It’s that time again folks! Let’s take a look at what today’s tidbits cover:

• Goblin Grave Digger and monsters spawning
• Various Preditor information
• “Pacing” in Torchlight
• Mod Hosting

Let’s start with a pair of tidbits from Erich:

Notmyhandle wrote:1. Can grave robbers summon an unlimited amount of skeletons? Or have you capped it to avoid possible glitches/performance issues?

I believe they are unlimited, but have a maximum number active at any time, so they will stop summoning

Notmyhandle wrote:2. Are you guys willing to release data sheets for the game? Or will the PrEditor speak for itself? I’m talking about creature names/stats, damage formulas, equipment names/stats, etc.

Yep. I’m pretty sure we will release the data sheets.

Continuing on with Preditor info, I’ll just present you with several quotes from several devs and several threads:

heron wrote:that video is awesome! quick question, can we place monsters inside the preditor or it’s totally up to the random generation of the engine?

You can hand-place spawners and not have any random monsters if you want.

Omnifas wrote:One question

Whats the largest size we can make 1 “floor” of a dungeon?

I may be wrong, but I don’t think there is a hard cap for max size. The only real limit would be that performance load times might start getting poor if the levels are too big. I don’t thing we really come close to these limits with our levels, really. Our levels tend to be limited more by what feels too long or too short than by technical limitations.

In regards to the recent video of Preditor’s level maker:

So the video actually was created by Volbard and I agree with you Mezentius that it does kind of look a bit overwhelming – especially for people just curious to see if they can make anything. What the video is missing is the actual tool interface. For example we have our palette which can sort thumbnail pictures of each room piece by dungeon type, props, stairs, trim – actually any kind of sorting string you like and simply clicking on the thumbnail will change the selected piece in the render view to the selected piece you clicked on.

My personally belief will be that people who want to play around will simply load an existing room and just tear it apart making their own interesting rooms. Will that be the majority of people – nope. Hopefully however there will be enough people interested that a community will rise up and add to the re-playability of the game. As developers I think it’s our job to support those people.

And finally – are we expecting the majority of content to be made from those community modders? Nope, we are not expecting it. If it does happen we couldn’t be happier.

Next up, continuing on the recent post about Hi-Res textures:

You can increase the texture resolution without any issues – for UI or models.
The external layout files for the textures specify a basis resolution (1024×768, for instance ) for the textures used for UI, so you can upsample the UI and change the basis resolution.
Heck, you could add shader support with the material files and require fancy shaders if you WANTED to.

You can replace all the models as well, with higher polycounts, or different meshes altogether.

And… just to show us that not everything is possible with our dream game:

heron wrote:could we get nVidia®-PhysX in torchlight?

On that one, I’m unfortunately probably gonna have to say ‘nope’
Travis

Also, because the capital letter was driving me nuts, Patrick cleared this VITAL INFORMATION up for me:

Webbstre wrote: Just posting this hoping Travis or somebody will answer… but is it spelled Preditor or PrEditor? I’ve seen both floating around.

PatrickB wrote: It’s “Preditor”.

On today’s final mod note, Volbard reconfirmed this:

By the way, we’re not planning on hosting mods. If we did, then we would have to be responsible for moderating them, and I really don’t want to be the mod nazi. I’m hoping the community will want to put something together to organize and maybe rate the mods. It would take some work and maybe a lot of bandwidth, depending on how it’s set up, but it would also be a big draw to the site.

Not to worry though, we’ve already got mod options in the works for you, focusing around our RGF Community Blogs!

Onto other topics, there is a really interesting thread about pacing going on in the official forums, with a few dev quotes coming out of it:

mediumheadboy wrote:Regarding the overall jist of this thread… Pacing is indeed a valid concern, but I really feel we as a team have done it right many times before. if you like the pace of Fate, Mythos or Diablo II, Torchlight’s pacing will appeal to you again. Torchlight is a bit different, but I think that is more due to our secret rooms, levers, slightly faster-paced combat and slightly more zoomed-in visuals, than any hassle-factors. Frequency of town runs seems about the same.
Our mini-games, like fishing, are ignorable or can take up a lot time, giving the player some control over the pace.

Webbstre wrote:

hadati wrote: stunned, frozen, rooted, electrocuted, burned, poisoned, movement speed reductions, armor debuffs, shrunkend

That is a good list of debuffs… I hope they all make it in the game

I think we do have all those, or they are at least planned. “Knockback” as effect for both player and monster attacks plays a much funner role than in our other games, too.

travisbaldree wrote:Instead of an inventory tetris minigame, we’re trying to put in other minigames.

We have fishing ( which is a bit more interactive than in fate ) and there are several others we are toying with ( a special trap disarm, gemcutting, etc. ).
Other activites that are ‘time wasters’ that break up the flow are item enchantment, and hopefully item combination. So ideally, you’ve got fun stuff to do besides whacking monsters.
Rather than sorting your own inventory, there is the less cumbersome ( but still frequent ) shifting of things to your pet’s inventory, sending them to town business.
Travis

That’s it for today, but feel free to get some more conversations going on our forums!