The Drunken Lizard Pub

A hardy welcome to all who are visiting the Drunken Lizard Pub for the first time or the 50th time! The rules are lax here, so behave yourself and have fun.

There's a big Q&A thread down in the Eschalon: Book I - General Game Chat forum, which is a good place to start if you want more info on our first game which is currently in the works. Otherwise, we hope you take the time to register and make the DLP a regular stop.

...Is yet to be determined....
...When it's finished....
...Maybe, keep checking the website. If or when we need more testers we'll post a sign up link there!

halløj.. Nice to be here:)

Welcome! Glad you found the place.

Care to give us any secret updates? By the way, the game is looking great and thanks for the Mac support.

Well I guess it's only fair to give you people a small, private update since you were clever enough to your way here.

Right now we're working on an interview with RPGVault which should give everyone a fresh look at what we've been doing recently...that'll be up on their site in a couple weeks and will probably have at least one new screenshot with it. We are also working on putting together a trailer for the game showing video clips of game play. That will be finished sometime later this summer.

Strictly speaking of development, we've recently improved the fidelity of our ToHit routine, moving from a classic d20 style roll to a calculated "ToHit Ability" percentile. This allows us to include a greater and more detailed array of bonuses and penalties into the ToHit roll than before. A d20 roll is great when you are RPGing by pen and paper, but it's just too simplistic for a computer game. We'll try and have an official update posted on the main page sometime soon.

Yay for secret info!!!

I feel important



Looking forward to the interview and especially the trailer...

Edit: on the matter of d20 no being good enough, isn't kotor using some sort of d20 system? I could be wrong though, don't know much about stuff like that

A 1d20 roll gives a 5% increment of accuracy when you use it for percentile rolls, which is really what a ToHit roll is: what is the chance your attack will strike the enemy. We needed more accuracy for this roll due to all the modifiers we are applying, so we moved to a true percentile calculation for the ToHit roll.

We don't use the d20 system in Eschalon. Our original ruleset just used a 1d20 ToHit roll, which proved to be not accurate enough after loads of testing.

As you said, d20 works well when in a general PnP session.

The only thing I ask is don't go to the other extreme either. For instance, does anyone here remember the "Rolemaster" system which had tables for tables?

That could drive your development staff looney. Mind you I'm not saying they aren't looney already, but it could make it worse.

Grayth

That's really the magic of computers...why "dumb down" or simplify a complex action such as "firing an arrow in combat" by reducing it to a couple of dice rolls? A computer really doesn't mind juggling 20 different modifiers and a few statistical table lookups, and then just spitting out the results: you have a 47% chance of hitting that particular target from your current position.

There's still lots of play balancing to be done yet before the process is perfected, but so far we've been happy with the updated ToHit system.

Oh yes, we're way past looney at this stage!!

Thanks for the information, good to hear that d20 isn't being used. It always felt like something meant for PnP, but since I never have played those it seems to just complicate things ("I have a 3d20 chance of hitting something" vs. "I have a 35% of hitting something").

Looking forward to the RPGVault interview and whatever else you guys have up your sleeves...

I better get into beta for this!!!

hey,

just read about this game this morning at rpgvault - it looks and sounds awesome! its the kind of game that i've been looking for.

i have a question which may, or may not be deemed secret.. but what the hell, this is the secret form, right? just wondering how you guys are getting mac and pc support - are you using java?

(bonus for mac support, btw - more of the large companies should follow the example of the few little guys that manage it)

anyhoo.. i'm looking forward to this, as it looks great.

david

Hey David,

We're using a cross-platform language called BlitzMax for most of the development. Other than a few platform-specific oddities, the port will be a straight forward compile on the Mac side.

We also have the option for a Linux port using this language, but we don't want to commit to that just yet.

Hi,

I've never heard of BlitzMax before, but it looks like it's fairly popular. Cool stuff.

Anyway.. best of luck with finishing the game!

david