Originally Posted by khrotos
No... however, let me ask you this, did you experience the slowdown just in areas with shadow-casting lights such as torches that came on at night or even in locations with no "night-lights"? Did you have performance problems in undergrounds?
Heh... sorry, I just noticed I accidentally edited your message... lets try that again. Not used to having an edit button where my quote button used to be ; p
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Underground areas are amazingly smooth, so no problems there (except for the area with all the fire in the obsidian caves and the area with all the soul cages in the demon war camp... but that was due to the overload of particle effects or whatever).
I experience the slow down problems in areas with shadow casting lights and also areas with no night lights. Whenever the sky turns dark my FPS takes a major hit. Maybe it was all the blue hues (nights aren't really that dark... just very bluish)?
I've heard other people mention that night caused slowdowns for them, so I have to believe something is going on there but I can't imagine why a shift in light color and intensity would cause that. We'll have to look into it.
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Posting quite some time after this one I quote, though I figured it was worth noting. In your research for means of digital distribution, I'd recommand considering StarDock Impulse too. I know first hand that some people really dislike Steam, and on the other hand really like StarDock's company spirit. Note that of course both channels are not incompatible, far from it, and that getting both means more exposition
On another unrelated topic, I hope you'll keep the localization system you had for Titan Quest and extend it for voices. Even if the game is first released with only English texts and voices, the option TQ had to select various text languages, and ease of accessing those texts for translation was great. Unfortunately it wasn't available for voices (you had to replace English voices with the voices of another language, e.g. French). If the game sells well and there is demand, you can then provide the translations, or simply let the community do the job too. I remember that for Titan Quest, there had been a time a community project to provide French voices for Titan Quest, which finally fell short as THQ France provided those voices
Besides the system lets you have the good side of both having the game in multiple languages and having to maintain only one version of the game (i.e. no specific patches for this or that language, which is a nightmare on lots of games)
PS : I really wish you the best to get this project to birth. I along quite some others in the French community will seek it out when it'll come to life
Hi Gorkk
We are considering Impulse and various other services besides Steam, although Steam does have one of the largest audiences, so we will definitely be there.
We are using the same localization system but it could be some time before we're able to localize in other languages. I'm not sure that we'll be able to afford V/O in other languages just due to the cost unless our initial launch turns out to be more successful than our baseline estimates.
We realize that a lot of our potential audience is overseas though and will try to do whatever we can to accommodate them.
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Nice to know
Good news. For V/O too you'll use the same thing as in TQ with no modification? As TQ didn't allow to have several different V/O side by side, unlike for texts. Don't think making the same mechanism for V/O as for texts would be too much
And no worry, most people don't expect you to make V/O for multiple languages, at least on release. Even if texts are only in English, as long as the community has easy means to add localizations, it's a great step forward)
I can assure you the community overseas will help you accommodate them
One of the largest audiences is not enough. Please don't do as DoW2, Empire Total War and Blood Bowl. I couldn't buy them as I don't like this mega DRM Steam is.
I like Steam. I already use it, but perhaps the more Digital Content Distribution Systems you can get, the better..
My idea:
0) Make the game a no-DVD exe from the get go.
1) Release the game via torrents (free for you, no middle man)
2) Sell keys to get it out of demo mode on your own site via PayPal.
3) Mail DVDs for an extra fee for people so inclined to own something.
4) Sell a special DVD box that has a nice map and things like a monster manual, item catalog and a spell book for skills/masteries.
Sell unlock codes, which you could tie to activation keys so that they were non-transferable and inspire users to activate, which unlock special items. The first activation could give a special pair of boots for example.
All the money goes straight to you, except for PayPal's part. And you make your gamers happy with noDRM and people who can afford it will buy the box set and have cool stuff outside of the computer to look at.
You just need to hire a programmer to write the server code that handles activation and unlock code generation.
I an ideal world, maybe. Any such protection would be cracked in 20 minutes (not that any DRM wouldn't be cracked in the same amount of time).
Personally, I'm not a fan of DRM and I definitely don't believe that one pirated copy equals one lost sale. I would love to see a mainstream game released following the model you mentioned, but I doubt anyone in game development could look at it as anything but a huge risk.
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