Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Niveras]

A lot of the time, unskippable cutscenes serve double duty as hidden "load times" for things happening in the background/offscreen. Loading textures, spawning NPCs, NPCs moving so they're in the correct position when the cutscene ends, locking players in positions (that might otherwise break scripts if a player triggered the next script too early), etc.

I'm not saying it isn't lazy - it's certainly possible to design around it or design without relying on it - but it is not always as simple as "give us a button to skip cutscenes."

[scriver]

Id rather have an honest load screen than the same bad curscene over and over again

[Kagus]

Id rather have an honest load screen than the same bad curscene over and over again

Especially when you need a loading screen to load in the graphics and models for the cutscene that's being used to cover the loading screen

[Niveras]

Id rather have an honest load screen than the same bad curscene over and over again

I tend to agree, I absolutely hate the unskippable splash screens when loading most AAA games (GPU, CPU, sound systems, etc). I'm fairly sure they also "hide" some of the loading but I can't help but feel they invariably also extend the loading time too.

[Damiac]

Id rather have an honest load screen than the same bad curscene over and over again

I tend to agree, I absolutely hate the unskippable splash screens when loading most AAA games (GPU, CPU, sound systems, etc). I'm fairly sure they also "hide" some of the loading but I can't help but feel they invariably also extend the loading time too.

Remember when the crazy "Press caps lock to skip loading" in XCOM2 was revealed, and it was actually real?

You can either wait a minute or so flying back to base looking at a "loading" screen, or, you could press caps lock, the system would hitch for 1/2 a second, and you're instantly back in base.  Clearly the first method had some inefficiencies!

If you read a bit about modern PC programming, you'll find all sorts of wasteful and stupid practices.  One of those which has gotten out of control are called "Spinners".  I don't fully grasp the concept, but it relates to multi-threading, where a process will keep a "spinner" going rather than "blocking" a thread. This allows the thread to be called back up pretty much instantly, rather than having to "wake up".  The downside is, no other process can use those CPU resources that are wastefully "spinning" a waiting thread.

This all makes sense, until you consider that your PC can have many processes running, and if all those processes have some "spinners" your computer is wasting a LOT of CPU time on doing nothing at all.  Which is how you can end up with something taking 100x longer to load than it should, especially if the developer didn't take steps to prevent it (I'm looking at you Bethesda! Fallout 4 loads like a dog!)

[nenjin]

I miss the cheeky loading messages. "Waking up Monsters." "Sweeping the Dungeon." "Recharging Wands" and all that silly stuff. I prefer that level of loading-tainment to just the same cutscene over and over again. It just feels punitive for some reason.

[bloop_bleep]

By spinner do you mean a polling loop? Instead of blocking until data arrives, constantly checking whether data has arrived? Yeah, I believe that's rather discouraged... It might be better if every time it is determined that no data has arrived since the last check the thread were to yield the rest of its scheduled block of time.

[Damiac]

By spinner do you mean a polling loop? Instead of blocking until data arrives, constantly checking whether data has arrived? Yeah, I believe that's rather discouraged... It might be better if every time it is determined that no data has arrived since the last check the thread were to yield the rest of its scheduled block of time.

Yeah I think we're talking about the same thing. Whenever I have seen it discussed they called it "spinning" or "spinners" but essentially I think it's what you're talking about, rather than stopping the thread and only re-activativing it on input, they just have the thread constantly looping through looking for input.

The advantage is less latency for that particular thread. This advantage vanishes however if multiple programs are doing it at the same time.

It may be discouraged but that doesn't mean it's not everywhere. 

Which means more computer resources go into making up for lazy programming than they used to. Which is why despite computers being absurdly faster than they were even 5 years ago, the experience of operating one is generally the same or even slower.

[Reelya]

Recently, playing a D&D based RPG, getting annoyed at having to spam zillions of healing spells to get my characters back to full health after a fight.

This is really "unrealistic", if I can use that term. A normal person needs say 1-2 basic healing spells to get back to full strength from death's doorstep, but if you gain experience in lockingpicking for example (say a high level thief), then suddenly you need a couple dozen basic healing spells to get back to full strength. Which really doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Apart from the fridge logic here of making you realize how ridiculous it is to need to cast dozens of healing spells for each character and how that makes no sense whatsoever, what was fun at low levels - clearly where these guy did the most testing of their games - becomes a massive chore once you're up to high levels. After each battle you dread going through the massive healing-spam session, that in some cases, can take longer and involve more clicking than the battle actually did, because they've clearly optimized things so that combat is fluid but after the combat, the interface sucks.

EDIT: btw the game is Eye of the Beholder 3, the last in the series, and hence why the issues with healing are more noticeable, since all my characters are very high level.

As for Eye of the Beholder 3, it's the epitome of what happens when the publisher takes over an IP from the studio who actually made it. There are so many things wrong with this game that it's hard to list them. The engine is significantly slower and more buggy than Eye 1/2. The graphics are worse. The level design is worse. These guys they put on it were clearly from the Gold Box RPG days, and more used to working in overhead, turn-based 16-color mode. They then applied that design approach to a first-person real-time 256 color game. Look like shit, the levels are shit and the sound is amazingly shit. Screeching clipped sound is the monster noises for basically everything. You want to hunt the monsters down just to stop the screeching noises.

The first area they start you in emphasizes the issues. It's a huge open area, instead of the narrow pathways of the earlier Eye games, and in a real-time first-person game, it's just clicking through large amounts of nothing. And they put these ghosts in there which probably only have 2-3 colors in the whole thing. What were they saving colors for? Sure, they only have a palette of 256 and this has gotta be used for everything that could conceivably be on the screen but surely they can use more of the default palette for the ghosts? I get it that each monster can only have a few "unique" colors due to palette limitations and the fact that you need to have colors available for all items, but only using like 3 colors for the only enemy on this level is just being lazy. The devs for the first two Eye games were much more creative in how they used the available palette for each monster. It's pretty low-res and more colors makes up for that. Eye 3 just has the low-res but they decided it would be easier to only use a couple colors per enemy to avoid palette clashes. One main enemy they came up with uses literally one color, black. "Shadows", you see? Brilliant. Have a whole level full of those since it won't waste any palette.

If they'd just used the Eye 2 engine and hacked in different levels it would have been better, but what they did was clearly to take the source code, added extra stuff then compiled it themselves. However the original was much, much faster, so they botched it and lost whatever optimizations the original creators did that made the engine run well. It would have lagged even on high-end machines of the day.

As an example of a "what were they thinking" thing, there are cursed items in Eye of the Beholder, and when you wield them in your hand-slots you realize that you can't unwield them. However, the Eye 3 people had a better idea: make the cursed item stick to inventory slots in general. But this just completely removes any threat from cursed items. Now, you can just put all items in your backpack then try and pick them out of the backpack. if they're cursed, you won't be able to take them out of the backpack or put then in your hand slots. And that's the point. By making the curse apply to all inventory slots you can now screen all items for curses when you get them, without risking your precious hand slots.

[Kagus]

basic healing spells

Isn't that kinda why advanced healing spells are a thing? Or do those not exist?

[Egan_BW]

It is kind of silly if we imagine that gaining HP when you level up represents becoming more experienced and adept at avoiding damage. That would mean that a 15th-level fighter with 54/109 HP is about as injured as a commoner with 3/6 HP. But the way healing spells work doesn't reflect that, so we're left to believe that the fighter is simply 18 times as dense in flesh or something.

[Reelya]

basic healing spells

Isn't that kinda why advanced healing spells are a thing? Or do those not exist?

Depends on the game. If they managed to make sure the available healing scales along with the increase in hitpoints, and not all games have managed this. This is a general RPG game-design gripe. I can think of at least one shittily-made browser RPG game that a bunch of Bay12 people were playing online that only has a standard heal spell, and doesn't have any sort of auto-healing option, so the amount of clicking to heal everyone gets increasingly long as you gain levels. To the point where I hacked in some javascript to cast the spells for me for the game to remain playable.

As for D&D, my top Eye3 characters in that game have almost 150 HP, and Cure Critical Wounds, and while the D&D online manual says it cures "4d8 points of damage + 1 point per caster level", which would be nice: 24 - 52 HP for a level 20 cleric , the Eye3 manual says it cures 6-27 HP. So D&D games really depend on the exact ruleset they've implemented in that game, and for this one, Cure "Critical" Wounds should cure 16.5 HP per average, which means about 8 healing spells to cure up my top character from almost dead. This is 2nd Ed D&D rules: the healing spells didn't scale with the caster's level in those rules: they added some scaling into later rules.

At least Eye3 does have an auto-cast routine for healing. But if you ever need to heal up and you can't camp due to monsters nearby, you're stuck with casting over and over again, and there's a significant cool-down period between castings. You can also cast Heal, which gets a character to full strength but you only get a few of those per day for a maxxed-level character. So Eye isn't the worst by far for this, but at high levels even the highest normal healing spell is next to useless vs the amount of HP each character has. Heaven forbid you'd be in an area you can't rest in and end up resorting to using up the level 1 cures.

[Kagus]

Have you seen how much it actually heals in practice? Documentation can be inaccurate at times.

Definitely not discounting that they decided to tweak the numbers for reasons unknowable, but I try and leave a little room for documentation being just straight up wrong about things

It is kind of silly if we imagine that gaining HP when you level up represents becoming more experienced and adept at avoiding damage. That would mean that a 15th-level fighter with 54/109 HP is about as injured as a commoner with 3/6 HP. But the way healing spells work doesn't reflect that, so we're left to believe that the fighter is simply 18 times as dense in flesh or something.

Well, I mean, healing spells in and of themselves are a bit wibbly... But one could sorta reflect that the healing spells also restore a person's resolve!

...it's still a bit silly though.

[Reelya]

Well the experiential effect is that Cure Critical Wounds cures "fuck all" of the remaining damage. I haven't done repeat tests, but "not much" is the subjective amount. And you don't get that many of them so you're left spamming the lower-value ones before long anyway. But like I said, the official D&D rules massively increased the amount this spell does, and added in the scaling-by-levels thing too. So it was a recognized issue in the core rules. A level one Cure Light Wounds spell now cures 1d8+5 points at maxxed levels, which has an average of 9.5 points per casting (4.5 points in 2ed), which isn't a whole lot less than the (2ed) average of 16.5 points per healing for the old Cure Critical Wounds spell, while the new Critical spell would cure an average of 38 points per casting, to give you and idea of how much they boost the healing levels.

EDIT: and checking online, the official rules say 3d8+3 for Cure Critical Wounds in D&D 2ed, which matches the 6-27 thing in the Eye3 manual, so it's definitely that. I doubt it would be giving more than that, there would be no actual reason to expect so. If the numbers are wrong, they're just as likely to be too high as too low. Also, these games were official implementations of the D&D rules. If the numbers don't match what's in the manual, then people get pissed. It's not like a typo or numbers being off in other games. If there's a typo in the book then that's one thing, but people would be checking these games against the official D&D rulebooks for discrepancies.

[Iduno]

basic healing spells

Isn't that kinda why advanced healing spells are a thing? Or do those not exist?

Yeah, then instead of healing almost nothing, you get nothing and a half. I think it was +1d8 every 4 levels, which scales much slower than hp, especially if you have multiple party members (which would by why it's called a party instead of a guy).

That's why half of the game in Baldur's Gate 2 was trying to find a place to rest; when you rested, you would automatically cast as many healing spells as necessary to heal everyone up, which saved a lot of time and clicking.