Messages

1

Other Games / Re: What type of player are you?

« on: August 29, 2012, 01:22:58 am »

I tend to try to craft loner forces of nature that are oddly pragmatic and try not to take things personally, but still maintain some lines that are not to be crossed.  This kind of character won't fire the first shot, but will fire the last.  And for the most part, that character will not judge the situation until it is fully understood.  You can have villagers pleading that their is town under siege by bandits and this character will walk calmly by himself right up the bandit leader and ask what their plans for the town are.  He'll try to reason and negotiate some kind of solution.  If that fails, the character will calmly walk away into the woods.  The next day, the entire bandit force is missing, except the the leader trying figure out where all his forces went.  The character will walk up and inform the leader he had best take his leave while it was still available.

The Deus Ex and Fallout series really allow you to have fun playing this way.

2

General / Re: Technology Used in the Making of Game

« on: August 27, 2012, 10:38:55 pm »

I don't think there would be enough gain when it comes to performance and requirements, when compared to the loss of "easiness" XNA provides. And there is a lot that XNA does for you, and/or makes easier to code/manage.

Very true.  Played around with XNA in its earlier incarnations and compared it to just using C# and DirectX straight.  There's a lot nice features XNA provides at the higher end, but sometimes it can be a bit heavy handed.  Making a simple 3D cube using XNA framework in comparison to straight DirectX is one such situation.  Getting a pure 2D display to work in is another bit that XNA can make difficult.  Most 2D games in XNA typically are 2D via 3D.

I mean, it's not like UR is in some way heavy on CPU or GPU. I'm running it on netbook, in 1920x1080. It's pretty much all I can ever ask for.

Of course.  But there are more technical requirements that XNA can put forth.  Such as requiring a graphics card with a particular version of shader support, etc.  Not too much of a an issue for your average Windows gamer, but might be annoying some.  There's a lot of graphics card features that UnderRail won't use, but XNA will turn on or demand by default.

About compability - using direct DirectX would probably allow you to run UR on Linux, under Wine. And... as far as I know, that's about it?

XNA is basically a framework of frontend libraries that encapsulates a bunch of DirectX API calls.  Not having to involve the XNA libraries would give Linux and Wine a fair chance.  You could then make a leaned down display initialization that'd keep the display feature requirements low and optimize the render.  Also later portability would be much easier, since DirectX API structure is similar (not the same by any stretch) to OpenGL's API structure.  Also, it'd help break out of any proprietary formats that XNA likes.

But... I'm not on the front lines of development for this project.  Just more or less curious as to why one developers does it one way or does it another, since I thinking of endeavoring on a project in the future.

3

General / Re: Technology Used in the Making of Game

« on: August 27, 2012, 04:34:17 pm »

C# is a great language and well worth using.  I was mostly curious if there would be a move from XNA to using a more direct C#/DirectX combination as the game matures to gain more control, efficiency, and simplicity.  Such a move would make the game more portable and reduce the system requirements greatly.

4

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.)

5

Discussions / Re: How did you find out about this game?

« on: August 27, 2012, 01:08:51 am »

It was PlumpHelmetPunk for me too.  I also saw this thread on reddit.

Well, I found out from LethalFeline.

6

Suggestions / Re: Autosaves

« on: August 27, 2012, 01:06:02 am »

Zone change autosaves would be nice.  The main thing I would like is a rolling autosave slot system.  I set have many autosave slots I want  (0-50) and the game rotates between them during zone transitions.  These could be done in the background as to not hold up the rest of the game.  I want multiple autosaves slot just so you don't get burned by accidentally transitioning zones after a bad move, etc...   

And rolling quicksave slot system would be great, too.  Nothing like a bad reflexive quicksave twitch to overwrite the one slot you had with a bad one.

7

Suggestions / Re: Stealth Rework

« on: August 26, 2012, 10:58:06 pm »

Another aspect to stealth is also subterfuge.  It might be an interesting mechanic for players to purposely reveal themselves briefly and then retreat the to shadows to lure NPCs out from safety or to distract them.  You could in a turn off Stealth Mode, move a bit, then re-engage stealth mode.  The NPC AI would then be drawn to attack/charge/move in that direction, while the player circles around to attack them from behind or just gets around them.  A feat to have to capitalize on this would be "Phantom Trace".  Instead of having to risk full exposure that comes from deactivating stealth mode, an ability could allow a player to create a "false positive" on the NPC AI that is convincing enough for them to attack.  Only a successful perception or detection check with a penalty based on the player's Stealth ability would allow the NPC AI to realize that it's nothing.

And to keep game balance, I wouldn't limit tactics like this to just the player.  This would open up for some pretty creatively mean enemies.

8

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.

9

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?

10

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.

11

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.

12

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

13

Bugs / Re: Cannot start new game.

« on: August 25, 2012, 05:47:55 am »

I can confirm the save location is the issue.  In Windows Vista and 7, the Program Files folders are read only to non-elevated (Not operating as admin) processes and users.  By default all users and processes operate under limited user permissions with only full control to their own account profile, unless the user invokes a process as an elevated process (What XP compatibility mode does) or the process tells Windows to prompt the user for elevation.

The user profile can be accessed with the system environment variable %USERPROFILE% .  A better location for any kind of data you need to write would be something along the lines of %USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games for Windows Vista and 7 users.  You can use %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\My Games for XP and previous.

I can't remember but there's a Windows API call to check for the OS version.  Depending on the language the game uses, you can catch the exception the CreateDirectory API throws to diagnose any problems with write access issues.