For all the people having problems with the graphics, here's some hints from Adam Heine:

Without knowing your specific specs, all I can really say is (1) play in full-screen (you probably already are, but just in case you aren't already) and (2) make sure you have the most up-to-date drivers for your video card.

If you are playing in windowed mode, make sure you're desktop is set to 16-bit color.

Tim Donley posted how to do this on the dev board (which I'm gonna ignore from now on, because of the ridiculous amount of spoilers there)

This one goes out to any of you who are wondering if this can be done and how to do it.
MC Dan Spitzley kindly gave me some insights on how to do this. First, you'll have to copy the entire contents of the game (one disk at a time) onto your hard drive. I'd guess you could just make three separate directories inside your install folder named CD2, CD3, and CD4. The next thing you'll have to do is edit your Torment.ini file located in the root of your install directory. Just re-point where the .ini file looks for CD2, CD3, and CD4 and that should be it.

I'm aware that the .ini has listings for a CD1 and a CD5 but obviously CD5 is not used and I'm pretty sure the entire contents of CD1 are installed when you first put the game on your system.

As to the total space required, I believe 2.28 gigs or so will do it. Needless to say, this is really for those with a lot of drive real estate.

Hope that helps any of you full install buffs. If you have any problems or questions just ask. Dan, myself, or some team member will probably be on the boards and respond.

Tim

'Nuff said!

Black Isle's Dave Maldonado (may he burn in hell for telling us when I don't have the game yet :-). This is a joke btw. I would never harm BIS. They're nice and fuzzy.) posted this on the message board, about the AI and Morte's taunt:

What the AI's doing is having your character 'move' to wherever the target's going (cutting them off, as it were)... which happens to be directly in front of you, as the target's approaching you. This aids in chasing down fleeing foes, but if you want to rush up to targets approaching you, you'll have to move up to them manually, then attack.

As a side note, I found the Guard command *very* handy in combat. I hot-keyed it to G in the Keyboard section of Options and used it to rush characters to points/areas I wanted them to stay at and fight oncoming enemies from. Aside from creating a stable defensive "wall," this gives you more time to 'fiddle' with more complex characters (thieves and mages) in combat without pausing constantly. For instance, you can set the Nameless One to guard a small circle, then have Morte 'Taunt' an enemy into rushing him. Simply move Morte in rings around the Nameless One... the enemy will frantically chase after Morte while the Nameless One (assuming he's effective in melee combat at this point) smashes the enemy to bits... entertaining *and* effective!

-- Dave

Chris updated the official site with a few more hints. Here's one:

9. There's a lot of combat in Torment, but you'll inevitably be rewarded a LOT more for not fighting in a number of situations. Don't be surprised if talking someone down or tricking them is worth three or more times what you'd get if you butchered them.

There's a new movie available. Click the link below.

Hmm. While I was away for 1.5 days, the secret ninja page (no I'm not gonna link to it) got updated. Of course, it's too late for me to win the t-shirt now... :-(

The faithful have been rewarded! From deep external sources, we have been informed that the final build of "Planescape: Torment" has begun shipping earlier today. Because of high demand, the product is on allocation - i.e. only limited quantities will be making it out to stores for the first few days as inventory is spread evenly across the country. Those with product pre-orders and/or on product waiting lists will be prioritized. We expect to be shipping product through next Tuesday or so in order to meet initial orders.

The secret password is "BIGTUNAISDABOMB"

The first ten of you who send this password to WEBMASTER@INTERPLAY.COM will receive an extremely rare and valuable Black Isle t-shirt (if you are willing to send us an address, which is kinda spooky when ya think about it).

Cya in the game!

-Tuna

Planescape-Torment has a webring now.
Webmasters who wish to join the Torment Webring can submit their site here.
The Ring is a great way to increase traffic to your site. All you have to do is complete this form. After that, you'll be given further instructions.

This is what the Great Programmerdude had to say about the matter:

Well, officially we don't support 2MB video cards. The reason for this is that we allocate a lot of DirectDraw surfaces in VRAM (front buffer, back buffer, cursor buffer, FX buffer, etc.), and 2MB is pretty close to the base amount that we need. This base amount does not include the additional VRAM tiles needed to cache in the scrolling background. The more memory you have over 2MB, the more background art can be cached, resulting in better scrolling. If you only have 2MB on the card the game will probably still run, but scrolling performance may suffer considerably. This is really a function of your video card drivers and how well they manage their memory resources. Some 2MB cards may still run the game acceptably, but it will differ from card to card.

Greg "Big Tuna" Peterson has announced a Ninja meeting... soon. How to attend it? Well, go to the secret page on the official site of course! How to find it? I'll give ya a little hint... it's in the shockwave version.

If you don't like spoilers, DON'T click the link below.

Some of the fans wonder what it would be like to work for BIS. We asked Adam Heine, who recently started to work for BIS. He gives you some answers... We also get some more info about Torment.

Thanks Adam!
The Interview

Vote for us, click the link below:

Well, it is.

The boys at AGN had Torment on their live show, Gametime. One of my questions was answered. Can you guess which one it is? :-)
The movie file will be put up at Allgames soonish.

Becker has put up another interview...sorta.
So go check it out

Oh so you want a quote do you?

Becker: Yeah, good thing. So can we see him?

Boris: No.

Becker: Why not?

Boris: He's auditioning for Dawson's Creek: The Movie.

Adam made this post on the dev board:

I finally beat the game legitimately last night (it's taken me a while cuz I keep getting distracted with these horrible bugs, but I squished 'em all), and I got some more tips for you when you all get into the game.

(1) Like Chris said before, ALWAYS go back to the Tattoo Parlor whenever you get a chance. He gets new tattoos for even the most minor quests you do and some of them are really cool!

(2) The guy who teaches you to be a fighter will most likely be the first of the tutors you run across. Even if you want to be a mage or a thief, it's a good idea to train with him once so you can get some good weapon proficiencies.

(3) Don't underestimate Morte.

(4) Again, like Chris said, it's a really good idea to save before major dialogues. If you're trying to play an evil character you need to be especially careful - some characters don't take too kindly to the typical evil responses and you may have to act good for a second if you're not strong enough to back up your threats.

(5) If you have an aligment in mind, play it to the hilt as much as possible. But don't be afraid to stray from the alignment every once in a while if it'll get you something good. By the end of my game, I had done enough Chaotic Evil acts to become that alignment three times over. If it would've benefited my game, I could've easily done some Lawful or some Good things and it wouldn't have changed my alignment one bit.

On a side note (relating to the Chaotic Evil thing), I know a lot of people are wondering just how evil you can be - especially concering the psychopathic slaying of innocents. If you do it right, you don't have to kill anybody. My character became Chaotic Evil relatively easily and rather early on in the game, and there was not a single point in the game where I killed someone simply because it amused me. Sure, I killed a few people who got mad at me (through no fault of my own of course ;), but I never went around and slaughtered a whole town or anything. It's quite possible to be evil without being an out and out murderer.

Wanna save your karma? Get yo' butt over to Games of Encouragement, a charity thingy run by our gracious hosts, Gamestats.

According to the Interplay online store, Planescape: Torment is going to ship December 9th. That's a delay of 6 days. I can live with that.

Chris Avellone made a leetle post on the dev board about the Torment novel:

The novel spills some of the secrets of the game, so if you read it, you aren't likely to be surprised by much of what occurs in the game. On the other hand, the main characters in the game are substantially different from the ones in the novel, and there's extra NPC allies in the game that are never mentioned in the novel.

Personally, I'd play the game first, then read the book, but neither one will spoil the enjoyment of the other.

Chris

It's happened again. A Nycaloth in the front wing.
On another note, I am pleased to announce that Gorm is now an honorary member of The Pit. I have no idea what this means though, I just felt like saying it.

Becker has made a "Top 10 reasons why Baldur's Gate is better than Torment".
Check it out!

Chris Avellone has given us some hints for the game on the Dev Board. Click here for the post.

It WON'T be december 3.
Head over to the official site for the scoop. Here's a quote for ya (actually, I ripped the entire thing for your viewing pleasure):

I wanted to give everyone a quick update as to how Torment is going. Last weekend on Saturday one of our network routers decided to act a little funky and caused our daily build of the game not to happen. We got the router replaced but it had already done the damage. About midnight last Saturday we all got kicked out of Source Safe (a program that acts as a librarian for all the source code and most of the game data). Running an analyze program on Source Safe showed that it had gotten corrupted. So, last Sunday we had to go back to older data that we knew was not corrupt, and for good measure we stepped through most of it by hand to make sure that it was all fine.

So to make a long story longer, because of all this we won't be shipping on December 3rd. We'll have a better estimate early next week as to when it is going to be.

Sorry for the delay,

The MP3's we have in our download section seem to be giving problems for quite a lot of people. I'm gonna re-encode them this weekend, see if that solves anything...

Gorm has sent in another beautiful piece of fan art, this time of some nasty-looking slaadi.

Tim Donley has made an update on the official page.
Again, nothing special, just some whining about how great the game is...

Remember, west.gamesnet.net #torment! (you'll need to use an IRC client like mIRC to enter)
And here's some more quotes for ya...

We have Trelons in our game, creatures created by magic, originally intended as mage-slayers.

[ed: about the intro]: ambigious and memory-laden.
AHHH... I think it's about two minutes.

I have a feeling people will really like spells in our game.

Check out our download section to listen to some music Pull made for Torment. The Pit is really enthousiastic about it. Are you?

Gorm just keeps sending in fanart, and I'm not gonna tell him to stop :-)
Anyway, check out the galleries.

Go check it out. Greg put it on the official site. Cool huh?

Gold, gold, gold.
Sheena Easton told us so on the dev board!!!

Both Greg & Eric. Check it.
A leetle quote for ya: (again, about how cool the game is)

Ok, ok, I know I sound like a total fan-boy here; obviously, I'm going to dig the game. You can't put so much work into something and not feel partial to it. Honestly, though, I'm very impressed with the level of character development and depth of story that Chris, Colin, Dave, and the other designers have put into this. Did I mention, you can meet a woman who offers you money for the experience of allowing her to KILL YOU?? Then there are the memories. You never know when one of the ghosts from your past will appear in your head. You might be watching someone dice tomatoes and BAM! You remember being a gourmet chef! (Or something like that) You might remember treating someone like total crap, once, and relive all the pain and sadness you caused him or her.

Scott dropped by again on IRC tonight. The server: west.gamesnet.net. The channel: #torment. Here's a few things Scott said, UNOFFICIALLY IN CASUAL CONVERSATION:

[Ed: about how many Lim-Lims there are]:You know, actually we really don't have that many.

[Ed: about bugs]:We're very stable at this point, which is a weight off the back definitey...

You can call the lim lim whatever you want, you know. give it that personal touch. [ed: Not in the game, just in your mind hehe :-)]

There are sitars playing from Colin's speakers.

i am a gamie techie dude [Ed: don't ask.]

You can specialize in weapons.

My favorite NPC... hmmmm
I have a few, but I don't want to mention them yet. Wait until after you've played it. :)

Yeah, GameFan put a few others up that are testing situations.
So, for the record, there will be no characters that say "Okay, cut the shit and send me on my way."

shoot Malkali [ed - Hehe.]

It's safe to say that if this CRPG does not satisfy the more critical role playing game fan's calls for depth and originality in a game, there won't be one that does.

where's transeer?
[Malkali]: A dingo ate his baby.

well say hi to them [the Pit crew.] for me and tell them your site [The Pit! WOOHOO!] is great. :)

you can talk somebody(s) out of existence, and somebody(s) into existence.

There may be some more Black Isle stuff at my website in the future.

[ed: This was an interesting piece of conversation:]
[Malkali] hmmmm... I can probably imagine who you need to talk into existance. :)
[Malkali] perhaps haunted armor dude gets a new life or something
[Scott] [shrug]!
[Scott] haha

As promised, here's some more information for our European and Australian friends. Here's what Greg had to say:

Ship date equals day product starts to leave our warehouses to go to the stores. Pre-orders will start showing up in 2-3 business days (if ordered overnight) so somewhere around the 7th. I assume it will start to show up in EB's and Babbages about the same time. Expect it in Best Buy's and CompUSA's a week before Christmas. Expect it in Europe right before Christmas as well - targeting as close as possible to simultaneous release the game tends to show up about two weeks later than over here. Australia I'm not sure about - it takes a while longer, so probably not until the new year. Pre-orders from Australia are shipped direct from here to your door (no picking up anything from a local store).

Gorm has been kind enough to send in a new piece of fanart, of a tiefling warrior in a positively sharp set of armor.

It's december 3.

We don't know what it means for people from outside USA, but we'll tell you as soon as we know. Look what Greg Peterson has to say...

Brian just swung by the office and told us to announce it. Assuming no major bugs or bumps, everything will be heading out the door on that Friday.

We are going to be sending out an email to all registered BG owners, as well as an email to all retailers announcing the final date. Make sure to reserve a copy if you want one before the holidays - we will be producing a hefty initial quantity, but it is always tough to get back into the production schedule right before Christmas.

Charles Deenen, Torment's sound supervisor and re-recording mixer has been so kind to give us some music and "background ambient soundeffects" from the actual game. Thanks Charles!
Check it out!

Malkali is my personal hero. Everybody on the Torment boards is doing Haiku, but I'm not creative enough for it. So, for us stupid dolts, Malkali created this little proggie. (Actually, it was for a class project of his, but we're gonna pretend he did it for us)

Just added two pictures by Gorm to the fanart section

We have... a message board! Go spam it! :-)

We are pleased to announce that the merger with The Mazes has been completed, and you're looking at the result... The Pit!
I still have to hammer out some stuff with the news script and the message board though...

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