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Corvus said:

Vista on the other hand will deal with 4 gig + ram (XP can only make use of 3 max i think)

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No.  32-bit OS's share the limit (which on XP I believe is about 3.3 GB) but either 64-bit XP or Vista ignores it.  I believe with Vista64 the actual limit is dependent on how much you pay for it.

Zaro said:

The attitude was unnecessary, all Vilhjalmr stated was that he wasn't going to run HDR.

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And suggesting you should spend time creating a non-HDR set of textures so people with ancient computers can 'enhance' the graphics for a game they can already barely run.

Most people can run the textures, but running HDR is significantly more demanding. There will probably be quite a few who will run the textures without hdr, which is why I'd like it to look good without hdr. Yes, it takes longer, but it's a better mod if it's accessible to more people.

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Yeah, and if you can't run Dx9 at all, it's unlikely you can get much out of shadows etc either.  It just boggles me that someone who has to already turn stuff down to make the game work would be complaining about 'enhancing' the graphics, since they can't fully utilise the existing stuff.

Some brief checking suggests cards have had Dx9 support since the 5xxxx series, and support of Dx9c (which I believe M&B requires for Dx9 features) since the 6xxxx series.  Shadows aside I was able to run M&B at full everything in 12x10 with a mid-range 6600GT, and people with cards four or more years old complaining their hardware isn't up to the task and projects should be scaled back in ambition disgusts me.

I was trying to balance to get good with hdr and without, but it's not possible. The only way non-hdr will look decent is with darker, highly contrasted textures. If you adjust textures and only have HDR running, you'll end up with good textures for HDR and horrible textures without hdr (too bland).

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Yeah you discussed this earlier in the thread, which is what I was referring to.  This is why I was curious on how much work is involved in creating a non-HDR set; if it's an insignificant effort (something that can be scripted etc) there's no reason not to, but if it requires actual effort you'd have to decide if it was worth it - which comes back to how much of the M&B playerbase are using ancient crapboxes.  I don't think you got any reply to your question regarding people wanting a non-HDR version due to hardware limits or simple preference - I know many people strongly dislike bloom effects in many games.

There are many laptops that are more powerful that desktops.

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And they cost three times as much.  Regardless, a tiny keyboard + trackpad or **** + sword choppy game = hilarious, no matter how much of a GPU you drop in.   It's even MORE hilarious if laptop users are complaining about hardware demands, when they decided to pay a massive premium for gaming laptops already.  A 260 is like $250 bucks or something; that's less than 20% of a gaming laptop.

Telapicus said:

Ah well at least I tried but someone might get there one day but what about a kinda message box that holds all the annoying death,damage,exp messages like on mmorpgs

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I don't get it.  At least you tried... what?  Tried asking someone to do something for you?  Wow, what a titanic effort! 

Moss, this is awesome.  The UI is one of the least polished areas of the game at this point, and removing as much of that as possible is cool.  As a suggestion, is it possible to leave the 'nearly dead' shield image in, so that there's no shield hud image but a warning that shows when the shield is about to break?  I don't use shields enough to have a 'sense' for how much damage the widely-varying types of shields can take.  Replacing it with something else (smaller, or less glaring, or even a tiny indicator near the reticle that appears) would be actually modern, but I have no idea how you'd do such a thing.

Vilhjalmr said:

Me.

And anyone who can't support the HDR stuff, which I suspect is a large number of people.

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What kind of mentality is required to download and use a 'Graphical Enhancement Mod' with a system so crap it can't even run the base game with decent options?  By all means, make an Enhancement mod for the population who have no shaders; they're the ones that have the performance to spare... oh wait. 

My understanding was that Zaro had decided some time ago to not create two versions, and the current textures are clearly designed with HDR in mind.  If changing the textures to a dinosaur-compatible set is going to take any serious effort or time, I doubt it's worth it - unless M&B has a huge population of people using 5xxx series cards or something.

Even more amusing - people playing on a laptop!  HA! 

Pnakotus said:

Names should at least be colour-coded so players aren't expected to immediately know who owns every single town in the game, but ideally there would be a history that was hyperlinked

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Hah!  Turns out there IS a history, buried in Quests, that is hyperlinked, and it's great stuff.  I feel a good way to make this more usable would be to have the 'announcement area' on the main screen also have these hyperlinks (and hopefully some colour-coding) in a scrollable, invisible window (like the chat windows in an MMO, for instance). 

Some new players have suggested to me that locations can be quite hard to find, so enabling the game to show you a location (whether by overlaying an obvious icon, or putting a nav arrow down, or whatever) in some way that can be accessed during conversations would help with the 'holy crap there's no way I can make it here in time' issue.

It's worth remembering that accessibility = sales.  I've only been playing 950/960 for several hours, and I already know where most of the relevant locations are in travel times, but making this easier for new players is always a good way to transform demo downloads into sales.  I'm very much enjoying 960, but I'm concerned the rough edges of the UI may make it difficult for new players to come up to speed.

I have never, ever understood the savegame complaints.  Even if savegames aren't compatible, you can import/export: if you want your equipment or army back, just ctrl-x to get them back.

By the time you've got a huge army and great equipment, the game is far too easy and boring.  I'm fine with starting over.

That people don't maintain multiple installs when the game's in 'regular patch mode' makes me laugh, though. 

Blademaster said:

The point is the concept, not the game. the game sucked!

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Yeah, but we already know 'blade awareness' is a good idea.  Die By The Sword was a terrible implementation of the idea, is all.

The game has a physics system now, so perhaps it's more likely.  I'd like to see even passive weapon awareness, so your spear poke through trees at rest etc.

Frankly, the only copy protection system to ever even HICCUP piracy was Starforce when it originally came out.  However you might feel about pirates - especially indy game pirates - you have absolutely zero chance of stopping it.  Rattle your sabre and cry your tears all you want, but there is nothing you can do to stop determined crackers.  'Copy protection' is more honestly 'put as many obstacles in the way of piracy to hopefully make purchasing more attractive', and with instant online distribution of cracks this is very difficult.  As Livonya says, you just have to make the best, most 'worth paying for' game you can, and remember how few people actually BUY games for PC (especially single-player only ones, as multi-heavy games are easier to lock down).

I could crack M&B very easily, but I own a serial (and was thinking of buying another, given the kickass work being done atm).  I also crack all my games as a matter of course, because I hate a) invasive copy protection and b) having to keep physical disks around and swap them.  If M&B's copy protection became more invasive in a (futile) attempt to stem piracy, I'd just crack it too.

This is great, if you don't mind I might try messing with it to emulate the old Pendragon 'culture, father's class, etc' system.  Can you increment starting level as well as stats?  That'd allow awesome 'pre game career' stuff, AND kill the sucky part at the beginning.

Clearly what in-progress mods need is more pointless nitpicking of the details of the largely irrelevant backstory.  They might as well not even finish it, really, since you don't like the setting which is covered by 'nobody really knows what happened'. 

People want a 40K mod for chrissakes.  And Resident Evil.  Do you REALLY think plausible backstories are a draw?

Vilhjalmr said:

Eh, I'd like to keep the map as natural looking as possible.

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I agree, I'd rather have the map by default having LESS huge floaty words than it does now - the suggestion is a map mode that shows you all the mouse-over info and some other info, at the same time.  You wouldn't play like that (well, some peope might... ) 

Since M&B is realtime and doesn't rely on die-rolls, implementing dual-wielding in a skill-requirment-heavy (ie massive penalties mitigated by skill, like horse archery) way would a) make ten-year-olds shut up and b) not be incredibly lame.  I personally don't have a problem if someone wants to waste their time dual-wielding, but the reason people want it is because in broken games dual-wielding is 100% win unbalanced nonsense.

And of course we'd need weapon durability then.    Hell, if we got shield bashes we could just make a shield that LOOKED like a gauche and leave it at that.

Quick turnaround on releases is awesome.  Great work guys.

An info overlay to give information like population, guys in locations, 'assist range' for parties/villages, trade routes and political borders would be good.  Much better than mousing over everything... but they'd need a smaller font to present it onscreen at once.

There seems to be a few bugs in the engine, as people with similar/better hardware have performance problems I don't have.  I also get pauses in combat, but they -don't- seem to be related to reinforcements (as they were in 7xx and 80x), they seem to just be periodic.  I get these pauses in large battles where everyone is on the map at the same time (due to battlesizer), and my framerate is otherwise 30-40+.  LOD changes probably wouldn't help this, as it's not pure grunt-related but something the engine is doing to itself.

Yeah I hear it's 100% that simple and this couldn't possibly cause problems!  BRILLIANT! 

Like I said, scaling LODs based on number of guys in battle would be fine (and easy to finetune, easy to leave out for people who think it's stupid, certainly easier to implement than a feedback-based system), but trying some 'throttle on fps' thing is just asking for problems.  Overcomplex solutions are NOT what M&B needs.  Simple, elegant, realistic solutions are always better, and since my suggestion achieves 100% of the goals while requiring less works AND less chance of problems... I can clearly see why we should demand a throttling system be implemented! 

So instead of just turning down the detail, you want a new system with bugs of it's own to do it for you?  My card sucks, and I can handle large battles (100+) except for the periodic pauses - which are BUGS, not features.  Trying to fix one problem with a complex solution that will include problems of it's own is amusing, but it better be toggleable in inis.  You guys can have all the constant LOD adjustments and badly timed dynamic model swaps you want, I'm fine just configuring my game appropriately and not owning really old hardware.

Amusingly, older FPS's tried to do this sort of thing, cutting out various effects etc at say 20fps.  It never worked, because it takes work to implement and thus causes lag of it's own, which causes more work to be done, which lags more.  Introducing overhead (in a nasty hack into an already not-very-efficient 3d engine) is an interesting way of making it FASTER.

Instead, try buying a $80 8600. 

If you REALLY wanted this kind of 'I'm poor' dynamic LOD, do it *before* battle, based on number of dudes.  Don't do it dynamically in a feedback loop that the system is going to skew - simply say 'battle involving more than 90 guys, halve my LODs'.  Doesn't need any processing in battle, doesn't swap assets, doesn't need a bug-filled hack, and is 100% configurable to people's systems.  Thus I suggest the ini allow you to specifiy LOD multiples for various battlesizes - this would even allow me to play 500-man battles, just by entering a line in ini.

It's amusing that 'oh noes the bad guys hit my horse' is apparently a flaw.  And not... y'know... quite sensible.  No, you can't block to protect your horse - what do you think this is?  The AI targeting your horse is a good addition, because it's ridiculous they wouldn't aim for the vulernable part.  I know I do the same on foot.

If your horse is constantly dying, its armour sucks or you're using it wrong.  As mentioned, the higher-armour horses are quite resistant to anything that isn't a spear-thrust during a charge.  Against middling enemy I can solo huge groups with a steppe horse (crap armour) and not get unhorsed.  I'm pretty rubbish at the game, really, compared to some of the old-timers here.  Frankly, anyone who says 'oh I'm way better than you' and then 'I get dehorsed all the time and it's the game's fault' is an idiot.  Like they say in the Dynasty Warriors manual, 'try not to get hit'.

Horse archery is easy, even at low skill, if you just slow down or stop.  If you think 'I can't bullseye headshots at full speed at level 1' is a problem, that's ALSO stupid.  I can't see the game getting slightly more difficult as a problem, since I've been playing since 731 and it's been pretty ridiculously easy once past level 10 or so.

If you find 'chill man, it just came out' offensive, and get your panties in a knot over people answering your question in a way you don't expect, and your sentences have zero punctuation, how do you function in society?  I guess you simply expect your mother to do what you tell her, along with everyone else?

Don't talk back to this guy!  The internet is serious business!