In contrast - I’m all in favor for GD2; but start by re-creating GD1 in a sexy new DirectX15 engine. And then expand to cover the whole world 
I think the current Grim Dawn has a lot of possibilities for expansion; starting over with a new engine etc I’m not so sure about.
If they are going to start over, then do something new; but rehashing GD?
The current game can be developed and expanded incrementally as long as there is a player base willing to buy the expansions. I’m thinking of the kind of development cycle that Paradox games go through; or Firaxis; or Warcraft as someone else mentioned above.
Considering the limitations you have to deal with, I’d say all of you at Crate are doing an amazing job on Grim Dawn.
OMG!! Earlier this year!!!
Something you are still missing is the ability for the engine to have untargeted movement skills.
This one does not require GD2 but an expansion can be enough, where new skills are added to the trees or constellations.
Unfortunately Grim Dawn looks ancient in this regard in respect to Diablo 2 and PoE.
I’d better not compare it to D3 at all, that took this to the next level by providing obstacle avoidance and concurrent skill casting during these as well (i.e. warcry animation during whirlwind) and you don’t get stuck as often happens in PoE.
A first step for you would be to at least try to implement the plain old D2 version of Whirlwind and/or a simpliefied PoE Whirling blades (directional to the target even if stuck in obstacles), and then try to work onward.
If you need a target try to fake it by moving a dummy ‘invisible&immune’ monster on the mouse cursor (should be created server side for each player and recognized/actionable only by the client of the player that initiated the skill) and see if pathing can help to guide the new skill.
The next step would be to periodically update the Whirlwind direction towards where pathing would lead and make it similar to D3 or PoE Cyclone.
This kind of approach could also be used for teleporting skills (same kind of teleport D3 has, that needs pathing to be able to go to the target location, i.e. does not work through closed doors) - infinite movement speed with stop animation.
Pathing in GD is quite ok for such scenarios, i’ve seen my char sometimes move around two screens inside a house i clicked when i was completely unaware where i should go to enter it.
I never looked at the code of the Titan Quest engine but I’m sure that some kind of hack would be easily achievable.
You can make the game beautiful as much as you like but ultimately will die because of lacking gameplay and usability/user experience.
Something repetitive as grinding requires the latter to give longevity to the game.
Cough…
Even if movement skills that don’t require a target weren’t gonna be in the game (even though they are, Zantai just linked the thread) doesn’t mean the game is ancient in this regard.
Not every game in this genre is supposed to be a bunch of cracked up rabbits running around super fast, specially not like PoE. And the game is not gonna die if this wasn’t added to the game. If anything, i’m concerned if this is going to make the game like PoE in terms of speed, which is absolutely ridiculous in that game. One of the things i like about this game is the moderate speed. which is not a bad thing in a lot of cases.
And if Whirlwind is added to the game, add a cooldown. Running around like the Tazmanian Devil looks really stupid to me.
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This does not nullify my argument tough.
D2 Whirlwind was slow, and skills can have fixed movement speed and teleporting abilities cooldowns.
I would like to expand the userbase of this game instead of limiting it.
Moreover in GD this would require skill tree point assignments instead of being free like in D3 and relatively free (some gear sockets in PoE), which would penalize the character.
Would you spend 10 points in increasing the speed of your “Whirlwind” from 80% to 120% (you can walk faster than this) or reducing the cooldown of your teleport to 3 seconds from 5 and cripple your damage of other skills by doing that?
GD is the best game in the genre to have them, but unfortunately doesn’t.
It’s gonna be medal augments that are gonna give movement skills that don’t require a target. Don’t know why you bring up a method to get them when Zantai already linked a thread on how you will get them.
And i honestly doubt movement skills will increase the userbase by much, if not at all. As far as i know, people quit the game not because there’s no movement skills, but most think there isn’t much to do in endgame or they don’t want to play the game three times for each character.
To me personally, i couldn’t care less if movement skills were added to the game or not, but that’s me.
Not cooldown but heavy resource cost that requires hitting in order to refill, if you ask me
Again, developers are free to choose how the mechanic is used in the game.
But they need to have the mechanic first.
Sorry did not read the full thread, will dig it up, thanks.
No, Marsovac, your argument was nullified because the movement skills that you so desire are being added with the next expansion, Forgotten Gods. And were demo’d on their stream a couple weeks ago. We are getting rush throughs, teleports, forward leaps with slams, backward leaps, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few.
But you already know that, since I’m sure that you followed the link that Zantai so graciously posted.
I hope Crate doesn’t do anything silly like disallow celestial skills on the movement skills… I want to have a forward smashing leap that calls down meteors!
Whether we get some sort of whirlwind ability the devs haven’t said yet. If we do, I doubt it would be skill point based unless it’s a skill in any new mastery - something else we don’t know for sure yet. Otherwise it might be another rune or something else:
“In fact there’s a seventh type of skill that we added recently, but it’s not going to be a rune for some reason.”
I’m surprised no one’s picked up on this intreging little comment by Zantai on the 25th May. 
My bad Zantai, did not read the topics for the expansion (I never visited the forums before and also do not like arguing with people, as often happens)!
Good job!!
My argument is almost futile now, but almost approved at the same time 
I still think these skills need to be real skill that take points from other skill to be powerful.
If not they will be free (no penalty for having them, just grinding) like in PoE and D3 and people will be a bunch of rabbits as someone rightfully notified.
Not happening so don’t worry. Again from the 25th:
"I just realized, we could tie devotion procs to the mobility skills right?
Yep.
Whirlwind skill in FG or riot
Well, you shouldn’t start rioting just yet. But it’s not going on a medal."
Again, sorry for not reading GD news, and congrats.
Would you be so kind to explain how did you add it to the engine in the end?
Was is much different from my hackish way from previous posts?
As I understand it is tied to pathing, as expected, but I wish to know how did you solve the supposed targeting issue with the Titan Quest engine, someone mentioned.
(you can go as detailed as you wish, i’m a developer with pretty good knowledge of game client-server interactions).
Thanks.
From what I recall from Zantai’s stream discussions, it involved a lot of back-end re-coding of the pathing calculations of the game, and not so much hacky-stuff in the ways of summoning targets to move to, etc.
When it comes down to it, I’d imagine the various different sorts of new mobility skills showcased there are all the same, just with different animations during the action (with teleport being one that has an instantaneous animation). So same tech overlayed by making the player character visually move in different ways.
Yes I see that. In the current state as demoed it would not fit a whirlwind/cyclone (channeled) kind of skill, but it is a good step nevertheless.
Also bear in mind, as Medierra and Zantai said earlier in this thread, the TQ engine has been massively overhauled and reworked over the years they’ve been working on GD.
It wasn’t that the pathing couldn’t be done, but it was getting it to respect the various barrier pathways at the same time. If a barrier of some kind is in the way, like a boulder that needs dynamite to blow it up, you won’t be able to jump over it for example. Again from the 25th May stream:
“When I asked about teleport skills last time, you said they weren’t in game because you had areas accessible when they shouldn’t have been. Have you fixed that in FG, or were you just BSing because of announcement later on?
No we were not BSing you. This skill took a lot of work to get functional. This teleport actually obeys the pathing rules in the game. You can’t teleport over dynamic barriers, you can’t teleport over areas blocked by say dynamite. You can however teleport through walls that are accessible to you.”
Well…for starters I’d hardly call it the “Titan Quest engine” at this point given that we’ve rewritten significant portions of it and implemented all sorts of upgrades and new features while making Grim Dawn. The pathing system isn’t even the same as TQ used. For all intents and purposes, this is the Grim Dawn engine.
And no, hacky solutions are what designers do; until their hacks no longer work, then a programmer gets involved to make the engine do what the designers need (or the designer hacks make a programmer cry, then the hacks get replaced).
The final solution is far from “hacky”. I was not the one who wrote the code, so I can’t go into explicit details, but I imagine vector calculations were involved to determine a valid pathing solution and whether the targeted destination is within a valid pathable range so as to avoid pathing over inaccessible areas or areas too far away to reach normally.
The core of it was getting teleport to work and then working backwards from there to create the other variants and behaviors. Adding a whirlwind-type skill was a different beast entirely since it involved a channeled attack+move command, which is unlike any other skill presently in the game. The channeled behavior from skills such as Aether Ray served as a starting point.
marsovac, if you want hacky how about this from Medierra in November 2017 talking about one they had in Titan Quest.
"Without a doubt the hackiest thing I remember from Titan Quest is how we managed the event scripting. The quest / event tech had a major weakness in that there was no way to delay an action once it was triggered. So if you wanted something to happen 5 seconds after a player ran through some bounding volume, there was no way to set a delay. It would always be instant.
We were nearing the end of production, so it was hard to request additional features, as engineers were slammed just trying to meet their milestone deliverables. One of the QA testers had started helping out with scripting work, and figured out that there was in fact a way to delay an action from triggering based on the length of an animation.
He ended up using these squirrels we had as ambient creatures as the animation timer, and they became the default timing mechanism. He created an invisible version of the squirrel, which he would place in the levels where he needed them, then would time everything based on the duration of their idle animation. Because of his creative problem solving, he was promoted to designer on the next project."
Arthur Bruno
Owner / lead designer, Crate Entertainment