Engine Capabilities

[Sexbad]

A bunch of nostalgia and ideas for mods are dancing in my head, so I've been wondering about what the game can be capable of in a technological sense. Can you give us some information on how the engine will work the game world? Will it be able to stream maps? Will large environments be possible? Things like that have been bothering me.

If you reply I will have a bo- I mean I will be very excited.

[Thomas]

First of all, the game will not be moddable in hl2 fashion where you can do just about anything. You are need stay within the bounds of the general gameplay. If there is a huge pressure on the modding front we might add some more moddability, but that is something we will see in the future.

Streaming is not supported, but you can have quite large levels if you design em correctly.

[nofsky]

I've been thinking about all kinds of cool stuff to try with the Level editor/tools coming with Amnesia. From what I've seen in your YouTube videos, the level editor and scripting language looks very nice but it's not really shown just how much of the core game you can change. I think it was mentioned somewhere in the forum that you could change player stats and things of that nature, so that left me wondering about some things:

Will you be able to add melee weapons (or even guns)?
Will it be possible to create a new unique enemy with custom AI?

Maybe these things are outside the bounds of the general gameplay, as you say. I just wanna know so I can limit my ideas to what I can actually do with the tools

[Thomas]

Melee weapons might be possible, if I do some fixes. We have code for melee in, but it is not used Not sure if it works currently.

Very custom AI is not possible. This one of the big things for the future of our tech, I would really like for all AI to come as script files. Would make development alot easier since u could tweak and easily update enemies ingame. But, unfortunately it is still just a dream

[nofsky]

Okay, thanks. Maybe these are things that can be patched in if modding becomes popular, or something for HPL3

[SHODANFreeman]

I'm already planning a fairly ambitious mod with a couple of my friends, hopefully not too ambitious, though.

[Sexbad]

I've been thinking about what could be designed as well. I have some devious ideas.

[fenixkane]

Has there been any plans to extend the capabilities of the engine and tools via patches post release?

[Sexbad]

Do you have any plans to implement the ability to use Newton's destruction physics stuff shown here? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyWgER5O1YI

[jens]

The main purpose of the engine and tools are for them to be used by us, so they will be continually updated. If we release any updates along with regular game updates will depend on how much interest there are in the tools from external folks. If no one is really using the tools, or only using sporadically then there is no need for us to spend a lot of time updating them for the public when we could concentrate on making the next game instead!

We don't have any specific plans for that newton technology, but in general we keep it up-to-date with latest newton and if we have a design in a game that would benefit from something then it would be added.