Dragon Age Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

Here are today's BioWare 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.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Faces In Games
All I can say is that after using facial expressions in Jade, I wouldn't want to miss them. You replace the "*angry*, *laughs*, *hahaha*" - style emotes from the dialog and instead select the appropriate "emotion" for the line and it really makes a difference in the game.

Dongles

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Hang on a sec... why is it a "failed" idea? I've seen many commercial applications using that system. As I noted earlier, it does begin to look silly when you have 4+ parallel or serial dongles connected in tandem, but with USB... it really shouldn't matter. They're small, inobtrusive, and can fit on a keychain. The pricepoint is an issue, however, I've seen them in the ~$15 range for quantities of 1,000... imagine 10,000 or 100,000.. that'd have to make a huge dent in the price-point.Don't forget, the idea of "copy protection" isn't to prevent it from being cracked/hacked/etc., rather to make it difficult for the majority of the public to participate in.If the game itself was designed to employ the protection, then wouldn't that prevent a lot of the problems that generally occur with publisher-based protection?
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Because you just need to write a driver that simulates the dongled device on the USB port or to remove the USB check from the main executable. You can't afford to put significant code on the dongle as it will degrade performance (as will highly complex encryptiong), and games do not have a lot of CPU time to spend on this. Finally, you need to put the decryped information into memory somehow if you want to avoid constant, performance degrading access to the USB device. It's easy to listen to data on the USB bus, it's easy to read process memory on your computer and a skilled person can find whatever calls to protection routines on that USB chip and rip them out of your executable. Even if you put parts of your program code onto that chip (which is unlikely for games because of performance and maintenance concerns - patching your game would become a bad bad nightmare), it will still end up unencrypted in your PCs memory at some point - and someone is either going to grap the executable image from there and create an unencrypted one or write a driver that emulates the responses from that dongle.My point is: it will be about as hard/easy for Joe Average to find a crack for USB dongles than for any other offline protection scheme.That said, it's expensive, about as annony as changing CDs , will probably cause another layer of potential incompatibilites with various hardware devices / exoctic usb chips, multi function hubs, etc - no you'd pay more for your games because of manufacturing cost but it wouldn't solve a single of those problems. Instead of changing CDs, you'd have to change dongles, that is less damage resistant than a CD can.

Two simple ways to reduce Warezing and increase Sales

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Seriously, if you (or your distributor) spends tons of cash on developing things like unique serial imprints (or hires a third party to do this) on CD/DVD disks and the involved research to come up with this and on customer support because the crap isn't working anymore again + replacement of disks because people are simply not aware that their drives are too old...And the alternative is so simple, so elegant. Sure its more difficult to produce nice addon material and multiple handbooks and cloth-maps. Ok, not as easy to ship because a simply bigger/heavier case, but actually WELCOMED by the players...And what do we get ? DVD-cases... thin, noninformative handbooks... good thing NWN came in a normal box...*crap*No-cd patches take usually 2 days to show up. Playing through the game to find out if contend from the handbooks is needed and WHERE (of course its somwhere in the games code, good luck in searching - as long as you don't use the same sheme for every game, but nobody would be that dumb, right?) usually takes much longer, EXTREMELY long in the case of game with the depth of ultimaIV for an example.Someone from Atari wants to save a few pennys again i guess ? THERE IS YOUR COPY-PROTECTION SOULUTION. They can ignore it as much as they want, its still the best way to do it, period.
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Back in the "good old days", piracy was as rampant as it is today. Only a small portion of dedicated game cares for nice boxes, manuals and trinkets, the majority of people care just for the game, regardless what is in it. The internet has made it easier to get pirated games, but nice manuals, cloth maps or code wheels or whatever will not help significantly. But again, the discussion on this board is mood, publishers require the copy protection and this is very unlikely to change. I can see them embrace DRM or other verification schemes in the future if they get a significant market penetration (i.e. as part of a new windows operating system), but till then, it is likely that we will be stuck with whatever is available in the realm of software based protection. If you do not like that, I'd suggest to contact the PR department of your favourite publishers and lobby against it.

Tim Smith, Tools Programmer

Beta volunteer!
From the FAQ:

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1.15: When will Dragon Age be released?A release date for Dragon Age has yet to be announced.
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No release date has been announced. We have not said the game will be released in 2005.

Scott Meadows, Programmer

Scripting language - OO?

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Does that mean that we'll get GetCameraFacing in DA? Along with SetCameraPosition and GetCameraPosition of course?
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I don't know. My statememnt was that of a principle nature.You will have to wait.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Dragon Age Licensing

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Suck it up David. Write the show and in the First Episode Kill Darcy Pajak as the bad guy.
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Yeah Pajak could be Deekin's nemesis. An evil vicious and dim-witted Kobold. Craig.