Eschalon: Book II

We just made our official Book II announcement on the website. There are a few early pre-alpha shots posted there.

http://basiliskgames.com/book2.html

This looks really great.

Might consider buying this in the future when I got more time.
Graphics look very good.

Cool, I just came from a huge announcement on Blues.

Would you like a tissue for that? o.O

Awesomeness! I am SOOO looking forward to playing this. As the Amercans say: "Hurry up already!" which doesn't make sense to me as an English person ;-p

That looks absolutely fantastic!! These kind of games are not my bag but I'll definately have a go when the demo is released.

Looks great. The first one seemed pretty cool, so I'm sure this second one will be even better.

pimpage!

http://www.binaryjoy.co.uk/games/games-news/eschalon-book-ii-news/

Can't remember if I ever said but Book I was the best Blitz game I've ever played.

Eschalon: Book I was truly wonderful - a fantastic retro RPG experience.

Any chance of seeing a revised, minimal GUI for Book II that doesn't take up so much screen real estate?

JustLuke: Well, the GUI helps keep the viewport window down to a manageable size. If the viewport starts getting much bigger than what you see, even by just one extra row or column of tiles, things really start slowing down and it gets jerky.

We'll be going full 3D eventually, then we won't have such limitations.

Grey Alien: Thanks man!!!!

Full 3d? Wow... Won't that be a huge undertaking? If I were you I'd think very carefully before taking that step. For one thing, you risk losing the retro-charm of the current 2d visuals. For another, people are very unforgiving of poor quality 3d models and environments. Having said that, a full 3d Eschalon game is an appealing prospect...

This looks terribly exciting.

Uh, Bluesnews...

I'm looking forward for it as well, good luck! I hope it still will be playable on my old Mini.

Btw one thing i was wondering about: Can you say how the percentage of sales split to the different platforms (win, osx (ppc, x86), lin)?

And can you tell what's the difference engine wise with Book II?

Yes I can, taumel:

52% Windows
42% Mac (Universal Binary)
6% Linux

Engine updates: a lot of optimizations (reduced code size and lowered RAM requirements), higher resolution (1024x768), and a better timing function (got rid of all millisec() calls). Most of the visual enhancements will come from re-rendering the tiles to take advantage of the increased resolution. There's a ton of gameplay enhancements as well, which don't really show in screenshots.

I do think the Book II engine runs smoother on old hardware than Book I did.

That looks fantastic! I love that the UI isn't too complicated. I hate spreadsheet RPGs.

@Tachyon

Thanks for sharing! It's interesting to see these percentages.

I'm really looking forward to the game, definately one of the best BlitzMax games beside of Mark's ones. Keep up the great work! :O)

Great stuff. I still mean to spend some time playing through the first game.

Just wondering (I don't have BlitzMax by the way), how do you get rid of Millisec() calls? Is there some better option in Max?

Book I was great, still need to complete it.
Looking forward to Book II.

Was looking through my Daily Tech News email from PC World and saw a reference to something that sounded familar:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,146928/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Well done!

'nother review: http://www.casualreview.com/game/487/Eschalon_Book_I?PHPSESSID=aa9533664e1bf8138bda82e410ec13e2

1. Why do you use the default inno setup images for the installer?
2. Can't you make a larger viewport optional? So that faster PCs can use it?

Grey: Thanks for the link.

Grisu:
1. Laziness. We'll improve it for Book II.
2. Maybe. We're looking into making a GUI toggle for Book II. That way, if you have a fast enough GPU, you can play full-screen and toggle the GUI visible when you need it.

Can't wait for the second book :D

As long as you stay with the same resolution fullscreen is faster than windowed mode . Personally i was fine with the 800x600 resolution, I wouldn't have needed a change here. I just hope that it still will be playable on my Mini which means 1.25GHZ G4 and a 32MB ATI 9200. If you would have altered the GUI slightly then an increase in resolution wouldn't have been needed at all. Anyway as long as you stay away from things like AA and Pixellights it still should be handable, otherwise, at least for cards in this range, there is a magic border between 800x600 and 1024x768 were framerates drop significantly.

taumel: As I said, I think you will be fine. We use a 1.4ghz G4 Mini here (not sure what the video chipset is on it) and Book II seems actually smoother than Book I, due to the optimizations we've made.

Sounds good and reasonable but as we're talking about it, what were the reasons for increasing the resolution?

Do you still use BlitzMax for it and if so are the optimisation doing direct OpenGL calls instead of BlitzMax commands?

Had the same GUI thoughts, you don't need a higher resolution, a more "minimalistic" one would make it possible to increase the viewport without increasing the resolution. Will Book II use transparency for the GUI e.g.?

taumel: The reason for the resolution upgrade was public demand. Nearly everyone commented that 800x600 was just too small on todays big flat-screen LCDs. I have to agree. Even the small increase to 1024x768 really makes the game look more detailed and pleasent.

Yep, still using BlitzMax of course. And still using 100% BlitxMax calls, not direct calls to OpenGL. The optimizations have been mainly done in terms of the number of elements being drawn on the screen- between game tile and GUI tweaking, I've reduced the number of DrawImage calls each loop by about 10%. I've also made code optimizations to the rendering pipeline, and reduced overall code size and memory usage by about 5%.

If you're running into the situation that you need additional performance then using direct OpenGL calls instead of builtin BlitzMax commands can, depending on the situation, lead from small to huge performance increases as you can hopefully either spare yourself redundant calls and/or make usage of built in structures which BlitzMax does not support. The larger the amount of drawn tiles is, the greater the gains could be.

As for the resolution i think it strongly depends on the art. Whilst one works fine in lowres another one is better presented in a higher resolution. I also was playing the game on a LCD and as i said before i personally was fine with the look but i definately would have tried reworking the interface and making it more dynamic whilst using less space and sometimes also working with transparency.

Out of curiosity:

At some point, will you post some kind of benchmark/demo to the public?
So that you can check the performance on various systems?

Your game is very nice looking and plays pretty good too. I don't usually play RPG's at all but it does look like a polished game which is not so common.

I was happy with 800x600 ;-) But higher will be fine.

'nother review:

http://jayisgames.com/ (I voted 5 stars!)

Thank you, Grey!!!

Grisu wrote:

Probably no benchmark, but a demo will be available when the game nears completion.

If you look at the Book II screenshot that was posted by taumel, at the bottom you see "hz: 60 ms: 3". That means the game is running at 60hz (my LCD rate) and each screen redraw takes about 3 milliseconds (it actually bounces between 2-3 in that area). For best performance we want to see that stay below 16-17ms.

Now then, I do have a pretty beefy system and graphics card (GeForce 8800GTX) but the game does scale down nicely to lower end computers. My 1.42ghz G4 Mac can run it on average around 14-18ms (full screen) in that same area which isn't too bad. There is a low-detail setting that can drop that down to ~10ms on the G4 Mac in that area, which is silky smooth.

I am going to estimate the minimum specs to be 1.4ghz CPU, with a "decent" accelerated video card. It may run just fine on lesser systems with low detail enabled, depending on your tolerance for sluggish performance.

The first book was great at first, but it was plagued by a lot of annoying bugs that eventually forced me to stop playing. I got caught in scenery, important NPCs were killed off by other NPCs without me being able to do anything about it, I completed a major final quest but couldn't get credit for it, etc. I was really disappointed, because I put a lot of hours into it and wanted to finish.

I wouldn't even hesitate to buy the new installment if the last one hadn't frustrated me so badly near the end. Its too bad, because the game was a lot of fun, otherwise.

Good luck with the new chapter.

SpaceAce

Its just looking fine... A great work in preparation...

I hope it will get success !!

Hey Tach - Great news! Very psyched to see you guys are doing well with the indie RPGs! Looking forward to more good news.

You should make an online version of Eschalon book I sometime.

I will *never* make an MMO (I hate them, the market is too saturated, it requires a large team to produce anything decent, etc.) but there is a possibility that a future version of Eschalon could have some sort of co-op play. It has been discussed.

"and a better timing function (got rid of all millisec() calls)"

Since we're all developers here, can you elaborate on that please? Especially when it comes to porting to mac/linux as well. I think we all would love a detailed explanation of your better timing handling? Thanks in advance if you decide to share your knowlage regarding this. :)

oh, looks sweet. I loved the first one.
One thing though, can you make more options to make it run faster, my computer at home stinks, it ran book one at like 6 fps :(

Or maybe a Party? I appreciate that now it's more like some Ultimas where you just control the avatar, but some Ultimas let you have parties too (e.g. U7 Part II Serpent Isle = classic)

Yeah that sounds pretty interesting.

boo on parties! :) I do think there have been too many rpgs with parties, there aren't enough [edit]single[edit] person iso rpgs. In my opinion it takes away from the game play by giving you too much to do and they just get in the way. I thought book one was awesome, the only problem is that book 2 has taken too long to come out! ;)

Phew! Good thing that it won't come out for a while yet. I was afraid that my Xmas holiday was going to be completely filled with playing Eschalon instead of working on my own game. :)

I'm looking forward to it as well and if it doesn't get screwed up completely i will buy it like Book 1. The only thing which still bothers me whilst looking at the screens again is that i think the interface could be done much better in terms of presentation, functionality and the space it's occupying (strange word!), there, just as one example, so much space wasted on the Mana Hit, Points, ... section that it hurts.

Hopefully it's coming soon in 09! :O)

I switched to Timers where I was having problems with millisecs flaking out on anyone who left their computers on all the time (a well documented issue). I don't think I've done anything revolutionary. Someday, after I move on to a new engine, I'll release this source for all to study and mock me for my rudimentary programming skillz.


I don't think this will happen. I'm not changing anything that made Book I enjoyable. You have the option to disable any new Book II rule that you don't like, making it exactly Book I. Book II is just a step forward with more skills, more items, additional combat options, hellish new enemies, new engine effects, better sound and a bigger game world.

So you mean when the timer wraps after 100 hours or whatever? Cant you just limit the delta so that when that occurs the game doesn't go crazy (it might have a tiny glitch just once)?

@Tachyon
Whilst all the technical improvements are welcome, what i really would like to see are more story driven quests and characters you really care about. Ultima IX or the first NeverwinterNights (later on) were really good in this respect. I'm thinking of quality not quantity here.

I also enjoy side quests if they have the right scale and are interestingly setup. I'm grown up, i've played through quite some roleplaying games in my life and so things like "kill the rats in dungeon" or "bring back my lost ring and you get wings of fortune" just doesn't make it.

Enhancements in the story/character/level design area woud be much more worth to me than things like new monsters or headshots now get recognized more accurate...

There was some good writing in Eschalon and a moral choice to make when you met your brother which made me sad - it was well done.

Yes but there weren't too many. I think you also played through NeverwinterNights and then you might remember how for instance the relationship to Aribeth got more and more intense and therefore everything around got way more interesting too, things became a meaning.

I also liked dealing with the pirates guild or what's always nice is if you have to deal with some magician who is following his/her own weird plans, always good for a really good sidequest and some private dungeon(s).

Anyway i guess this is a gameaspect were enhancements would be way more interesting than on the technical side as long as you can write. What i miss in most rpgs are stories which you play when you're doing a pen&paper roleplaying session. The stories there mostly are way more interesting compared to those in computer games. Not a bad idea if you first use your lobotomy +7 skills there.

Although graphics inferior I really enjoyed the atmosphere and plot in Avernum 5, it's very unusual and built a great atmosphere a bit like Ultima VIII

I have to confess that i need a certain amount of visual stimuli, if that is satisfied, either by good graphics, a style i like or a nice font everything is fine and i mainly care about the inner values. Portal is a fantastic game in this respect. I don't know Avernum but the graphics just look extremly distracting. ASCII art would have been the better option here.

Since some of you have been following development closely, you may be interested in a "Peek #1" published at RPGVault showcasing some of the new rules and challenges.

Direct Link: http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/944/944387p1.html

Awesome, can't wait!

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

My main wishes still would be enhancements on the story/quest side and if there will be new monsters, picking up interesting ones, no more rat fighting please.

-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-JVnbyIr04

I don't mind rat fighting. You've got to start somewhere.

I do, like in the video it's just too much of a cliche and i also don't see a problem coming up with a more interesting introduction into things than just rats over and over again.

You should see some of the rats running around here in Birmingham... they are the size of small dogs! :-)

You see, also in Brimingham, enough rats already. :O)

yeah I used to live in birmingham and I saw a dead rat on the pavement, it was pretty big(!)

Good job on Eschalon BTW

Thanks guys!

@taumel: Peek #2 should be posted in a few weeks and in it we talk more about the storyline and such. As for Rats, yes, this is an unapologetic old-school RPG so there are a few standard archetype creatures (especially early in the game) but we've got a number of unique ones as well.

The key to Eschalon's success, really, is that we aren't trying to reinvent the genre. While there are plenty of modern RPGs out there that promise something new, we've always said Eschalon is directly inspired by the early Utimas, Might & Magics, and Wizardys- the kinds of games many of us old-timers grew up playing on the family computer in the 80's / early 90's.

Well, i've played through almost all the Ultimas, Bard's Tales, Eye of the Beholders, Baldur's Gates and so on, so i guess i know what you mean and i agree to keep up a certain old skool vibe but it also wouldn't hurt skipping the slashing rats and bugs lessons and for instance gaining your first exps in a nice sidequest were they don't show up. There exist plenty alternatives and as pen&paper sessions show you don't need them at all, also not for leveling up new characters.

I want to play it...... NOW (rocking like an addict)

When will i be able to buy the linux version?

@D4NM4N: Whenever we release the Windows version, the Mac version will come about 3 weeks after that, and the Linux version will be about another week after that. This is done simply because we don't have the resources to actively support 3 new products at a time- by staggering the releases we can offer better support to new users.

Just out of curiosity, if one buys it for a single OS does he/she have rights to builds for the other OS'?

Yes- it's something we don't advertise but if you request another version, we'll give it to you.

When will book 2 be released?

Release date is scheduled for Summer '09.

Eschalon is probably the best blitz game out there.

Hey do you use bmax or bplus?

He uses BlitzMax, how else would it be cross-platform?! :)

Oh, sorry! I didn't see the linux/apple version.

RPGVault has posted the second peek at Eschalon: Book II. In the article we talk more about the gameplay and a bit about the storyline. They have three exclusive screenshots as well.

Link: http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/952/952707p1.html

I just noticed that buying "Eschalon: Book I" on steam could save 20% before Feb 17th

I'd better free up some time in my schedule for when this is launched :-) Here's a game work way more than $9.99 for sure.

I really like the music () in Eschalon!
It looks really good too.

Nice read, will there be a third sneak peak?

taumel: probably not. RPGVault gives lots of love to the big AAA publishers with deep advertising budgets. Giving Indie games like Eschalon a bit of cover space is considered a charity event.

We'll be doing more specials/peeks on other sites in the coming months.

Well, keep us informed. :O)

I second that!

Who does the music for you? One-man job, or is it a studio?

Music is from a guy named Borislav Slavov ("Glorian"). He isn't cheap, but he is awesome.

http://music-marks.com/

Hmm i just checked the music, whilst i can understand why people like it, it's not my cup of tea, not from the composition, not from the instruments, too overloaded, dunno i don't like the mood it generates.

Reminds me of that i really liked Klaus Badelt's work in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn. The simple but yet so great piano theme, ahhh anyway.

I'm looking forward to Eschalon II. The first one was fantastic.