@\NightandtheShape/@

I believe it has been started and cancelled a couple of times. Sounds frighteningly familiar to another games third release, doesn't it? Yeah, but we all know FO3 was canned because MCA and Josh are actually a couple of lazy lay abouts

How long has JA3 been in development, it seems like years upon years upon years...

Prettier Bloom??? There is nothing wrong with the bloom, heck MOTB shadow plane is there because of the BLOOM. Bloom != HDR, they're 2 seperate effects that can infact generate some similar effects... HDR tends to look alot better in lighting situations, but you can do cool things with bloom, like totally desaturate an entire scene of all its colour... Ala Shadow plane.

hence why it's more useful to scientists Some guys did some real time ray tracing on 3 PS3's... Which frankly seems like a waste of time.

Hardly a cheap trick, and certainly more preferable to CoD's point and click mechnic where infact it is near impossible to miss because it makes you into an instant marksman. BiA atleast had a gritty realistic feel to its weapons, though I must state that I do believe it is flawed on other levels such as that of level design. The weapons mind were indeed one of the better things about BiA. The effect is that BiA is atleast challenging, where CoD is piss poor easy, fun online, but otherwise a pathetic attempt at a WW2 shooter. I don't have much experience with MoH so I won't say much, but from what I do know of it is that it also suffers greatly from CoD's instant marksman perfect shot syndrome which, while fun, it is utterly pathetic.

The PS3 is more useful to society as a scientific tool, than a games console.

That is one impressive engine!

FEAR may just be another shooter in regards to the general mechnics, but it sure looks nice. That's also not mentioning the general Bullet time and melee additions. BiA not only had interesting team mechanics, but the weapons were alot more realistic than your run of the mill point and shoot COD affair. You're being a little harsh don't you think?

I was actually trying to have a constructive conversation, as I couldn't understand the general motivation behind developing an engine of this manner, why not develop something entirely different... All said, I have tried to maintain that the product itself is of a fairly high quality. I was honestly trying to understand why so much effort had been put into a product of this type, but really it isn't all that different to say "Devils Whiskey"... *Goes back to playground* WEEEE!!!!

You guys always spoil all my fun!

I figured that Bioware would do this anyway... YAY!

Please elaborate ) As expressed: I seriously believe that FIFE will be a great option for hobbyist and independent developers. This engine is not meant for modern AAA titles; I do completely agree that this engine will never be featured in a mass market game. If anything I agree, for indie devs, hobbyist etc... But I don't see the point. If I was an indie developer, I would suppose I already fall under that "Specification", and I would do a better job, in that dream scenario I'd develop an isometric 3D engine. Easier, yeah I suppose there is a significantly easier learning curve in 2D, but there is also a significant increase in asset development time, and a significant increase in asset sizes. So because party based RPG's work better from a 3rd person perspective I should us a 2D engine, insane absolutely INSANE logic there my friend. I wouldn't say you can really compare Oblivion or the eldar scrolls series in general to the previous works of Trokia and Black Isle. Complex character interaction doesn't require a 2D engine, please see MotB. 2D doesn't improve gameplay... The concept that it could is bizzare to say the least you can use a 3D engine and have the exact same mechanics. So your arguement doesn't make sense, you keep bring oblivion up, but you fail to mention games such as NWN's series and Kotor series, which certainly have elements of gameplay that you desire. I would add that gameplay has been dumbed down in some games of late, but the truth of that is more about mass appeal than 3D gfx.

I wouldn't call it "solid 10 year old technology". Especially for independent developers modern 2d engines can be a good option for their games. Concerning your "why?" question: I think that for the majority of the people who work on FIFE the motivation is twofold: On one side there is the motivation to work on something that could help to bring back the games that you would like to play yourself. Quite many modern RPGs seem to suffer from the problem that they're targeted towards a more and more increasing audience. Usually developers try to attract younger gamers who often spend more of their pocket money on games than adults do. This is also related to the shift of development focus from PC to console games. There are fewer quality RPGs for PC and the ones that are in production are often cross platform (read: developed for modern consoles and PC) projects. Oblivion was a fine example of what I would call the downfall of mature RPGs for PCs. A lot of aspects where simplified compared to Morrowind and the game appeared as a console to PC port in some aspect (e.g. the poor, very large user interface so the XBox users can read the fonts while sitting 3m away from the TV). My personal hope is that FIFE gets adopted by indie developers who would like to create RPGs in the spirit of Fallout, Planescape Torment or Arcanum. While these games didn't feature top notch graphics, I enjoyed them far more than any of the mass market RPGs that were released in the last several years (Vampire: Bloodlines by the new defuct Troika might be the only exception to this rule). On the other side there is some personal motivation involved for every developer who works on FIFE. By working on such a project you learn a lot about how to create games, work in a team, communicate with other individuals, discuss concepts with them. Basically working on FIFE helped to build up my soft skills in a lot of areas and learn how to work in a team with people from all over the world. So spending all the time on the project might help me to get a job once I finished university ) It was more of a sly tongue in cheeck referance to the fact that it's been about 10 years since a new adn acclaimed 2D isometric engine was developed for commercial purposes. That is what was meant my point being that, despite it's quality it's still an excercise in fuitility to develop a 2D engine of this vain. When I stated "Why?" it was in referance to why would someone choose such a 2D engine, not why to develop such an engine... The point being that an engine is not responsible for making game like Fallout good, I suppose you get those die hard 2D fanatics whom are firmly offended by any idea of progress and bitch and complain at every turn because of change. Basically put what I am trying to say is something like, lets take say Planescape : Torment, lets apply the same generic game mechanics, point click etc... The only thing which I'm going to hypothetically change is the 2D to 3D, is it really a different game? I don't think so, infact it wouldn't need to even look that different, if anything it could potentially add to it. It would have made more sense to me personally to take the generic mechanics of something like Fallout, but make it 3D, that I would have considered to be progress, instead its not, it's a step back... That said I do imagine that the project will have a varied amount of success in indie circles and may even find a nice indie project or two. There is always a luddite lurking around somewhere.

Articles in programming books that I've read, that's mostly where I formed my opinion of him as a programmer...

100% correct and a large portion of why i always felt troika failed. if he is such a good coder, that's what he should have had a larger role with. #1 rule of business: stick to the knitting (i.e. do what you're good at). good programmer != good developer. heck, even having good ideas about games, apparently fallout being one of them, is not sufficient for good game development. taks While this is often very true, sometimes it's rare but sometimes programmers make excellent producers, and managers. I've seen it so I can believe it, but I don't think its common.

I certainly wouldn't try to absolve trokia of their mismanagement... I also forgot that sarcasam is wasted on sand. If Tim Cain's role was Lead Designer and Project Leader, then he had nothing to do with day to day coding standards. So he as an individual cannot be credibley fingered as a bad programmer by your own definition. as he would have had nothing to do with the programming aspects and more to do with development timeframes, and general overall game design. Console's are more stable to develop for but they have their own pitfalls as the code generally has to be tighter due to the general constraints of the machine, but also in effect you tend to be able to do more with what you have and the main issue is then that of memory. Opening up the power of all those core's on the 360 isn't an easy job, and the fact the processor is also in order also presents its own challenges in regards to optimisation. Core Design were a fine example of how a company can go from being extremely rich, to being bought out by another company entirely, due to mismanagement...

Okay, let me explain this to you in simple terms. When I write a program I write it using the hardware, and software which is on my current machine. That goes for driver, api's, redistributables etc... PC's have an amazingly large amount of different setups in both a hardware sense, in regards to motherboards, graphics card vendors, hard drives, processors etc... And a software sense. But when you run that software it is likely to be on an utterly different machine with a different setup entirely. To track down every possible occurance of a bug software much be tested on EVERY available setup, this is both impractical and impossible, though companies due try to ensure that they test on as many machine setups as possible. There is always a matter of 3rd party software which can be thrown into the mix which is unknown, and may have an effect on the outcome. Interestingly enough I haven't suffered the same problems with ToEE that you have it runs perfectly fine for me on all my systems, which all have different setups, but for you the game fails. You say that it is bad code, but it can't be all bad as it works fine for me, I too am a user and it runs, and is stable. Your setup is entirely different, and in that case it doesn't run, it was most likely never tested on your exact setup, the difference between my machine and your machine could simply be who developed the graphics card. An example of this experience was experienced by myself when I bought 2 seperate gfx cards, which had exactly the same chipset, the none brand GPU which was cheaper wouldn't run Black and White 2, where the PNY GPU was happy to run Black and White 2. It is for these reasons that in general console development is seen as a good thing by developers because they're working upon identical hardware, hopefully using identical firmware. You claim that the reason ToEE doesn't work for yourself is because of bad programming, it is more accurate to say that the code must be fine as many people have infact managed to play and finish the game with only minor hiccups, another testiment to this would be that I was unable to finish NWN's upon release without the entire game breaking, where Volo had 0 problems. To this day NWN's will not run on my old laptop using the onboard sound, it runs fine with an external sound card. I do not attribute this to the fact that NWN is coded badly, it's because the onboard sound chip is actually crap, having crap drivers etc... Even in the event that a company managed to test a game on every single setup and possible configuration, of which would take many many years, it may very well be that what fixes the software for one machine then breaks it on another machine. And you have to bare in mind that the amount of code that exists within a game is infact rather large, so the desire is to get the game to work on as many setups as possible. Its very easy to write a program that functions perfectly well on one machine with absolutely no hiccups, but when its on another machine it reboots the computer, I've actually managed to do this. Is it because my code was bad, or was it that the second machine didn't exactly have the correct specifications, or better still was it a combination of both... The truth of the matter is that the second machine didn't have enough video ram, and that I hadn't coded any memory management so it was infact a problem with both the code and the hardware despite the fact that it worked flawlessly on a different machine with higher specifications. So let this be a lesson to you, always buy quality parts, always keep gaming PC's unbloated and always without a doubt DON'T DOWNLOAD PR0N!!!!

If the programming was done right there wouldn't be a need for QA. Spoken like a true ignorant whelp!

User experience is alway varied...

Not a bad result, i suppose if anyone seriously wanted to do a games based on solid 10 year old technology then this engine is perhaps the best for that purpose in the world. The only real question now is... WHY?!

I'm sorry but it doesn't work like that, I wish it was more straight forwards but, sadly it isn't. Also you can't say what you see if what you see is based upon ignorance, very much like looking at a shadow of a woman and saying based upon her shadow she is ugly, when infact she may actually not be. Alot of 2D skills are relevent in 3D games. ToEE didn't have all that much 3D involved with it, and Bloodlines uses an early version of the source engine anyways... Most of the problems with games are because bugs aren't known about thus they cannot be fixed! Heck I write software on a daily basis and often it will take another person to find bugs before I can fix it, naturally all bugs are fixed as I find them myself. It's very easy to believe something is working but when presented with new conditions find that it isn't and then have to fix the problem. There is good and bad in all games, NWN2 for example still has some horrible icky nasty bugs which make me want to slap the entire team round the face with a wet fish! It's just that the bugs themselves don't totally break the game, though one of them could be percieved as a game breaking bug, but it's got a possible work around. In my experience ToEE was always more stable for me than NWN's 2 has been, but that said, I have't played as much of ToEE as I have NWN's 2, so it's definately a somewhat unfair comparison. Simple and to the point, Bad Games != Bad Code. There is good and bad in all projects that any team works upon, the render for a game could be awesome but the HUD and interface could be a nightmare slop of code that the slightest alteration breaks everything and causes a headache. A part of code can be bad while another part extremely good.

Fixed, I'll let you have the others.

So very true...

But Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines::::: : : was flawless. Here is a fact, all software tends to contain bugs of some nature. Here is another fact, an incomplete or buggy product doesn't mean that ALL the code is bad, it just means that its unfinished. The reason why I say Tim Cain is a good programmer has more to do with articles I've read written by him in regards to programming than products that he's worked on. Having read some of his code, I can express an opinion which is valid based upon observation and experience opposed to yourselves having suffered some bugs in some software. It's kind of like saying "Tolkien is a crap author, the LOTR's movies sucked", and having obviously never read the books.

Ahh because obviously Tim penned every line of code... LUNACY!