How about the Assassins. Should the controls be better for Generals being RTS style, but suck for Assassins, or should the controls be MMORPG style but suck for Generals?

Or... How about the option to choose different control schemes and customize them? :OOOOOOOOO

Well, we don't even know the gameplay, how can you say wasd will be better ? Wait some more weeks and we'll see what is the choice of the developpers and what is better to play an assassin or a general.

edit : oh and I really hope Diablo 3 will not use wasd.

Exactly..

Point-to-click i myself would be using as a general to move my army around.
But in combat, when using my Demigod, especially with an Assassin, I'd want to use WASD.


I think the only reason not to would be for tradition. The same reason Porsche gimps the 911 by putting the engine behind the rear wheel, because it's tradition.
They won't put the 911 turbo engine and LSD in the Cayman because it'll spank the 911 too hard. ;[


A MAJOR OVERHAUL? I don't think so.
It might not work idealy, but it could be made to work.
A lot of korean MMORPG's where they get ported to the west have WASD added by basically telling the game that you clicked up/down/left/right/diagonal.

There are numerous ways they could do it, easy ways and hard ways. It's up to them.
They could just do it the easy way for the early beta's and see what people say. I think most people will ask for having the WASD improved if it isn't good, not removed.


Um.. what does top-down view have to do with not having WASD movment?..
The game is an RPG-RTS hybrid.
Assassins do not have massive army. You only have ONE unit just like an RPG.(unless some of them have a skill to summon minions, but they'd be the exception NOT the rule I imagine.)

Because it's using the Supreme Commander engine.

You could make it work but there would be a delay between when you press a key and when your character moves. I think that would drive too many people insane.

You're assuming it'll be that way.

I know it's on the supcom engine.
In teh supcom engine there is a .5second delay between clicking and moving also.
Hopefully they've removed that with Demigod since there is less units and such, though.

You can't remove it. It's intrically tied to how RTS engines are synchronized. They can make it smaller, but there will always be a delay.

I am always calm. Always see reason in things, especially ideas and suggestions. But...





...NO. I won't take this crap.

Not for this type of game. UGH I can't even think about it. How could YOU think about it.

Diablo III is not going to be WASD NOT because of tradition, but because it's a bird's eye view game. Even if it weren't it damn right wouldn't be WASD.
All bird's eye view games == All classic RPGs are point and click.

If Dungeon Siege wasn't p&c i wouldn't buy it.

Hey, do you want gamepad support too?

Point and Click: Because it's easier to handle stuff.
It's really, really stupid to suggest WASD for a game like this.
Why build a human with their left hand missing? Castrate half the spells because they can't be used properly with WASD? And don't reply suggesting WASD + mouse..

And how do you handle your hero when you want to explore the map?
Let's say your units are in the middle of the map. You are zoomed in and exploring, while having your WASDhero offscreen. How do you quickly move the guy there? Zoom out until you see both and move him? Slowly move your way there, estimating where you have to go from?
Misfunctional.

Can we get a dev to answer?
My pre-order depends on that.
Although i'm 99.3% it's point-and-click.

Well that delay is going to be there whether you WASD or click, then.
so.. I don't see your point, really.

I see your point in that it is an RTS engine so adding good WASD movement COULD be more difficult, and it is the only valid argument anyone has made against it.
The other posts not in favor are just people not knowing what this game is. :/



And NO not all "birds eye games" are point and click.
I don't know where you get this from. How many games have you played in the past 5 years?..
And DotA is an RTS mod not a hero based game.

Tons of Diablo clones have WASD movement.
Tons of top-down RPGs have WASD movement.
Tops of RPGs have WASD movement. (primarily guildwars as an example, a competitive RPG like Demigod wants to half-be. And Guild Wars people typically play as what is basically a birds-eye view, zoomed so far out and looking down at your hero.)


Actually I don't even know why I justified a response to you with you posting with thinking i was suggesting to REMOVE point-and-click.

just lol

Look, mate, WASD is there in most MMOs, because it's easier to send the signals to the server. You apparently don't have the game experience to know.
And don't tell me Mass Effect is WASD. Mass Effect is partly FPS.
Fable? Fable is a console port.

... um no.
Lol you have it reversed.

WASD is more load on the servers.

With click-to-move you click the map and it is just a single packet sent to the server and some checking up to make sure all is fine. With WASD it has to constantly update and send and receive packets.


WASD is added to MMO's and RPG's because it's superior input method for controlling a single character, shooter or not.

FABLE has you move like that because it's an ACTION RPG. Sort of like Demigod is, eh..?

It's 3 am here, and I can think that HOLD button and RELEASE button is easier to handle than spamming clicks to move around. edit: and there's this little thing called "pathfinding" most devs cba with if it's not a strategy game.

If you took 3 seconds and thought about it, maybe you'd realise that's the reason you see other players running till they reach a wall and keep running against it when they are lagging.

I can't be arsed arguing with you anymore.

Superior? It's up to personal preference. But in a bird's eye RPG game, no, seriously, no. It smells rotten.

I used to have some respect to you, but after seeing you mentioning DotA and how much you hate it in at least 3 threads, and getting defensive and laughing at me, moaning and groaning at me as if I'm about to kick your nice little sand tower down in this thread, well you don't deserve the time. nitey

Haha you don't like me because I don't like DotA. :p

WASD does use more bandwidth, in Guild Wars at least. It consantly sends updates to the server that you're still holding down the button to move. That game also has an auto-run hotkey which sends you running till you turn it off, and it has click to move as well.

But of course this is different for all games. IIRC, in Neverwinter Nights it used the low bandwidth version of WASD movement where you'd keep going if you lagged.

No. I didn't say I don't like you. I said I lost respect to you. Because you are trolling about DotA, and because you are discrediting me, when I have always answered you with logical arguments, except this time ofcourse. I would loose respect if you praised DotA everywhere too.

More of why not WASD:
Do I really have to loose my orientation to just turn my hero around? Playing a bit like this feels like the battleground is moving around, not the character. Map still = 4/8-way movement. And with the battlegrounds not having any huge recognizable points around, and being the same, well unless your base is blinking, most people ARE going to get lost. Look at the ancient Greece themed map. It's just a grid made of roads.
Or... is it going to be the new WSAD movement? AD turning left and right? "Oh there's a creep that I can one-shot behind the hero and I'm about to die..." AAAA, creep bashes once, AA, creep bashes twice, dead hero.

ugh now you're just being assinine.
Have you never played a game with WASD or something?
The movement can be based on either your screen orientation OR your characters orientation, whichever it turns out works better.

If you had WASD so much then DON'T USE IT. What does your extreme hatred for it have to do with my love of it?

As long as one can choose to go point-n-click OR go WASD, I see no problem....
just as long as the method of movement isn't forced

Yes, exactly.

I understand why people want click to move for Generals. It's better input method for controlling armies.
But for an Assassin I don't see why people don't want to let me use WASD. What does it matter to you? Click all you want.

It's like you want the rocket launcher, rifle, grenade launcher, bfg, and plasma gun taken out of Quake3 because your favorite weapon is the Railgun.


IT's just how Guild Wars has the option for both WASD and click to move. So do most MMORPG's, RPG's, action games, platformers, so on.. pretty much any game where you control a single character and the mouse is a cursor(instead of like in FPS being a crosshair where you shoot) has both WASD and click-to-move. There is the option for people who have the preference for one or another.

Does it really matter these days which is more intensive? (I mod with the source engine (i.e. TF2/HL2)) Source spends more time updating animation frames(multiple integers each entity), game states(lots of stuff), health (float per entity), movement(float and vector per entity), world positions (three floats per entity), ammo (multiple integers per entity), freaking eye vectors(I mean thats just showing off), prediction numbers (for all that previous stuff), and a metric ton of other crap that the commands for keyboard pressed/not pressed, which are smaller than the vectors used for which way your eyes are facing... does NOT effect the network speed AT ALL!!! NADA!!! ZIP!!!

Let alone a click which is simply a world position... how many of those do you think are floating around in a game? EVERY SINGLE UNIT has a world position (And a couple other variables) that need to be updated evrey time they change, spamming clicks or keyboard keys are by no means going to cause adverse network traffic! Let alone the fact that the speed and bandwidth of connections today can handle a lot.

Both use about the same net traffic (actually the click is more expensive cpu wise as pathing needs to be calculated each time) So stuff the whole, 'the engine can't handle it thing' as clicks are harder (and I say this from experience) to implement than freaking arrow keys. (though granted in a rts environment it might be a little more challenging)


And on five other points:


starts with C and ends with lick.

And either way I don't care either way, but devs, just make sure I can rebind the keys!

innociv I thought you were for it why are you trying to make the point WASD is more taxing? (don't argue with people who agree with you >.>)

Also fR1Xi0n your arguments mean more with reasons besides, "You apparently don't have the game experience to know." i.e. insulting people, and besides 'You apparently don't have the game experience to know' that they're really the same network wise.

The cheap version would be delta compression where yes you keep going if you lag, the expensive one would be through updates, because of the way RTS engines work, delta would be best because it's already set up to lag by default, the entire game has to be refreshed anyways, whats a nibble (and yes thats a real term) more?.

Well with click-to-move the updates can be tweened.
WASD IS more intensive.
But the thing is, like you said, does it really matter these days? The difference isn't enough to warrant not including WASD over the slight increase in network traffic.


I say it's more taxing because I don't BS. I state the pros and cons, and why the pros outweight the cons, instead of being zealous and misinformative.
Because I know the slight increase in network traffic is a non-issue.


I would like a REAL WASD. But if they put in the way nwn and the korean mmorpg ports do it i think that'd be fine for the early betas as proof-of-concept.. Since it's simpler to add in, and can hopefully add in real WASD before release.

*Sigh*

In supreme commander, evrey unit has a world position when that changes (because the units moving.. duh?) the game updates that in a packet, now I haven't worked with supcom and I don't know the details but I'm assuming like most RTS's it updates everything and then moves on to the next update (which would make sense if you think about the way the lag acts with more and more units)

Now lets say a world position is an x and a y (as demigod doesn't do the z and a click is ordering units so its not needed for graphics) lets say that number can range from 1000 to -1000 (i.e. 2^11)
so in a packet(simplifying a little here):

0100101100001001010110 would be a click (or any unit position, actually unit positions would be 50% bigger)
0001 would describe all the arrow keys

But again it doesn't really matter, as most packets are huge compared to that. Most other fields in a packet are huge compared to that actually. And really its much much smaller than that because of compression, delta compression, optimization, bit packing and other schemes.

Well most RTS games the netcode is just telling all the players what orders people give, not updating every unit. (IE, player _ ordered units _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ to move to _) If i'm not mistaken, that is.
Maybe supcom is different. IF it is then it'd seem even easier to make WASD work well..

I could be wrong here.

Regardless, Demigod needs WASD controls for the Demigods as an option.

So I give an order to a unit, what path does it take? When it shoots what random number angle did it shoot at? who does it shoot by default? Granted many things SHOULD come out the same when calculated with same code but they don't always do.

And if it was this way... why have a half second delay? Why if one computer is slow should they all slow down? Why if one computer has a bad internet does everyone slow down?

Now granted I've never written a commercial RTS engine (I have written one though), but I'm pretty sure thats how they do it.

(Now in client-server schemes, the client sends commands, and the server sends a ton of information about everything (the way all your enemies eyes are facing, their position ect. ect.) for those of you who are interested, and this is my major experience with commercial engines)

Games don't have unknown variables like real life does.

In a game you can tell a unit to move from point A to point B in one similation and it'll do the same thing every time.

There is no random little pebble on the ground you can't account for like real life.

I still find it incredible that you insist this while simultaneously knowing almost nothing about the game.

Recode the whole game so WASD is possible for all i care, if it isn't. =]