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Re: Atmosphere

#76
JoshParnell wrote:
Victor Tombs wrote:I was one of the key promoters/supporters of Hyperion's idea but I remember it being sidestepped by Josh. I'm not even sure, without trawling through the thread, whether the coding warrior even commented on it. :angel:
Hmm, don't remember side-stepping that (heh, too many changes in my mindset over too long of a timespan!), was very much interested in his work. Something like that is likely what we'll see in LT.
You didn't side-step it. You actually posted in the thread, and later mentioned some prototypical work in a devlog. :)
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Re: Atmosphere

#78
Victor Tombs wrote:
Talvieno wrote:You didn't side-step it. You actually posted in the thread, and later mentioned some prototypical work in a devlog.
Josh may not have sidestepped the issue elsewhere but he didn't post anything in that thread.
:wtf: Really? I remember him posting there...

Edit: You're right. :eh: I wonder what I'm remembering, then...
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Re: Atmosphere

#80
JoshParnell wrote:Hmm, don't remember side-stepping that (heh, too many changes in my mindset over too long of a timespan!), was very much interested in his work. Something like that is likely what we'll see in LT.
:eh: I'm not sure what to take away from that comment, Josh. :? Is there nothing you can show us?

Fair enough if you can't or don't want to show us. I'm inclined to trust you to do a superb job of this important part of the game. :angel:
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Re: Atmosphere

#82
One advantage of representing characters with just glowy lines and circles is the ease of conveying emotion. Anger, excitement, happiness, all could be conveyed with simple animations and color changes. Even if Josh doesn't do it, modding it in should be fairly dimple.
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Re: Atmosphere

#84
I'm cool with icons if they look like the subject they are representing and are not just abstract, one advantage using them, or atleast thinking about using them is Josh may be able to impliment a system that could then be modded so users can create their own 'face packs' to insert etc.

I'm sure i've read some interesting stuff on the procedural generation of faces before, but for the last 24 hours i've not been able to find those sources :( Years ago I had been doing research for one of my game designs and thinking along the lines of those police identikit type approaches, and had been interested in how Frontier had made it's faces.

I know in FFED3D the modding community had stripped out the faces from Frontier (the pure pixel art generated faces) that could then be used in FFED3D (based on FFE, the third Elite game) to replace the slightly poor FMV's. They were not created as in Frontier, just simple bmp (iirc) replacements, so no procedural math was used just the pics.

Compared to the pure spreadsheet menus of Elite: Dangerous, those faces in Frontier and FFE made your contacts feel more human, and so space less sanitized and devoid of life, that seems the main advantage of having a 'human face' in those (or any?) games.
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Re: Atmosphere

#85
My two cents. As long as there is a UUID of sorts, and you can have a historical record of your dealings with an actor as well as the ability to navigate said information. How that is portrayed visually becomes irrelevant. Yes faces are nice, but they most certainly are not needed for recognition of an actor that you are having dealings with. If you have records of all your dealings with an actor you'll get the information from that. Though ideally you can also delete records that you don't want/need to retain that way you don't clog up your save data with useless information. At the same time though there would be no reason not to have the option to save every interact you have with every actor you encounter.

That all being said, faces would certainly make the game feel more lively, but only to a very finite extent. Unless there was a way of making every single face you encountered unique and even then after awhile of playing you'd most likely stop noticing or caring about the faces of random actors you encounter. The ones you deal with regularly sure, random ones? Nope. This is demonstrated even in real life with people who are constantly dealing with large numbers of people. Unless you have a good reason to remember each and every one, you simply don't.
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Re: Atmosphere

#86
Well, that raises an interesting question: how many people are we each likely to interact with, on a personal level, during a normal game session?

For those of us who enjoy the pew-pews (which includes me sometimes), I don't imagine I'm going to want to see the individualized face of every single enemy I just blasted into space atoms. Even Wing Commander only showed a generic Kilrathi image for all the regular enemy ships destroyed.

What about the players who enjoy market interactions? Do they need to see a lot of faces? Or will most of that gameplay be about studying the Limit Theory version of spreadsheets?

How about the players who enjoy mining? It seems like they'll spend most of their time out in the deep dark, looking for rocks that haven't already been picked over. They might come to town from time to time to stake their claims, but wouldn't they normally seek out the same NPC to deal with as a known and trusted character?

Research? Will that be handled by setting up projects in a Research screen? If research options are chosen by talking to a Researcher NPC, will the players who enjoy research be able to do it often enough to see a lot of different NPC Researchers?

Fleet command? Doesn't delegation mean we'll mostly be giving high-level commands through a small number of fleet captains?

Interaction with colonies? That might be done through an NPC colony leader -- but how many such leaders will a player normally talk to during the typical play session?

Player management of factions? Not implemented until after v1.0 ships (as of Josh's last comment on the subject).

In summary, while I suppose a player who wanted to do so could fly around hailing every ship in sight, I'm not sure that will be the standard playing mode for many of us. In which case, is there really enough value in Josh's taking the time to implement a random-but-acceptable face generator?

Please note: I'm not opposed to the idea of NPCs having faces! I actually like the idea. I'm just testing what I personally would like against what seems to be a realistic perspective for getting Limit Theory into players' hands as soon as possible.

Thoughts?
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Re: Atmosphere

#87
Even for many pewpews or many trading interactions, I would prefer icons. I think it really adds to the mythos of the game, more than faces (and I'm very aware that's a personal view and others may disagree, much as with flavours of ice cream) - and poorly done faces look terrible. I'm looking at you, X Rebirth.

edit actually no i'm not it's not installed on my computer and my apartment is empty :c
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Re: Atmosphere

#88
My thoughts....I haven't changed my mind. I want something I can relate too. Icons with no resemblance to the living leave me cold. Faces, I can relate too.

I believe Josh has already said that he enjoyed the work shown in Hyperion's thread and would most likely be supplying something similar. :angel:

Edit: He actually used the word "interested". I'm sure enjoyment must have been part of that interest though. ;) :)
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Re: Atmosphere

#89
*sigh*

*budges non-icon-NPC-representations slighty higher on the infinite mental list of things that would be nice but not critical for 1.0 and will be included only in the event of an impressive series of Acts of God*

(I mean, those definitely have happened before in the course of LT development, so don't get me wrong, it's not ruled out. Thing is, you never know exactly where those kinds of miracles are going to strike. So instead of having faces you might have, for example, destructible asteroids during mining (to be clear, that wasn't me dropping a hint, it was just an example). At this point I take only the low-hanging miracles :ghost: )
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
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Re: Atmosphere

#90
JoshParnell wrote:*sigh*

*budges non-icon-NPC-representations slighty higher on the infinite mental list of things that would be nice but not critical for 1.0 and will be included only in the event of an impressive series of Acts of God*

(I mean, those definitely have happened before in the course of LT development, so don't get me wrong, it's not ruled out. Thing is, you never know exactly where those kinds of miracles are going to strike. So instead of having faces you might have, for example, destructible asteroids during mining (to be clear, that wasn't me dropping a hint, it was just an example). I take the low-hanging miracles :ghost:
what about those pareidolic icons yeyeahhhhh

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