Dragon Age Forum News

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Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

David Gaider, Designer

Two rings or ten?
The fact aside that enchanted rings are certainly not a given, the idea of loading up like some ring hoarder with a ring on every finger just so you can cackle evilly at all the bonuses you've accumulated and blind small children by the glare coming off your hands is a pretty silly one. I'd rather just say that anyone who attempts to wear two rings in such close proximity causes them both to explode and the shrapnel causes them to lose the hand completely. Not only would that be funny, it'd have an ironic sort of justice to it.

Age Distribution of CRPG Players
Hmm. The thought of making DA some unrelenting Greek tragedy just so LdyShayna will wail in despair does have its appeal, now that you mention it...

What'll be the first thing you do?

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A couple of years from now, you'll have the DVD version of DA installed on your system, finally. Considering it will offer all sorts of different opportunities for gameplay and/or building, what'll be the very first thing you think you'll do?

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Sleep, most likely.

Conversation enhancements
We're still playing with exactly how this feature will be implemented, but currently we use it like this:

In the conversation editor, there's a new "parameter" field under the starting condition or actions taken section. There we can either enter in a numerical value or, via a pull-down list, access a 2DA... this provides us with a text option (such as, say, PLOT_ONE_GIVE_REWARD) which translates into a numerical value of its own (the advantage being that it's easier to understand what text means).

And that numerical value is passed to the script, and called via GetConversationParameter().

Naturally it has a lot of applications. From easily defined generic scripts (I select, say, our generic script in the starting conditions and then flip down to PERSUADE_3+ or RACE_IS_ELF on the conversation parameter and voila! done) to the aforementioned plot parameters.

Nothing beats having a single script for one character or, say, a plot and then using a switch followed by all the 2DA values... PLOT_ONE_ACCEPTED, PLOT_ONE_GIVE REWARD, PLOT_ONE_COMPLETED and so forth, each value corresponding to the script needed.

I don't know if it makes sense to the unitiated (it didn't to me at first, either. I was like, "Huh? Parameters?") but once you use it it's very inuitive and you'll wonder why it wasn't always there to begin with.

Naturally what I'm describing is just our very early use of it... the function may completely change by the time DA comes out and may not resemble NWN2's version at all, but it is indeed very handy.

More:

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Aha! Confirmation of a Persuade skill that has a numeric component!

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Actually for that I was just pulling out NWN stuff.

Your Faction with BioWare just got worse!

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2. If the faithful do not have the certainty of proof -- that is another thing.

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That's the one I meant.

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Quote: In general, not being certain of a god's existance does not mean the god does not exist -- or mean the god does not care about (and react to) behavior.

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And that is a very valid point. One that said faithful would no doubt bring up, as well.

Dragon age, what is it, whats it about, where is it based

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David Gaider....sorry that I had to call you on this one, buddy, but you're obviously the leader of the forces of evil. Maybe once, long ago, you were one of us, that had souls, but now you have sold yourself to the evil machine that is Bioware. Gods save us all.

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Silence!

Now... where are my evil apostates? And I've lost the keys to the evil-mobile, too. Damn it!

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

How about... ahem... riders?

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Something confuses me here... It sounds like the whole party must move together... Can't a single player go solo

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I suppose it's possible for a single player to go solo. but then that wouldn't be the purpose of this game. It's more like BG in that respect, and so only taking one person will lead to frustration as some puzzles and encounters would be more difficult to bypass or solve.

We’ve designed the engine, and campaign around a party of heroes (or anti-heroes) moving about doing stuff. If we wanted to make a Tome Raider type game we’d design the game around jumping and swimming and other 3-dimensional thingys because that’s what that type of game requires.

Dragon Age doesn’t require the engine to allow climbing, or swimming. However if they are needed for the purposes of the campaign, we can simulate them through scripting. But they would be an exceptional method of movement not common.

Riding is similar to that except that more people rode then climbed about or swam in the middle ages. And it’s true that many great moments occur from horseback. It still remains to be seen if we are going to implement horses for Dragon Age, and I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Conversation enhancements

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Georg kind of states that assigning variables on each line is bad for memory issues. What about this?

GetConversationIDString(nID)

where this would pull the conversation line attached to the ID so that you can parse it. That way if you structure the conversation appropriately, you can use one script to pull repeated "variables" from the text even without it truely imlemented. Or you could search for phrases or symbols used to "declare" a variable.

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In Jade we got a GetConversationNumber() scripting command which does exactly that.

With that feature the number of scripts has been cut dramatically.

I.e. for a plot you create a 2da that has all the plot states in it


Code:<pre>

name variable value xp gold journal
0 plot_not_started g_man_plot 0 0 0 ...
1 plot_started g_man_plot 1 0 10 ...
2 plot_killed_guy g_man_plot 2 10 10 ...
...
</pre>

and then use a single conditional script to read or write the plot state

i.e. j01_a_manplot 1 to set the "man plot" to 1 or j01_c_manplot 1 to test if the "man plot" is 1.

It also handles giving xp, gold, journal entries, and a variety of other things so in theory you can script 90% of a single plot with 2 scripts. Using a 2da to move some of the more tedious scripting task to data (such as giving out rewards) has the great benefit of centralizing all that stuff plus it get rids of the need for more than one parameter on dialog lines. My estimate is that the number of unique scripts needed to implement a plot in the game has dropped by 70-80% compared to NWN with this system. You can also use it to automate other tasks based on 2das, such as giving out a weapon style. Jade has a lot of styles and with the NWN system you would have to create 1 script for each style to give, while with the conversation number thing your single script looks like this. <snip>

In Jade we also got one more node per dialog line

(Condition) Text Appears When
(Before) Script to run before text shows / VO starts
(After) Script to run after VO finishes. Since there is constant communication between the design teams, you will most likely see features like these or similar to these in DA, plus improvements based on the things learned from Jade.

More: Some of the aversion against 2das come from the fact that they were a pain to work with as module builder in NWN (load order, require hakpaks, etc). I'm pretty sure that the resource organization in DA will be quite different from the way resources were organized in NWN.

[ August 20, 2004, 23:44: Message edited by: Taluntain ]