raudelmil

I imagine that the game prioritizes loads based on how much screen space will be affected by the load. And, if you want to improve on how that looks, I imagine you need to make loading happen faster. If you have enough memory, you might be able to tune SuperFetch to preload things for you. (I am not sure how you would do this, except by playing the game a lot, and also going off and letting your computer hum when it has the disk running when you are not doing anything.) Or, more directly, you might be able to move the data files into ramdisk and then have the ramdisk replace your data directory (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938934.aspx), but I am not sure how that would interact with steam patches. Or, if you do not have enough ram, maybe you could get some improvement from ReadyBoost. Or... maybe I am completely wrong about what you are seeing...

In my opinion, having children that can die opens some positive stories in addition to the negative ones. If they can die then protecting them makes sense. But that also opens up other issues. If I understand properly, when people die in skyrim, others take their place, and those invulnerable children are the final fallback that gets used to keep the game from becoming unplayable. And while some people will happily go on without even touching the main quest, other people might be upset if they cannot finish it because some random dragon terrorized a town they were leaving. So... from my point of view? The "unkillable children" thing is sort of a comment on the structure of the gaming community -- they are a simplification which allowed Bethesda to focus on other issues. I can totally agree that killable children can allow for better story telling. And, I can also totally agree that killable children can allow for worse story telling. Both become possible with killable children. (And, personally, I am going to try to avoid any mods that change gameplay until well after I have "finished" the game. If nothing else, I cannot believe that any such mods could be properly playtested before then.)

But orcs do not get any persistent benefits... and bosmer have a rather specialized (and perhaps not so useful) daily benefit...

Arena might make a good phone game -- it has gesture based combat, and is sized about right. It also has some memory management bugs (certain things cause it to crash) and perhaps some gameplay issues that would make a rewrite tempting, and of course phones do not run DOS. But ultimately its appeal would be that relatively little work should be needed for the port, so it could be sold for just a few cents per copy.

I could see using the rendering engine and maybe even the maps in a multi-player context, but it would take years just to come up with good play mechanics that work for multiplayer. I am not so concerned about level scaling (champions online, for example, solves that one rather nicely, with sidekick mode). But the entire design of the skill system and the equipment. The skill system in skyrim is designed for interacting with npcs and monsters, it's not designed nor relevant for multi-player. For that matter, if you want a multiplayer game which is a fair test of skill, you need to get rid of the concept of "leveling" and "outfitting" and replace it with handicap system (which is sort of like leveling in reverse). And that's not even getting into the design of the game synchronization that would have to be addressed for multi-player.

If I understand properly, that will not be a "build" in skyrim. In skyrim you will be picking a stream of perks, rather than picking generic categories. And you pick them where you used to be picking your attribute multipliers (and with no attributes for multipliers we will not be doing that attribute picking either). But, weapon set switching will apparently be a lot easier (so you can have one set for opening attacks, another for close combat, another for when you are exhausted (low on fatigue), a defensive set for running away and/or healing, and so on) and they should be simple to manage. So, hypothetically speaking, the kinds of skills you have outlined here could all be useful together. But my guess is that they have buried a lot of hidden features to assist you, whichever path you take (and a bunch of others that you will have to ignore because you choose a different path). So unless you deliberately make levelup choices to make your life harder, I imagine you will have a good build and one that favors the sort of tactics that you most frequently employ. So, from my point of view, finding a good build really requires you to be experimenting with things you enjoy doing. Maybe eventually, people will have a comprehensive view of the possibilities and come up with some min-maxing that is valid. But I would bet that many of the initial posts about how to min-max will be woefully ignorant of the possibilities (and, thus, likely to be giving advice which [if followed] would leave you less powerful than if you just dove in to the game and played).

But the nude mods, at least, serve a useful purpose: they are a basis for other clothing and armor mods. And, yes, the original bodies can often be used in the same way, but not always and all too often in past games they have not just had way too much cloth for them to work generically, but they have also had inhuman proportions for human characters. But, it's true, the skimpy mods get way overdone. and are often done crudely, and most are not worth the time it takes to download and install them (except, judging this without looking for yourself can be misleading, when other people are giving them good reviews). But, personally, skimpy mods do not bother me so much as the mods that silently modify gameplay in ways that are not described in their description. Those mods tend to make me angry (since I often do not see the problem until long after I have them installed and at that point I might have to choose between coping with a game I did not want to play and tossing a character I have built up over several weeks of play). Skimpy mods you can usually just uninstall or ignore. Mods that silently change gameplay can stick me with quests which cannot be completed or they can require that I completely change the type of character I am playing (e.g. a mod which adds npc activity and which also changes what items are available for sale late in the game might be perfectly balanced for combat might and yet unplayable using stealth -- and that would be fine if I knew about that issue when I was installing it, or if it could be safely uninstalled, but mods of this nature have all too often failed me on both accounts).

And, likewise, if you have 12 GB memory (or however much), don't change from windows 7 64 bit to windows xp 32 bit. I do not know where the threshold is, but at some point, using a 64 bit OS improves your system performance.

Archery can also be used to give you some control over where your battles take place. For example, personally, I might rather fight from cover than spend a lot of time letting enemy archers or wizards attack me. And even one shot might be enough to convince them to change their positions.

So, we know that our character will start out imprisoned. And, we have reason to believe that we will be potentially frequent invitations back into the clink. And all it will cost us is our stuff and our skills and.... So, anyways, I am wondering how people are planing on handling this aspect of our character. I know some have "ne'er do well" attitudes and are probably planning on playing the sort of character that inspired the creations of the prisons in the first place. But, because of the penalties, maybe it's tempting to load from a save rather than pay the price? But if this game is designed with a level 50 cap and enough exps that even with diminishing returns we can hit 20 levels above that, I am not so sure that I mind paying the penalties. And it's certainly an interesting possibility for character development (though perhaps not one that I would want for every character). Anyways, I was wondering about fun and different takes some of you might have on these possibilities?

http://bit.ly/opUBne Noun: An element of a culture or behavior that may be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation. An image, video, etc. that is passed electronically from one Internet user to another.

Here's what I expect to happen: 11-11-11, first thing in the morning, I launch the game before I go to work. When I get home, I expect that there will be an installer prompt. I shall click that and then wait 3-4 hours for the steam preinstall to decrypt. At this point, the installer should detect file corruption and start a fresh download. Most of the 12th and the 13th, I will spend trying to find updated drivers for my computer. On the 14th, I will start playing the game. After about 5 hours in the character creator, my game will crash and I will have to start over. I should have my character ready by the 17th. I expect to play through the intro on the 18th and 19th, losing relatively little progress to crashes as I create a new save file every couple minutes. On the 20th, I get out of the cave and start adventuring in earnest. Sometime the end of the 24th, I expect to realize that I built my character all wrong, and I start over. I hope this helps, and I am glad you asked. :laugh:

In the past, I have used third person when I wanted to make sure to see if things sneaking up on me, and first person when I could not live with third person (for example, sneak animations in morrowind are agonizing in third person) and third person when I could not live in first person (talking to a shop keeper in first person was sometimes deadly in morrowind). But what will I do this time? If my past experience is any guide, I will try switching back and forth between both modes and eventually I will find reasons to like one over the other and those reasons might leave me using different points of view in different situations.

I have some questions after reading this thread, like "how do you get Steam to work with a ram disk?" and "how much memory gets used for raw data and how much for transient data?" But, also, I am hoping that we can tell skyrim to cache stuff in memory, if we have enough of that.

Personally, I would rather that the game was built so that it worked when children could be killed. But I do not want this change so that I could kill them (though I recognize, especially from reading this thread, that that's where it would go for some people). I want children to be killable because otherwise it's pointless to defend them. I remember, in particular a scene in Fallout 3, where I died a number of times trying to defend a kid that just ran into a torrent of fire from raiders. I was working on defeating the game AI by picking them off before his AI triggered. Finally, I realized that (a) he could not be killed, and (b) there was no way I was going to be able to beat the AI and keep him out of battle. So from then on, I let him draw covering fire for me while I picked off the raiders slowly. That was disturbing. So, anyways, I want kids to be killable and I want them to run away from danger, and I want sane NPCs in the game to defend them (fallout raiders were delusional psychopaths, they could easily have thought the kid was a giant ant), and I want to be able to protect them myself. But I think they need better AI support before this would be possible. So, until then, I just want them to be nowhere near anything dangerous, because I know that the game cannot deal with the ramifications.

I meant -- their faces are loosely shaped like a dragon's head -- with a somewhat triangular outline -- they all tend to have a jutting chin and large sloped foreheads. And, sure, we should be able to create whatever sort of face we want, but it sort of makes sense for the presets to follow this theme?

So... presumably, by now, everyone has seen the various preset faces, and I know some people like them and some people do not. But... is it just me, or... do those faces maybe all suggest some kind of "Draconic" influence on their facial structure?

Maybe? But I'm remembering the nwn -> nwn2 modding scene. nwn2 modding tools are very powerful, but nwn has an order of magnitude more mods than nwn2.

So... maybe this time instead of "Horse Armor DLC" they will have "Mounted Combat DLC"? So, anyways, here's how I would balance mounted combat: First, I would go play Mount&Blade for a while, to give me a feel for what I wanted to accomplish. Then: In general, horse combat should feel awkward compared to foot combat. Some things would be easier (hit&run) but other things should be harder. In particular, terrain should be a big obstacle, for mounted combat. Horses should have problems with the rugged terrain of Skyrim. Even standing still, archery should miss a lot, and when moving this should be even worse (with a limited arc of fire). Likewise, you have a limited range of weapon motion. Magical attacks would need similar limitations. And I would also introduce a set of ai behaviors and animations designed to avoid damage from mounted riders. And of course, they would be trying to kill your horse out from underneath you as well. Then, once you've made basic horse combat almost useless, you introduce a whole tree or three of perks to alleviate these difficulties. If someone is willing to burn a perk trees on something like this, I think they should get advantages comparable mastering any other perk tree. (And the three perk trees could be Offensive -- aimed at hitting things successfully and gaining damage bonuses from movement, Defensive -- aimed at keeping your horse alive and staying on top of it and Utility -- aimed at getting your horse to cooperate with you and retaining some of your mounted combat abilities in bad terrain.) Without that? Without skills developed specifically for mounted combat, you are essentially mounted infantry...

Yes, animations are a whole new kind of data structure, when compared with oblivion. But powerful is not going to be enough. Powerful is a limit on the kinds of things that can be accomplished by modders, but other issues which matter for modders include learning curve, stability, organization of the interfaces, and documentation. In other words: How long does it take to learn how to do task xyzzy? How often does it crash or mutilate your work? Or how often do changes result in bugs in the game? When I am doing xyzzy (making armor, making npcs, adding behavior to npc, whatever) how many places do I have to go to do what I want? The game does X and I want it to do Y, how do I find what parts of the game I need to address to fix this? (Where X and Y would typically be visual appearance or behavior or some kind of cause/effect relationship) In other words "ease of use" matters -- and when you create a powerful system it's easy to neglect these other kinds of issues. Anyways, I am hoping they nailed this one -- and having a large team that probably all used this same set of tools makes me hopeful. But ultimately the creation engine is secondary to the game itself, and past experience suggests that it could easily have some very rough edges. Edit: and personally, I am hoping that the underlying file formats are documented well enough that I can build my own tools to do things the way I want...