Game News Project Eternity Kickstarter Update #49: Prototype Demo

[Sprout]

I'm comparing this to Wasteland 2 as well. And the perspective issues in the Torment shots are inexcusable.

Perspective issues, where? sorry, I don't have the eye for that sort of thing.

As for how it'll end up looking, I still think it'll prove to be a distinct improvement if they put enough effort into it.
But I'm not an expert or anything, I could be wrong, so feel free to reserve the right to the "I told you so".

 

[Alex_Steel]

It is obvious that Sprout is not a learning animal.

 

[DeepOcean]

Those youtube comments.



Everything Everyone Almost Everyone is shit.

Do you people still have the willpower to read youtube comments? Doesn't matter the video in question, youtube comments are almost always retarded it's a law of nature.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Making one area look good is fine. Making those features work (or be useful) across multiple different areas and scenarios is more difficult.

what you clearly don't get is the fact that they're doing groundwork right now, and no special features for selected areas.

Making the water rise and fall for the waterfall isn't a special feature for that selected area? Pray tell, how much rising and falling water is planned for Eternity? Me hopes lots! It could be a recurrent theme. You could encounter fountains and make their water rise and fall, the water could rise and fall in bath houses as you take a dip, we could even have oceans where the water falls and you can walk across like Moses crossing the Red Sea! Then the water rises again so that all the chariots following them are flooded (this game will have chariots, right?).

They've spent a lot of time making one area look good. And sure, it looks great - and dynamic! But I'd sure love to see one of these other exteriors "they've worked on". Because at the moment, it seems like they spent two weeks dicking around with one relatively tiny area (the player will spend how much time running through here?) on a feature that will mostly be ignored by players in the final game. And if it takes two weeks (or even one week) to "nail" the specific "dynamic content" of each set piece, then they don't have time for a lot of areas.

Unless their pipeline is chock full of "rising and falling water" areas...

 

[Infinitron]

Making one area look good is fine. Making those features work (or be useful) across multiple different areas and scenarios is more difficult.

what you clearly don't get is the fact that they're doing groundwork right now, and no special features for selected areas.

Making the water rise and fall for the waterfall isn't a special feature for that selected area? Pray tell, how much rising and falling water is planned for Eternity? Me hopes lots! It could be a recurrent theme. You could encounter fountains and make their water rise and fall, the water could rise and fall in bath houses as you take a dip, we could even have oceans where the water falls and you can walk across like Moses crossing the Red Sea! Then the water rises again so that all the chariots following them are flooded (this game will have chariots, right?).

They've spent a lot of time making one area look good. And sure, it looks great - and dynamic! But I'd sure love to see one of these other exteriors "they've worked on". Because at the moment, it seems like they spent two weeks dicking around with one relatively tiny area (the player will spend how much time running through here?) on a feature that will mostly be ignored by players in the final game. And if it takes two weeks (or even one week) to "nail" the specific "dynamic content" of each set piece, then they don't have time for a lot of areas.

Unless their pipeline is chock full of "rising and falling water" areas...

The game is in its preproduction phase. Writing, design, concept art. What they're doing in terms of actual coding now is engine proof of concepts.

 

[Arkeus]

Unless their pipeline is chock full of "rising and falling water" areas...

Again, one level of the endless dungeon is a drowned level.

 

[Davaris]

Unity water comes with the engine. I assume that moving it up and down would be as trivial, as moving geometry up and down, because you can do that in the editor.



What I would be asking, is why they aren't using the engine in a normal 3D way. Baldur's Gate had good reason to use pre-rendered, because 3D was so damned ugly back then. Now we have decent 3D, they come up with this convoluted solution? That's where your additional eye candy costs will come from.

 

[Infinitron]

What I would be asking, is why they aren't using the engine in a normal 3D way.

What I would be replying, is "shut up and make way for the resurrection of 2D".

 

[Surf Solar]

Unity water comes with the engine. I assume that moving it up and down would be as trivial, as moving geometry up and down, because you can do that in the editor.



What I would be asking, is why they aren't using the engine in a normal 3D way. Baldur's Gate had good reason to use pre-rendered, because 3D was so damned ugly back then. Now we have decent 3D, they come up with this convoluted solution? That's where your additional eye candy costs will come from.

 

[Davaris]

All of what they are doing when it comes to using this roundabout method, is about the eye candy. So why is anyone complaining, when they spend time on eye candy effects?

 

[Jasede]

I'm comparing this to Wasteland 2 as well. And the perspective issues in the Torment shots are inexcusable.

Perspective issues, where? sorry, I don't have the eye for that sort of thing.

As for how it'll end up looking, I still think it'll prove to be a distinct improvement if they put enough effort into it.
But I'm not an expert or anything, I could be wrong, so feel free to reserve the right to the "I told you so".

I also have no eye for perspective and do not care one iota about any perceived perspective issues. It does make me wonder, how many of these issues are in BG 1, 2 and PS:T and IWD 1 and 2? I would assume it is plagued by the same "problem" - not that it ever managed to curb my enjoyment of those titles.

 

[Davaris]

What I would be asking, is why they aren't using the engine in a normal 3D way.

What I would be replying, is "shut up and make way for the resurrection of 2D".

What I am looking at is the equivalent of the dudes from Pimp My Ride, cutting the wings off a jet plane and turning it into a hot rod and when someone says hey that's stupid, everyone is shocked.

From an engineering standpoint it looks nuts. If you are going to make a 2D game, use a 2D engine, don't nobble a 3D engine and make it into a 2D engine. They will have to write specialized pathfinding for it and all sorts of workarounds, because of what they have done. Meanwhile, the solutions are already available on Unity, for a normal 3D game and they cost nothing.

To a programmer it looks crazy. You use the right tool for the job.

 

[Infinitron]

What I am looking at is the equivalent of the dudes from Pimp My Ride, cutting the wings of a jet plane and turning it into a hot rod and when someone says hey that's stupid, everyone is shocked.

From an engineering standpoint it looks nuts. If you are going to make a 2D game, use a 2D engine, don't nobble a 3D engine and make it into a 2D engine. They will have to write specialized pathfinding for it and all sorts of workarounds, because of what they have done. Meanwhile, the solutions are already available on Unity, for a normal 3D game and they cost nothing.

To a programmer it looks crazy. You use the right tool for the job.

It will be worth it for all the future Obsidian and inXile games that get to reuse their code.

 

[Davaris]

It will be worth it for all the future Obsidian and inXile games that get to reuse their code.

Do you know if they wanted to do it this way, or did the crowd ask for it?

 

[Infinitron]

Do you know if they wanted to do it this way, or did the crowd ask for it?

Obsidian? It's an Infinity Engine like game, they had to. It was never a question.

 

[Davaris]

I thought the Codex was trying to talk Obsidian out of it, because 2D would be difficult? Never mind.

The other problem with this approach, is modding will be out of the reach of the ordinary person. If you aren't skilled with 3DMax or equivalent, its going to look like garbage. And yet inXile is always talking up Unity, because of ease of import and its community of asset makers. So it looks like that approach will be abandoned with these kinds of games.

 

[Infinitron]

I thought the Codex was trying to talk Obsidian out of it, because 2D would be difficult? Never mind.

Are we reading the same forum??

The other problem with this approach, is modding will be out of the reach of the ordinary person. If you aren't skilled with 3DMax or equivalent, its going to look like garbage. And yet inXile is always talking up Unity, because of ease of import and its community of asset makers. So it looks like that approach will be abandoned with these kinds of games.

Fuck the modders. All they'll make is romance bullshit anyway. More important is their ability to edit and improve existing content.

 

[Jaesun]

They are making this "modding friendly". But yes the 2D backgrounds will be the limitations for mods for it. Just like all the other IE games. Also with Torment going 2D I also assumed they would also not do a toolset (because of the same limitation).

But Modding was NOT the focus or even promised for Eternity or Torment. Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns and Divinity: Original Sin however are focused on modding.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Unity water comes with the engine. I assume that moving it up and down would be as trivial, as moving geometry up and down, because you can do that in the editor.



What I would be asking, is why they aren't using the engine in a normal 3D way. Baldur's Gate had good reason to use pre-rendered, because 3D was so damned ugly back then. Now we have decent 3D, they come up with this convoluted solution? That's where your additional eye candy costs will come from.

We may have decent 3D, but we don't have decent hardware. Period. I doubt that 3D game that looks as good as Project: Eternity demo in 2D will run at 60 fps in 1920x1080 on modern PC.

Just for the test:
Try to run F.E.A.R or Condemned on ultra settings (or run the performance test in original F.E.A.R for more accurate results), then divide your performance by (at least) 4 (because of the larger size of locations). Then imagine how castrated the enviroment should be to give you constant 60 fps.

 

[tuluse]

What I am looking at is the equivalent of the dudes from Pimp My Ride, cutting the wings off a jet plane and turning it into a hot rod and when someone says hey that's stupid, everyone is shocked.

From an engineering standpoint it looks nuts. If you are going to make a 2D game, use a 2D engine, don't nobble a 3D engine and make it into a 2D engine. They will have to write specialized pathfinding for it and all sorts of workarounds, because of what they have done. Meanwhile, the solutions are already available on Unity, for a normal 3D game and they cost nothing.

To a programmer it looks crazy. You use the right tool for the job.

It's just 2D backgrounds. Characters will be 3D, and there might be other 3D elements.

 

[Davaris]

Just for the test:
Try to run F.E.A.R or Condemned on ultra settings (or run the performance test in original F.E.A.R for more accurate results), then divide your performance by (at least) 4 (because of the larger size of locations). Then imagine how castrated the enviroment should be to give you constant 60 fps.

These are FPS games. They are a different kettle of fish. FPS must look good up close. The camera in this game, is overhead and is pulled back a fair distance, so the finer details are not as much of an issue. And you are correct, you are never going to get quite as good quality, using a 3D engine the way it was designed to be used, because they use will use render farms to render out the scenes for this game.

You have to way these things up. What you gain in one, you lose in another. If it was 3D you could run their Unity engine, move a few things around, attach script or two to the 3D objects and you would have your new level, that fits perfectly with the rest of the game.

With this approach, you will need a professional level 3DMax user at your disposal, if you want to make levels that look like they belong in this game. This is not the type of engine where you can hack at the images with Photoshop or Gimp and they will work with the lighting methods they are using. You could do that with the Infinity Engine, but not this.

As I said when I first saw it, it looks really good. As long as everyone is happy with it that's fine. I didn't back this one, as they were raising huge amounts of cash, so I'm not sweating the outcome. If the game turns out good, I'll buy it for sure.

Edit:
But maybe the Photoshop/Gimp modders will surprise me. I'll just have to wait and see.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

These are FPS games. They are a different kettle of fish. FPS must look good up close. The camera in this game, is overhead and is pulled back a fair distance, so the finer details are not as much of an issue. And you are correct, you are never going to get quite as good quality, using a 3D engine the way it was designed to be used, because they use will use render farms to render out the scenes for this game.

I wasn't talking about FPS game. I just have no other examples of using large amount of RT lights with little to no baking.
Zooming function would be highly desirable in 3D, at least for tactical purposes. Zooming out to see the whole situation and zooming in to look what the exact character is doing, for example. Baking lightmaps would save some performance in this case, but some mentioned features (day/night cycle) would require RT lighting. And the same complex scene in 3D (even low-poly) with at least one light and RT shadows would give a big performance hit on some machines.
Modding would be quite harsh in current case, but we'll see how they handle it. After all, (correct me if I'm wrong) there are some mods for Fallout that have custom locations, and they seem to work fine (though I don't know how hard the development process was).

 

[Davaris]

I wasn't talking about FPS game. I just have no other examples of using large amount of RT lights with little to no baking.
Zooming function would be highly desirable in 3D, at least for tactical purposes. Zooming out to see the whole situation and zooming in to look what the exact character is doing, for example. Baking lightmaps would save some performance in this case, but some mentioned features (day/night cycle) would require RT lighting. And the same complex scene in 3D (even low-poly) with at least one light and RT shadows would give a big performance hit on some machines.

And they say they are running it on an ordinary PC. By ordinary, I assume they mean no graphics card. So there is no comparison. I'm going to ask people that know a lot more about this than I. I would love to know what they think.

Modding would be quite harsh in current case, but we'll see how they handle it. After all, (correct me if I'm wrong) there are some mods for Fallout that have custom locations, and they seem to work fine (though I don't know how hard the development process was).

Fallout was a tile based game. I don't think they did anything fancy with the lighting, so it should have been easy to mod the graphics. I hear the scripting was the hardest part.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

I'm curious, could anyone explain how exactly what Obsidian showed in the demo works from a technical point of view?
I imagine they took a pre-rendered background and put a second 3D-"layer" on it which contains all the animated effects, water, the animated waterfall etc. Maybe I should have put it the other way around: They created a basic 3D level in Unity containing just the basic stuff like the watefall and other 3D effects and added the pre-rendered 2D background to it. Is that about right?

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

And they say they are running it on an ordinary PC. By ordinary, I assume they mean no graphics card.

Am I the only one who thinks this assumption is bizarre? When was the last time "ordinary PC" was commonly defined as a PC without a graphics card?? 1998? o_O