Topics

1

General / Technology Used in the Making of Game

« on: August 27, 2012, 01:21:50 am »

I was curious as to what technologies are being used to create UnderRail.  From what I've gathered, it looks like XNA Game Studio Express.  Hence, C# and a ton of Microsoft libraries at this point.  Didn't know if there were other bits in place, or if that's all that is there at the moment.  Also, I was curious if there'd be a move towards a more general platform in the future, since XNA can be bit confining and bloated at times.  (XNA seems to be aimed toward more demanding 3D games with the design of the libraries and preference towards certain design methodologies.)

2

Suggestions / Testing Toolkit

« on: August 26, 2012, 10:35:59 pm »

As the game develops, you'll need to plan to have some nice in-game debug and testing tools.

Command Console - Similar to the consoles in many games, this would allow developer and testers alike to poke and prod the game in various ways to squeeze out those bugs.  Character, Inventory, and Environment state editing options, and few action commands (kill, spawn, move, etc..) would be very useful.

Logger - Being able to turn on a logger to write out the flow of the game functions would be very useful.  I've made a few threaded asynchronous loggers in a number of C# applications to catch all those annoying bugs.  Also having a logger allows testers a bit more ability to help the developer to hand in a log file and give a base level of information about the issue.

A few associated editors would be nice, too.  But those can come at a later point.

3

Suggestions / Stealth Rework

« on: August 26, 2012, 07:13:25 pm »

There's a few bits about Stealth and sneaking around that need to be reworked a bit to make the skill a bit more functional.  As it stand right now, it's full potential is held back and loses value at higher skill ratings.

1.  Hostile actions shouldn't immediately put you out of stealth mode.  As it stands any hostile action puts you immediately out of stealth mode, even for things that shouldn't.  If I have a high stealth, stealthily open a door, and pitch a grenade into a room of unsuspecting people...  They shouldn't immediately know where I am at.  After the effects of the grenade, they should start immediately looking to try to find where it come from.  Depending on the attack and maybe some perception checks, they should get a hint as to where the attack came.  This would allow them to go into a search mode to find you and give them very high bonuses to their ability to detect you since they are on high alert.  And further hostile actions towards them will grant them even more bonuses in finding you.  This would effectively put most low level, low stealth skill characters out of stealth.  But for those who dedicate skill points to Stealth, they'd get the benefit of being able to do a few attacks without immediately being detected.

2.  Instead of the binary "Hidden/Not Hidden" mechanic, there needs to be degrees of stealth.  The awareness "Eye" icons should indicate the tier of penalty being applied to all actions when in stealth: Green = No Penalty, Yellow = Minor Penalty, Orange = Moderate Penalty, and Red = Major Penalty.  This creates a more "Press Your Luck" mechanic that puts player more on the edge.  It allows more opportunity for various stealth actions with the balance that you can be technically detected at any time by a bad roll.

3.  Stealth awareness "Eye" levels need a drain down.  As it stands right now, Stealth awareness is a cumulative mechanic.  If the changes above are made, a drain down should be added.  This would account for when NPCs move away from the player character, NPCs get distracted, or, depending on the player's feats, reputation, or high stealth skill, NPC's start to not pay the player that much attention.

4.  The Stealth Mode cooldown should be removed.  What's the problem with trying to hide whenever you can?

4

Suggestions / Selection Highlgiht

« on: August 26, 2012, 07:50:24 am »

To help with targeting, item selection, and other UI functionality, the cursor targeted object needs to have an outline highlight applied.  Since this game is going to feature many underground, dark areas, it is going to be helpful to make sure you are selecting the right objects.  It'd also make sure you are targeting the right enemy when the enemies begin to cluster up.

5

Suggestions / Transparency Bubble

« on: August 26, 2012, 07:45:24 am »

There needs to be a transparency bubble around the player character that is applied to any tiles that are overlapping the character.  This is in similar fashion to Fallout 1 and 2.  I get the feeling I have missed a number of things due to it being covered up by wall sections.  This transparency bubble needs to allow the player the ability to to select items within range of the bubble.

6

Bugs / Hang up when focus is lost

« on: August 25, 2012, 06:53:03 pm »

When the game loses focus (clicking to something else) there's about a 75% chance it will not recover when the focus is returned.  There seems to be some stuck loop going on that isn't breaking when focus is returned.  Wish I knew more, but I'd have to see the code to narrow it down.

Even with the last EXE patch it still has issues.  Also, there's an odd "refresh/redraw" of the game window that seems like the game reopening the game window quickly every so many minutes.

Windows 7 x64, Core i7 920, 18GB ram