Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil Forum Highlights

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(Originally posted by Gopher)

Here are today's Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

Steve Moret, Lead Programmer

A Game by any other name:

When I was working o*n the installer I think the last word we got from Atari (previously Infogrames) was that most likely "Greyhawk:" was going to be removed from the beginning of the name of the game. Whether there will be a subtitle or postfix name, I don't know. But I'm sure that the name will contain:

"The Temple of Elemental Evil"

Thats whats in the installer. However that may change too, I think some kind soul at Atari has decided to take over doing our installer (saving us prescious time to continue working).

Official Website:

Thanks for the compliment. I will be sure to pass o*n to Lucas and Peter your appreciation for their accuracy. I have to admit they are some excellent artists. In my opinion our backdrops blow just about every other prerendered CRPG out of the water.

Glad everybody likes the website, it took lots of work o*n o*n both our part and the web guys at Atari. There are a couple more cool things we want to try and add to it (but working o*n the game has taken precidence); we've been playing D&D here at the office and some of the GMs have been keeping session logs. We'd like to eventually post those logs, and there of course is some more concepts / screenshots / etc that we want to get up there. But for right now getting the game done is priority #1 Wish us luck!

Shadows:

Since we don't have dynamic lighting (not really an option with prerendered backgrounds); I think we are going to have 3 (or 4) options for shadows in the game:

Shadow maps: your mesh is transformed (collapsed to the ground at the angle of the sun) and rendered to 1 bit alpha texture, then that texture is rendered o*n a quad at your feet. This gives a nice uniform looking shadow.

Collapsed mesh: your mesh is transformed and rendered without textures o*n the ground plane with a black /w alpha material. This gives the same shape/size shadow as above but overlapping elements can cause darker shadows. Not really noticible but creatures with wings or large weapons can sometimes have dark blocks in their shadows (this option may be removed) performance wise its a little better than #1 at a small cost in quality

Blobbies: circular blob scaled for your character's size these cost 1 texture lookup + 2 polys + scaling to render the quad, but look kinda boring

None: uh... yeah, no shadows makes the ground look less real to tell you the truth but o*n those low end systems it might squeeze that extra frame

No promise o*n what the final options will be, but these are the o*nes we have planned right now. Maybe Lee can drop o*n by and explain what happens in a little better technical terms.

3.5 D&D Rules?

Until/unless we get approval from WotC we won't be leaking any 3.5 information. I don't even know if we're allowed to have an opinion o*n how great 3.5 is. (oops)

Dynamic Lighting:

Nope, there is no dynamic lighting. All the torches / lanterns would do is cast shadows which would o*nly lower performance.

It was a tradeoff we had to make when deciding we wanted to do the prerendered backgrounds. In retrospect with some of the clipping geometry thats stored with the level we could cast shadows o*nto walls and do other fancy things but we haven't the time to implement them.

Maybe if this engine is used again somewhere... hmmm.....

Huy Nguyen, Magic and Interface

E3 Trailer:

If in 30 seconds or so, a trailer can make turn-based combat look "fast", "exciting", and "sizzling", especially to those who don't normally enjoy turn-based combat for whatever reason, then marketing/pr has done its job.

I'm sure it's the video editing that gives combat the appearance of being "sped" up or whatever, but rest assured, it's 100% turn-based. That video was taken of someone playing thru the game normally. You can choose to go grab lunch o*n a PC's turn if you want - but that wouldn't make for a good sizzle video.

If you were able to watch all of us demo the game at E3, we knew combat/interface so well, it was second nature and played so smoothly that the casual viewer might not even have realized it was turn-based - but we always make sure to tell people that we are 100% turn-based and single-player o*nly, etc etc.

[edit]: Except for the multi-select, it looks like the editor sped up that part for "sizzling" purposes probably ...anyways, I guess the point i'm trying to make is that trailers are made to sell/hype, and whether it's good/bad/misleading, we as developers don't have much final say... so i just assure everyone it's 100% turn-based! Btw, you'll love the simultaneous turns. I think it turned out great!

Sean Craig, Core D20 Implementation

Familiars and Animal Companions:

Familiars in 3rd edition aren't really combat-friendly. Especially when the penalty for their death is so high. So they are implemented as inventory items and are mostly used for boosting stats.

Druidic Animal companions, o*n the other hand, are good for combat, so they go in a follower slot. Nothing like a pet polar bear to turn the tide of a battle. If you already had three followers, then you could not summon an animal companion until you dismissed those followers.