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It should be a little like Hitman.  Find a townsman, knock'em out, steal their gear.

*the guards are on the lookout for a suspicious looking milkmaid*

Hey guys!  Did you miss me?  Do you even remember me?  Ideas!

Bullet-time

Cell shading

Cattle herding

Peasant breeding

Rendering prisoners in battle.

Random encounters with Pokemon trainers on the travel map.

High-def rendered cinematic cut-scenes before battles and upon entering cities or dialogue with any NPC's.

Actually, that guy seems to have strung his bow with a braided line of armpit hair, which is quite common for medieval archers you know.  You see, archers were notorious cowards, which resulted from a lack of tempering on the front lines, and would try sneaking down off the walls, trying to blend in with support workers.  So the captains deprived the archers of their bowstrings, forcing them to use armpit hair.  This worked well, because nobody could mistake an archer with a bow attached his his pit.  Obviously someone who studied history very thoroughly contributed to this subtle touch of authenticity.

Good evening, fellas (and ladies.  *RAWR*)  I've been mulling over this one on my own for some time now.  We've only got a few options when scaling armor. 

    You can..
            1) painstakingly model each of the different versions of the same sets..
            2) merely "stretch" the armor as needed, at the risk of losing texture asthetics.
        or 3) painstakingly (but not as much) cut up armor into texture sections.    <---- my preferred idea

What I mean is, imagine we have a square quilt.  It is a red textured square with generic... ninja dragon print.  Yeah, badass...  Anyways, the red square is bordered by 4-inches of black fabric on all sides..  with flame decals..  awesome.  *blink*  Right..  so, let's say we want to make this kick-ass quilt twice as big.  But we don't want 8-inches of black border (with FLAME DECALS!).  It's just too much.  So we keep it at 4 inches, and add more fabric to the red square portion.  To keep it simple, we put in the additional fabric from the top and left side of the square, "sliding" it into place.  We're not disturbing the size or proportions of the original part of the square.  Merely adding more fabric to compensate for greater space.

That's how scaling armor should work.  Determine which textures are stretchable, and which are extendable.  Draw out the "supply lines" in the armor's structure.  A chainmail suit may have the chain texture slide up from the beltline, perhaps, to accomodate taller characters, and also slide from the mid-back, counter-clockwise around the body to accomodate the girthier warriors.  All of this done while the leather straps are stretched to fit, rather than slide from a corner of the armor's model.

And not all armors should properly fit the soldiers.  It's funny to see a vest refuse to close over the bulk of a fat soldier's stomache.  It gives him an honest "Why the crap did I give up cattle farming for this?" look.

So I say YES!  Give us character height, girth, body fat and muscle bulk sliders.  (And boob/booty size for the ladies.  *RAWR*)

How about the ability to hurl Bob-Ombs at your enemies? Mwa ha ha!

Personally, and I mean no offense, I think you're all missing the obvious application of a car in Mount & Blade... For the most appropriate usage, please see Army of Darkness. That car, while it would lose in a fight to a rocket launcher, is still all kinds of badass. =D

meatbag999 said:

Is it also work with crossbows?

Uzi huh?? interesting.

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Not so much with the crossbows, because you have to reload. But with the bow, it's pretty much as fast as you can click.

FurionLumin said:

Heheheh. I made an archer with high AGI, Bowskill, and edited a bow to have the highest speed (I think it was 255).

I was shooting faster than Legolas on speed.

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The trick is to edit the bow's damage to 1.. yes, that's right, 1. By doing so, you make the aiming reticle always pin-point accurate. To get the damage back, edit the damage of the arrows. That combination turns your bow into a semi-automatic uzi. Along with the bow speed, I mean.

OMFG!!! I've been waiting all day for that, and all I had to do was hit REFRESH!!!


*whips out the new .730 pistol and shoots Firefox*

I can't believe this browser opens up the cached version of the webpage.... BAH! Must... play....

Janus said:

It's been listed on the download page since earlier today, BTW.

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]

I still only see the .711 on the download page. Maybe it's my browser...

Janus said:

Watching the video, it looks quite cool how you can create your own creature/building/vehicle designs by attaching and removing parts, joints and bones, and by stretching and morphing parts of the anatomy as you see fit. The way the engine then determines by itself how the creature should move (from the video) is rather nifty too. No doubt there will be ways to break the system by making completely oddball designs, but nothing's perfect. That portion will still be quite cool.

I can see this game as being really really fun and cool to play around with for a while, before you tire of it and put it aside to never be compelled to play again.
In other words, a lot of wow factor but not a lot of staying power for most people (including myself). That said, I'm looking forward to it for all of the wow factor.

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I hear ya, Janus. I'm that way with a lot of games, whether those games are like that or not. But on a VERY positive note, the WOW factor in this game isn't only the gameplay itself, but the technology. Just as Will was talking about in the video, procedural content is a whole new industry to itself, and looking at what it's capable of in Spore, we should be able to see it implimented in other games. So even if the spark of this game burns white hot, for even a bright and shining moment, it will have blazed a trail for great games in the future.

Archonsod said:

I was excited, then I played Black & White II.

The connection?

Both games seem to have really interesting and fun looking parts, but require you to play through tedious restricted sections to access them.

While the whole "building a civilisation" thing looks great, the "play pacman" bit looks dull. Hopefully, Mr Wright will allow you to pick up at whatever stage and continue on. Otherwise, I'll consign it to the "Games which could have been amazing if the annoying tutorial\first level\initial restrictions weren't mind numbingly dull yet compulsory" pile.

Click to expand...

Well yeah, from the ground up, you're learning the interface. The controls. The tools you'll be using once you reach space. For once there, once equipped with that marvelous UFO, it's sandbox from there on. Equipped with the UFO, you can jump around from microbe state to civ state and anywhere else. You can edit creatures you find, splice two types of creatures together, start new life on another planet.

I haven't played Black and White II, but I did play the first game, and yes, I agree, the tutorial on that was horrible. It was inescapable, and tedious. But it was only so AFTER the first time I played it. As I recall, the first time through, it was pretty informative.

But look on the bright side. It's Will Wright. There'll be cheats.

The creature editor works on points, like currency. After the first time you play from scratch, should you choose to start a new planet from scratch, you can just cheat your way to the space age in no time. So worry not, bretheren, your 8-headed hydrakitty won't take long to create.

There are just so many things I can think of to do with this game. One of which... Flying Sharks! And possibly that plant from Little Shop of Horrors.. the Audrey II. Yeah.. badass.

Mwa ha ha!

Yeah, I know what you mean. But I've got my hopes up for this one. Watching the video again myself. Just... so... cool.. *drool*. But as for space battle, who knows? That would be pretty cool. I want to be able to nuke their sun. Mwa ha ha. Or their moon, as a warning shot. }

Yeah, from everything I've seen, this is gonna be a home run. If anyone has ever played E.V.O. for the SNES, this game will definitely strike home a little. It's got inspiration from lots of games, from SimCity and CIVS, to Pac-Man, and even stuff from movies, like Close Encounters. (manifested in the UFO's ability to attempt communication with alien planets through musical tones).

I've heard rumors of the ability to have cybernetic bodyparts on your creatures, and seen powerful UFO abilities, like Terraforming. A few blasts from the Terraforming ray will create volcanoes, and atmosphere on an otherwise barren moon, giving you a nice new little planetoid on which to build an outpost of your civilization. Or put up a city in a bubble!

So.. many.. things to.. impliment...

Might I suggest the GDC video, found at the following link..

http://www.planetspore.co.uk/videos.html

(note, the video is long, but sooooo *drool* worth it)

((side note: If you don't know what procedural means, you will when the video is over. Heh..))

(((Another side note: The page that link goes to says there's a 300k downloadable version of the movie file.. I just want to clarify that it's 300MB. So if you're on dial-up, you might wanna stick with screenshots.)))

I could almost break into song about this one. But musical cheesiness aside..

It's a sim, naturally. You begin life as a microbe, in a tiny.. 2-dimensional Pac-Manesque puddle. You eat the smaller algae stuff, avoid the bigger brown blobs. Eventually, as you eat enough, you get access to the editor, to mutate and change your little organism. Add flagella to move faster, a spike with which to defend yourself, or other things to grant other benefits. As you progress, the aquatic world in which you live zooms out, and eventually you evolve into multi-cellular life, in a 3-dimensional aquatic world. There are still things to eat, things trying to eat you, etc. When you have advanced enough, eating things and whatnot, and you find a mate, you can lay an egg, and get the more advanced editor. You're now manipulating things like the skeleton of the creature, adding things like flippers, mouth parts, etc..

From the ocean, you can eventually move on to land, in a fully adapted ecosystem. Per your own choosing, you can advance your creature's brain to the point where it becomes sentient, and there the game turns into Civs, kinda. You now have a hunter/gatherer tribe of your creature's specie, and you're competing with other tribes of your same specie. As you develop into villages, and cities, other cities will be raising up, too, with different culture. You can trade with them, establish diplomatic relations, or go in full on war with them. You could even convert them "culturally" (that's code for religiously). The creature editor is even adapted to let you edit and design their buildings, the items they use, the vehicles they drive/fly. (If you choose not to go on land, you can develop an undersea civilization).

There are no limits to the creatures you can create. The animations are all done procedurally, so depending on how you put the skeleton together, it may walk, fly, or swim differently. You can make a spider creature, you can make a dinosaur, you can make a 17-legged octopus with a dozen eyes and 5 bird beaks. Will Wright made a three-legged lizard thing with a hand on its tail, and made a carnivorous Carebear.

Eventually, you will dominate the planet, and can move on into outer space, visiting other planets in your solar system. You can use your UFO (which you get to design) to suck up lifeforms from a planet, and deposit it on a new planet. (Supposing the new planet as an atmosphere, the creatures won't explode). You can travel beyond your own solar system to the rest of the galaxy. You can travel outside of the galaxy, to other galaxies, and the rest of the universe at large.

The creature files are 1kb each, and because of this, the game will easily connect through the internet to pull creatures from a central network, where people's creatures are automatically uploaded. It will use these creatures to populate your world. If your ecosystem needs a flying carnivore, it'll find one that someone created. And if it can't find what it needs, or you don't have an internet connection, the game will come with hundreds of thousands of premade creatures. Because the files are so small, though, uploading and downloading is seamless. As you traverse the universe, you can even visit a planet someone else has created.

Now it's not really multiplayer. That planet is just a copy of someone else's. What this means to you is that if the sentient race on that planet doesn't exactly welcome you with open arms, feel free to decimate their entire world.

The game is the ultimate sandbox game. And you can find out so much more about it at http://spore.ea.com

So this is what Heaven is like... sweeeeeeet.