Return to “Announcements”

Post

Re: Development Update #7: July 2013

#17
JoshParnell wrote:
Slymodi wrote:easiest place to get lost in ever! :evil:

~Sly
100% agreed to that...it's just ridiculous :crazy:
I used to leave lit torches at the side of doorways i was using most at any given time, just to help me find my way a little quicker.

In relation to Limit Theory and what you had showed in that last video with the planetscape and the ship flying around, would it be possible at a later date to add more free flying around those planets?

I'm not sure if you have expansions in mind for LT or not, but surely it must be possible to have a procedural system AND some locked in points of interest on them, i'm thinking about how Frontier and Frontier First Encounters did planets and flying around them. So my question is if not in the initial release could it be possible to have free-roaming over the planet surfaces in a later expansion/DLC thing for LT?
Post

Re: Development Update #7: July 2013

#18
Zak Gordon wrote:
JoshParnell wrote:
Slymodi wrote:easiest place to get lost in ever! :evil:

~Sly
100% agreed to that...it's just ridiculous :crazy:
I used to leave lit torches at the side of doorways i was using most at any given time, just to help me find my way a little quicker.

In relation to Limit Theory and what you had showed in that last video with the planetscape and the ship flying around, would it be possible at a later date to add more free flying around those planets?

I'm not sure if you have expansions in mind for LT or not, but surely it must be possible to have a procedural system AND some locked in points of interest on them, i'm thinking about how Frontier and Frontier First Encounters did planets and flying around them. So my question is if not in the initial release could it be possible to have free-roaming over the planet surfaces in a later expansion/DLC thing for LT?
That's a pretty clever idea..I'll try it next time (always get Redoran / Hlaalu mixed up :( )

Of course, anything is possible ;) Just not for the first release!
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
Post

Re: Development Update #7: July 2013

#19
Quoting Josh's YouTube comment:
I wish it were just a matter of convincing. Trust me, I want it as much as everyone else (if not more..) Although from the outside it may seem that I am close to being able to allow free flight on planets, that's very far from the truth! Please take my word for it. As someone who likes to call various technical feats "easy," I am saying that this is *absolutely not easy*!! I am *not* close to being able to support this feature...
I'm asking solely out of curiosity -- I'm neutral towards free-roam making it in not --, what is the principal difficulty associated with this feature? I obviously can't claim technical knowledge of the game engine, but how is free-roam (within a limited/looping space) so fundamentally different from a fixed-perspective planetary view? Considering all the footage Josh has graciously shared with us, and how it (at least superficially) looks derived from a fixed view, I wouldn't have thought this to be such an intractable issue, especially considering his outstanding technical skill. What am I missing? I would be happy to know. :)
Post

Re: Development Update #7: July 2013

#20
The time it would take to make sure there's no glitches in an infinitely variable system. Such as degenerate meshes or weird clipping. And the time it would take to make things like cities without errors in placement and terrain clipping, using let's say a context free grammar method, is a lot less time for space things. Let's face it, it's the space age, there have to be cities on these planets, that alone is a huge time investment.
woops, my bad, everything & anything actually means specific and conformed
Post

Re: Development Update #7: July 2013

#21
JoshParnell wrote:
Zak Gordon wrote:
I used to leave lit torches at the side of doorways i was using most at any given time, just to help me find my way a little quicker.

*Stuff about free flying around planet surfaces*
That's a pretty clever idea..I'll try it next time (always get Redoran / Hlaalu mixed up :( )

Of course, anything is possible ;) Just not for the first release!
Leaving the torches around looked nice too :) In particular i would use them in Vivic, in the Foreign Quarter section for when i was doing the later part of the Thieves Guild Quest (Bal Molagmer) that involved lots of back and forth travel. Once you were in the open section of the Underworks i can't tell you how many times i ended up going down the wrong entrance to realise this was not the way to the Book Store! Placing that torch near the correct doorway made it clear to see without needing to check my mini map all the time.

'Never say Never' - good answer in terms of LT, as you never know, you might crack the specific difficulty you perceive currently and you might end up doing expansions down the line. "The Future is in constant motion", as a wise green 3ft bipedal once said in a galaxy far, far away :)
Katawa wrote:The time it would take to make sure there's no glitches in an infinitely variable system. Such as degenerate meshes or weird clipping. And the time it would take to make things like cities without errors in placement and terrain clipping, using let's say a context free grammar method, is a lot less time for space things. Let's face it, it's the space age, there have to be cities on these planets, that alone is a huge time investment.
Yeah 'feature creep' is always an issue, maybe more so in this type of project than any other! One guy, no matter how brilliant, can only do so much in a given time frame. I'm not sure how David Braben worked out how to place all the starports in/on all the objects in Frontier and FFE without them clipping too badly.......still those games had other issues, the suicidal auto-pilot for one thing! So yeah in a wide open procedural setting, it must be very difficult to make things fit seamlessly compared to a fully hand-crafted/placed game.

Certainly stuff that Josh can look at later once LT is done and given to the masses, well IF he ever wants to look at it again by that time!

Online Now

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 22 guests

cron