Torment: Tides of Numenera - Art, Tools, & Tales

The 39th post-funding update for Torment: Tides of Numenera has information from project lead Kevin Saunders about some new art, game tools. and other new topics.

Here is the TLDR version.

TL;DR: Production continues; added visual effects artists to the team; a look at conversation editing tools; Bard's Tale IV announced as inXile’s next RPG after Torment; Paizo publishes Adam’s Pathfinder story, “The Patch Man”

More information.

That sunken market looks very cool. They mentioned underwater areas; I wonder, does that mean there will be swimming animations and underwater combat?

Please someone inform me.. What does TLDR stand for? I see it often, but don't know what it means.
Thanks in advance

TL;DR = too long; didn't read. Sometimes used to indicate a summary when there is a wall of text.

It stands for To Long Didn't Read as the update is a huge wall of text.

Update: Dammit you beat me to it rjshae.

Anyway it would nice to get more information on the expected release date. The last update said late 2015, but I have a feeling it wont be out till sometime in 2016.

Indeed!

The Bard's Tale 4 is coming! The Bard's Tale 4 is coming!

*Dances with joy*

I love the Twine-like dialogue screenshot in their kickstarter' update.
I wonder if it's indicative of the style they use to write the story, I mean with the "tree' branches" developing in width instead of length: more options but less follow ups, or if that doesn't mean anything at all.
Just a curiosity.

I really hope they don't use Unity for their 2 next games(planescape & bard's Tale), and that they won't be as badly implemented as Wastelands 2. This was a real shame for such an established developer.

Originally Posted by Risine
I really hope they don't use Unity for their 2 next games(planescape & bard's Tale), and that they won't be as badly implemented as Wastelands 2. This was a real shame for such an established developer.

Well Torment has already been confirmed it will be using the unity engine when the kickstater first launched, and I'm sure Bards Tale 4 will also use the engine.

I have no problem with this as version 5.0 of Unity has fixed a lot of the problems.

Torment is being made by the "engine " obsidian created in unity. What ver 5 of unity fix? I hope it's more optimized.

Originally Posted by Edgy
Torment is being made by the "engine " obsidian created in unity. What ver 5 of unity fix? I hope it's more optimized.

It's still the Unity engine just modified with Obsidian Tech.

Unity version five is the latest build of Unity, and it fixes most problems gamers have.

Link - http://unity3d.com/unity/beta/5.0

Unity is an excellent engine, but very poor for ambitious project, like W2, M&MX, and others. Because it's a GENERIC engine. I'm not here even talking about optimisations, but talking about just using specific platform features. And Unity developers didn't seem to change that way of thinking their engine until know. Hope you are right about version 5 of the engine anyway.
And for W2, not all was the fault of the engine. DA was not terrible, graphics were more than poor, no humour, almost no freedom compared to Fallout 1&2, game not finished ( especially in Hollywood ), and so on.