Obsidian: 'Mod makers won't tolerate poor toolchains'

[funcroc]

http://www.developmag.com/news/30028/Obsid...poor-toolchains

 

Obsidian: 'Mod makers won't tolerate poor toolchains'

Ed Fear in Paris Today, 1:55pm

 

Paris GDC: Lead designer Josh Sawyer on how Neverwinter Nights 2 changes angered the mod community

 

In a session at Paris GDC, Obsidian lead designer Joshua Sawyer discussed the problems the team faced when creating Neverwinter Nights 2, a game designed to be expanded and changed by users.

 

A sequel to Bioware's original Neverwinter Nights, NWN2 had to not only provide a better game than its predecessor but also to expand upon Bioware's hugely popular Aurora toolset to give users greater modding potential.

 

"BioWare's approach to the Neverwinter Nights toolset was to go for ease-of-use, so that people could get small things running quickly and then expand from there," said Sawyer. "Obsidian's approach was to cater for the hardcore, though - dramatically increase the level of control, meaning that more things could be altered. That would make the barrier to entry higher, but we thought that would similarly raise the quality of what was produced."

 

As such, Obsidian ditched the tile-based exterior sections for heightmapped terrain - which, while giving a lot more scope for variety and finely-designed areas, increased the construction time by ten times with artists having to hand-place trees and paint textures onto the terrain by hand.

 

"While this is bearable for people who are being paid to do it, many users are put off by the effort required," said Sawyer.

 

One thing that severely limited end-user creativity was the company's decision to use RAD Tools' Granny animation middleware - an end-user exporter licence for which was not available to Obidian, meaning that users could not create custom animations.

 

While there were certainly aspects of the toolset that the team improved - in particular the conversation editor and the toolset's plug-in architecture - the overall response from the community at the beginning was poor - or, as Sawyer put it, users 'backlashing' over a more unfriendly toolkit.

 

And while it may seem that the company fluffed its chance with Neverwinter Nights 2, continual patches - and improvements brought about during the development of the game's expansion packs - have helped address some of the issues that disappointed the community at launch, and have helped shape the development of the next generation of Obsidian's tools now being used on both the un-named Aliens RPG and forthcoming espionage RPG Alpha Protocol.

[Humodour]

So basically, many core functions of AP and Aliens are designed with modders in mind to some extent?

[J.E. Sawyer]

Hmm. I don't think I ever mentioned AP, which is using UE3. The Onyx engine/toolsets are not specifically designed for end-users, but we try to keep end-users in mind for the future. That said, I do think the Onyx tools are much more user-friendly than their Electron counterparts.

 

I showed one of the Onyx tools, our conversation editor, at the end of the presentation. Unlike the standard "tree-style" editor, Onyx's conversation editor uses a flowchart, similar in many ways to a Visio flowchart or an AI state machine flowchart. I think it's a much more intuitive layout to work from.

[crakkie]

Did you get to see Mac Walters' Writing Tools presentation? If so, did it make you feel jealous or superior about your tools?

[J.E. Sawyer]

Did you get to see Mac Walters' Writing Tools presentation? If so, did it make you feel jealous or superior about your tools?

Yes. The main dialogue tool is pretty similar to the one(s) BioWare/BIS/Obisidian have been using for a while, but with a few extra bells and whistles. Their plot state/story manager looked extremely useful, though. It allows devs to update a database of quest states and then run another tool at run time to a) check and b) set those states in the game. Very powerful for testing purposes.

[Marcus]

What happened to making games for the sake of making games? Why worry about making a product more hacker friendly?

 

- Mr. Curious

[Rob McGinnis]

What happened to making games for the sake of making games? Why worry about making a product more hacker friendly?

 

- Mr. Curious

 

I can't speak for Josh, but the experience I have had with NWN/NWN2 has shown me that many people buy games just for the mod ability. To them, the toolset is the game.

 

So it's sort of like a new genre... err.. that's not all that new

[Marcus]

To: Mr. McGinnis

 

I have never bought a game for hacking purposes. Purchasing Never Winter Nights 2 was motivated by my love of roll playing games. I hope people buy games for the pleasure of playing and not just for hacking. Too bad.

 

Thanks for replying.

 

P.S.

I enjoyed NWN2. I can't wait for the next expansion or modules.

[Humodour]

Well, I don't think making decent mod tools necessarilly detracts from the role-playing experience. You likely already have them as developers anyway, so it's simply a matter of making sure you code the engine in a way that's modular, and/or possibly recoding your dev tools somewhat to make them easier to use.

[Xard]

Just how the hell "

[Marcus]

Just how the hell "

Edited July 11, 2008 by Marcus

[Xard]

Using Toolsets in games is very different from cracking bank accounts

[Marcus]

Using Toolsets in games is very different from cracking bank accounts

Thats true.

 

I didn't take into consideration that the game company is giving a toolset.

[Xard]

[walkerguy]

Walkerguy: 'To those of us on consoles it doesn't even matter.'

 

 

Unless you're a console hacker. HAHAHAHAHA

Edited July 15, 2008 by walkerguy

[Marcus]

Shhh...

 

Microsoft may hear you!

[Deadly_Nightshade]

Why worry about making a product more hacker modder friendly?

 

Um... Ever since the dawn of modern gaming modders have been taken into consideration - just look at Doom.

 

I can't speak for Josh, but the experience I have had with NWN/NWN2 has shown me that many people buy games just for the mod ability.

 

Exactly, the majority of my games are modded in some way - and I am more likely to buy a modding friendly game over a non-freindly one.

 

I have never bought a game for hackmodding purposes. Purchasing Never Winter Nights 2 was motivated by my love of roll playing games. I hope people buy games for the pleasure of playing and not just for hacking. Too bad.

 

Why cannot you enjoy playing a game and modifying the said game? I do that all the time, in fact I often spend more time modding than I do playing.

 

Just how the hell "

[Deadly_Nightshade]

Unless you're a console hacker. HAHAHAHAHA

 

Well, since cracking consoles -and, yes, it is cracking in this case since chipping and ROMing are illegal activities on some systems- is hard and, in most cases, prone to error, I would not compare that to modding PC games.