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Posts posted by funcroc
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Well, if the questions that I've asked are of any indication, Obsidian is going to try their best to ensure that the game runs on as many systems as possible, and as well as possible. They're targeting integrated chips too, and not just for lowest settings. Got this in my Kickstarter inbox.
HI ***,
We are really going to work to get the integrated graphics chips to run the game well - and not just on the lowest setting.
Thanks again for the support!
-Feargus
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##ProjectEternity Update 6: Choosing the Best Tool for the Job http://www.kickstart...ty/posts/313192 … #Linux
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from OEI programmer Jon Burke's Facebook
Obsidian Entertainment - September 2012 — with Stephanie DeBrule, Tyler Davis, Antonio Govela, Param Anand, Joshua Eric Sawyer, Van Aguilar, Robert Nesler, Mark Bremerkamp, CHIZZELO, Feargus Urquhart and Adam Brennecke.- 1
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OT: https://twitter.com/...643474512871425
Had a little demo of South Park: The Stick of Truth in the office earlier. Lots of laughs, fans of SP definitely won't be disappointed! -
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- Adam Brennecke's twitter profile updated
I make games. Project Director and Programmer at Obsidian Entertainment currently working on the Project Eternity Kickstarter.- OEI co-founder Darren Monahan's twitter account
OT: ex-BIS/OEI designer Dave Maldonado's twitter account
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A 4 Hour Story in 400 Simple Steps: Fallout DLC
SPEAKER/S: Chris Avellone (Obsidian Entertainment, Inc)DAY / TIME / LOCATION: TBD
TRACK / DURATION / FORMAT / AUDIENCE LEVEL: Game Narrative Summit / 60-Minute / Lecture / All
GDC VAULT RECORDING: TBD
DESCRIPTION: Using Fallout: New Vegas DLC's Dead Money as a test case, creative director Chris Avellone runs through the process in creating a small RPG game narrative from pitch to completion, detailing all the tasks along the way: Pitch docs, narrative standards docs, thematic design, maps and level layouts, bug fixing and more until your game story is finally in a player's hands. Focus and questions include specific studio tools and techniques: story flowchart creation, building emotional vistas, script proofing, and text editing and lockdown sessions.
TAKEAWAY: Specific layouts, formats for conversation editors, localizaton info, level and character design templates, approaches to character concepting, research, and more of a "how to" and "what needs to be done" in terms of game narrative - this will be a listing of a complete product cycle for a narrative designer on an RPG.
In the Shadow of Greatness - Sequels and Reboots Deconstructed
SPEAKER/S: Mary DeMarle (Eidos Montreal), Tom Abernathy (Microsoft Studios), Chris Avellone (Obsidian Entertainment, Inc), Raphael Van Lierop (HELM Studio) and Ivan Mulkeen (Eidos Montreal)DAY / TIME / LOCATION: TBD
TRACK / DURATION / FORMAT / AUDIENCE LEVEL: Game Narrative Summit / 60-Minute / Panel / All
GDC VAULT RECORDING: TBD
DESCRIPTION: In the era of reboots and trilogies, what are the challenges that a development team faces when it comes to how they treat beloved game IP's? This session will bring together developers from various studios who have all had their hand involved in recreating or reigniting projects that have previously struck gold. Special consideration will be given to how to follow up a successful or beloved story, including how to do right by the existing fans, while attracting the ever important larger fan-base - and how you overcome the preconception that one must play the prequel before playing the sequels.
TAKEAWAY: This panel will address: What are the major considerations taken and needed for successful reboots and sequels? What common misconceptions can we debunk? How does DLC fit into the narrative structure (for fans and for developers)? What does the future look like for original IPs?
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Tyler Davis' LI profile updated
Current
- QA Department Head at Obsidian Entertainment
Past
- Production Analyst at Obsidian Entertainment
- Internal Production TCR Analyst at Obsidian Entertainment at Square Enix
Credited Games: Project Gotham Racing 4, Dungeon Siege 3, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers, Bajo-Tooie, and Lode Runner.
QA Department Head
Obsidian Entertainment
July 2012
- QA Department Head at Obsidian Entertainment
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https://twitter.com/...664485274935296
[Eric Campanella,] Lead Character Artist from Planescape has a cool robot game, if you like robots blowing **** up. I do. http://t.co/we4nYJj7 -
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http://godhatesgeeks.com/?p=650
Right now, the only thing this priest wanted to do on Day 1 was make up for E3. The stuff we missed. And, the absolute worst moment of our wonderful Electronic Entertainment Expo experience was skipping on South Park: The Stick of Truth.This morning
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#1: https://twitter.com/...4/photo/1/large
Yay! South Park: Stick of Truth booth at Comic-Con!#2: http://insertcoinslv...ap#.T_7Nyqt1Dug
South Park Is Hilariously InappropriateSouth Park: The Stick of Truth has been on my radar since it was announced earlier this year. I mean, come on, Matt and Trey have teamed up with Obsidian Entertainment to create a turn-based RPG with the only focus being on the point of the game playing like an episode of the show. What
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OT: ex-OEI programmer Erik Novales' formspring
What was it like working on the Neverwinter Nights 2 Toolset?Very tiring! Heh.
It was an interesting, and very big challenge. It did give us an opportunity to really enhance and modernize some aspects of the content creation process, and try and eliminate some of the really troublesome or tedious aspects of making content for NWN. We considered retrofitting the new graphics engine into the old toolset, and then trying to fix a few of the major productivity drains, but we thought there might be some serious technical issues in trying to do so, and so the new toolset was born.
I was basically redoing an enormous existing application, on a technology platform new to Obsidian (though I had worked with it before, at Totally Games), with new game engine features that had yet to be written. And, with a few exceptions, I was writing it nearly all by myself! (A lot of the terrain functionality was done by Adam Brennecke, and Steve Weatherly worked on bug fixes and a lot of the internationalization work for the toolset. For the expansions, Josh Verrall took over tools programming, so thank him for all the new stuff that was added in MOTB and SOZ. We also reused the existing script compiler, and of course the graphics engine from the game itself.) If you take a look at the credits for NWN1 vs. NWN2, you may get an appreciation of the resource disadvantage I was at...heh.
It wasn't all bad news on the scope front, though. One thing that simplified matters was that it was an editor being written to support many data structures that already existed and were extremely well-documented. There were many examples of "correct" data, and many applications and tools that already existed to produce and consume many of the Bioware data formats. This made it much easier to verify that things were working correctly. Similarly, given that the UI was intended to be an improvement of an existing one, there was a lot of existing guidance on how things should be laid out, and certain obvious improvements that could be made. The content creators at Obsidian also had a laundry list of desired improvements, from working on earlier titles with the Bioware engines, and where possible we implemented those suggestions.
A big win on the technology front was our decision to use the .NET platform, which worked really well and provided us with a great starting point for the application. The ability to easily integrate third-party components with the framework and Windows Forms was also incredibly useful, and paid huge dividends both in time saved and a much more polished UI. The docking toolbars, tabbed windows, and property grid UI were all big winners in my opinion. There was also a third-party tree list control that we used which was really helpful -- it made the conversation editor much more efficient in terms of letting you see more information at a glance.
One thing that I wish had existed while I was working on the toolset is the LINQ extensions in .NET 3.5. In particular, it would have made writing a lot of the code in the conversation editor much simpler -- there was a lot of code to deal with the conversation tree structure that could have been written much more succinctly with LINQ, with fewer opportunities for bugs to creep in. Some of the code for the more esoteric features, like the "question node" in the conversation editor, could definitely have made great use of LINQ. (And hey, with all of that hypothetical time I would have saved, I could have made the interface for it much more intuitive!) Another area where I think LINQ would have also been a big help is the script editor parsing.
Another set of tools that would have been great to have on NWN2 (not just the toolset) were the crash and bug reporting tools I later wrote for the Onyx engine at Obsidian. These tools allow one-click crash and bug reporting, with tons of useful information automatically collected, submitted, and analyzed. This would have helped tremendously with hard-to-reproduce bugs and sped up development.
I could probably go into some more detail, but the tl;dr summary would be: interesting work, huge scope, and, as always, the wisdom of hindsight and more modern tools would have saved me a heck of a lot of effort.
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OT: http://www.gam3rcon.com/panels.html
"Writing for the Computer Gaming Industry"3:45 PM to 4:30 PM | Theatre | FREE with Gam3rCon Admission
While the game-play, graphics, and physics of modern computer games are often the first things to attract players to a computer gaming title, it's often the rich histories, plots, and quests that keep them coming back for more. In some cases the stories have been so controversial or involving that they eclipsed the game in which they were placed (we're looking at you Mass Effect 3). Join our panel of veteran computer gaming writers as they share their stories about creating the narratives for the stories you love.
Featuring Neal Hallford (Betrayal at Krondor, Dungeon Siege), Anne Toole (The Witcher), Chris Avellone (Planescape: Torment, Fallout: Las Vegas), Haris Orkin (Call of Juarez, Dead Island), John Zuur Platen (Ghostbusters, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin), plus special guests TBA. Moderated by Jana Hallford, co-author of "Swords & Circuitry: A Designer's Guide To Computer Role-Playing Games".
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OT: ex-OEI designer Katie Susoeff's LI profile updated
senior writer
Bigpoint GmbH
July 2012
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http://gamestar.ru/article/1956.html or
http://webcache.goog...ticle/1956.html
Greetings, please introduce yourself to our readers. Tell us about your position and job responsibilities.I'm Tim Cain, and I am senior programmer at Obsidian Entertainment. I am currently responsible for combat and AI development in their South Park RPG.
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http://www.gamereact...38afada867b098e
Obsidian Entertainment - Chris Avellone Interview (2012-07-09)David Caballero caught up with Obsidian Entertainment's Chris Avellone at this years Gamelab in Barcelona and peppered him with questions regarding all of Obsidian's current and possible future RPG projects.
Eric Fenstermaker is on Twitter
in Obsidian General
Posted · Edited by funcroc
Found these at LinkedIn.