in playing the game sounds questionable to me, like it would eventually get boring and that I'd want to generate a different world with different characteristics after a few weeks.  If you look at something like Dwarf Fortress, I don't think people keep playing the same fortress for very long periods of time even though there's a lot of randomness and detail.  Maybe I'd get bored with the default world after a few weeks and want to play a desert world, or a low tech world, or a high magic world, or whatever.

The world is generate-as-you-go.  So when you first go into the world, it's very tiny, only maybe 40 tiles, of which you can see 9.  As you explore around, the world generates around you.  This is familiar to anyone who knows Minecraft.  Like in Minecraft, there's no reason to start a new world because any new features added to the game become available in existing worlds.  Just explore beyond the boundaries you've found so far, and the new stuff starts showing up.  The DF comparsion isn't very apt, because the world there is pregenerated at a fixed size, and your fortress is all in one place.  Here it's all about exploration, not staying still.  There's a number of interviews and such where I went into this in a lot greater depth.

Lastly, what does the largest settlement size look like, roughly?

Settlements take up an entire region tile from the overworld map at this point, so they are the same size as any other region.  In terms of the number of characters in them, that we're still figuring out in terms of deciding what feels best.  My guess is that most will be pretty small, though of course you can pack them with more NPCs that you meet and invite there.  Lots and lots of room! :)
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Offline Magos Mechanicus

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One thing I've been wondering a bit about is the actual impact of civilization level on the characters that are part of that civilization. As I've understood you so far, players customize their experience mainly through crafting appropriate equipment (trapper players make traps, mages craft spell gems, knights craft swords etc.), and characters won't have a "profession" outside the one deciding what type of thing they can craft. Combining that with how pointedly mortal individual characters are, it seems like D&D-style large complex level-up menus would be out of place and could get in the way. So when you explore a new region and your civ levels up... what happens to your character? Does he just get better stats, without player input, or could we choose to for instance focus on Magic Attack? What about NPCs? Do they auto-level, or do you get to allocate points if you pick them as your new character?

Offline x4000

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There is no customization of character stats, you are right. Each character has different stat categories all with a proficiency range of 1-10. When the character is created, a fixed pool of plots gets randomly allocated between those stats. Then those stats never change.

However, the effective stat is a simple formula combining civ level and the innate proficiency. So your health rating is always 1-10, no matter what. But any character with an 8 health rating will have a formulaically predictable actual health value at level 1, level 30, level 3000, etc.

You can customize how you play by choosing which npc to take over after you die; but if none of them are all that great at magic, then you're just not going to have great magic for a while, till you win over some more npcs.

In terms of crafting proficiencies, some of that will be based on civ level, and others will be bases on having stuff like an appropriate workshop to work in, etc. So that's where some of the settlement improvements will actually benefit crafters, although we're still working out the specifics for things like legendary items, etc. A lot of that settlement stuff we are just now prototyping and then seeing what seems most fun, etc. That part is the part that was hard to design fully in advance.
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Offline Magos Mechanicus

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I see. Well, that's interesting. Should give players a bit of extra incentive to win over NPCs with the kind of skills they like to use in play, and that makes sense from the perspective of their character as well.

 

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