Kayzee

Wine is bitter?

It's probably alcohol in general I find bitter... not sure, I don't really drink. Maybe more sour? But yeah, every bit of wine I have had always tasted like vinegar to me. Maybe I just never tried the really good stuff, I donno.

PROPERLY FERMENTED, wine is far less bitter than sweet or tart, depending on the nature of the grape, or other fruit.

A properly fermented red wine is very sweet, for instance. Strawberry wine is even sweeter (improper fermentation of strawberries leads to high levels of toxicity worse than arsenic but far less lethal-leads to a very harsh hangover after the effects wear off lol).

I went to Red Lobster a little while back; I got a glass of red wine and it was not that great, but I've had far worse. It wasn't fermented well, nor for very long. It tasted cheap but not so much toxic.

Like, properly fermented wine is a very long process, though how long depends on a number of factors including climate, elevation (very high elevations take a LOT LONGER BY A GREAT DEAL), the quality of the fruit, the method of pressing, the steps taken to begin the process, and so many more.

Back home, for example, the wooden barrels used to ferment wine grapes in, are washed and scraped regularly because otherwise, the toxins from previous fermentations will seep into the next batch. They always have a set of barrels ready for the next batches, and when the barrels have reached their limits, the wood is burned (and damn it smells fantastic).

Scraped? They scrape out two or three layers of wood out of the inside of each barrel as needed. A typical barrel of theirs lasts up to sixty-four fermentations. The grapes sit in the barrels fermenting for a whole season.

Slicing someone's head off is probobly a lot harder then you might think, but that's what makes guns kinda lame and swords awesome. I mean some people are really good with guns and are still impressive, but most of the time guns just seem boring to me.

Being suitably dramatic can help magic for sure, but it can be fickle sometimes and you can't just pull a huge explosion out of your ass when ever you need it. Like I said, it needs to be balanced carefully. It's like making a game really. You can make magic do whatever you want but if you just make yourself OP your gonna get yourself nerfed one way or another. So there needs to be some type of limit or flaw. That's why magic always tends to cost something. Some kind of MP, time, reagents, HP, sometimes more extreme things. The whole 'MP' thing tends to be the easiest to deal with I think. Really I think that game-like stats are a pretty good abstraction for things sometimes, even if it can get a little bit silly.

Of course, magic isn't really completely 'real'. It's mostly or maybe entirely 'unreal'. That means you can pretty much make up any kind of rules you want. But you need some kind of way for you to limit it, some kind of rules, for it to really work.

When I actually translate what most consider to be magic from my native tongue to English, it really translates as 'sorcery'.

Sorcery is the art of using the aether to do something that most others would not necessarily be able to, such as cast something/someone aflame, freezing them solid, encapsulating them in stone, concealing something in a cloak of invisibility, healing sickness in an instant or very quickly, among many other things.

Things like disappearing acts, card tricks, illusions and such are not sorcery, they're mind tricks.

Mind you, one can use sorcery to do a lot of the mind tricks you see on TV, but most of the magicians know how to manipulate what their audience sees, not manipulating/using aether specifically.

Of course, pyrotechnics involving machines that are broken/fried by EMP, that cause detonations of rockets in an enclosed area (video above), that's neither mind tricks nor sorcery; it's internal combustion and technology. lol

Hehe, I don't think 'mind tricks' and 'sorcery' are as different as you might think. You could say the fairy idea of magic is more like pulling a 'mind trick' on reality it's self, or remembering that what seems to be 'reality' is mostly a mind trick it's self. Using 'aether' is one way of doing that, but not the only way. After all, regardless if 'aether' is real or unreal, that's not where the magic is. The magic is in the manipulation not the thing being manipulated. :3

I had been following Daggerfall Unity for a while, but then, you know...life just gets in the way and it fell off my radar.

Well, I hope you have fun. Honestly, we both deserve it, but as usual...lol

Pretty sure TES is more about lore than anything else and Morrowind was the start of the development of this.

Naw, Daggerfall has tons and tons of lore actually. Mostly in the form of books and quest text and stuff. About the only thing lore-wise Morrowind really did ever so slightly better was NPC interaction. In Daggerfall most NPCs were static sprites that didn't do much more then give you random quests or show a generic conversation screen you can ask about stuff in, or were randomly generated people who randomly walked around town with purely generic dialog. Morrowind had more dynamic NPCs and from what I remember has a bit more NPC specific dialog, though a lot of it was still generic.

That's really Morrowind's problem in a nutshell: I respect the decision to focus on fleshing out a smaller area more, but it does it in a really half-assed way and still manages to be pretty generic regardless. I mean, I already mentioned Ultima 6 and 7. In those games everything feels crafted and filled with personality, even most of the dungeons and other side areas. Nearly every NPC feels unique and have their own schedules and tasks, even the shopkeepers and other townsfolk.

Or to put it another way: Daggerfall's world was kinda shallow, and it seems to me that's because it was frigging huge and mostly procedurally generated (not at runtime, every game of Daggerfall has the exact same world, but the world was mostly built using procedural generation you can tell). Morrowind's world was kinda shallow, and it seems to me like it's purely because it's lazily designed and poorly written. I guess you could say that even though Morrowind is trying hard not to be like Daggerfall, it still feels like Daggerfall in all of the worst ways while all of the interesting stuff that made Daggerfall great was stripped out.

I even sort of have a soft spot for the first game in the series: Arena. Arena's combat is pretty shit, it's RPG Mechanics are boring, and it seems even more generic in lots of ways then even Daggerfall (and it's not that detailed graphicly), but man is it fun to randomly go out and explore in that game. In Daggerfall there are a lot of set areas on the map with something in them, but between them is basically lots of random featureless terrain. There is little to no reason to actually walk around randomly in the wilderness instead of fast travailing everywhere. In Arena their are less set areas on the map, but the random wilderness outside them is a lot more interesting.

Arena also takes place across the whole of Tamriel rather then a particular region like the other games. It's kind of interesting seeing the basic blueprint of the whole continent (one they have mostly stuck to), being able to both go to places that would be fleshed out in more detail later and going to places that are still only mentioned in the later games like Black Marsh and Elsweyr.

True, very true.

With each new entry, there's more and more lore added. Some of it makes sense, some, not so much. As far as combat goes, TES has crap combat, I won't lie. It is some of the worst combat I've ever come across, even worse than the likes of Unreal.

Yeah, procedurally generated landscape and world. It was clever at the time but hasn't aged well. It works better for other games and game genres like shooters.

Yeah, it seems pretty neato! Don't really have a camera, but I am not going alone so maybe I can share some pics? No promises. Hehe...

Damn! Sounds fantastic, love.

If ya do get some pics, be sure and share, especially those with you in them (even if just with me privately lol)

I'm just poking fun. Seriously, hope you have a blast. Actually, you might even be better off not returning until after the government is eliminated from the equation but that's neither here nor there...

Maybe after you're all rested up from your break, you'll finally get back into gamedev.

Yeah, I guess I have been a bit lazy with my game lately... And we will see about pics. If I am in them I would have to be in my ugly human disguise though. :3