YouTube video by Muel Austria Final Fantasy VIII - Deling City: The Assassination - #42

Example of a dialogue-heavy segment in Final Fantasy 8. Characters move and animate a lot within the panning frame. There are 2 renders within the house — a close-up shot is used briefly for a conversation between 2 characters before cutting back to the wider group

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPK_...

While fully 3D games can use this modern cinematic style, the expense of creating 2D environments or pre-rendered 3D views pushed older games to present dialogue more like old movies, dominated by long and medium shots with few cuts

shmuplations.com/ff8/

I'd argue this boring blocking stems from the homogenization of cinematography in film, as argued well in this video essay. Every shot is a close up, and we hardly ever get to see how they relate to the environment

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKx5...

I made a compilation of these to involuntarily raise the Insight level of whoever gazes upon it

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Mass Effect

Avowed

3rd-person RPGs really have to find more inventive ways of presenting dialogue than OTS shot/reverse shots. I understand that not all dialogue scenes can have expressive directing because budget, but come on, JRPGs with static character portraits for different emotions are more fun to look at

Every sentence that starts with "As a cyclist myself…" is a dead giveaway that the speaker thinks bikes are only for recreation, not transportation

More broadly, "As a [X] myself..." nearly always prefaces some concern trolling bullshit that marginalizes [X]

To me, respect and reverence for an original piece of art means preserving it, warts and all, not remaking or garishly modernising it to sell back to the masses

"If we create small, deep, object-rich simulations that allow multiple solutions to tough problems, players will inevitably stumble upon the 'real' goal of an RPG — to grow a unique alter ego."

"Allow players to make choices and then show the ramifications of those choices... Games should be rife with ethical dilemmas rather than right and wronge choices. 'What are you fighting for?' and 'How do you achieve your goals?' should be unavoidable questions."

"Every game problem should have multiple solutions, by design or because alternatives arise naturally out of the simulation. How players deal with the problems they encounter... should affect subsequent interactions with the denizens of the game world..."

"Conversations should reveal things about NPCs; your responses should reveal things about you... Conversations are made interesting by the things they reveal about the characters speaking, the game world, and the world's state — not the number of branches on a conversation tree."

"Here's a radical concept: let players control when and if combat happens. Our goal should be to make combat an option, but not always the best, and never the only one. Encourage noncombat interactions, especially conversations"

Every time I find an old piece of Warren Spector soapboxing about how computer RPGs should go beyond character classes, dice rolls, and combat encounters in favor of dense & reactive simulations of human spaces I wonder...

...has no one ever told him about Pathologic?

Also got one lady saying there aren't enough old white men in the city council because the Democrats are importing immigrants to win elections unfairly

Yep, bike lanes are a key component of the Great Replacement plan, y'all just wait

Joined Nextdoor to read posts from people crashing out about new bike lanes in my city while concern trolling NIMBYs offer support

"It truly does seem, sometimes, that the goal is to intentionally punish motorists, rather than make things safer for cyclists"

lol

I also have a new and improved "CTB Wait Addon" for FF6, which makes the combat entirely turn-based, like FFX's "Conditional Turn-Based" battle system. For folks who don't like the time pressure of ATB

(I have already done the same for FF7 and FF9)

If you compare with vanilla FF6 ATB (below), you'll notice that the relative speed differences between characters are irrelevant, as the gauges fill up during animations and backlog the queue

The old "Classic ATB Enhanced" paradigm is still available as well

So I ultimately gave FF6 the same rule as my FF7 ATB hack: Time can flow during the current animation until any character is ready to act. This is "Modern ATB Enhanced" for FF6

FF7's Recommended ATB was designed as a response to the flaws of FF6's ATB system, which allowed time to flow during all animations as a technical improvement over FF4 and FF5. While a strict animation pause makes FF6 play like the other SNES titles, it deserves a modern approach

FF7 Comprehensive ATB hack PSX hack coming soon

FF7's Recommended mode is a bit over-engineered though; apparently no one understood exactly how it worked until I looked through the assembly code

I simplified it: time pauses during the current animation once any character is ready to act

vimeo.com/1055318760

After making my original ATB hacks for FF6 and FF9, I took a look at FF7. That game has a really interesting "Recommended" mode. Instead of strictly pausing time during animations, it allows a bit of time to flow before stopping to ensure the queue doesn't get (too) backlogged

I got some helpful criticism on my FF6 ATB hack:
- It makes battles a bit slower
- It makes battles unfair when used with difficulty hacks with high speed monsters
- Status effect timing is not quite right

So I went back into the workshop to rebuild it from the ground up

you can basically build full ranged but you're gonna want to do that later and take some points in unarmed for this one sequence where they make you fight a prison rat before you have any party members

classic crpgs are great because they really place so much emphasis on how you can approach any situation from [noticing you're building for stealth] oh the stealth skill doesn't work in this, it's not actually implemented

Yes, let's!

But really, the key point is that the world modeling available to the designer is largely separated from the engine architecture. I didn't have access to the leaked C++ source for 2 years of SS2 modding and it didn't affect my output much (except for some hacky stuff that I wish I knew)

Oh, Sean Barrett's twitter profile is protected, so you need an account to view the tweet

In any case, it's just some screenshots from the powerpoint I linked

The powerpoint? Try this link:

chrishecker.com/Game_Object_...

My study of the engine that Ice-Pick Lodge created in 2005 for Pathologic leads me to believe it works on similar principles. The underlying engine handles the major systems that require performance, while 90% of the gameplay is driven by xml data and virtual machine scripts