Torment: Tides of Numenera - Indigo Voice, Floors and a Video

In Kickstarter update #41 for Torment: Tides of Numenera, the pending Kickstarter for The Bards Tale IV is plugged and there is news that the second of their From the Depths novellas is released and the technique behind moving floors.

Nathan Fabian here. At my day job I make pretty pictures out of billions of finite elements for one of the Department of Energy labs. At night I dabble in game development, including some consulting through my company, Longshot Studios. I was a backer of Torment and have been working with the team part time for almost a year. Currently, I'm working mostly on our animation system, but I wanted to talk a bit about a recent Torment challenge I worked on. It gets a bit technical, but the final result is pretty cool.

Imagine you are handed a pylon. It is a very ordinary sort of pylon. In fact it’s only a computer model—a few tens of polygons, quite unremarkable for a pylon. But your mission isn’t just to hold this, it is to take it forth and multiply! 100 by 100 pylons to create a dynamic floor where each individual piece can move up and down independently, changing the shape of the floor on the fly. This single pylon must become a mega structure of 10,000.

“No problem,” you say, “I have the power. I have code!” You execute a loop, create 10,000 pillars, and your graphics card (GPU) catches on fire (not literally). This was not the incantation we were looking for.

Modern graphics cards are extraordinarily powerful and can render hundreds of millions of triangles per second. For someone who grew up reading Michael Abrash books and articles, it feels indistinguishable from magic. Back then, we were happy to get resolutions of 320x240 because “Look! Square pixels!”

Where did our incantation go wrong? Why was the devil box not appeased?

In another Kickstarter update we are presented with a new video.



More information.

I think it looks great…

Characters and their animations doesn't look great at all - compared to PoE that is.

Environments are gorgeous. I'll assume the jerky character animations are a preliminary version.

Originally Posted by Fanest
Characters and their animations doesn't look great at all - compared to PoE that is.

PoE animations were also a little rough in their earlier implementations. Hopefully these will improve.

The music and narration set a good mood, but the tiny characters diminished the level of drama a bit.

Originally Posted by Hexprone
Environments are gorgeous. I'll assume the jerky character animations are a preliminary version.

Wasn't T:ToN made with the same engine as Wasteland 2? Because that game shipped with the jerky character animations.

I hope locations are coherent and not strange for the sake of strangeness.

What a deep, wet and sexy narrator voice! Who's the guy? I'm hoping to hear more of him..

Besides that, environments looks good enough, appropriately alien and fantastical, given the setting. But animations are slooow and don't look professional. Hopefully that will be improved before the game launches..

Originally Posted by Fanest
Characters and their animations doesn't look great at all - compared to PoE that is.

Animations are still a work in progress. Our animator Josh shared some thoughts on animation shown in the video on our forums here: https://forums.inxile-entertainment….151208#p151190

Originally Posted by Aditya
What a deep, wet and sexy narrator voice! Who's the guy? I'm hoping to hear more of him.

That's Alexander Brandon, who is handling Torment's sound effects and ambiance. He's also a voice actor (did some voices most recently in Skyrim, as well as some of our previous Torment clips) and was one of the composers behind Deus Ex and Unreal back in the day. He is an extremely talented and cool guy and it's been a pleasure working with him on Torment and Wasteland 2.

Did anything come of the campaign to get Vin Diesel as a voice actor, or was that just an idle notion?

I'm really hyped about it, Planescape Torment was such a jewel. I hope it is not disappointing.

Good news that a new book is available, going to start reading this weekend !

I was impressed by the video, and am pretty excited about this game. But I also think that to make things weird in the game just for weirdness sake is something to be careful about, and this is a good point a rpg watcher brought up, because too much of that can make the game seem artificial and ruin the atmosphere.

It is kind of like what has happened to many big blockbuster Hollywood movies for the past recent years. They have concentrated so much on CGI, and special effects wizardry, and action scenes, that they have lost the soul and the movies are missing something these days. A lot of these movies lately just seem like one big set action piece, where story and characters are given short shrift, and seem like afterthoughts.

Excuse my rant and digression, have been seeing some movies lately.

I don't agree with you. Mad max 4 was awesome and different than average Hollywood action movie.

PoE has vastly superior environment graphics to me. This is a bit of a let down. But it's an improvement from Wasteland 2 which looked quite bad.

Awesome turn based combat awaits! Interesting worlds and I already see modders modding the hell out of those ugly green-red movement+selection colors..

Environments are, indeed, very interesting and attractive. Characters and combat look awkward - but I guess they've got time to improve it.

That said, game isn't really my thing - but I'm glad that fans are getting yet another fan-service throwback to the old days

Ok, I'm glad for the fans - but I'd obviously want something other than stagnation from these crowdfunded titles. Something is better than nothing, though.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
That said, game isn't really my thing - but I'm glad that fans are getting yet another fan-service throwback to the old days

Ok, I'm glad for the fans - but I'd obviously want something other than stagnation from these crowdfunded titles. Something is better than nothing, though.

The game promises both the depth of PS:T and good combat, something no other game has offered to date. Plus they have the Crises and Tides systems which are also new.

It's hard to take you seriously considering this. Really, what does an innovative RPG look like in your eyes?

Originally Posted by Sacred_Path
The game promises both the depth of PS:T and good combat, something no other game has offered to date. Plus they have the Crises and Tides systems which are also new.

It's hard to take you seriously considering this. Really, what does an innovative RPG look like in your eyes?

Why would you taking me seriously matter?

I don't know what you mean by "depth" - but PST was rather simplistic to me. It had a lot of words to read, and a nice enough story - but I wasn't entertained by it.

Good combat is but a claim. I'm not seeing anything I haven't seen a dozen times before.

Really, what does an innovative RPG look like in your eyes?

It looks like an RPG that does something significant and new, like Divinity OS that implemented a cooperative mode that fully integrated both players in all interactions. That's something I've never really seen before in a complex RPG like that.

And you saying it's like stale bread is just another claim. Why should I take your word over the devs'?

It's hard to argue that PS:T had no depth, but since you didn't bring an argument I guess that's it.

That depth came not only from the story, but mostly from choices and their underlying philosophy. I don't really like PS:T as a game, but I respect that they achieved what they wanted to achieve, and what no other RPG has achieved since then.

And I've never seen something like the Tides and Crises systems in a game either - that's why I brought those up. While a lot of RPG's track your reputations, they don't really change the way you're playing dynamically.

Originally Posted by Sacred_Path
And you saying it's like stale bread is just another claim. Why should I take your word over the devs'?

Why would you taking my word matter?

I'm stating my opinion - not your opinion.

It's hard to argue that PS:T had no depth, but since you didn't bring an argument I guess that's it.

I didn't say it had no depth.

That depth came not only from the story, but mostly from choices and their underlying philosophy. I don't really like PS:T as a game, but I respect that they achieved what they wanted to achieve, and what no other RPG has achieved since then.

What made the story deep in a way that a game like, say, Witcher doesn't have?

The amount of pre-written choices in the dialogue trees?

And I've never seen something like the Tides and Crises systems in a game either - that's why I brought those up. While a lot of RPG's track your reputations, they don't really change the way you're playing dynamically.

Lots of games have claimed to do just that, though. But we've all seen the results.