suggestions

[Jurrich]

some suggestions:

- mark quests or colour code quests so that it's clear whether they're tech or nature quests.
- "town portal" item. a favourite in any hack-and-slash, if you're going to let people insta-blink to towns on the map (even while in combat) then it makes sense to also offer this ability as a real ability, either through items or even a special skill requiring a decent amount of power points.
- enable locations on the map as blinkable when you discover them. If I run through the map and discover 2 enemy settlements and another town, why can't I blink to those places on the map? also, why is every NPC in the town "disabled" until they're relevant to a quest? I'd like to at least be able to walk up to the merchant and sell all the items I found while exploring the map.
- fix the map; why isn't my map recording everywhere I walk, but instead showing odd patterns?

I'd also like to see a tad more logic in the game

- the stronger I get, the faster I should be able to use a particular weapon. if I have a "normal" speed weapon then I would imagine that at strength 30 I should be able to hack and slash with it a lot faster than at strength 10, even if it does comparatively low damage.
- why can't I pick up items that are on a ledge that isn't even as high as I am?
- why can't I shoot down hills? I would imagine that shooting downhill *increases* my archery range, not decreases it... This is probably related to line-of-attack being restricted to the same elevation level, but this makes no sense for ranged weapons, all that should be put into the attack consideration is "is there a line of sight".

Then finally there's something which I like as gamer, but think is probably not supposed to happen if we're being just a bit logical too:

playing for nature I got the bark skill to fortify against elemental attacks. I bound it to "7", so it's in my quickuse options. I then foolishly did some tech quests and ended up 5% into the tech side. There went my strength and agility modifiers, but remarkably I can still use that fortify skill - I just can't add points to it anymore.

on a related note, skills of which I've stripped the skillpoints while talking a skill master do not seem to disappear if bound to a hotkey. I initially skilled upon heal a little, but then discovered I never use it since potions are dropped enough and the auto-heal/powerup skill is really really useful. this skill is now "greyed out" in my hotbar, but I can't click-drag it out of there, it just sits there, which is a tad annoying.

Then, an issue of space, from what I know of the french version:
if this game comes on a super big DVD, why in the world does it need to shovel 9 gigabytes of data to my harddisk, when I have a decently fast DVDrom for it to only copy those bits that it needs for the level I'm walking through? I'd like to see the option to only copy the necessary loader files, so that I can play with the DVD in my drive instead. when a game is this big, I don't really want it to dump all its data on my HD when most of that data's not even going to be in use during the game; only a few hundred MB of RAM will be required for the base data of each level walk.

And on a final note, as a non-technical user observation, I'm playing the game on low settings, because all the fancy physics don't interest me that much, the game is good enough without them, and seeing particle sprays and flowing water eye candy only means my computer has to work ten times harder; there does not seem to be a genuine reason for the game to have these high system requirements (or be this slow even on "low" setting at 1024x768), it feels very like at low setting the physics engine that gets installed alongside the game is doing more harm than good.

[Gorkk]

Originally Posted by Jurrich

- "town portal" item. a favourite in any hack-and-slash, if you're going to let people insta-blink to towns on the map (even while in combat) then it makes sense to also offer this ability as a real ability, either through items or even a special skill requiring a decent amount of power points.

What's the point if you can do it without those items?

Originally Posted by Jurrich

Then, an issue of space, from what I know of the french version:
if this game comes on a super big DVD, why in the world does it need to shovel 9 gigabytes of data to my harddisk, when I have a decently fast DVDrom for it to only copy those bits that it needs for the level I'm walking through? I'd like to see the option to only copy the necessary loader files, so that I can play with the DVD in my drive instead. when a game is this big, I don't really want it to dump all its data on my HD when most of that data's not even going to be in use during the game; only a few hundred MB of RAM will be required for the base data of each level walk.

Simply because all PC games fully install on HD since HD have enough space for it. The good point is you can then play without the drive... well, except for those silly and crappy "copy protection" publishers put there, using the DVD as a dongle.
The main reason for putting everything on HD by the way, is that a HD is waaaayyy faster than a mere DVD.

[Jurrich]

What's the point if you can do it without those items?

Perhaps I wasn't clear on what these items should do (I kind of assumed everyone playing silverfall would have at least played one diablo), "town portal" items don't "port you to town" but create a "portal" through which you can step, and you'll end up in town, where the portal will be available to walk back through once, so you don't have to run all the way back to where you used it.

Essentially this is a feature consistency request: "if I can teleport myself to a town, then why can I not teleport back to where I did that?" Of course, as a dev you could argue that if you got somewhere then there is a safe path between that point and the town so you "run" back or something and the "teleporting" is just cutting out the running, but then you forgot that it works both ways; one should be able to run back to that initial point since the safe path doesn't disappear until you restart the game.

Simply because all PC games fully install on HD since HD have enough space for it. The good point is you can then play without the drive

That's a slight overgeneralisation, not all PC games do this at all.

That said, playing without having to use the drive is only good if you *want* to play without the drive. Most of us hate having to hear a DVD spin up and down ingame just to load the next item, but let's look at silverfall as a game experience. On a P4 2.8 with 3Gb of ram and the game installed on a 7200rpm HD with an estimated 32MB/s transfer rate, moving from one level map to another is not instant. It's not even a 10 second wait. It's a LONG wait, and can take up to 30 seconds. Current DVDrom drives have a pretty good transfer rate, between 12 and 15mb/s - a bit of math bundled with psychology shows us if it takes 30 seconds anyway, having it load from DVD in another 30 is perfectly acceptable; if I can wait half a minute, I can wait an entire minute if I'm going to be running around killing stuff for the next hour at the least.

This, to my mind as a discerning user who has a vast amount of HD space and does not want programs to decide that they can blindly claim an almost 10 Gb cut of that (there are better uses for that space), means that not being offered the opportunity to load data from DVD instead of from HD is bad, not good.

remember, "good" is subjective. If you think that "no DVD is good" without taking a moment to wonder why that would be good, then that's your choice, but for me as representative of that other group of users, not having to use the DVD does not automatically equate to good; 9Gb of not-strictly-required HD hogging is instead quite bad.

So, because there are different kinds of users, my recommendation was to add the option to custom install and load from DVD. This won't affect you so you will be just as happy with how the game installs as you are now (you keep the option to fully install), and in addition will make another user group considerably happier than they are now(they get to fill a considerable amount of space with data they find more deserves it). It would certainly improve the standing of the game for people with 80Gb or 120Gb harddisks who can run this game (which would be everyone on a 1 year old commercial prebuilt system, and yes, those can run silverfall just fine)

[Gorkk]

Originally Posted by Jurrich

Perhaps I wasn't clear on what these items should do (I kind of assumed everyone playing silverfall would have at least played one diablo), "town portal" items don't "port you to town" but create a "portal" through which you can step, and you'll end up in town, where the portal will be available to walk back through once, so you don't have to run all the way back to where you used it.

I played D2 a lot, but your suggestion was obviously not clear enough. Now it is And then, yeah, why not.

Essentially this is a feature consistency request: "if I can teleport myself to a town, then why can I not teleport back to where I did that?" Of course, as a dev you could argue that if you got somewhere then there is a safe path between that point and the town so you "run" back or something and the "teleporting" is just cutting out the running, but then you forgot that it works both ways; one should be able to run back to that initial point since the safe path doesn't disappear until you restart the game.

Originally Posted by Jurrich

That's a slight overgeneralisation, not all PC games do this at all.

Actually I don't know any published the past 5 years that don't.

Originally Posted by Jurrich

[about full install]

Well, for no DVD use (well, which you can't with their "protection", but still has some upsides even with it):

• DVDs are noisy
• DVDs are fragile, and the more their used, the faster they'll break
• Intensive use of DVD drives lead them faster to break down
• HDs are fasters than DVDs (and when 30s is already long, too long for lots of users, 60s would surely be out of question for most users

On the other side, for no "Play from DVD" possibility: games are usually compressed on the DVDs (as on the CDs) in order to use less space. I think (not sure) that Silverfall is distributed on a single layer DVD (double layer is more expensive), and hence has to be compressed to fit on one. To fit 10 GB you need a dual layer DVD or two DVDs. Hence more costs, for which they have to make all customers to pay more, not only those very few who would enjoy playing from the DVD (and honestly, considering the vast amount of HD space we have for relatively cheap nowadays, I don't see why someone would want to play from DVD with less perfs, have their DVD break faster, have their DVD drive break faster, just to save some unused space )

[Jurrich]

The French full version game takes up about 7.7Gb on the DVD. If there's compression going on there, there's not a lot of it, which is why I object to merely offering a full install. if the game fit on 4.3Gb and had to be unpacked to more than 8Gb, it'd be a different story, but that's not the case.

As for DVDs wearing out and DVDroms breaking, again my suggestion does not affect *you*, it just means that everyone who does not care about those things (for instances, I personally couldn't care less that it reduces the lifetime of my game disc or drive - a drive will not really fail within two years, costs $30, and to be honest I doubt I'll still be playing this two years from now).

so again, this is not about "removing full install capability", this is about *adding* the ability to also run the game partially from disc. No matter how much you'll never do this, there will be plenty of people for which the size of this game means that running it with the DVD in the drive will be perfectly acceptable because they're not bothered about the effects that you highlight as bad.

[warkhan]

Originally Posted by Jurrich

lotsa things

Believe me dude, you don't want a run a graphic intense game like this from your DVD. Even the fastest dvd player available is nothing compared to the slowest HD. Anything other than a full install and the game will lag like crazy, plus you'll end up waiting like 9 minutes for next level to be loaded.

I completely agree with you on the town portal idea though.