Like I said, you look at pretty pictures and videos (or lack thereof), I look at what the guy has to say (i.e. design and his ability to deliver). I've enjoyed Wizardry 8 and many other cool games that had bad portraits and questionable interface to know better than to focus exclusively on them.
Strawman. It's not about the graphics. Talk is cheap. Making engines is hard. Showing what you made > talking about your game in general terms.
And yet it is about the graphics. You've bitched about DS quite often and never about the mechanics. Your issues are: bad portraits, bad AI, bad animations, bad visuals, long development time.
As for engines, not sure how far your understanding of engines goes, but what we've seen in Sui Generis KS is an engine with the most basic functionality. For example, if you were to get Unity, you'd be able to get to this stage within a few weeks, just to give you an idea. It would take at least a year to turn Unity into an RPG engine.
Now, again, the SG programmer deserves everyone's respect for making his own engine from scratch and achieving such stellar visuals. I think we all agree that when it comes to visuals, the engine is much better than any other engine, so I'm not criticizing what he did. I'm merely pointing out that we haven't seen the rest and the rest is the most important part. Even the last development update talks about the challenges of implementing dynamic stories but shows nothing but multilayer clothing on different characters.
Strange that you'd bring up Wizardry 8 which was a pretty decent (I'd even say good) looking game at the time it was released. Interface and portraits were fine. The main problem was slow combat resolution, not the graphics. Is your mind playing tricks on you, old man? I don't usually like blobbers, but I enjoyed W8, more so with sped up combat. I would have thought you'd reach deeper to establish your street cred and non-graphic-whorishness.
Didn't I say that I've enjoyed it? Loved the mechanics, liked the graphics, hated the portraits. Sue me.
You bring it up all the time like it means something. So, he worked on it with people who worked part-time and the progress was slow. He didn't give up and he kept working on it, even though he could have easily gotten a job. I respect such passion and dedication. You don't.
Again missing the point. I don't care that he worked 3 years or 10 years on the game. Good for him. But having no game to show at all after 3 years of work undermines your "ability to deliver" argument. 3 years with the "awesome engine for hardcore RPGs with all of the integrated systems" and it produced shit in the way of gameplay. Do you understand now?
It took InXile a year to show the first gameplay video. Why? Because you need to do a shitload of systems that form gameplay. Developing and integrating these systems together takes time. So, a year, with a decent size team working full time, and 3 mil budget.
Compare it to working with 3 people part-time on pure enthusiasm. Look at how long it took us to get to demo stage. I know you think that AoD is shit and all, but it takes many years, when you work part-time, to make a game like AoD. Or Dead State.
He didn't create the tools to realize his vision (the RPG part of it, the procedurally created cool stories with reactivity and such). He created tools to make a pretty gameworld with physically distinctive characters. It's fucking awesome and I'd have loved to work with such tech, but this isn't an RPG engine yet and RPGs are what I give a fuck about. I've seen a lot of pretty games and concepts over the years and learned not to trust them because awesome graphics and awesome gameplay tend to be two very different things.
Again with the stupid comparisons. You compare AAA engines to the work of one guy, again? And the comparison isn't unfavorable? Meh, not that impressive, seen it before. Are you aware how asinine that is?
You missing the praise on purpose?
One last time, the visual aspects of his engine are amazing. The guy did a fantastic job there, but I don't care about pretty games where you run around battling monsters. Until I see the rest, until I see the RPG aspects, especially those related to dynamic storytelling, his work, as impressive and praise-worthy as it is, doesn't have much value.
Again, it's not about the graphics.
If he can implement all those "pretty graphical nonsense", what makes you think he can't or hasn't already made a dialogue editor, character manager, scripting engine... whatever is needed? Making the tech you see in video from scratch, involves more than fiddling with some shaders or messing around with a few matrices and vectors.
Because you need more than some editors, some scripts, some 'character manager' to make what he promised. I'm curious to see what he can do, which is why I check the updates, but it's not as easy as you think. Now, since you think that I'm dumb and can only do teleporting scripts, let me quote the developer himself:
'During our Kickstarter campaign we were criticised for showing a lot of technology but not enough of a game or story. This was frustrating for us because actually the dynamic story is one of the aspects of the game we're most excited about. Technology is just a tool to support that vision and make the world more immersive.
We talked about a "dynamic story" but that could mean anything.
Because we don't know how much we can accomplish it's been difficult for us to go into much detail, and we couldn't promise things we weren't sure we can deliver. Now we're actively working towards this goal and we need to tell you what we're working on. Still this is a complex topic that is difficult to explain concisely so please bear with us as we try to convey our ideas.
<here is what we want to do>
Can we really do all this? As we've said before, we have to try. It is difficult, we ourselves have to occasionally remind ourselves why it might be possible. We are committed to it and actively working towards it. To us this is the only way worth doing it. It’s the same attitude we have with everything. We're doing combat using physics because that's kind of how it works. It might be far from perfect but it's a lot better and infinitely less boring than comparing a couple of numbers."
If a programmer shows his work in a form of an engine and says "this is what I can do, give me money to make my dream game", that's not relevant to making an RPG in your twisted logic.
Because it is design not engine that makes a good RPG. There is nothing twisted about this logic, but we've seen a number of really good looking games with poor mechanics, which made these games worthless.
In other words, I'm convinced that Madoc is a great programmer. I have no idea if he's a good designer because I haven't seen anything yet.
Why didn't a "designer" show a design document, as an example of his work? "I don't do engines and don't really have any gameplay to show you, but here's my 50 page awesome design document, here's all the characters and locations I've made in the 3 years slaving on my dream project. This is how combat works. These are the skills. Look at these awesome perks! Give me money to make my dream true!" Was there a DS design document floating around Kickstarter? I must have missed it.
I didn't pay much attention to Brian's KS updates, so I have no idea what he did show there and what he didn't, but I know that he made a LOT of detailed posts on the forums prior to KS, during the 3 years, explaining different mechanics in details. So, the info was definitely there.
"Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless."
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Good design isn't, which is why the list of good RPGs is very short, while the list of forgettable RPGs grows with every year.
Like I said before, until I see what SG's engine is capable of when it comes to hardcore RPGs, assuming he's even interested in taking it there, I can't say anything about this engine's REAL capabilities. Maybe they are as good as the visual aspect, in which case SG's programmer is the greatest fucking programmer alive. Maybe they aren't. Time will tell.
So you have no clue what you responded to? There's a surprise! So what "hardcore RPGs" have been made on Torque 3D, that impressed you so much, that you decided to use it?
What's your definition of hardcore? Is Wizardry 8 hardcore? Fallout? Do some retards bitching that they can't beat the assassin in the inn make the game hardcore? Is branching dialogue considered hardcore?
His heart seems to be set on an action RPG and he doesn't seem to like the traditional PnP mechanics (numbers and all).
With access and knowledge of source code you can do anything, iterate faster, not wasting time on things that are impractical to implement. Do you want me to repeat that again? Access and knowledge. Access and knowledge. That second word is knowledge. Let me use it in a sentence. If you write your own engine, you have the knowledge of all of its internal workings. Here's another. If you don't know how to implement tagged skills, you lack the knowledge of your engine and it takes 10 years to make a visual novel with janky TB combat. Understand know?
When you license an engine, you get access to the source code. It takes time to learn the engine (at least a year in Torque's case), but eventually you'll learn it. Naturally, working with your own engine is better, but it will take a long time to get your engine to the stage that you need. I'm sure that eventually Madoc can get it there, but by doing KS he sort of forced his hand. Sure, he can delay the game, but he can't delay it for years and years are what he needs to make the rest as impressive as the visuals.
I do enjoy your condescending comments about AoD, so keep 'em coming.
Are you aware that you used it in your post to shit on SG and it was the reason for my initial reply? Are you forgetting things that happened hours ago now, too?
