alanschu

And it seems as though Crawford has been fired.

The discussion about Bloodlines had more to do with the graphics engine (i.e. Source) IIRC. Even then, Bloodlines rewrote less than NWN2 did.

I didn't pick Kiprusoff because I was thinking Anaheim's hot play would upset them. Go go anaheim! I'm like 41000 on the Sportsnet pool. Dead last in the group that I am in (8 or so people) by about 4 points.

To cut on prodoction time. That doesn't mean that (bar very few exceptions) EVERY dev alters the engine to their wishes. Does this always have to happen before the work on the actual game can begin... doubt it... Hell, I have a game here (Painkiller) that got a ENGINE UPDATE for all existing levels in a freaking patch! Explain that if the engine segments where needed completely in order to build up the maps and terrains... Because extending an engine is MUCH different than rewriting it. Oh yeah, they "suddenly" had a different toolset. Ofcourse if you sit at your PC for a few hours you do not advance from A to Z by B, C, D, E etc... No, after A Z is a sudden entry... No, they didn't suddenly have a different toolset. They had to make it. No, but it is altered and edited even still. Lately the added mouth-movement and what else is yet to come. A final version (or even near-final version) of the engine is not needed to make those wire-framed levels... nor do the levels have to be completely build from scratch again after an engine update... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Because extending an engine is much different than rewriting one.

Thanks for that.

How was Silent Hill?

I agree! Them, as well as Carolina, surprised me the most this season. Though Buffalo is carrying on their success. I guess I should have picked Miller to win.

I think that's more of a "story" issue SP. Exposition leads to the "rising action" to the climax, and falls down to the denoument Expositions can be with a bang, but I rarely find they are better than the rest of the story. If it is, that is VERY bad.

Point conceded to Darque. Akari posted quite frequently (in particular) when KOTOR 2 was in development, and the NWN2 boards do have lots of dev posts.

Then this would definitely explain the cut in content.

They invented something for that. It is called QA... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Excellent! I was very curious how you were going to respond to this. This is NOT an issue that QA would find, because it would never get to QA. Designers do not just add stuff to the game and wait for QA to test it. This issue would be found the instant a designer tried loading their map in the toolset. If that part of the game was still very incomplete, QA would not testing it, as it's not in a state to be tested yet.

5-6 years isn't long enough for you? Why do you think people license engines? Because they didn't change the toolset for KOTOR 2. Because they also redesigned the Toolset for NWN2. It's not the Aurora toolset anymore. It doesn't....because they did more than alter the graphics engine....they redesigned the toolset. Trust me, building levels with one toolset, only to scrap that toolset and bring in another one is not a good idea. And it's not going to be that easy of a transition to just load stuff designed with one toolset into another. Unless they built their toolset in that way (which would take even more time). You can do it if you anticipate it from the beginning and incorporate it directly into your design patterns. Furthermore, UE3 has been in development for a long time. Finally, UE3 hasn't been released yet, but UE4 has already been in development for two years, so it's not like the designers at Epic are shooting from the hip when it comes to expectations of how levels are created. They didn't decide to suddenly rewrite the graphics engine for UT2K7....the concept of the UE3 engine existed long before UT2K7 would have left preproduction.

He didn't push the economy forward by increasing military spending. He increased military spending beause of his ideological beliefs about the Cold War and Communism (which is bad, which I already indicated.....his excessive military spending did NOT help the country). Especially seeing as his improvements in the economy were before the sharp increase in national debt (according to your graph anyways).

If a game has to be 20 hours because otherwise the QA team cannot cope up with freeing it of bugs you either need more or more competant testers... Personnally if a game is only 20 hours because of the QA-team cannot handle more I would opt to sack them all... A claim you can only make if you are in the loop. Which you aren't. They clearly have a goal to get the game out by a specific date. And since you mentioned KOTOR 2, all the "40+ hours of quality" doesn't mean much if it's a buggy mess. Given how people were all over them because of KOTOR2 being buggy on release, they'd probably rather NOT destroy their image any more. Actually it would be more valid. Source was totally new. Electron is build upon Aurora, like Troika had an (very) early version of Source and had to adjust/clean it of bugs/memory leaks, add in the wanted graphical adjustments etc. themselves. They didn't adjust it, nor did they fix memory leaks. And according to Brian Lawson, a man much more credible than you. Electron is the rendering engine. In other words...graphics. Source (which is a graphics engine) was not developed by Troika. Electron is. Does the building of the engine compares to the building of the game. Does UT2K7 been in production as long as UE3... nope. But damn well they started building UT2K7 was FAR from finished and needed several adjustments. Would that mean all the early work done on rules/design/levelbuilding etc. would go to waste. I doubt it. And once again HL2/UT2K7 cannot really be compared to NWN2 since NWN2 HAD a basis. You're just grasping at straws now. Last time this came up here on the forums somebody (dev) told us that that was only the graphical engine that got total revamp. Thus not the things like levelbuild, quest-building, AI etc. etc. etc. Errr, that's exactly what Brian's quote said. "Electron is the new rendering engine." I never assumed anything other than the Graphical engine was revamped. But try making a level when you have no engine to design it with. Nor tools to design it with. Try editting a previously built level with a completely different toolset. Really, do you think the leveldesigners or Chris Avallone would be working programming the toolset... You have programmers for that usually... the storywriters don't do it... (hell, I don't even wan't them to) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> He'd be working in preproduction. Kind of like the state Fallout 3 would be in right now. It's why game development takes so long. Furthermore, Lawson's post gives the indication that these rewrites didn't happen right away. You also introduce the possibilty of new bugs, new problems, and different hurdles. Even if they can still use pre-rewrite assets, it's hard to write and test scripts if the map you designed has now exploded due to the changes in the toolset.

Outside of Reagan's heavy military spending, I'm not sure how what he did was so horrible for the American people..especially their welfare. Median income went up, while inflation slowed (in spite of Cold War deficit spending). Pretty impressive by any means. To successfully increase the amount of money in the marketplace, while slowing the rate of inflation is not an easy thing to do.

No Kovalev or Elias for me. How is Afinoganov pointless? LOL. Crazy....team scores 8 goals and he, a talented offensive player, doesn't get any. It was goofy...three hatricks in one evening of playoff hockey.

Joke's on all of us.

Are games made for QA in the present day or for us costumers? Point not found...relevance not found... Then you're not looking hard enough. They said they want to release a quality game. If there's less game to run through QA, there's a greater chance that a larger percentage of the bugs will be caught. And look it ain't no RPG. Better is to actually use Vampire bloodlines, and that one made it longer than 20 hours of gameplay, nah? No. What sense would it be to compare Bloodlines, a game where the developers didn't have to make or modify the engine in any way, where tools are provided for them to make the game, with a different game? Bloodlines has much more in common with KOTOR2 than it would with NWN2, since it's built upon existing technology. Because much of the 6 years of development was not dedicated to actually making and creating the game story. You see, Half-Life was developed on top of existing technology from the Quake engine, and built with the same tools. Half-Life 2 was developed completely from scratch. Completely new engine, which would require their own toolset. The reason why HL2 definitely isn't longer (despite years more production time) is because they had so much more to do The original. As we all know Electron is the same engine but with the graphical engine upgraded. Since the underlying rules are still the same that shouldn't prevent OE from building up the game... Brian Lawson would disagree: "While we "started with" the "Aurora Engine" many things have changed. The toolset has been complpetely rewritten...from scratch. Hence, there is no underlying Aurora Tool code or anything of that nature. The tool that will be used to "build" the game will be brand new. Electron is the new rendering engine and the same goes for it. It's 100% stand alone in the sense that it uses nothing from Aurora." http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewt...&forum=95&sp=30 By the sounds of it, both the toolset and Electron are brand new. And a friendlier to use toolset should how block devs from making the game itself from being bigger? Sure you can alter the toolset, but that wouldn't mean that at the same time the current couldn't be used for levelbuilding... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It blocks the devs because instead of taking the time to make game content, they are spending time making the toolset. Toolsets don't just make themselves.

I've seen much more "OMG WTF it doesn't work" threads on Bioware than success threads. I mean, there was obviously enough backlash on the forums for Bioware to release an official statement, and Georg Zoeller probably broke his keyboard hitting CTRL-V and linking it to virtually every thread. I'd wager you were one of the lucky ones Volourn, rather than I being one of the unlucky ones. 20 page threads about people explaining how they found various work arounds along the game don't typically come around if it isn't a very common problems. And I'd be surprised if they were stickied. Neither do official statements from the company explaining why the MP doesn't work (for some people anyways). One question though, how did you work with the Relic of the Reaper and whatnot?

I get the impression with Garrett (and lots of sportscasters) that they have a bias towards who they think their expected audience is. It's not surprising that he focuses a good chunk on the Oilers in a Detroit-Edmonton series. I'd expect him to pick the Flames in a Calgary-Anaheim series as well. As for Carolina and Dallas, it makes sense. I picked Turco and Gerber in my pools. I also picked Lidstrom (0 points), Forsberg (1 point), and Jagr. At least Heatley has SOME points. Thornton? Shut down! Thankfully Cheechoo was able to salvage something. I am so hideously in last place in my pool it's not even funny.

I enjoyed the Virtua Tennis games, though I think I'm just not enough of a fan of the sport to justify buying it. I think they are pretty successful though.

Did you head back with that disassembler or whatever the heck it's called and turn all those plants into nanites?

If you got 2 extra years of dev time I doubt anybody with ANY competance would choose to "just scrap that then"... WHat? Would a shorter game not be easier to run through QA? Nice example. I assume Electron has been hacked and posted all over the net? " Even at 5 years, Half-Life 2 was still in development longer than Half-Life 1...before Source was leaked. An engine was already there... that should not block terrain generation/story creation/quest creation etc. Which engine is it? The graphics of NWN2 don't really look like NWN. I'm talking about the toolset that comes with the game for us to use. Resources have been spent to significantly improve the toolset (I think Llyranor even posted a PPT presentation about it) to make content creation for the end user less of a challenge.

Heh, you come HERE to have discussions with OE employees? Thank god Sawyer was hired!

Yeah, the assault rifle is definitely strong. The final fight against Shodan was laugh out loud funny because of the Assault Rifle. The evil geometric shapes were much more annoying! I'm surprised he didn't use the wrench as well. I always saved my ammo, even in my first playthrough. I got the impression it didn't exactly come in bunches