After a long while of having this game in my backlog I finally got around to playing Amnesia.
There is very little I can say bad about this great game except:
It's OpenGL. Can't play in 3D mode (the 3DTV's 2d->3d mode is crap) and my setup doesn't work with OpenGL. No more OpenGL please!
Candles and candelabras should be movable objects.
Areas of darkness are inconsistent. Some dark places have no effect while some lighter places do have an effect. It's hard to to tell sometimes where and when the effect of darkness will occur.
Having a blast playing this game, can't wait to finish all of it and try some custom stories.
well the more predictable a game is the less scary it becomes so I dont really see the problem with unpredictable sanity effects in darkness
(06-02-2013, 07:41 AM)The Mug Wrote: [ -> ]well the more predictable a game is the less scary it becomes so I dont really see the problem with unpredictable sanity effects in darkness
But then the less immersive a game is the less scary it becomes, and the fact that some darkness drains your sanity while other darkness doesn't, it doesn't make any sense and can ruin immersion.
Some areas removed it because it's not fitting. If a small room is completely bright, except maybe a bit of the far corners, why would he go nuts? There's more light than dark throughout the room, so if it still made you lose sanity, it might come off as a bit ridiculous.
Well, it isn't that big of an issue..at least not to argue over.
Just finished the main game, in a little over 9 hours. Shorter than I expected but I loved it. On to Justine.
(06-02-2013, 07:16 PM)drachehexe Wrote: [ -> ]Well, it isn't that big of an issue..at least not to argue over.
Just finished the main game, in a little over 9 hours. Shorter than I expected but I loved it. On to Justine.
Grats with finishing the main game and good luck with Justine, took me forever to beat the expansion.
OpenGL is a cross-platform graphics API and since Amnesia is also built for OSX and Linux it's easier to just use OpenGL. I wouldn't count on them going with DirectX anytime soon. It would be nice if they dumped OpenAL and went with something like FMOD since OpenAL has its fair share of issues and Creative doesn't seem to be supporting it any longer.
(06-07-2013, 04:07 PM)satsun Wrote: [ -> ]OpenGL is a cross-platform graphics API and since Amnesia is also built for OSX and Linux it's easier to just use OpenGL. I wouldn't count on them going with DirectX anytime soon. It would be nice if they dumped OpenAL and went with something like FMOD since OpenAL has its fair share of issues and Creative doesn't seem to be supporting it any longer.
Please don't, OpenAL imo is much better sound API than FMOD for the simple reason that it supports real 3D sound (and also hardware sound acceleration) FMOD fakes 3D sound and is only software based (CPU).
If ditching openAL is even considered then they should at least try OpenAL_soft (not maintained by Creative but by the open source community) or Rapture3D (based on the last OpenAL version before Creative bought the API) this last one is really awesome because it uses binaural sound when listen with headphones (and it works right now with Amnesia because it uses OpenAL).
(06-08-2013, 10:54 PM)Argoon Wrote: [ -> ]Please don't, OpenAL imo is much better sound API than FMOD for the simple reason that it supports real 3D sound (and also hardware sound acceleration) FMOD fakes 3D sound and is only software based (CPU).
If ditching openAL is even considered then they should at least try OpenAL_soft (not maintained by Creative but by the open source community) or Rapture3D (based on the last OpenAL version before Creative bought the API) this last one is really awesome because it uses binaural sound when listen with headphones (and it works right now with Amnesia because it uses OpenAL).
I think I've given up on hardware acceleration. I have an X-Fi Titanium PCI-E card and if I don't use a work-around for Amnesia (and Killing Floor) then I get BSOD due to an OpenAL issue on 64bit OS'es. Creative doesn't seem to care about that problem since they want people to buy their newer non-HW accelerated cards that probably don't have the problem and I'm not sure that game developers can resolve the issue or care to because Frictional's solution to the X-Fi OpenAL BSOD problem with Amnesia was to just disable hardware-accelerated OpenAL.
I know that APIs like FMOD have inferior positioning but I think that most game developers have completely given up on hardware acceleration; the only reason I hang on to my X-Fi is because it has 7.1 outputs on it and modern Creative cards only have 5.1 outputs.
If Fritcional can fix the OpenAL BSOD on 64bit operating systems, then that would be great but if not then they should just dump OpenAL and move on to something that would increase compatibility.
It's too bad that Creative makes some decent sound cards but can't make drivers for them. They're the ATi/AMD of sound cards.
(06-08-2013, 10:54 PM)Argoon Wrote: [ -> ] (06-07-2013, 04:07 PM)satsun Wrote: [ -> ]OpenGL is a cross-platform graphics API and since Amnesia is also built for OSX and Linux it's easier to just use OpenGL. I wouldn't count on them going with DirectX anytime soon. It would be nice if they dumped OpenAL and went with something like FMOD since OpenAL has its fair share of issues and Creative doesn't seem to be supporting it any longer.
Please don't, OpenAL imo is much better sound API than FMOD for the simple reason that it supports real 3D sound (and also hardware sound acceleration) FMOD fakes 3D sound and is only software based (CPU).
If ditching openAL is even considered then they should at least try OpenAL_soft (not maintained by Creative but by the open source community) or Rapture3D (based on the last OpenAL version before Creative bought the API) this last one is really awesome because it uses binaural sound when listen with headphones (and it works right now with Amnesia because it uses OpenAL).
How exactly does FMOD fake 3D sound? It's just audio that is panned from channel to channel based on player location, the pan size and signal ratio is all controllable. OpenAL is a dinosaur, and hardware sound acceleration is no longer needed these days (in terms of effecting quality, most soundcards use the hardware for encoding different streams for different devices (Dolby, DTS etc) it really doesn't do anything. TDD and Pigs both use the Ogg Vorbis as delivery for audio, OpenAL just has a standard playback system for Ogg Vorbis that allows us to start, stop, fade and loop. Whereas with FMOD we are able to set parameters which dynamically effect the audio, so, through some special scripting we can create some really complex cool logic for audio playback. OpenAL's 3D panning (imho) is pretty poor, I perceive it as the signal either being 100% L or 100% R (for stereo setups), it never sits nicely between the two. We have done a lot of mono/stereo blending in Pigs to combat this, as it was having a detrimental effect on the quality of the sound.