Dragon Age 2

[Nightshape]

I like the art direction I've seen for Dragon Age II. When I say that a game is pretty, which is what I've said about DAII, I'm talking about the asthetics of it. When I say 'graphics,' I typically mean textures and rendering and eye candy.

 

I'm trying to figure out what it is you don't like, the rendering is fine, I've seen some pretty nasty low resolution textures, and the general post processing effects all seem fine.

 

What marketing speak? I'd really doubt marketing would want them to talk about the limitations of the DA II engine. Sure, marketing might want them to talk about the problems they had with DA:O and how they fixed them for DA II, but that's not what I'm referring to.

 

Moreover, it's not marketing speak that BioWare tends to change its engine every two games or so.

 

Infinity -> BG I and BG II + expansions

Auroa/ Odyssey -> NWN and Knights of the Old Republic + expansions

JE engine -> Jade Empire

DA/Lyceum engine -> DA:O and DA II and expansions

Unreal -> ME 1-3

 

It's marketing, a way of branding technology. What's complex about that? You've been caught hook line and sinker by it.

 

I've given you the insight of my professional experience, and tried to explain that a 'new' engine isn't entirely new, its an iteration of a previous engine, the last large iteration that bioware clearly made was the shift from Infinity to Aurora. Past that it's just an iteration.

 

All Bioware are most likely doing is renaming the engine opposed to using a version number.

 

The problem here is that you're defining new as 'completely built from scratch' and then telling me I'm wrong because I'm not using your definition of new. You are not going to convince me that among game developers, the word 'new' is only used for programs that are not derived from other programs and that don't make use of pre-existing libraries.

 

Yes, but I'd argue what is it that makes a new engine?

 

A truly new engine would require new tool chain, and a huge revision to the game engine. Some engines are actually just put togeather from pre-existing libs within companies, I've heard that renderware was a large set of core libs, but I've never used it so I can't comment.

 

Naturally developers use new, but my point is that you're on about how they're planning on writing a new engine, and I'm saying what they're actually going to do is, iterate heavily on the existing engine.

 

Its relatively rare for a company to invest such a large amount of money in building an entirely new engine, if they do do this, then Dragon Age 3 will be a very very long way off.

 

Oh and DA 2's GUI looks entirely lifted from ME, who's betting some smart coder went, lets just take the ME code, and reskin it.

 

That does afterall depend upon what Bio is using for their front end code anyways... That job could have been exceptionally easy, especially if they're running flash based GUI's in both games.

 

None of this matters all that much mind... I get to carry on making games, knowing I'm being paid because I know my stuff, and you get to carry on believe'in the myth.

[Tigranes]

Of course coding involves building on previous iterations and lifting things from existing stuff, but isn't it still possible to demarcate certain major changes and say "that's a 'new' engine not just a new version'? Surely there's no point saying an engine is only new if everything in it is new, as that would be horribly inefficient. I guess the question is whether, given that, how significantly 'new', say, Lyceum (or Onyx?) is.

[Gorth]

Crossing the magical 500 threshold (I'm sure there is some superstition behind that).

 

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