Dwip Posted July 21, 2011 Share Posted July 21, 2011 Wait, how is it necessarily going to RAISE polycount to do single piece armors? I mean, it's more polys to do cuirass + greaves than just cuirass, but how many times are people going to NOT do cuirass + greaves? If anything you might stand to gain a few back, though that would depend heavily on the specific armor in question.Insofar as you're loading one object versus two, and one texture versus two, I can see that you'd get savings out of that, though I can't imagine as how one object versus two would be a whole LOT of savings, and depending on texture sizes, it's going to take a while before you see that, though depending on your card, maybe not very long at all, if people's experiences with the higher res versions of QTP, &c are anything to go by. Too, Fallout 3 and FNV use 1024x1024 armor textures, and depending on if they upped those, it wouldn't take forever before you started feeling it.As far as animation, the only thing you're saving is loading all the polys in one set rather than two. Legs are still getting animated, you've still got to build the armor the same and the skeleton the same, so unless there's some magic in loading only the one object (doubtful), you aren't saving anything.All that said, I'd imagine it's a whole lot easier to TEST animations on single sets of armor rather than pieces, so there's that. Imagine it's much more efficient during the modeling stage period. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted July 21, 2011 Author Share Posted July 21, 2011 I think I worded that a bit awkwardly. By "necessarily has to rise" I mean that if you have chest+legs, your poly count is up no matter what vs chest only. It doesn't much matter if you have chest+legs as a one piece suit or as a two piece suit. You'll still have roughly the same number of polygons rendered.So if they're seriously trying to tell us that conversion to a once piece suit made that colossal a difference, something is rotten in Bethesda land.FO3 made such a huge leap in multi-core processor support that it would take QTP3x2 before you'd even begin to feel the burn of ultra-res textures. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dwip Posted July 21, 2011 Share Posted July 21, 2011 Well, sure, ok. But like I said, that implies that people are actually driving around in just a cuirass, rather than cuirass + greaves. I can't think of a single NPC off top of my head where that's the case. So, you know.And yeah, I don't buy the texture thing a WHOLE lot (FO3 has something like 1.5-2x armor texture size over Oblivion), but I can see where, eventually, given enough textures, you'd feel it. Not particularly likely though.So I dunno. Maybe one of those things where it's just a combination of a lot of little things. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prettyfly Posted July 21, 2011 Share Posted July 21, 2011 It would have made a lot of sense if they'd said that it was to allow them to have a really great armor modification system when it comes to smithing, but they didn't, so I'm assuming that's not the case, and perhaps suggest that the smithing system isn't going to be as extensive as I'm hoping for as well.Acutally, and on that note, I hope we get the opportunity to change the aesthetics of our armor rather than just being able to make it more effective at protecting us. I'd love to be going around in a suit of armor with a gold trim. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sigurð Stormhand Posted July 21, 2011 Share Posted July 21, 2011 I'm sure it has more to do with each piece of armour being an object the game has to process, value, health, protection. All those values get doubled even if you just have a chest piece, becuase they still have to be zeroed.So, yeah. Probably a RAM and CPU issue. ALL HAIL MICROSUX!Now I'm just going to sit here and wait for the black helicopters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Kaira Posted July 23, 2011 Share Posted July 23, 2011 Today's highlight in the mosh-pit: two features that were argued should not be in Skyrim that are not entirely attached to reality:1. Full customization of houses: Erm, why the hell not? My house, my decor, my rules. Don't like it? Go spin. :facepalm:Seeing as house ownership is one of the additions to Oblivion I actually liked, and there was nothing wrong with it save it being a bit static with the furniture, I see no point at all to strip it down.4.Teleportation: I think he completely forgot about what fast-travel allows you to do with this one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prettyfly Posted July 23, 2011 Share Posted July 23, 2011 Yeah, wtf was with that guy. Being able to customize your house somehow makes for a worse RPG? What he said for teleportation didn't even make much sense to me anyway. What does teleporting have to do with people coming out of the shadows to tell you things . Oh, and he also suggested that Bethesda are going to make NPC's less interesting so that they can include marriage options. Dunno, I would've thought that would entail more interesting NPC's with more features than before.Elsewhere, I got into a quasi-debate about how wealthy the average Australian is while trying to discuss the concerns surrounding the PS3 port of Oblivion (it turned out the guy had been injured at work and was having to live off government benefits as a result, and while you can get by just fine on that, its not comfortable, especially when as in his case you're paying $200 per week in rent like he is, prompting me to offer my condolences). And for the first time I even managed to get the attention of a moderator who kindly told me to get back on topic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted July 23, 2011 Author Share Posted July 23, 2011 Whoever this guy is you're talking about sounds like he was high on something. Or just plain stupid. Being able to customize my property would be very cool. Especially when one returns from a dungeon with sacks full of displayable loot and nowhere to display it!$800/mo rent and some fool has the gall to complain about that? Tell him to move to Los Angeles and just TRY to find an apartment that cheap. I dare him. Assuming he refuses to live with rats and roaches that is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prettyfly Posted July 23, 2011 Share Posted July 23, 2011 Yeah, and the guys still at it too, although he's dropped the whole 'customizing houses is bad' argument and has gone back to telling everyone that they're going to have to remove features from NPC's so that we can marry them. Oh, and he's blaming a rush of kids who have come to the forums saying they want the game to be more like the Sims, and that Beth is caving into them. Retard.Actually, I misread his post; its actually only $200 a fortnight, so $400 a month. And for that matter, his unemployment benefits are $480 a month, and he gets them for as long as he wants. Which was why I reasoned that if you're going to be unemployed, Australia isn't a bad place to unemployed in. It's really just a perspective thing on his part; if you're unemployed you don't compare yourself to the unemployed in other parts of the world but the working people in your own country. Anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Kaira Posted July 23, 2011 Share Posted July 23, 2011 He's a troll. Nothing much else to it.Next! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndalayBay Posted July 23, 2011 Share Posted July 23, 2011 Well I challenge you to live on $80/mth, which is all he'll have left after paying rent. But that has absolutely nothing to do with Skyrim! I noticed that the mods on Beth were getting a bit touchy - guess that forum is driving them nuts I don't even bother looking at it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sigurð Stormhand Posted July 24, 2011 Share Posted July 24, 2011 Well I challenge you to live on $80/mth' date=' which is all he'll have left after paying rent. But that has absolutely nothing to do with Skyrim! I noticed that the mods on Beth were getting a bit touchy - guess that forum is driving them nuts I don't even bother looking at it.[/quote']I live on £50 a month, that's about $80. I gave up drinking and going out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndalayBay Posted July 24, 2011 Share Posted July 24, 2011 And eating! I grew up poor and we had to try living on amounts like that. I was really skinny and hungry all the time. Now we spend about $500/mth on food and there's only two of us. Here a package of chicken breasts costs $10, with a large package costing $20. They are supposed to be premium quality - you can get cheaper ones, but I can't see getting by on $80/mth. We have food banks here for those who can't afford to buy food.I thought Australia was pretty expensive too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prettyfly Posted July 25, 2011 Share Posted July 25, 2011 I'm fairly sure the average package of premium chicken breast is less than $10 in Australia, but they may well have different sizes. The guy actually has $140 a week to live off; he gets $480 every fortnight and spends $200 a fortnight on rent. Still not heaps, but you can get by on that. Not that I'd be buying much chicken breast on that sort of income. :tongue:Anyway...Skyrim. A thread about 'what Bethesda should learn from Obsidian' quickly turned into a FO3 vs FNV battleground. No surprises. My case was that Obsidian could teach Bethesda some stuff about story telling but Beth is still the undisputed master of all when it comes to worldspace creation. Oh, and there was a thread claiming that if you couldn't toggle finishing moves Skyrim would be ruined. Couldn't bring myself to look at that thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted July 25, 2011 Author Share Posted July 25, 2011 Sorry, but Obsidian blows goats at doing much of anything right. Both Neverwinter games being classic examples of how NOT to make games, among other things I've seen people deride them for. They may be decent story writers but they suck so bad at everything else that you rarely get to appreciate it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dwip Posted July 25, 2011 Share Posted July 25, 2011 I thought living on $200/mo food stamps was fun. $80/mo seems a bit excessive.Re: Obsidian, I'm pretty much with prettyfly on this one. F:NV was a much, much better story than FO3, to be sure. NWN2 sucks the good suck (though the xpacks are...somewhat better, sort of?), but F:NV is way better. NWN1 is, of course, a Bioware game, thus proving that everyone has their off days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted July 25, 2011 Author Share Posted July 25, 2011 That may well be, but as I said, their complete and utter incompetence in every other aspect of the game ruins any chance you might have to enjoy that. Nowhere more proven than the fact that each F:NV patch is met by crys of "you fucked this up worse" every time they do one. Obsidian should just go die in a fire, or farm their guys out as quest writers and leave the actual tough stuff to people who can handle it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Kaira Posted July 25, 2011 Share Posted July 25, 2011 Don't be ignoring tradition now. Everything Obsidian does badly is all the publisher's fault, after all. :tongue: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndalayBay Posted July 25, 2011 Share Posted July 25, 2011 Talk about the kiss of death... If Obsidian does something, I'm thinking twice, thrice, before buying. And reading lots and lots of reviews. But hey, if it's cheap enough... :grinning: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prettyfly Posted July 25, 2011 Share Posted July 25, 2011 Well, New Vegas allowed them to basically work straight off an existing game which was already quite good, and mods showed them all the easy fixes and improvements they needed to make to the game. Add to that a good story (being their only real talent) and someone who knows how to make a statically levelled world (Oscuro), and we ended up with a markedly improved Fallout game. But of course, if Beth hadn't done the difficult part of making the base template for Fallout 3, Obsidian had no chance of making NV in the first place.Stability wise, I'm also unconvinced that NV was a much different to FO3. In my experience there was no difference, and the poll over on the Fallout general discussion seems to indicate that both games were about the same in terms of stability. And re; 'you fucked up my game with this patch', that sounds a bit like what happened with FO3 as well to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dwip Posted July 25, 2011 Share Posted July 25, 2011 What he said. Although two things:1. "You fucked up my game with the patch" is hardly confined to Obsidian. The patches for Fallout 3 and Civ 5 would like a word, among other things. Not that the patches have, in fact, fucked up my game at all.2. Insofar as the point is that Obsidian are good story writers, their technical merits are probably irrelevant to the discussion.Counterpoint to all of this: The end of KOTOR2. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted July 25, 2011 Author Share Posted July 25, 2011 Except for the whites-only NPC head/body problem, Fallout 3 1.7 is a pretty good patch and fixed all the shit that was actually broken.I'm not seeing a great deal of love for the F:NV 1.3 or 1.4 patches and many people have said they BOTH broke the game badly, with 1.4 doing a lot more damage in terms of weapons balance simply to support some new DLC that's out now. People once more cursing the name of Obsidian. How this company stays alive is beyond me.I 100% agree with the assessment that they would have folded by now on NV if it weren't for Bethesda providing them a mostly-working engine.Can't say one way or the other on Civ 5. I don't follow their forums and I passed on buying a copy due to Steam. Also can't comment on either of the KOTOR games as I somehow to this day have still not managed to play them.So far as I'm concerned if I see Obsidian's name on the box I'm going to treat it as a warning label from now on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kayle Posted July 25, 2011 Share Posted July 25, 2011 Counterpoint to all of this: The end of KOTOR2.Worst.Ending.Ever. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arthmoor Posted July 25, 2011 Author Share Posted July 25, 2011 Worse than Neverwinter 2? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dwip Posted July 25, 2011 Share Posted July 25, 2011 Worse than Neverwinter 2?IMHO, no. NWN2 was special levels of bad. KOTOR2's ending didn't make a whole lot of sense, but it did kind of work. It also had the benefit of being backed up by a massively superior game that was actually fun to play. Speaking of which, O Fearless Leader, since you have access you really do owe it to yourself to at least play through the first KOTOR. It is a very, very good game, one of the best Bioware ever did.As to F:NV, eh. I still haven't seen anything so bad as the head/body problem and the ESM thing out of it, so there's that. Most of the rest I chalk up to people bitching for bullshit reasons (sort of like Skyrim...), since I have no reason to think otherwise.Civ 5, OTOH, actually HAS had broken functionality in various patches, including breaking stuff that used to work. It's something of a nightmare, mitigated only by the fact that said patches are actually improving the game steadily. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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