Vagrant0
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Posts posted by Vagrant0
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Monetizing mods? Like really? This site will crumble on itself in a notime if things keep going that way.
Not really. While there are those who would want to monetize their work, there are also a good number of people who just don't want to deal with that facet of mod development. There are already ways in which someone can get money from their modding, some of them even supported by this site. The only thing that isn't supported by this site is limiting access to a mod solely for the sake of people who are paying money for it. Monetization is not just a Bethesda thing, but has been considered and seen as an eventuality both by game companies as well as many sites that host mod content. The only thing here is that Bethesda has really been the only one to step forward and take a chance on it.
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If they find a way to monetize modding and make it a strong business model they would clamp down on independant modders because that would impact profit models. I have no idea if this is what is happening, half of the rants I have read on the subect in these forums have been 1/4 bullstuff 1/4 wishful thinking 1/4 Angst 1/4 Conspiracy theory.
Sorting through what is actually possible, reasonable and rational is kind of the point of the threads I keep posting.
Monetizing mods would be like throwing fuel on the fire at this point. It was bad idea the first time they did it, and would continue to be a bad idea now.
And they're going to be slowly inching toward ways to do it just because they can earn money on it. For the most part they're just taking it more slowly, and probably more forthcoming about where these mods are coming from and how the price is split. For as many outraged people as there are, there are people who are looking for a legitimate way to cash in on their mod work.
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That's a pretty tall order, given that we are working with humans.... and, far worse, politicians.....
And pretty much why it hasn't worked, and probably won't work.
Politicians have really just screwed themselves over between their method of gaining favor by means of finger pointing and raising panic. This has, in many ways, helped foster that ultra-nationalist group from those who feel that their "right" way of living is now being threatened by foreigners. Really, it all boils down to the question of why cultural diversity is a good thing despite the tendency for most people to actively oppose cultures other than their own. You cannot have a distinct cultural group within a population while also wanting everyone to assimilate to the dominant culture. Meanwhile you cannot have a dominant culture that remains stable when you openly accept people who are unwilling to assimilate.
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Vagrant0, I would hope you guys on the moderation team would know better than to repeat the same claims that have been debunked for years:
2. GAME MODS; OWNERSHIP AND LICENSE TO ZENIMAXA. Ownership. As between You and ZeniMax, You are the owner of Your Game Mods and all intellectual property rights therein, subject to the licenses You grant to ZeniMax in this Agreement.
That's from the current Fallout 4 CK EULA. Pretty much a concrete declaration that YOU own your mods, not them. All they do is sublicense that work if they so choose, which they to date have never actually done. They use mods as an idea farm, not as a labor source for the actual implementations.
It is still the matter of their sub-license that grants them the rights to re-distribute content under an assumed permission by means of you using their software.
Really though, personally, I'm just getting tired of people getting upset over this matter every time the question of usage rights to content pops up. Either you accept the EULA and everything that goes with it, or you find another game to play and mod. Bethesda sees profitability in the ideas of paid mods and mods being available on console, which only makes sense given how modding has been so central to their games. Getting upset, making demands, ect just makes them take a step back and progress their plans more slowly, one inch at a time. It isn't until they start losing community and customers that they might take notice and stop taking mod authors for granted.
It also doesn't do anything about content which was taken from one site and uploaded elsewhere. For that you have to make a claim on their web service about the unauthorized upload, and then wait for a response. For this part, Bethesda has really dropped the ball and learned nothing from the Steam fiasco. They didn't make much effort towards vetting content to make sure it was from the original author before getting it added to their service.
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You cannot form a union based on the foundation of shared debt. Just as it becomes difficult for people to welcome foreigners when they've spent the last dozen generations trying to kick out or kill anyone other than those of the same cultural group. It also doesn't help matters when there are groups actively trying to destabilize whatever order might exist or exploit it for their own benefit. Humans are selfish, bigoted, and slow to accept differing points of view. The few exceptions, those who have managed to evolve, won't be able to bail the water fast enough to save the sinking ship.
A unified Europe hasn't happened since the times that the Romans (one group got close, but ended following the orders of an idiot and shot themselves in the foot with blind fanaticism) essentially swept through any land they could be bothered to claim and force people to accept Roman rule by prosperity, by force, or by having nobody left to object. It was also why the fall of Rome left such a large power-gap to be filled by whatever roaming bands managed to make peace or hold off being decimated. Just because the only working models we have had are ones where; you conquer everyone who isn't your culture, or wall off your country killing off anyone who tries to invade, does not mean that these are the only models which can work, but for any different model to work, you have to have a reason for people to want to make it work, but without giving them a means to exploit that reason for themselves.
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As far as Fallout 4 mods go, Bethesda claims ownership of any .esp and .bsa data as part of using their (tools) file formats. This includes anything done to scripts, using their forms as a model. On the practical side of things, this means that the only thing an author retains is whatever textures or models they have made from scratch. If it uses anything which was not entirely made by the author (no altered basegame meshes or textures), Bethesda can claim usage rights on it. Furthermore, using their construction set signifies an agreement that they can use your assets anyway. Legally, they can pretty much do whatever they want. Naturally, anything uploaded to their site also gives them permission to use all files however they wish.
If this bothers you, you're honestly best off just applying your talents to one of the hundreds of other modable games out there these days who don't have such complete and draconian policies. They decided to play this game and burn whatever bridges to mod makers in an attempt to bolster their bottom line. The modding scene for FO4 won't die, someone else will always pop up to fill the place you left behind. Instead what happens is that another game starts to gain more of a following, and in most cases this leads towards better tools and techniques for that game. If you don't like what a company is doing, stop supporting them.
For everyone else, I wouldn't be overly concerned about what mods make it to console. The internal memory limitations pretty much remove the chances that any sizable mods will even work. Doubly so once a script extender starts being used. The vetting process for mods for use on console will also probably exclude a large number of mods just because of the nature and quality of the content presented. Meaning that the majority of mods they are likely to host will be smaller files, simple content like weapons or clothing, Anything beyond that, they will likely contact individual authors for permission or to produce a version that will work for console (similar to the debacle of paid skyrim mods on Steam).
Really though, what matters is how well YOU support your own content. If you go out of your way to make it difficult to use your mod, chances are that either nobody will want to use it, or someone will just make a work-around and re-upload it somewhere else. But if you do well in documenting, offering assistance to others using your mod, and update it when reasonable, people will be more likely to seek out the original sources. This doesn't mean your mod still won't appear in some sort of mod-pack (since a collection of mods packaged together is convenient for people new to using mods) or that another site won't try to mirror it, but that people who acquire the mod from those sources will be more likely to look at the original source. Having a splash screen, unique readme files, mod description strings, or similar to point them to the original source definitely helps. Working with other authors on collaborative projects also helps (since these are usually more sizable, and being in a singular large file makes them generally easier to add to a load list).
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The Isle
http://store.steampowered.com/app/376210/
Pretty much the best, and only real option out there other than Ark.
Saw more than a few interviews and Dev streams. The devs from this game are competent, determined, and generally seem like a good bunch of folks. It is however Early Access and mostly online kinda stuff... But still looks to be worth watching.
Ark is close, but is too much of a Minecraft meets Dinosaurs. Survival, but not really, and mostly lacking in those panic moments.
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I admit using TGM or other cheats myself.
The bottom line is that really I don't have much time to play games these days, and in the case of Fallout or Skyrim, difficulty is inconsistent at best, tedium at worst. Playing through the same interior several times until NPC behavior works in your favor, or having to use a stealth playstyle (really just you sniping people from outside their agro range) just stops being fun after a point. Yeah, when things start to get fully modded and more interesting forms of difficulty can be added, I may try going back through to challenge it. But when we're talking about the poorly balanced vanilla gameplay, there wasn't much depth to it to be missing out on.
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Gameplay Tweaks or changes is more than sufficient.
The problem here is that, atleast from how I understand it, and how you describe it, this isn't something that mod authors actively and intentionally can plan towards making. These is nothing that would completely distinguish these kinds of mods from a mod which is just intended to make the game easier for the sake of people who want it easier. To make matters more complicated, adding a flag like "ease of use" or "accessibility" is not immediately understood as to what is being meant by these terms, so may be flagged towards mods which are just easy to install. With abbreviations, you run into the other side of the problem, people who have a mod with that intention, but don't recognize the meaning of the tag.
Mod authors taking flak or dealing with complaints is an entirely different matter. Many of the comments along these lines just stem from how "easy" it is (or the perception of which) to adjust a few values and upload a mod and how common different flavors of these kinds of mods tend to be... Sometimes flavored by the poster's own envy of the author for doing something before they could, getting praise for it, or even having the ability. That is not to say that these sorts of comments should be tolerated. Mod authors have the tools to trim their own comment threads, and particularly venomous postings can be reported to have the post removed or actions taken against the poster.
If you can find a good way to have a tag for the mod to declare this sort of thing, it's easy to add to the list, but nothing I can think of feels like it would do the job right.
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When you're talking about a project like this, you need to be careful in what the end use of it will be. Converting something like a school, place of work, public place, or neighborhood into something for use in a game can open up a large number of legal issues. Not just copyright things, but Department of Homeland Security kinda things. Even if you don't personally have plans of laying siege to your neighborhood, it opens the door for others to use it as a planning model for illegal activities. And by you being related to the creation of this model, you become liable for how others make use of it (even though common sense says otherwise).
Meaning, that you can make something similar, or inspired by a real world area, but as soon as you start talking about 1-1 or nearly exact similarities between location or configuration of buildings/rooms, you open the door for misuse or legal problems.
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Where to start?
Most of his companies have been run into the ground in the last 10 years only to be kept alive from taking money from one company to keep the others afloat.
Trying to ban anything in the US has, historically, never worked. Least of all thought control.
Trying to close off immigration or deport people because they are from a certain country has always been expensive, filled with serious problems, and been the cause of countless human rights violations.
Mexico gets no benefit from building a wall except in the case of an impending ice age, which people are actively trying to dispute and ignore, good luck trying to force that.
Any policy enacted by President requires agreement by Congress and the Supreme court. You can promise anything you want, but most of these ideas won't get approval. Whatever might just fails due to logistics or by nature of people actively resisting these ideas.
Frankly wouldn't be surprised if the whole notion of the Republican party supporting Trump isn't just an effort to push someone with a recognizable name through, someone they can attach a vice-president to who is actually capable of pushing the party agenda, and disposing of the unwanted bits after they've been elected and sworn into office.
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Except that things like the Capital Wasteland and the Commonwealth were eluded to back in FO2 almost in the same way they were depicted in those games. The only real thing Bethesda did with them was build upon the ideas and adapt it to a first person type game.
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like most eastern rpgs, it would be grind, bad gameplay but pretty to look at. PASS.
It depends on how you define a grind... Most MMOs in general are a grind in some way... either by means of equipment grind or level grind.
From what I've seen of this game, most the usual grinding has been solved for. Quests auto-complete if you've done them with a character previously. Crafting and gathering can be managed by means of hired workers. The game has automatic pathing so in most cases you can set a destination, go make yourself a snack, and come back to find yourself at the location. The leveling progression still requires about 20-30 hours spent killing things and doing quests, so that isn't even close to being unreasonable. The equipment progression isn't very bad either since large enemies out in the desert can drop higher tier equipment and everything else can be crafted or gained from quests or random killing.
The only real grind I've seen with this game is in relation to the top-tier pvp grind... Where you are looking at months spent for BiS equipment, meanwhile dealing with the alignment and bounty system. Which, in my opinion, is a fair requirement so that people who want to be a badass pker have to actually work for that kind of thing instead of buying all their equipment outright, buying their levels outright, and just using their statistical advantage to steamroll through everyone else. There's no person to person trading, there's no buyable wealth, and everything sold through the auction house has a minimum price associated with it.
Ultimately, things are only a grind if they are a repeatable action that you don't enjoy for the promise of some end state that you might enjoy. It's not for everyone, not everyone has the same definition of a grind, but MMOs in general have become much more friendly to casual players who don't want to invest 3 hours a day completing dailies over a course of 3-4 months in order to unlock their next tier of equipment. And understandably so, since casual gamers pay the same amount or more into a game on average while utilizing fewer system resources (due to being logged off) on average.
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Dumbed down in what specific ways? I don't get the phrase "dumbed down" I guess. No physics arc when an arrow is shot at something so you have to aim above a distant target?
Mostly in terms of how combat works.
You are limited to only 2 weapon/skill sets, with any effects that are tied to one being canceled when you switch, and only 5 skills and 1 "ultimate" being set within each... For a total of 12 skills maximum that you can use at any time out of the few dozen available. Meaning that if you are a dragonborn as your class, most your class skills (3/5 of them self-buffs) will either need to be constantly on your bar to remain active when you switch weapons, or you will lose them upon switching. The problem comes in with how the majority of the game is setup to need means of both melee and ranged attack (made worse by a large number of quests which need to be done solo), so you are frequently switching between weapon sets. With the other classes, you have a very similar situation. The classes have self-buffs or abilities which give you an advantage (slowing, stunning, healing, summons, ect) but which aren't setup to allow continual use. The "Ultimates" on the other hand are long cooldown skills which often end up being fairly weak and situational, while also requiring a significant time investment with a weapon type to unlock them. Meaning that regardless of what weapon you prefer, at best you can maybe use 1-2 skills tied to that weapon and spamming them frequently between mouse clicks. While the skill morph system might have been a solution to this problem (granting utility to skills you use)... morphs are only 1 way and skills only morph once (mostly for cost reduction).
Combat itself isn't overly engaging since it ends up being the same old wow-style combat where things hit you based on turn as long as you are within a proximity. There's no evasion or blocking beyond dice checks. Meaning that where you stand around an enemy has no difference, and enemies that cast spells or use a bow pretty much auto-aim at you. Overall, it felt like the whole UI and game experience was heavily geared towards not requiring much in terms of framerate or connection, and being played with only about 8-12 buttons, and ends up being about as deep as a puddle.
While the quests differentiate from the standard "kill x amount of enemies" at several points, and is arguably the best part of the game, the combat and actual gaming sections of it just make it hard to tolerate, and even worse when most of it is non-cannon. Great as a singleplayer game, rubbish as an MMO where you frequently have to group with others, compete with bots for resource nodes, and constantly see people completing or killing the same things you are tasked with completing or killing. When I played, the freeform dungeons were among the worst... Bot players killing bosses as they spawned, meanwhile the loot from these bosses was the fastest way to get money and the only way to get certain enchantments. Supposedly this was eventually patched, but the result was nothing to do with preventing bots, but rather limiting the rewards further (which were already pretty bad due to how easy it was to become overleveled for areas).
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Fallout 4 Clearly shows the engines age... I mean it took them THIS long JUST to make rain that doesn't fall through roof's
You realize... it is THEIR engine... They own it, they continually update it with every major game. The engine is updated. Just like how Unreal and Unity release their updated engines. The only difference is that the Creative Engine is not a stand-alone product for other developers to use. It is all in-house, for better or worse.
The engine may have problems at its core... But all engines do. Unity has severe physics issues regarding moving entities. Unreal has issues related to content that is not in a fixed predictable state (such as terrain morphing). Meanwhile switching between any engine means starting over from scratch, both in terms of any pre-production work (making those tools to use in making the game) as well as getting your development team up to speed and familiar with the engine/codebase.
The problem here is that the engine was designed around the premise of closed spaces and limited environments. It is not a simulation heavy engine, it doesn't handle NPCs very well, it doesn't handle vast open worlds well. These issues were not a concern back with Morrowind and Oblivion since the game was constructed around these limitations and instead tried to focus on the story. The problem is that things have become much less focused on story, while having vast and explorable content closer to a sandbox simulation than an RPG game. All these mechanical things like NPCs behaving without the player to see them, fps style combat, or weather effects are things which Bethesda has had to shoehorn into the game code, and why it feels like it does.
For something like a rain effect, it is actually fairly difficult without it being a very resource demanding. Rain in Morrowind and Oblivion consisted as what was essentially a particle emitter that was moved with the player and cast downward, with an additional emitter used for heavy storms. The particles had no collision because collision requires a processing tick every time one thing intersects with another thing. Even in Skyrim, it had to be a similar situation due to the system demands at the time. Fallout 4 only managed to get it working because there was enough processing power available to handle raytracing (which is also used for shadow projection) which is not an object moved to the player, but is instead managed almost completely by the videocard. If you were heavily invested into it, you could probably go back and add rain collision to Morrowind (just like how you can now add shadows, reflections, ect). It has nothing to do with the engine, and everything to do with the technology at the time.
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Alright, Reading through your lengthy and honestly quite boring reply filled with needless facts I've already looked upon you miss the main idea of game development: Having fun. Video games have since long become a product rather than an art form, with large companies releasing a new piece of a franchise every year game quality has dwindled. I personally see that and look to try to show others as well. I am not looking for a business making a ton of money, no I want to get some people together who share the passion and joy of developing video games from scratch.
Then don't even involve money. If you're doing it for fun, look for artists who also want to do it for fun. The moment money comes into play, either by means of hiring an artist or selling a product, it becomes a business. What you make becomes your product, the people you sell to become your customers. Meanwhile things like governments and anyone who can be bothered enough to hire a lawyer will want their share. Meanwhile most professionals won't even give it a second thought unless you show that you are serious about it. You can still have fun while being serious. You can still have a relaxed approach. But money means dealing with all that other stuff that goes along with it.
There are a large number of ways to do something like this without going the business route these days... But most of them involve releasing a free-to-use product when all is said and done.
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Generalizing here... But from what I've seen, based on a large number of gamers, youtubers, streamers, people I've chatted to over the years...
Group 1 = "I want this game because I'm super hyped about it and it will be the greatest thing ever because all the pre-order trailers look awesome!"
Group 2 = "I want as much playtime as possible from this game because it is probably the only game I will be able to get for awhile due to budget or someone else buying games for me."
Group 3 = "I just want a game that remains interesting, which I can crack out on for a few weeks, and feel like I got a good value from it."
Group 4 = "I don't have much time to play games, I want something to distract me, be full of interesting content and little padding (grind). Money isn't much of an issue, but I still want to have it feel worthwhile."
Group 5 = "I own many games that I don't actually play because the reality is that even if a game might be good, I don't have time to play them all and will often just keep going back to what is familiar."
Group 6 = "I don't play games any more. I just collect them, let them run to get trading cards, maybe work on achievements, because I enjoy the meta more than the content."
Group 7 = "I only play games because it gets me views, or is popular among my friends. If it isn't hype, or I can't make funny faces and heavily edit the footage to be entertaining, or discuss it with my friends, it isn't for me."
Almost everyone fits into one of those groups. But I imagine you might be able to guess which group ends up buying more games when they come out, and subsequently earning the companies making these games the most money... Sales figures and Steam playtimes for titles show that things are heavily in favor of titles that are at about $2.50 - 4.00 per hour value than games with more content or at a lower price. Sales over the years because of an active community are nice, and are good for certain companies. But generally companies produce a product, enjoy the wealth, budget for the next project, and not look back.
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@IAmVicar You will be payed a commission of each product sold.
Going from personal experience as well as what I've seen over the years, as much as this might seem like a great thing... 9/10 times it ends up being both a logistical and legal nightmare. To the point where I've seen more than one developer have to close down production or their services to remove and replace assets, or close things down completely because of legal disputes. Financial, contractual, copyright, there are many places where this sort of plan can go horribly wrong for everyone involved. Sometimes, yes, it can work if the developer is paying out to one or two artists they personally know... But over the internet, this is a very large red flag for anyone who works professionally. It is essentially asking an artist to do professional quality work and everything it entails on a promise of eventual payment... Nevermind the issues that can occur if an artist submits work that isn't entirely their own.
Generally, the best way to approach the matter is by agreeing to a singular payment upon work being completed and ownership of those assets being transferred from the artist to the game owner. It's more expensive up front, but is much less open to the majority of the issues that can occur. There are some stipulations that can still be defined within the contract, such as half the fee initially, the other half at time of release, or similar to decrease the initial cost and keep the artist invested in the success of the project. But these need to be established clearly initially in full before any work is done. Part of getting professional work for your project means having to pay the costs of that work. You still have to be doubly sure on the validity to work claims, but unlike with the previous situation, you own all responsibility related to those assets but can usually sue the artist for fraud outright.
Understandably, your average indie developer can't go dishing out hundreds of dollars to artists for assets. Usually, the budget is only about as much as it costs to rent webspace, pay for software licenses, and pay a distributor (like Steam) their publishing fee. Nobody is questioning this... But this is also why there are plenty of artists out there who will work for free, who just want the exposure, the work experience, or being able to claim your project as part of their portfolio. If you can't afford the costs of an artist... Don't waste their time, don't waste your own time dangling a carrot over their head and expect to get anywhere. Work within the bounds of your capability and your budget. The moment you start trying to extend beyond either, you will usually run into serious problems. Again, checking the validity of work is still very important... And you still own the responsibility of any copyright claims against you. But you also didn't pay for those assets so don't have to deal with lawyers unless you refuse to remove those assets or dispute those claims.
All that aside... There are a number of concerning issues regarding your post.
First off, your project should probably be either in a feature complete stage using placeholder art before bringing in professional artists, or very close to. Not only will this make it less likely that you will end up having artists work on things that you ultimately will not use, but also gives any artist a very clear idea of what exactly you need done... Less back and forth means quicker production and deliberation. It also buys you additional time before release to bug-fix and optimize your game as those final assets are produced and implemented. Professional game companies do this in-house through phasing since they have a budget that holds them to completion of the project; indie developers usually have no budget with the majority of projects crashing and burning before they are out of alpha just because they try to split production too many ways. From an artist's standpoint, the more complete your game is, the more likely they will see any benefit from it. If the game is early in development... you should be doing as much of this in-house as possible, even if 3/4 of your graphics were made in MS paint and all your sounds came from someone speaking into a $10 headset microphone. All these things can be fixed and adjusted when the game is in Beta.
Second... Java is generally not very good for the purposes of a commercial game product. I know it can still work, but it does add complications to things like publishing and selling a finished product. Minecraft made this work since they invested early in a website and login system in order to use their game, but they could get away with it since the game involved online and multiplayer at an early stage. Other games however may not work well with this plan, and some publishers might completely reject your game because of how Java can cause issues, be poorly supported by Windows, or just be absolute hell to handle DRM... For artists, It also goes back to some of the first point, but also brings into question just how marketable your game is before they will even think of working on it. Regardless of contract, it usually isn't worth their time to work on something if it isn't something that isn't marketable or won't get any meaningful attention. Sorry to say, but the reality is that there is an absolute shitload of games out there being made by indie developers, many of these games also looking for additional help to get them to completion. But if your business plan isn't sound, it doesn't matter how new or unique your title is, or even how complete the game is, it can still be failure with your first game setting the tone of anything you follow it up with.
Long story short... Keep within your in-house capability and budget for the majority of development. Have a solid development and have publishing plan sorted before you even consider outside help. Keep outside contracts simple and concise so that you don't have lawyers beating down your door.
You may also want to use an official e-mail for your company to communicate with outside help instead of a personal e-mail... For a large number of reasons.
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Offhand... Probably as the conquerors and exploiters that they were. Initially confused about how everyone is speaking English, and questionable about how the English managed to make contact first but not tell the world about it. Then probably curious about how they live, what riches they have to exploit and steal. Then start trying to bring Christianity, naturally. Then bring all the new and wonderful diseases. Then realize that they can get a stupid amount of wealth just unloading poorly crafted iron equipment onto their merchants (the ones who converted and didn't die of smallpox or various STDs the sailors brought over), sleep 3 days, and do it again, and ship back endless wealth.
Well, what if they got Rockjoint or Ataxia from the salted meat on the Khajiit ship? I was honestly expecting a less anticlimactic response. If a Nord happens to be on the Khajiit ship, not to mention a particular nord whose name begins with a U and ends with K, Christianity would not sit well.
Maybe not, but even in the age of conquest, people weren't stupid. The only reason why the Americas were so forcefully invaded was because the native people were seen as being much more primitive in terms of their technology while also having a wealth of gold to take. India and the East however were dealt with in a much more diplomatic fashion because they had both military and cultural advancements which were on a similar level to Europe. It wasn't until European technology outpaced the East and the demand for tea and spices made it profitable for full scale colonization that the story started to change.
That aside, Nords in particular might be rather quick to convert given the numerous similarities between Jesus and Talos. Talos, afterall, was once mortal and ascended into divinity.
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Disk space feels like a silliest excuse I've ever heard... Some Final Fantasy (along with many others) on consoles were released on 4 disks in 1 pack no problem lol.
It sounds silly now, not that silly in 2006.
Multiple discs meant more printing and needing to split up the game to do disc swapping. Possible for some games, not really possible for something like Oblivion where you have an open world that can be experienced in any order you wished. Meanwhile the harddrive space of the original Xbox360 was fairly small and not well suited to act as swap space. At the end of the day it is a financial decision... Either pay extra development time to rebuild the game in a way that can be split into multiple discs making an even tighter production schedule tighter, as well as suffer higher costs for each unit shipped... Or just re-record dialogues with a smaller set of voices which still costs money, but not nearly as much, and has a far smaller impact on the development team. Back in 2005/2006, dual layer DVD technology was still a fairly new thing, so was much more expensive than single layer DVDs, even compared to multiple CDs back in 1997.
A member of the team even commented on how voices were a disc space issue.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2006/05/23/oblivions_ken_rolston_speaks/2
All the dialogue in Oblivion is voiced. How did that affect your approach to writing dialogue? Did it reduce the variety of dialogue you could write? If so, do you prefer fully-voiced dialogue or text dialogue with more branching?
Rolston: I prefer Morrowind's partially recorded dialogue, for many reasons. But I'm told that fully-voiced dialogue is what the kids want. Fully-voiced dialogue is less flexible, less apt for user projection of his own tone, more constrained for branching, and more trouble for production and disk real estate. Voice performances can be very powerful expressive tools, however, and certain aspects of the fully-voiced dialogue -- the conversations system, for example -- contribute significantly to the charm and ambience of Oblivion.
Even FFVII had disc space issues where the publisher basically told the devs to wrap up the game in 3 discs instead of 4 midway through the production just because they wanted to keep costs down.
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Offhand... Probably as the conquerors and exploiters that they were. Initially confused about how everyone is speaking English, and questionable about how the English managed to make contact first but not tell the world about it. Then probably curious about how they live, what riches they have to exploit and steal. Then start trying to bring Christianity, naturally. Then bring all the new and wonderful diseases. Then realize that they can get a stupid amount of wealth just unloading poorly crafted iron equipment onto their merchants (the ones who converted and didn't die of smallpox or various STDs the sailors brought over), sleep 3 days, and do it again, and ship back endless wealth.
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I use this, it's handy because it gives you the option to load the element should you choose to do so. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flashblock/cdngiadmnkhgemkimkhiilgffbjijcie?
For firefox, noscript plugin works well. There's also flashblock which works alongside it and allows you to see both the site that the request is coming from as well as manually approve or deny it. I strongly suggest these for anyone who uses Firefox and has enough literacy to recognize sites and enable content intelligently.
I would also suggest the WoT (Web of Trust) addon since it often works as an indicator about a site's legitimacy before you visit it by means of a search, it will also auto-block and prompt for sites that have been reported as questionable or dangerous. It has saved me from more careless link clicks than I care to admit and is something I strongly recommend any time I get a chance.
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A large degree of these things cannot be screened for effectively. As the whole ADD testing and screening situation has shown, doctors are more than happy to put a kid on drugs just because a test tells them to. Spoilers: Everyone is a little f*#@ed up to a greater or lesser degree. Some of it might be genetic, but a good portion of it is also environmental or conditioned. If you sit someone down and tell them that their behavior is because of some illness, they won't change that behavior and will just blame the illness. Schools including or excluding students based on this criteria would only create havoc with the already screwed up school system and put alot of unnecessary pressure onto parents toward just medicating their children instead of trying to correct behavior as it happens.
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I've heard talk thatt most bullies are taught to be that way by those who have bullied them and I have also heard that they are born that way and it just is a personality quirk that makes them that way.
Your thoughts.
I wouldn't say "taught" is the right way to describe it. More that it is a learned behavior that is usually related to how a person defines a position of power. If they see power as being only by means of domineering over others, they are more likely to act in a similar way when they are put into a position of power, previously this would usually by means of physical force or presence. But with internet bullying, it has become more about effort, being sneaky, having access to unsupervised connections, and playing politics. How and where they learn this is often up to circumstance and is not easy to detect. But the interesting thing is that often people who were bullied end up being bullies themselves at a later point once the power has shifted (often middle management).
At its core though it is all about using power over others and how that position is defined to them. It can be corrected if someone in their life can teach them other ways to use that power, but usually has to be from someone that that person will even listen to.
Future of EU...
in Debates
Posted
You kinda missed the point.
She was essentially saying that majority or minority does not matter. As long as there is an active and thriving element within a community who holds a radical view, that group can still cause harm. She says nothing about trying to combat an ideology, but instead tries to force blame onto that peaceful majority... Basically doing the same thing alot of people do when faced with a difficult question, ignore the question and instead focus on some aspect of the question to find fault. It plays well for crowds, but ultimately doesn't accomplish anything.