Some questions about Arx. - by Clark
Clark on 10/10/2002 at 20:21
As a big fan of UW1 and UW1 I have some questions about Arx. I have tried the demo, and it looks and feels very promising.
1. Will you be able to, as in UW, write things down on the automap? Love this feature in UW.
2. I was missing the dialogue system of UW, where you had different answers to chose from. In the demo all dialogues seem scripted, and you can't choose what your character will say. Anyone know if this will change, or look different in the german version?
Thank you!
/Clark
Kinlaadare on 10/10/2002 at 21:00
to answer your questions...
1 you cannot write things on the map, and this is a mess...
2 all the dialogues are scripted. But as you are free to do nearly all what you want, this isn't really a problem :D
Trust me or not, the game is fabulous and quite immersive... it reminds me the best RPG, and u know what I mean :D
Clark on 13/10/2002 at 20:07
Thank you for your answer.
These issues are surely no showstoppers for me.
I'm looking forward to the finished game, and hope it will bring the same feeling as the Underworld series did for me.
/Clark
Shadowcat on 14/10/2002 at 10:02
I very much hope that an annotatable auto-map feature will be added in a future patch... it's SUCH a useful feature, and I find it difficult to believe that it would be especially difficult to add. I know there are probably more pressing matters to work on, but if you're listening Arkane, please spend a little time to add this feature in -- it would be a great help (especially for those of us whose memories aren't the best!)
I finished the demo yesterday and enjoyed it a great deal. My frame rates got pretty low at the end section (I have an 800MHz Athlon thunderbird, and a 128MB GeForce4 Ti4200 video card, with a SB Live Value sound card, and 256MB main memory, and was running the game at 1024x768x32)
I found that the mouse movement seemed noticeably less jerky in those circumstances if I turned off the mouse-smoothing option (and increased the sensitivity a bunch to get the speed up again). I guess that when the frame-rate drops, the smoothing option doesn't function terribly well.
Dropping the res to 800x600 helped a little, I think. Interestingly, increasing the viewing distance to maximum didn't seem to have much in the way of a detrimental effect in the wide open space that the game seemed to slow down on. (This is all vague impressions rather than actual figures, of course.)
Oh, and hacking into someone and the consequent spray of blood seemed to cause quite significant slow-downs...
I had one crash to the desktop. I'm afraid I don't recall the circumstances :/ I know I'd just saved the game about a half minute earlier, which was a great relief :)
I'm looking forward to the full game! (Already pre-ordered it :)
Le Magot d'Oz on 17/10/2002 at 13:29
an autosave feature may be usefull... (it case you randomlly return to desktop) but it may also slower the frame rate...
An annotatable auto-map feature, will be a very usefull feature with no doubt, but its absence derive from early gameplay choices (as it was previously planned to be released on Xbox). Anyway, as well as Morrowind who did not include such a feature for the same reason, they'll release on PC only an add-on which do include an annotatable auto-map... (so it tend to proof it's not an impossible feature to add... :angel: ... :rolleyes: :cool: )
xman on 18/10/2002 at 13:08
Quote:
Originally posted by Le Magot d'Oz an autosave feature may be usefull... (it case you randomlly return to desktop) but it may also slower the frame rate...
An annotatable auto-map feature, will be a very usefull feature with no doubt, but its absence derive from early gameplay choices (as it was previously planned to be released on Xbox). Anyway, as well as Morrowind who did not include such a feature for the same reason, they'll release on PC only an add-on which do include an annotatable auto-map... (so it tend to proof it's not an impossible feature to add... :angel: ... :rolleyes: :cool: ) The Xbox port is
NOT an excuse for the absence of a writeable auto-map on PC !!!!!!!!!!
I guess the game has to be re-compiled according to the machine (PC or Xbox).
So why not add something like this in the code:
#if XBOX
// disable writeable automap
#else
// enable writeable automap
#endif
That's so easy to code that opposing the Xbox to the PC is not an excuse!
PS: well what I say is approximately what you say : it's obviously possible to release different executables for PC and for Xbox so it's possible to include the writeable automap on the PC version.
