Thoughts and Suggestions for Book III

[Aldbeski]

i mostly like the idea of cursed items it sounds great
also don't forget about the ropes for mages and healers

[CrazyBernie]

also don't forget about the ropes for mages and healers

Are we going on a witch-hunt??

[AstralWanderer]

Some interesting ideas - corruption in particular could be tied in with spell use (the more you cast, the worse you get) which could help balance the mage classes. It would however be quite a thematic change for Eschalon (though one that could be justified plot-wise).

Another way to balance mages would be to simply create a third magic skill and move some of the spells into that, making the Elemental school a little less of a jack-of-all-trades.

What I would like to see is more flexibility with screen resolutions. One game I picked up over 10 years ago (Age of Wonders) can run in any resolution from 640x480 to 2560x1600 and it would be nice to see this choice in Book 3 - scaling the graphics for higher/lower resolutions shouldn't be too hard (and line-of-sight limitations as to which NPCs and hostiles are visible would counter any advantage a larger view would offer) while the user interface could be modified for widescreen displays (e.g. by moving the bottom buttons alongside the screen).

Providing an option to replay books 1 and 2 with the book 3 engine, as a single campaign, would be a nice touch also - though some re-balancing would probably be needed (maybe leave that as a community mod?).

[GuideBot]

Multiple resolutions in 2d games is a lot of work. More interface art, dealing with the player being able to see more, and so forth. Even things like the button size needs to be changed, as 32x32 pixels is pretty big at 640x480 but barely perceptible at 1680x1050. I'm happy with the options available. One thing I would like is some support of widescreen without stretching, somehow, but I can't think of a viable way to do it. My monitor is connected by a VGA cable which I believe prevents me from being able to stop the stretching.

One idea I just had - The skill trainers have caused a lot of debate because the encourage min-maxing. One possibility would be to have the trainers refund skill points if the player is already at a certain skill level. For instance, player trains to level 2 in elemental. Player finds the elemental trainer. For 100 gold, the player gets back 3 skill points, for 200 gold the player gets back an additional skill point. For 300 gold they get an additional point in elemental. So the order in which they skill up / visit the trainer doesn't really matter. I don't recall if the 100/200/300 gold figures are correct - if they aren't pretend they are

[AXS]

Maybe there could be another way dealing with trainers, if they trainers could train you a limited number of times without taking in account the current skill level.

If you train from 0 you can only get to 8.

But if you do when in level 8 for example it could be to 16.

Or intercalated 3 points in character creation 2 from trainer , 2 from level ups plus 2 more trainings etc,etc .but in the end they would be 8 , no matter what plus 2 from book.

To rebalance a little, its costs, could be calculated like this: 100 gold per training level plus 15 per actual skill level so the first time you train , if you are at level 20 in swords it would be 100 plus 300.and the second time 200 plus 330 (maybe mercantile skill could reduce the cost by 10 per skill level to compensate a little it could get REALLY expensive )

When trained 8 levels , trainer response could be "i have teach all of my tricks and experiences of this skill , you´ll have to prosper by yourself from now on." so that is logic he can train you in level 1 as in level 20.

[SpottedShroom]

For maximum resolution flexibility without having to make a ton of new graphics, it might make sense to add support for image scalers of the kind used by DOSbox, MAME, Exult, etc. Some examples:

http://scale2x.sourceforge.net/

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Scaler

Of course, the downside of scalers is that the best looking ones eat a lot of CPU time. I'm also not sure how easy they would be to implement in BW's chosen toolkit.

[GuideBot]

A scaler will also make things blurry if the end resolution is not an exact multiple of the start resolution. They work well for things like DosBox as most of those games are 320x240 or so and so there are a number of exact multiples of that that are still smaller than today's monitors (e.g. 640x480, 960x720, 1280,960). Book 2's resolution was 1024x748 so it won't scale up nicely unless you're using 2056x1496 or larger.

[AstralWanderer]

Multiple resolutions in 2d games is a lot of work. More interface art, dealing with the player being able to see more, and so forth. Even things like the button size needs to be changed, as 32x32 pixels is pretty big at 640x480 but barely perceptible at 1680x1050.

I can't agree on the button size issue - just creating ones for the highest resolution and using your graphics-software-of-choice to scale them down for lower ones should work (or even scale on the fly whenever a new resolution is selected).

The greater view distance is a valid point but one which can be handled by only showing NPCs/hostiles within a certain distance of the player, as I noted above (and could be linked to Perception, giving it more use to non-spell-casters). Given the ability of most RPGs to handle multiple resolutions (even the Infinity Engine series, via a mod) the current fixed resolution of Eschalon is, in my view, an unwelcome anachronism.

[AstralWanderer]

For maximum resolution flexibility without having to make a ton of new graphics, it might make sense to add support for image scalers of the kind used by DOSbox, MAME, Exult, etc...

Similar scaling is already done by the graphics card when playing fullscreen on an LCD monitor. It would be better quality-wise though to have maximum resolution tiles scaled down for smaller screens than the current "lowish resolution scaled up".