Black Angel
Grand Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus
There isn't, and they have no intention to. You know who the Furies are, right?
Disco Elysium OUT NOW (previously: No Truce With The Furies)
- Thread starter Gaspard
- Start date
Francis H
It Wandered In From the Wastes
Had to have a refreshener, but yeah, I know. I was suggesting a change of title consider the amount of people that read it as furries, but I will still buy this independently of the title tbh.
Black Angel
Grand Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus
Take a look at this thread from the start, and try look at the thread in the RPG Codex's General RPG Discussion, there's still people misread it, but it's okay. Nothing really wrong, and it only kind of spark some interest to read it before they realize it's not about furries, but rather about a possibly good incoming cRPG. Good marketing move, I say
Francis H
It Wandered In From the Wastes
The best marketing is the controversial marketing. Just look at Hatred.Take a look at this thread from the start, and try look at the thread in the RPG Codex's General RPG Discussion, there's still people misread it, but it's okay. Nothing really wrong, and it only kind of spark some interest to read it before they realize it's not about furries, but rather about a possibly good incoming cRPG. Good marketing move, I say
Gaspard
Kasparov
Haha, Furries/Furies is just fine 
R.Graves
Confirmed Retard
Do people care that much about Furries in the first place? Kind of an irrelevant group Tbh...Take a look at this thread from the start, and try look at the thread in the RPG Codex's General RPG Discussion, there's still people misread it, but it's okay. Nothing really wrong, and it only kind of spark some interest to read it before they realize it's not about furries, but rather about a possibly good incoming cRPG. Good marketing move, I say
Dr Fallout
Centurion
Nice. I've also traveled around Estonia, on a big road trip.
Gaspard
Kasparov
Hear ye! Hear Ye! Gather around! For it is news post time! Robert/Marat Sar dropped this in the mail:
"Afterthought system for dialogues"
Robert Kurvitz
Since this devlog is all about skinning milk cartrage assets in SKUyA — I make this remark with deep apologies to our technical artists, SKUyA is not a real thing and no one “skins” anything — I thought I’d share a little “RPG stuff” with you. For good measure. It’s this little trick I might have implemented over the weekend. It’s called afterthoughts, because L’esprit d’Escalier was too fussy to copy-paste in this post.
For those unfamiliar, L’esprit d’Escalier or Spirit of the Staircase is a cute french expression for the predicament of coming up with a perfect reply too late. I.e. when the conversation is already over. When you’re walking down the staircase and suddenly the perfect witty reply or devastating argument pops into mind. Well — how would that work in an RPG?
I haven’t, technically speaking, seen it work in engine yet, but I think we have the answer.
CHECK IT
In No Truce, you have conversations with a lot of people. But the person you’ll have most conversations with — is yourself. We use this literary device a lot. We’ve even built special systems to facilitate it. Systems like our sense orbit, that lets skills pop up outside dialogues. Basically, we designate areas and then — if you have a high enough skill — said Skill will pop up there. Click on the skill and you can have a conversation with it (a part of yourself), if you like.
For example: you step on a stage, Drama pops up and asks you if you feel at home. This grounds you in the world more. We can even give conditions to these pop-ups: click on a drainpipe, it says: “rainwater is gushing out.” Then go down the street, Visual Calculus pops up and tells you the street is tilted to east, because the water only streams there. (No click on drainpipe — no get this pop up. Conditions!).
So, using these building blocks, we can do afterthoughts too! Even exactly the same L’Esprit D’Escalier effect I described before. Say you’re in a conversation. With a colleague from the RCM, the Revachol Citizen’s Militia. You get into a little argument over an irrelevant detail, then go back to the main topic. You end the conversation and walk away. So far so usual. But the area around the colleague you just talked to is designated as the area where a medium difficulty Rhetoric pops up if you had the argument before (the condition is met), and you have enough points in the Rhetoric skill. You then click on the little Rhetoric orb on your head, this starts a dialogue. Your Rhetoric gives you the perfect thing to have said. If you’re nice to it. Some skills are touchy. (Yes, really).
Then turn back to that colleague of yours. The argument appears on his main conversation menu. You choose it. He replies with something like: “You literally just came up with that four meters away. I could see it on your face, you made this…” (Makes crooked face) “stupid face, like you were trying to come up with something.”
WHY I REALLY LIKE THIS…
Postmodern tricks aside, afterthoughts let us make our dialogues shorter and leaner. No Truce is a talk-em-up, but conversations still need to have pacing. And under pacing I mean they need to be FAST. The quicker the better, so as not to become chores. On the other hand, we like to pack in as much content as we can for different character builds. The detective with perfect encyclopedic knowledge wants to pick up trivia and discuss that with his colleague. The physical character wants to get Half Light anger flashes (more on that another time) and hound the suspect on a stupid suspicion he has. Putting all these skills in the conversation, however, slows down the tempo and leads you into tangents. This draws attention from the main dynamic of the conversation.
We work on some dialogues for well over a month. In this time a writer-designer gets many weird, adventurous ideas for different skills to add. Afterthoughts could be a way for us to keep dialogues leaner while adding more content for different builds. A win-win.
In theory.
It may be annoying in practice, who knows. Right now I’m quite excited about them. I made a bunch of these micro-dialogues over the weekend. Who knows, maybe there’s even a gif added to the post, illustrating one pop up…
"Afterthought system for dialogues"
Robert Kurvitz
Since this devlog is all about skinning milk cartrage assets in SKUyA — I make this remark with deep apologies to our technical artists, SKUyA is not a real thing and no one “skins” anything — I thought I’d share a little “RPG stuff” with you. For good measure. It’s this little trick I might have implemented over the weekend. It’s called afterthoughts, because L’esprit d’Escalier was too fussy to copy-paste in this post.
For those unfamiliar, L’esprit d’Escalier or Spirit of the Staircase is a cute french expression for the predicament of coming up with a perfect reply too late. I.e. when the conversation is already over. When you’re walking down the staircase and suddenly the perfect witty reply or devastating argument pops into mind. Well — how would that work in an RPG?
I haven’t, technically speaking, seen it work in engine yet, but I think we have the answer.
CHECK IT
In No Truce, you have conversations with a lot of people. But the person you’ll have most conversations with — is yourself. We use this literary device a lot. We’ve even built special systems to facilitate it. Systems like our sense orbit, that lets skills pop up outside dialogues. Basically, we designate areas and then — if you have a high enough skill — said Skill will pop up there. Click on the skill and you can have a conversation with it (a part of yourself), if you like.
For example: you step on a stage, Drama pops up and asks you if you feel at home. This grounds you in the world more. We can even give conditions to these pop-ups: click on a drainpipe, it says: “rainwater is gushing out.” Then go down the street, Visual Calculus pops up and tells you the street is tilted to east, because the water only streams there. (No click on drainpipe — no get this pop up. Conditions!).
So, using these building blocks, we can do afterthoughts too! Even exactly the same L’Esprit D’Escalier effect I described before. Say you’re in a conversation. With a colleague from the RCM, the Revachol Citizen’s Militia. You get into a little argument over an irrelevant detail, then go back to the main topic. You end the conversation and walk away. So far so usual. But the area around the colleague you just talked to is designated as the area where a medium difficulty Rhetoric pops up if you had the argument before (the condition is met), and you have enough points in the Rhetoric skill. You then click on the little Rhetoric orb on your head, this starts a dialogue. Your Rhetoric gives you the perfect thing to have said. If you’re nice to it. Some skills are touchy. (Yes, really).
Then turn back to that colleague of yours. The argument appears on his main conversation menu. You choose it. He replies with something like: “You literally just came up with that four meters away. I could see it on your face, you made this…” (Makes crooked face) “stupid face, like you were trying to come up with something.”
WHY I REALLY LIKE THIS…
Postmodern tricks aside, afterthoughts let us make our dialogues shorter and leaner. No Truce is a talk-em-up, but conversations still need to have pacing. And under pacing I mean they need to be FAST. The quicker the better, so as not to become chores. On the other hand, we like to pack in as much content as we can for different character builds. The detective with perfect encyclopedic knowledge wants to pick up trivia and discuss that with his colleague. The physical character wants to get Half Light anger flashes (more on that another time) and hound the suspect on a stupid suspicion he has. Putting all these skills in the conversation, however, slows down the tempo and leads you into tangents. This draws attention from the main dynamic of the conversation.
We work on some dialogues for well over a month. In this time a writer-designer gets many weird, adventurous ideas for different skills to add. Afterthoughts could be a way for us to keep dialogues leaner while adding more content for different builds. A win-win.
In theory.
It may be annoying in practice, who knows. Right now I’m quite excited about them. I made a bunch of these micro-dialogues over the weekend. Who knows, maybe there’s even a gif added to the post, illustrating one pop up…
Black Angel
Grand Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus
Oh, wow. So it's like how, in the classical Fallout, you hold down the right mouse button on an object in the gameworld and then you choose 'Look At', and then the description appear in the box in the lower left corner of the screen; but some of them are exclusive to certain amount of Skills, and then those checks can be used on an ongoing quests? It's either going to be useless or going to be not only useful, but necessary to flesh out the world, the story, and the narrative based on what type of characters we've made to role-play as. Either way, sounds awesome!
The only game I know of to do something like that is Underrail with Perception checks for hidden doors, trap doors, and ventilation, and even then sufficient amount of Perception made them automatically appear instead of having to be clicked. Really looking forward to how No Truce would handle all them L’esprit d’Escalier checks.
The only game I know of to do something like that is Underrail with Perception checks for hidden doors, trap doors, and ventilation, and even then sufficient amount of Perception made them automatically appear instead of having to be clicked. Really looking forward to how No Truce would handle all them L’esprit d’Escalier checks.
Dr Fallout
Centurion
This... if this works...
Great stuff! Frankly I really like the idea of being able to 'talk' to yourself, though I fear that players may not like their skills having distinct personalities as it kind of takes away from the role playing...
Great stuff! Frankly I really like the idea of being able to 'talk' to yourself, though I fear that players may not like their skills having distinct personalities as it kind of takes away from the role playing...
Black Angel
Grand Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus
I would argue otherwise. Different skills enable different characters to think about different stuff would give more opportunity for the role playing.
Dr Fallout
Centurion
But it limits how you would like your skills to be like? I'm not exactly a fan of having a proud drama skill...
Black Angel
Grand Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus
How is that? I mean, in the classical Fallout having high Perception was only useful for using ranged weapon and spotting traps, and obviously the skills tied to it, while in Underrail, Perception was also useful for spotting trapdoor, hidden doors, and other kind of secrets. In the classical Fallout, there's rarely the use for Strength to force open doors (by Fallout 2 you can use the help of a Crowbar, but the checks only happen on Vault City and that's it. Correct me if there's more), while in Fallout 1.5: Resurrection they now have checks to use high Strength (and/or a Crowbar) to not only force open doors, but also locked containers and lockers.
The way the post above describe it, particularly this:
means various skills would have various uses, and it unlocks only for the characters who mastered those skills.
I think I kind of get the gist of what you mean. Iirc, previous posts describe what skills we would get to use in the game, so maybe take a look at those and see what might interest you?
Also, with this kind of feature, I can see they fail to maybe evenly distribute the checks among the skills, to the point where only particular build(s) would be used most. Of course, I understand there's no fun in being too focused on balance, but hey, this is a totally new game so we should see what's next update can bring.
Dr Fallout
Centurion
Well they said that skills might have a personality, different responses and so on. While that would be fun, it would limit the role playing opportunities to talk to these skills. If they don't change the personality of the skills, it might end up that everyone (no matter what) will have a proud Drama skill, a furtive sneak skill and so on. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Black Angel
Grand Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus
Yeah, I can see that as a problem. Let's wait for the further elaboration and next updates.
Gaspard
Kasparov
Interrupting the musings about dialogues and airborne bubbles to bring you this weeks blog post:
Have a great week-end, mutants!
"Tiling of the World"
Irve
Human memory has an interesting quirk: events in the past tend to fade and the busy, stressful times become a muddled extent of non-memories — I have years from which I remember: I think I was quite busy at the time.
When I think back a year, I feel definietly the same muddyness of ever-present programming puzzles, with one bright detour to the wonderful land of Blender.
Technical background to tiling
Our art pipeline, as explained by Rostov, starts with sketches and then a rough block-in which gets refined into a nice-looking render. Now: while we could render the whole image at a time we have decided to split the world into smaller tiles.
I don’t remember the exact discussions which led to our solution, but can still summarize one main decision.
We were thinking of doing the world in Pillars of Eternity way: essentially setting only the walkable ground planes and windows into the 3D world and then having a back-drop image without geometry, which occasionally occludes the player. Problems with that were manyfold, but mainly concerned in-world lightning and questions of what can the player see at a given time. Eventually we decided to have a simple 3D block-in world which gets a similar depth-occlusion shader.
This way we have a general understanding of geometry for the dynamic lights and visual raycasts while using a custom shader on the ground world to create the illusion of rich geometry.
A slice of world from an unintended angle
How tiles are made
Now we were faced with an another problem: how to tell which part of the 3D world should show which tile and how to put it there?
The problem of mapping a 2D image to 3D space has been solved for a while and standard tools tend to call it UV mapping, which essentially means that every triangle of a 3D mesh gets its own location on a texture and then the texture is calculated with the right modifications.
As our renders are isometric and have a fixed angle we project them from the screen plane to the mesh. How does the mesh get its projections? Que my entrance music.
By hand the process would look like this in Blender. We create a cuboid which represents the orthographic rendering camera space. Then we join all the different meshes (walkables, barriers, walls etc) into one solid mesh.
Then tell the large joined objects in the scene that they should be intersected with the cuboid (which I started calling Intersector-1 since it reminded me of an old computer game).
Now, since our camera is animated to produce the tiles (a tile for a frame), the intersecting modifiers on every detail cut away all the pieces outside of the camera. For each of those tiles we apply camera-projected UV coordinates, so that the rendered and painted tiles match up exactly once imported to Unity. Then export an FBX file. For every tile.
This routine process is completely automatable.
Blender
Blender has been built with a decision that everything that a user does can also be done from Python. You can observe it by dragging down from the upper menu and scaling or moving the default cube. The lines starting with bpy.ops are the actual function calls and their arguments that you can type into Python console to make them happen again.
bpy.ops in action
While it takes some digging around, this log makes it incredibly easy to create your own plugins for automating any tedious or repetitive task.
My own little slice of Blender
You can create operators, which are small Python classes which run a function when the user wants to. For tiling I have “copy everything to another scene”, “join everything”, “project UV from active camera”, “export frame”, “export everything” etc.
If you want to go an extra mile you can check if the context is right for calling them. And there is a nice way of creating user interface buttons — which then get automatically grayed out if you wrote the polling function right. Eventually you can even write some additional meta-information to create a plugin.
Blender has shown us its nasty side too: it appears that crashes with boolean operations, especially when objects have open meshes or exactly overlapping surfaces. Regardless of automation the artist who builds the block-in has to be careful.
Researching how to modify Blender was fun, the hack-try cycle really short and if I ever need to mess around with automating the program I know that I find it delightful. Now back to the Unity.
Irve
Human memory has an interesting quirk: events in the past tend to fade and the busy, stressful times become a muddled extent of non-memories — I have years from which I remember: I think I was quite busy at the time.
When I think back a year, I feel definietly the same muddyness of ever-present programming puzzles, with one bright detour to the wonderful land of Blender.
Technical background to tiling
Our art pipeline, as explained by Rostov, starts with sketches and then a rough block-in which gets refined into a nice-looking render. Now: while we could render the whole image at a time we have decided to split the world into smaller tiles.
I don’t remember the exact discussions which led to our solution, but can still summarize one main decision.
We were thinking of doing the world in Pillars of Eternity way: essentially setting only the walkable ground planes and windows into the 3D world and then having a back-drop image without geometry, which occasionally occludes the player. Problems with that were manyfold, but mainly concerned in-world lightning and questions of what can the player see at a given time. Eventually we decided to have a simple 3D block-in world which gets a similar depth-occlusion shader.
This way we have a general understanding of geometry for the dynamic lights and visual raycasts while using a custom shader on the ground world to create the illusion of rich geometry.
A slice of world from an unintended angle
How tiles are made
Now we were faced with an another problem: how to tell which part of the 3D world should show which tile and how to put it there?
The problem of mapping a 2D image to 3D space has been solved for a while and standard tools tend to call it UV mapping, which essentially means that every triangle of a 3D mesh gets its own location on a texture and then the texture is calculated with the right modifications.
As our renders are isometric and have a fixed angle we project them from the screen plane to the mesh. How does the mesh get its projections? Que my entrance music.
By hand the process would look like this in Blender. We create a cuboid which represents the orthographic rendering camera space. Then we join all the different meshes (walkables, barriers, walls etc) into one solid mesh.
Then tell the large joined objects in the scene that they should be intersected with the cuboid (which I started calling Intersector-1 since it reminded me of an old computer game).
Now, since our camera is animated to produce the tiles (a tile for a frame), the intersecting modifiers on every detail cut away all the pieces outside of the camera. For each of those tiles we apply camera-projected UV coordinates, so that the rendered and painted tiles match up exactly once imported to Unity. Then export an FBX file. For every tile.
This routine process is completely automatable.
Blender
Blender has been built with a decision that everything that a user does can also be done from Python. You can observe it by dragging down from the upper menu and scaling or moving the default cube. The lines starting with bpy.ops are the actual function calls and their arguments that you can type into Python console to make them happen again.
bpy.ops in action
While it takes some digging around, this log makes it incredibly easy to create your own plugins for automating any tedious or repetitive task.
My own little slice of Blender
You can create operators, which are small Python classes which run a function when the user wants to. For tiling I have “copy everything to another scene”, “join everything”, “project UV from active camera”, “export frame”, “export everything” etc.
If you want to go an extra mile you can check if the context is right for calling them. And there is a nice way of creating user interface buttons — which then get automatically grayed out if you wrote the polling function right. Eventually you can even write some additional meta-information to create a plugin.
Blender has shown us its nasty side too: it appears that crashes with boolean operations, especially when objects have open meshes or exactly overlapping surfaces. Regardless of automation the artist who builds the block-in has to be careful.
Researching how to modify Blender was fun, the hack-try cycle really short and if I ever need to mess around with automating the program I know that I find it delightful. Now back to the Unity.
Have a great week-end, mutants!
Gaspard
Kasparov
Blog time!
"MOTOR LORRY OF THE DAY #1"
Robert Kurvitz
Today we start our seminal, fabled, scandalous, highly controversial “Motor-lorry of the Day” series. That’s right, Martinaise has an intersection. With a long-standing traffic jam. (Perhaps the world’s first isometric traffic jam!). For it, we’ve created some heavy vehicles.
We call them motor lorries, sometimes camions. The drivers are called camionneurs. This is a a stylised render by all means, real pure blood lorries of course have textures as well.
This is the Faln A-6. It’s literally the most boring lorry at the intersection, perhaps in the whole world. Faln, the manufacturer, is an industrial conglomerate. They make houses, tracksuits and heavy vehicles. The houses are terrible, the tracksuits legendary and the vehicles, well, the vehicles are okay I guess.
"MOTOR LORRY OF THE DAY #1"
Robert Kurvitz
Today we start our seminal, fabled, scandalous, highly controversial “Motor-lorry of the Day” series. That’s right, Martinaise has an intersection. With a long-standing traffic jam. (Perhaps the world’s first isometric traffic jam!). For it, we’ve created some heavy vehicles.
We call them motor lorries, sometimes camions. The drivers are called camionneurs. This is a a stylised render by all means, real pure blood lorries of course have textures as well.
This is the Faln A-6. It’s literally the most boring lorry at the intersection, perhaps in the whole world. Faln, the manufacturer, is an industrial conglomerate. They make houses, tracksuits and heavy vehicles. The houses are terrible, the tracksuits legendary and the vehicles, well, the vehicles are okay I guess.
Dr Fallout
Centurion
Nice vehicles! Really imaginative.
Gaspard
Kasparov
Here´s another one:
"MOTOR LORRY OF THE DAY #2"
Robert Kurvitz
Game Designer
Time again for the legendary, quasi-legendary, mostly forgotten Lorry of the Week! Last week’s entry had people asking: how does it turn? To that I say: I don’t know. We have forwarded the question to our certified genius / notoriously difficult to work with industrial designer, but he has secluded himself in a forest inn for the time being. So I wouldn’t hold my breath.
This week we have the Faln A-Z “Tempo”.
The Tempo used to be colled the “Contemporain” before years of lorryman lingo weathered it down to two syllables. With revision 9 the manufacturer followed suit. This truly iconic vehicle from the late thirties has seen two decades of service and multiple revisions. The Faln A-Z (pronounced “a-zed” in the Revachol region) is a trusted haul and a lifestyle choice for lorrymen, poor people and drunkard artists who need to transport large format paintings.
That adorably awkward boxy salon and those two headlights have become synonymous with roadkill, light fascism, romantic memories of a youth misspent “down at the reservoir” – a mythical place on the outskirts of Revachol where “we used to drive in my brother’s Tempo” – and sadly the occasional rape.
Enjoy your week-end, mutants!
"MOTOR LORRY OF THE DAY #2"
Robert Kurvitz
Game Designer
Time again for the legendary, quasi-legendary, mostly forgotten Lorry of the Week! Last week’s entry had people asking: how does it turn? To that I say: I don’t know. We have forwarded the question to our certified genius / notoriously difficult to work with industrial designer, but he has secluded himself in a forest inn for the time being. So I wouldn’t hold my breath.
This week we have the Faln A-Z “Tempo”.
The Tempo used to be colled the “Contemporain” before years of lorryman lingo weathered it down to two syllables. With revision 9 the manufacturer followed suit. This truly iconic vehicle from the late thirties has seen two decades of service and multiple revisions. The Faln A-Z (pronounced “a-zed” in the Revachol region) is a trusted haul and a lifestyle choice for lorrymen, poor people and drunkard artists who need to transport large format paintings.
That adorably awkward boxy salon and those two headlights have become synonymous with roadkill, light fascism, romantic memories of a youth misspent “down at the reservoir” – a mythical place on the outskirts of Revachol where “we used to drive in my brother’s Tempo” – and sadly the occasional rape.
Enjoy your week-end, mutants!
Dr Fallout
Centurion
Wow, I really love the art style and design. They look functional but also... I don't know, I'm getting an alternate 30's style...