DiabloFans

Quote from "Vnom" »

I want to demo test this sweet looking game.

Vnom, a demo version is still a few months off, but will most likely be available to play for all via download from the main website. I'll announce it here as well when I hit that milestone. When the game reaches full on Beta I will keep you all in mind.
-Jon

Thanks Seth, I hadn't thought to embed a flash movie as I didn't think it would be allowed. Regardless I can't seem to get it to work correctly at the moment.

New Screenshot:

Quote from "edwith" »

One last note, if you are in a group kill the boss and say an item drops for your friend, he happens to not pick it up for some reason, he doesn't want it not enough room etc. but you want it, youll never no its there. It would make sense if it would become a 'global' item after a certian amount of time regaurdless of whether it has been picked up or not.

I like that idea of having an item become global to all players after a specific amount of time, however we aren't sure how the inventory system works exactly right now and they have suggested giving the player a more flexable system that doesn't require "tetris" space organizing so I can't say if it would ever really be a problem that a player can't pick up an item. I'd imagine in D3 there will be a much larger "economy" online and that no matter what drops players would be able to sell the items for cash to an NPC etc and then it would become open to the global market for a price anyway. In that case, like everyone before has said, if you are playing with a fair minded friend it shouldn't be a problem for them to share if something comes up that could help you along.

Quote from "HowwwwL" »

I've played Warcraft I, II, II, Diablo I, II, WOW, Starcraft plus all expansions.

The only way I would ever, and I mean ever, consider paying a monthly fee for Diablo 3, is if they guaranteed expanded content every 3 or 4 months, and not having to pay for using new character types.

Blizzard could charge players the ability to open new character classes. I can see a lot of people opening up their wallets to play a Necromancer or their old favorite D2 class in D3 for instance.

But without constant new free content with subscription (i.e. new areas, dungeons, classes, etc.), I don't see how they could seriously warrant a fee.

I agree with this for the most part, however I think there are some things that people wouldn't mind paying a little extra for ie. uploading and or buying custom textures for their armor or something like that, although there would be obvious problems with doing that (Sacrificing control of the look of the game/Quality of items) as well as only tapping into a small subset of the user base being interested in making custom items or textures. If you look around at other games or virtual worlds that use that kind of system in the economy I'm not sure if it would be worth while to do in Diablo considering the sort of set tone and mood of the game over all. I'm sure there is something that they can charge for without taking away from the current service.

I entered a few days back when I saw it on the front page, thanks for the heads up. I hope I win too, but odds are none of us will :/ I hardly ever win anything. lol

Quote from "Zhar" »

From the description you just gave, this game just went to my number 3 game tracking spot ^^.
Behind Diablo 3, and Gothic 4, and thats saying a lot :D.

And about the characters, you got any ideas that you could reveal ?

^Hey everyone, I just updated the site to announce the first look at a playable character in the game. I haven't officially given him a name yet, if anyone wants to offer suggestions I'd be glad to take them into consideration. Take a look let me know what you think.


http://www.DynastyTheGame.com

Quote from "Zhar" »

From the description you just gave, this game just went to my number 3 game tracking spot ^^.
Behind Diablo 3, and Gothic 4, and thats saying a lot :D.

Anywho, the buddha head statues actually sounds pretty incredible, would be neat to see a wall of them, and one cracked statue. Then venturing into the statue, only to find it hollowed out and full of cobwebs, spider egg sacks, and giant spiders. Thats what lept to mind for me anyways :D.

And about the characters, you got any ideas that you could reveal ?

Thanks Zhar, more characters will be presented and officially released on the site soon.

Quote from "Seth" »

I can't stress how neat this is that you're doing it all by yourself. I still check your website about every week to see what updates you've made. I can't wait to see your first city- there will be one, right?

Thanks Seth, yes the current version of the story will take the player through several different types of environments including a grand gothic imperial city. The plan for the initial demo is to include (Among other things) a small village environment from which the main character enters the story from after returning from years at war with outlying enemies of the state. The forrest area you are seeing right now is simply for game engine testing and will no doubt be improved upon to include ruins from the once peaceful asian style culture. Things like cracked Buddha head statues will be prime places to find nests of nasty enemies living in.


Zhar, you aren't missing much on the quicktime videos other than some work in progress music from the video game composer that is providing music for the game and some preview silhouette turntables of characters that haven't been announced yet officially. As the game continues to grow I will be sure to post more.

Thanks to all three of you for your support and interest!

Currently in the initial stages of developing the game system I am using the Swollen model as the Player Character. This is to allow me to work simultaneously on the engine as well as character/environment design. The main character is soon to be integrated into the game as it rapidly expands. Thanks for the question and interest Seth!

An early screenshot of the game whilst in development. Still a long way to go.
Two more screenshots are located on the main site's Media/Screenshots section if you are interested:
http://www.DynastyTheGame.com

-Jon

Hey everyone,
I thought since we all share a general interest in games around here that maybe some would find it interesting to follow my personal game project as it develops. It's just at the beginning of production so it wont be completed for a while, just thought I'd let everyone know what I was up to.

http://www.DynastyTheGame.com

Let me know what you guys think, I'm updating the site regularly now.

Yes, most likely they would have to alter the engine, if it all characters were going to all of a sudden have to be a combination of several different meshes to create a character, not only that, but all the characters they have made up to this point would have to be scrapped or they'd have to cut them all up into pieces and hope it worked out. Plus they would have to go back and rework the animations to be applied to the new divided mesh. There is no reason to make Diablo this way...it doesn't make sense for what it's supposed to be doing. Having characters be a combo of meshes is the exception to the rule not the standard practice by any means. It only makes sense to complicate things like that if it makes sense to game play, as I mentioned Quake works this way so that the head can be looking one direction, the hands and torso can play a shooting animation and the legs can run all independent of one another.

I don't think anyone is arguing that "It can't be done.", by going back and reading all the previous posts you can see clear examples of why the process of RANDOMLY generating spikes on this creature would be a task that is more indepth than simply clicking a few buttons or typing a few lines of code.

Yes indeed you can theoretically script something that would randomly generate spikes in designated locations on a mesh, but why would you do that? Why wouldn't you just edit the mesh by hand, it would end up taking less effort. The thing is though that you'd still have to take the time to retexture the new meshes anyway. The whole work flow you are suggesting would take more time than actually just making a new variation on the character. The reason Spore was brought up was because people are assuming that it's easy to drag one part of a model and place it in another position. You CAN detach part of mesh and then weld the points to another part of a mesh or another mesh all together, but from an edgeflow point of view and with polycount in mind it would make more sense to make a new character from scratch if you wanted pieces of a character in different positions. We've already brought up the topic of bones etc. You'd have to re-weight the new mesh to make sure it deforms correctly regardless of how it's created. You can't leave these things up to pure computer generation. Why take the time to have the computer make something then go back and test it and tweak it to make sure it's right when you can just make it right the first time yourself?

I don't think we need to accuse each other of not knowing what we are talking about, but I think a reasonable person will conclude that it will take a large enough degree of effort to warrant the original response by Bashiok that we are discussing.

The weapons and shields of creatures and players are in most cases separate objects in order to aid in collision detection. Also, for the specific case of the skeleton's they are symmetrical and randomly selecting different objects for them to spawn with on attachment points is a lot easier than rearranging a characters base structure. In theory the skeletons can be set up in the exact same manner as the player characters and have any armor/weapon placed on them in the same area as the avatar characters, although they most likely have a selection of only a few items designated for them.

I think you guys are thinking that this is something that can be solved solely by a programmer. While programmers are without a doubt very important to game development, it's not just a matter of a guy sitting at a keyboard and typing some code to get what you want. Give some credit to the hundreds of artists who design and create by hand every model in the game from scratch. A lot of the discussion here is based purely on imagination. Can what you guys are talking about be done? Surely. Can it be done easily to a game that is already in progress and wasn't planned from the start of the modeling process to function that way, thats a tad bit harder than you are suggesting.

All the characters are a SINGLE mesh, you don't put them together like Spore animals. The creation of the models in the game and how they are arranged is not a code intensive process in and of itself. Even the randomly generated environments have walls that are pre-modeled and just arranged in different configurations by the game engine. Having all the spikes as different meshes could work, but it on the most basic level would take more polygons and thats just a waste when you are trying to make an efficient model unless it's something that HAS to be done.