jcdenton

Seems this issue is still unresolved so I'll offer up some tips that worked for me, running every game (demo) that SpiderWeb Software has made on a Win7 box with a non-integrated video card. If you have integrated graphics than you can try this but it might not work for you. Such chipsets always seem to be made with cheap components that get stressed really easily, so stick to browser games. Laptops were never meant for gaming, get over it. -Before updating video drivers, be they Nvidia or ATI, you must uninstall the old ones, then you need to boot into Windows Safe Mode and run a software called 'Driver Cleaner' to clean the remnants. -Otherwise, you run the risk of random errors and incompatibilities. -Nvidia drivers do make an effort to give you the option of 'clean install' but it is always a good idea not to risk issues. -Once you've confirmed everything is completely uninstalled (Win7 just installs a 'VGA driver' by default in my case, leave that alone if that happens to you) then just install the new ones (make sure you aren't in Safe Mode when installing and be sure you RUN AS ADMINISTRATOR even if you had UAC disabled. Good idea do to this with every trusted program that you install so they get proper write permissions. -Update your DirectX from Microsoft's website, both DX9 and DX10/11 or whatever. -If the issue persists, you need further tech support to figure out your motherboard and get updated drivers for those as well. Ask your local computer geek to do it, as it can screw you up badly if a non-professional attempts to do so and messes it up.

Jerakeen, you're a mad genius! I didn't see the tooltip that comes up because I'm usually moving so many items at once that I don't bother reading it, especially with it being off to the side a bit. On Windows, to send an item directly to junk, you control-click it. *facepalm* You know Jeff is awesome and all but they ignored the fact that PC mice have 2 buttons. Right clicking would be a lot faster/easier. Wish it was an option. The MMORPG thing was a pipe dream. Someday perhaps, but with kickstarter funding it might be possible for Spiderweb Software to do something like that. Remember how primitive Ultima Online used to be? You realize how many utterly crappy F2P MMOs come out and yet tons of people still play and pay for those? Imagine a GOOD isometric-style MMO coming out! Just dreams and all, of course. Lilith, thanks for that heads up. I've done the initial dungeon quests and can now sell stuff to the blacksmith, finally! I'm kinda still hoping someone would have the patience to go through and make everything worth at least one coin, unless that already isn't an issue. Still would love a 'rest' feature to regen vitality like previous Spiderweb games have had.

Here's a mail I sent to Jeff with some thoughts and some pointers. I'm copypasta'ing so pardons if it is badly formatted. Insert tons of gushing here Just playing the fantastic and generous demo here, me being a broke college student, but it is still enough gameplay that rivals most other FULL releases like damn Call of Duty Modern Warfare or other games with 4 or 5 hour campaigns Different audiences, but still. Four or five hours at $60? Multiplayer hasn't always been enough of a reason to drop that kind of dough for me. Mini-review and random requests here, feel free to use whatever. Besides, my best ideas I keep to myself - (Request) Junk bag ease-of-use addition BEST FEATURE EVER PUT INTO AN RPG! Drag and dropping each and every single item to the junk bag gets really tiring and may be more difficult for those with arthritis or other issues who want to limit repetitive mouse movements. Why not have 'right click' be the 'send to junk bag' option? If I open inventory and something is either on the ground or in the pack, right click to send it straight to junk, no fuss no muss! Currently, right click doesn't even equip weapons/armor, just does the same thing as the left click. Another option is to have a keybinding to change the cursor into a 'send to junk' mode and then click on whatever to immediately send it to the junk bag rather than having to drag/drop everything. - (Request) Vendor in the town of Avadon Still haven't found one yet. If it wasn't for the junk bag being equivalent to a weightless portable-hole-of-storage, I'd have been forced to make tons of trips back and forth to leave piles of loot everywhere on the ground and hoping it would be there later. So why not make a vendor available at the start, even if they only buy your items and don't sell much, or only sell a limited quantity of certain things? For those who are kleptomaniac wh0res like myself, might not hurt to have *every* item in the game be worth at least one coin, please? Even could have it be a separate copypasta thing posted in the forums (similar to the one for glowing lockpicks or revealing secret passages). -Graphics/Aesthetics Both the actual graphics and the art style aesthetics are fantastic. Everything is very clean, has no visible borders/lines, and while staying square you do have some rooms with roundish centerpieces that draw attention away from the blocky hallways to be a truely wonderful and eye-pleasing choice! Easily the best looking game you've made yet! Animations are top-notch and great attention to detail =D Kudos to the artwork person/people who made the various loading screen pieces! - (Request) Object pickups and range Having 'worthless' objects able to be picked up seems an odd design choice; not really needing 'realistic' in a world where you can conjure up fire and ice at will. Not being able to pick up something unless you are within a certain distance of it or looking at it even if you can see it on the table near you but it won't let you pick it up until you're almost right next to it. This seems to vary by location and not really 100% sure how it works. Again somewhat 'realistic' but odd. Might not hurt at times to sacrifice 'realism' for game enjoyment. Running around hitting 'g' each time just to see what's on the ground might break the flow of the game. Objects aren't easily visible and have no sparkly or glowy effects without modifying files. Diablo 2 let you press the ALT key (on Windows) in order to view the object names and find loot easier. Perhaps having a similar feature or implementation of such might be beneficial. In some of your older games, you could hit the 'pickup' button and have letters appear over objects so you could pick up whatever you wanted without pulling up a separate screen every time. Even further, perhaps an 'auto pickup and sort' feature for those who don't want to miss a thing. Work on this however you feel you need to do so. Just thoughts, that's all. - (Request) Zooming the game in/out Environmental objects can be really tiny and changing the text to 'larger' doesn't seem to have a noticeable effect to me. Any way to add in a 'zoom' feature? Going back to Diablo again, in that game you hit the 'Z' key to zoom in really far and detailed/pixelated in order to closely examine your character or the environment. That was in 1996/1997. So why no zooming available here? >_> You already have unviewed areas darkened so zooming out a bit for a more tactical view wouldn't be cheating. -Using potions and regaining health Fantastic way to make things much more fluid and fun! No longer having to sacrifice your turn just because you ate some food or drank a potion - (Request) Combat planning mode Have a 'planning mode' available for combat where you plan out where your characters move and who they attack, and what they do in what order, then you confirm the actions and they all play out. Slows down combat a bit but would greatly help certain fights where you might easily click in the wrong spot for moving a character or might not realize they were close enough to be stopped by an enemy (Zone of Control), etc. Would also let players 'undo' the last move as long as they didn't confirm the actions. - (Request) Sounds I'd love to hear the 'battle yell' sound (or a better-version of it) from Nethergate be used for the 'Battle Frenzy' ability. It would seem to work well for that purpose and always elicited a chuckle from me whenever I heard it. Standard sound effects that I've heard so far, nothing super special but they work. - (Request) Music Would love to have the option of background tracks playing. You already have SOME music in the game, let us loop it please without having to use a separate program for that. -3 party members instead of 4 A design choice, but stronger for it. Makes battles that much faster -Good difficulty scaling that matches the stated difficulty Normal that is what it says instead of being too easy or hard, and hard/torment for those who want challenge -Medals/Achievements Nice for completionists, much appreciated that these were added in -Skill Trees Need a bit of work in designing them a bit more intuitively but a great effort nonetheless. Having people start at the bottom and go upward is an interesting design choice. - (Request) Stat Point Allocation Balancing Yeah it breaks things, but THANK YOU for having this in. So sick of so-called 'RPGs' out there that don't even let us stat-allocate! It has been in there since D&D first edition! Please don't remove it in the next game, just make it so that maxing the stat has to be done with a significant penalty, gimping yourself in another way. You could max DEX and be nearly impossible to hit, but your damage output would be severely gimped instead. Max STR and ignore DEX but you'd have a hard time hitting anything. Or start having a stated penalty if the difference between both stats is off by more than X amount. Be creative with it, you can figure it out without having to take away stat allocation O_O Or just put a hard cap that keeps a person from maxing it too high. - (Possible Bug/Confusing UI Stuff) Resistances Armor resistance? WTF? Shouldn't this be 'physical' resistance? That would make more sense. A bit confusing >_> Perhaps modify the armor resistance levels so that they can easily 'stack' and we wouldn't need to do tons of math just to figure out how much physical defense we have. There was the 'THAC0' system which seems a bit confusing at first but was intuitive when you understood it. Lower numbers = better defense. It could be reversed and have higher numbers = better defense instead, with a hard cap put into place to prevent 'unhittable' characters. - (Request) Vitality and 'Resting' I understand why this system exists (perhaps to encourage players to take breaks during long gaming sessions?) but why doesn't it slowly recharge outside of battle? WHY IS THERE NO 'REST' FUNCTION!? We could rest in D&D and many of your earlier games (at the risk of being ambushed by mobs if it was a dungeon) but that was our risk to take. Perhaps the two mages could use 'mana' instead of vitality, but that's your design choice to name it w/e you want as something universal instead of different names. I always imagined vitality to be yellow or orange or something, not blue like mana. Players who have played games before see certain colors in certain ways. Red is health, Blue is mana, Yellow/Orange are vitality/rage/whatever. Purple could be for warlocks/necromancers and dark magic. -Scarabs duplicating class skills Honestly, this may be convenient but also upsets people who invested the skill points to get those coveted skills. Scarabs are an awesome-enough idea that would really benefit from allowing unique game mechanics rather than duplication. I still understand why they are like that but it is just a thought. Making certain classes obsolete by scarabs sorta undermines part of your well-done class design. - (Request) Resizing of UI objects Not sure if this is an engine limitation or a design choice to not let anything be resized. While I greatly enjoy being able to hide and move around certain elements of the UI, I'd love to be able to resize the minimap (and zoom in/out), change the transparancy of it, or do the same with any of the other game windows, including the roster and the interface at the bottom. Maybe even an 'auto hide when not in combat' feature? I'd love to be able to resize certain game windows for easier and cleaner reading, especially since one of them overflows the text out of the box (the one that lists the credits and special thanks to so and so). - (Request) Augmentations/Runestones being more useful Fantastic implementation of this feature =D Runestones are a bit too rare to be used by many players until end-game, for fear of using up a runestone on a piece of gear they'll later replace anyways. One way to handle this would be a fixed coin cost to remove a runestone and possibly lose either the gear or the runestone itself as a tradeoff. Up to you how you wanna do it, though you could just be kind and let us keep both I think about the 'Materia' system from Final Fantasy 7 as one of the most flexible ways that the whole 'gem socketing' has been done while making it very easy and effective to experiment with different combinations at any time. - (Request) Crafting? I remember Temple of Elemental Evil having a (broken at release) feature of being able to gather certain materials and craft your own gear while paying a cost in XP and gold. This was later fixed by fans but the idea was fantastic and has worked fairly well (once it was fixed). Would love to see your take on this either in an update patch or a future game. - (Request) MMORPG? Ever considered making a multiplayer isometric RPG, perhaps MMORPG? If you could bring over your attention to detail and storytelling abilities, it may be quite the hit, especially if it were Free-to-Play with an 'ethical' cash shop that didn't sell power. By Mistah JC Denton, En Da Fresh!