Dragon Age Builders Chat
Stratovarius I'd like to welcome everyone who dropped by to hear from us about the Dragon Age toolset.
Stratovarius For a little back ground, Bioware has had two builder's events, inviting 8 of us the first time and 12 of us the second to take a look at the Dragon Age toolset, make some recommendations, and generally get a feel for where they were going with the game.
Stratovarius fluffyamoeba and I have been lucky enough to make it up there twice, and everyone who'll be speaking today was at the second event. We've also managed to rope in a few Bioware employees who were there, showing us around the toolset and the available content
Stratovarius As well as working on Dragon Age and the creation process.
Stratovarius Bryan D, over there, does all of the wiki content that will make building for Dragon Age much easier when it comes out, while Craig is a scripter and builder on the game, and has helped us both times we've been up there.
Fluffyamoeba and Tenjac
Stratovarius Now, I have a feeling this might go on for a little, so I'll hand it over to our first two speakers: fluffyamoeba and Tenjac, creators of ZombieModding while at Edmonton this last Builder's Event
fluffyamoeba heya, i'm the prc minion that does the behind-the-scenes scripty systems stuff
Tenjac And i'm the one that breaks it all.
fluffyamoeba and also does spells
fluffyamoeba :)
Tenjac that too
fluffyamoeba one of the things that we had to do at the builder's event was the module challenge
fluffyamoeba we had about 5 hours over 2 days to make a module with 10 minutes of gameplay, some dialogue and 2 npcs
fluffyamoeba this was done in teams of 3
fluffyamoeba ( http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/dragon-age/1005288p1.html ) here is where they're talked about on gamespy, with screenshots
fluffyamoeba as we had a team of 3 scripters and no writers, our team went for infinite zombie spawning to make sure we had 10 minutes of gameplay...
Tenjac That was a bit of a cheat which we marketed as being unlimited gameplay
fluffyamoeba we used a prebuilt area - it's possible to reuse any existing area's art to make a new area with
* BioBryanD notes that that particular endless-zombie module uncovered a minor bug in the game itself because it did a thing that none of our internally-build modules have tried doing.
fluffyamoeba yup. leveling party NPCs
fluffyamoeba or rather, leveling party NPCs to a level that isn't the same level as the PC
Tenjac That bit did give us a bit of trouble for a while
fluffyamoeba 3 hours and 4 biodevs later...
fluffyamoeba we had the pc level to 3 to get around that problem
BioBryanD Heh. I was thinking of a different one, actually; when you auto-levelup the player for the first time with tutorials enabled, it pops up the leveup tutorial but you can't dismiss it because the levelup process is already complete.
Ranlas Oh yeah. I hated that bug.
fluffyamoeba that too
fluffyamoeba what is nice about the PC creation system is that if you *want* to pre-define the PC for your story, you can as it's controlled through scripting
Ranlas And predefine we did.
Tenjac One thing that really struck me was that if we had been trying to do this in NWN or NWN2, there is no way that we could have possibly done as much as we did. Prebuilt area aside, the tools themselves are so good. They are a real leap ahead in making creating your own modules easier and of a higher quality.
fluffyamoeba and that there's a lot of utility scripting functions already done and in files wit hdescriptive names
Ranlas On top of the built-in documentation for scripting functions. That really let us move forward quickly.
fluffyamoeba we essentially called a DoAddingNPCsToParty() function and it handled adding them, leveling them and whether they're fully player controlled
fluffyamoeba oh, and as for dialogue...ours was done in 2 minutes including generated VO
fluffyamoeba Gamespy Article -- what you see in these screenies is pretty much all there was :p
Ranlas robot-voice generated dialogue made for some entertaining VO
fluffyamoeba yup - there's a photo on the blog of us laughing at the screen - that's what we were laughing at
Tenjac But, the toolset will generated VO for you dialogs automatically and sync the lips to it. It's another nice feature that's made easy now.
Tenjac not sure how in depth we want to go into that at this point in the chat though
BioBryanD Granted, it's the default Microsoft text-to-speech engine. We call it "robot voice".
BioBryanD Oh, fooey, already mentioned.
Stratovarius RoboBrad being the exact name in the Toolset, I'll point out. Unfortunately, we don't have a screen shot to show you that
BioBryanD Actually, RoboBrad is a different system - it's what automatically puts emotions into facial performances, I believe.
fluffyamoeba i do like that the conversation carried on when the party were fighting - this didn't always happen in nwn
BioBryanD It's named after Brad Prince, who used to do that stuff manually back in the day.
Tenjac Not with DA :P
BioBrianC Brad was the lead cinematic designer on Mass Effect 1, and said tool was made to help speed up the conversation scenes.
BioBrianC He's at the Austin studio now working as lead world designer for the MMO I believe
BioBryanD Yeah, "back in the day" being a previous game entirely. :)
Stratovarius Alright, that concludes our little overview of what the module building challenge was like, and what's possible in a short amount of time. Certainly, everyone was impressed with how capable the toolset is for people who have not seen it before.
Stratovarius Now, before we get onto our next speaker, there's one thing I'd like to speak about.
Stratovarius This chat is a question and answer session after we finish talking, and we'd like to get your questions sent in as early as possible
Stratovarius The best way to do this is type "/msg TigerDragon" or "/msg Stratovarius", followed by the text of your question. And don't worry if you think you'll need to leave before the question is answered, we're posting a log of this
Stratovarius TigerDragon and I are the only two people serving as question takers for this chat, by the way, so please don't message others.
Andarian
Stratovarius And now, I'd like to introduce our next speaker, Andarian: Head of the Academy for Modding Excellence, and a Hall of Fame module builder, he's here to share a few of the insights that he's gained from working with Dragon Age
Andarian Hi everyone. First, I want to thank the PRC folks for hosting this event, and of course Bioware for hosting us at the Builder Event that we're talking about (not to mention building the game and the toolset itself :))
Andarian As Strat said, I'm the current Chairman of the Academy for Modding Excellence (AME), and author of the NWN1 Module Series Sanctum of the Archmage
Andarian I'm just back from vacation and haven't had time to prepare anything extensive, so I'm just going to talk for a few minutes a bit extemporaneously about the DA Toolset from a builder's perspective.
Andarian Some of you may know that my focus as a module builder is primarily on dramatic storytelling, and that I approach modding as a new medium for narrative art. So let me start by saying that I was extremely impressed by what I saw in terms of the tools that Bioware has provided that appeared to me to be aimed at enabling precisely that kind of work.
Andarian One of the key ways to build drama in a module is through the use of carefully crafted details that work together to set or sustain a mood. This includes not just static details, like placeables in an area, but dynamic details like poses, action, movement, animation, music, and so on.
Andarian The Dragon Age toolse provides a lot of tools to enable the module builder to exercise exactly this kind of cinematic control, through things like stages, cutscenes, facial editing, and so on.
Andarian *toolset
Andarian Cutscene control in DA no longer needs to be done by scripting, but rather uses a "timeline" based editor that allows precise control over the composition of views, movements, animations, and the like.
Andarian The dialog editor has incorporated a number of features into the interface that used to need to be scripted, such as the manipulation of boolean plot variables. It's another example of a pattern that I saw in the toolset, of Bioware identifying common module building tasks and building tools into the interface to automate them and make them much easier to use and to work with.
Andarian My own experience with participating in the "mod challenge" bore out many of these impressions that I got from the tutorials and playing with the toolset.
Andarian Fluffy and Tenjac mentioned that their team was light on writers, so they focused on an action challenge...
Andarian Our team had the opposite: two well known strongly story-oriented mod authors, and a third member who was very good with area layout
Andarian So we focused more on trying to brainstorm a story concept with dramatic elements and dialog. That's the challenge mod on page 2 of the Gamespy article -- "The Magic Cat"
Andarian You can see it here: http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/dragon-age/1005288p2.html
Andarian We scripted it to open into a dialogue in which you have a closeup view of a strange cat that starts following you around, and of course turns out to be important to the story
Andarian We were very impressed with the way that even the default cinematics made this opening scene very effective visually
Andarian We made the cat into a companion, and after a few test playthroughs we realized it was even more fun to play the mod from the point of view of the cat :)
Andarian The conversation editor was very familiar to most of us who had used NWN1, but with some new features that made it more powerful and easy to use -- including tie-ins to the staging, cutscene, and scripting tools
Andarian I was very interested in the scripting tools as well, particularly from the point of view of integration between scripting and conversation nodes. There are some new features there...
Andarian ...including a limited ability to pass parameters to scripts, which I've always found very desirable as a feature.
Andarian I think Sunjammer will talk more about scripting in the DA toolset, so I think I'll pass the torch over to him now. Thanks to everyone for listening!
Sunjammer
Beerfish Scripting? I just got here for the boring stuff eh? (*runs*)
Sunjammer Thank you Andarian, and thanks to both Team S, sorry the PRC team, and to BioWare.
Tenjac lol
Sunjammer Actually I'm not here to talk about scripting.
fluffyamoeba Beerfish, you can come back now...
Sunjammer And you'll be glad to know I'm not going to regale you with the tale of how, despite my 34-hour, transatlantic travelling ordeal, I still managed to be the first builder into the conference room!
* Sunjammer foolishly selected the Missing Scotsman Origin
Sunjammer Instead I'm going to provide an overview of the eagerly anticipated BioWare Community Network site (to use its official name) and mention the Dragon Age Toolset Wiki, which is really BioBryanD's baby.
Sunjammer Social Site & Wiki
Sunjammer The Beta Testers have had access to an internal version of the Wiki since about February however we didn't get to see the new version or the "social" site until just before lunch on the first day of the Builder's Event.
Sunjammer Since then some of you may also have had a sneak preview but by now most of you should have at least heard of the "social" site and/or the wiki.
Sunjammer However for anyone who has been living under a proverbial rock for the last month, suffice it to say that BioWare's plans for the Dragon Age Community go much further than they were able to go with Neverwinter Nights.
Sunjammer Instead of merely hosting the forums and having to leave everything else to third parties, such as NWN Vault, BioWare is intent on creating a one-stop-shop for all things Dragon Age.
Sunjammer How would you describe it?
Sunjammer For Players it's probably going to be a combination of the BioBoards; Facebook; Xbox Achievements and PlayStation Trophies; and the Modules download section at NWN Vault.
Sunjammer For Builders it's going to be all of those plus elements of the BioBoards Guilds, SourceForge. In addition there will be an official wiki for all things technical and/or toolset related.
Sunjammer Why is it become known as the "social" site?
Sunjammer Well fluffy has a threory ...
Sunjammer However SocialEngine is the name of the software package BioWare are using as the base and it has been installed on the social.bioware.com subdomain. While we are on the subject I should also mention that the new wiki uses MediaWiki.
* Sunjammer waits from everyone to return from the uncooperative login screen
Sunjammer Features
Sunjammer The first thing you should do when you get access is to update your Profile. This allows you to do the usual things like add your real name, date of birth, choose and avatar, etc., which is
Sunjammer likely to be all players will be interested in.
Sunjammer However the profile page also has a dedicated Builder Information tab that lets you list your Proficiencies and indicate if you are Available to work on projects. This information will be used for matchmaking builders and projects.
Sunjammer After that you'll want to manufacture some Friends so that you can Message them; comment on their Blog; and flame them on the Forums. If they really like you they might even reciprocate.
Sunjammer Moving on ...
Sunjammer This is where the features start to get more interesting because you're newly created friends might belong to one or more Groups which might have one or more Projects. If they think you can help they might invite you to join a group. Alternatively you just Subscribe to them and monitor their progress.
Sunjammer Groups have their own Discussions (usually private for members) and Comments (usually public for all users) however the owner and/or officers can control the visibility of these.
Sunjammer Projects also have their own discussions and comments however the key feature for projects is the ability to host and manage Files. Project members can, for example, upload their Art Resource files; their Builder-To-Builder (B2B) package files; and miscellaneous files such as design documents.
Sunjammer In addition when you are ready to release your content you can nominate a Featured File and make it public. When players read about the new content and view your project they will be presented with an almost-idiot-proof big green Download button.
Sunjammer There are a couple of other features that exist but may not be available initially, simply because there isn't time to fully polish them: Polls are available for members, while Albums (photos) are available separately for members, groups and projects.
Sunjammer At the Builder Event we also asked for and IRC server and client to be added so that chats like these could be hosted on the social site. There hasn't been an official answer but the indications were positive.
* Sunjammer crosses his fingers
Sunjammer Our Experiences
Sunjammer So that's the theory and the features but what's the site actually like?
Sunjammer I think it's only fair to point out that site only went live the night before the Builder Event (while I was stuck in Torronto). Despite that it's safe to say that when we saw it we were all impressed: we'd been making feature suggestions in the Beta Tester's forum and the social site appeared to check every box.
Sunjammer Obviously it is still in a very crud form and far from being ready but it is usable (we're using it constantly) and, more importantly, the site is improving every day as Jesse van Herk and his team work continue to develop it.
Sunjammer When Andriana and Fernando informed us that we had to make a mini-module Stratovarius set up a group for "Team 5"; set up a "Little Red Riding Hood, Redux" module as a Dragon Age Addons project; invited Markus and me to join the group; and later that day uploaded a B2B file containing resources for me to import to the base module.
Sunjammer All of that went smoothly, though only being able to currently invite firends to join a project is a little cumbersome.
Sunjammer Unfortunately due to issues with the hotel's wireless network our team was unable to download anything but the smallest files. That said I was able to upload a conversation from my laptop that evening and download it the next day in the conference room so we at least proved the concept worked.
Sunjammer However since getting home from the Builder Event we've been creating groups, project, swapping files, discussing projects and commenting on Jesse's blog.
fluffyamoeba and constantly bugging them with requests and bug reports
Sunjammer When the site's address appeared in the first GameSpy article and the membership tripled overnight it proved to be a little disconcerting. However that in itself was a useful test because the signal to noise ratio plummeted and all the Beta Testers started begging for various filters.
Sunjammer Conclusion
Sunjammer Although still a little rough round the edges the BioWare Community Network is already a huge step forward from what we have available today. It is being actively supported and developed by BioWare so I suspect it is only going to improve both in terms of features and usability.
Stratovarius Maybe that Missing Scotsman origin is worthwile after all... I wonder if its a hidden feature for DA? ;)
Stratovarius Now, before we get onto the next speaker, I'd like to remind everyone to send their questions to TigerDragon and myself. For those of you on the java client, the best way to do this is "/msg Stratovarius" or "/msg TigerDragon".
BioBrianC It'll be our first downloadable module for our next game, BioWare: Origins - role-play a game developer and fight forum trolls
Jassper
Stratovarius Our next speaker today will be Jassper, one of the best scripters from the NWN1 community, and one of the lucky few who was able to make it to Edmonton this time around.
Beerfish Snort....BioMods do that every day (*flex*)
Jassper I just have a few genral commnets on the DA toolset
Jassper I my opinion the DA toolset is the cream of the crop. As already mentioned, it give us power over all aspects of the game.
Jassper The tools are very versatile as well. They are laid out so basic users can create simple things, but allow advanced users to do complex things.
Jassper As some of you know, I have been anylising the VFX editor. I tryied to do this in the NWN2 toolset but got very frustrated because all I could make was a streaming colunm of - somthing. LOL
Jassper The DA VFX editor is much more intuitive and easy to get results quickly. In it's most basic usage, anyone can create nice looking VFX's without the need to learn all the advanced stuff.
Jassper All the nice advanced stuff is there however, for those that want to make very complex effects.
Jassper I am currently producing a tutorial series for the VFX editor and will be available on the DA Wiki/Social site that Sunjammer talked about
Jassper Another nice feature in DA is the Builder to Builder and Builder to Player Tools.
Jassper The Builder To Builder tools halp ease the task that groups must go through when sending mod builds over email
Jassper In fact, They can now use the social site to exchnage mod builds
Jassper The builder to Player tool packs you mod and resource files into a nice single downloadable file for the Player
Jassper Thats about it for me at this time.
Bioware's Bryan Derksen
Stratovarius Next up, we've managed to nag one of the Bioware Developers into talking. BryanD is someone you'll all be quite thankful for, as he's spending his days at Bioware building up the Dragon Age wiki, filling it with all the cool things that are possible in Dragon Age for us builders to play around with, and he's here now to give us a little talk about that.
Sunjammer yay!
Stratovarius Although, he did have to go rather soon and this hopefully doesn't mean he's been called away
BioBryanD Heh. Well, as previously mentioned, there's a MediaWiki-based wiki built into the social site to serve as documentation central for the toolset.
BioBryanD I've been spending the past eight months or so building the content so that it'll be as comprehensive and well-formed as possible for when we launch. Wikis need a good foundation to build from, and I think this is shaping up very well.
BioBryanD In fact, I know of a few internal developers who've been using it already. As one might imagine, sometimes in the heat of developing a big application the internal documentation can get a bit erratic. :)
BioBryanD Sunjammer's been helping out recently with some of the work too. He's created some GeSHI highlight scripts for the DA scripting language, and is gearing up to do a great big parsing job to create wiki pages for each of the core game's functions.
fluffyamoeba *cough cough* ;)
Sunjammer based on fluffeeeamoeba/TK's excellent NWN version of course
BioBryanD Heh. Of course, lots of other people are helping out too. It's a wiki, after all. :)
BioBryanD The wiki's got a bunch of tutorials in it too, ranging from the most basic introductory stuff up through the complexity levels. I expect those will continue to be added to over time.
Tenjac I can vouch that they're handy :P
BioBryanD Especially since so far I've been writing most of the content, and I certainly don't know everything about the toolset.
BioBryanD Not yet, anyway. :)
Stratovarius I'd like to thank the BioDevs for stopping by, since two of them will need to leave soon. And don't worry about them answering your questions, we've been passing them along and will post all the answers we got after the chat.
Beerfish
Stratovarius Next up in our list of speakers, we have Beerfish, long-time BioMod, expert woodcarver (His work decorates some of the rooms at Bioware's Edmonton office), and expert on the Head Morph and Cutscene tool. He was the only person not from Bioware to give a demonstration at the Builder's Event in Edmonton.
Beerfish Hello world, I'm just going to make a few brief points on a couple of things. Think of me talking like William Shatner.
Beerfish The Head Morph editor is very easy to use, you can make some very attractive faces and some damn ugly or nasty looking faces from the same base head morph.
Beerfish I can see people having fun playing around with this whether they are intent on making full modules or just playing around.
Beerfish The Cutscene tool is a wee bit more invloved but once you learn a few key things about it you re on your way. I really think some fantastic stuff will come from that tool.
Beerfish I encourge all of you to drop into the Dragon Age toolset forums at BioWare as time progresses if you have any questions that come to you after this chat. New info and discussions on various aspects of the toolset are ongoing.
Beerfish And to repeat a bit of a mantra, there is no such thing as a silly question. Our goal is to make help available to mod builders of any level of expertise, including total beginners.
Beerfish Even if one has no intention of ever making a module of their own, some of these tools are fun enough to play around with that people will be able to use them to make contant and share that with builders or the community.
Beerfish The one suggestion I'd make for any new user of the DA toolset is to not worry about the large picture at first, the toolset has a fair number of different great tools but looking at them all togther can seem daunting. Just pick one that interests you and learn about.
Beerfish Then pick another, before long you will have a good general knowledge of many of them.
Beerfish That's about it from me for now. Thanks for listening!
Stratovarius Alright, alright. We're nearly done with the speakers now.
Stratovarius Once more, I'd like to remind everyone to send their questions to TigerDragon and myself. For those of you on the java client, the best way to do this is "/msg Stratovarius" or "/msg TigerDragon".
Stratovarius
Stratovarius And the final speaker is... me! Shocking, I know.
Stratovarius For those who don't know me, I'm the founder of the Player Resource Consortium, an above average scripter, and proof that listening to the advice that Beerfish just gave works.
Stratovarius I picked scripting with no prior programming experience, found someone to teach me a bit, and the PRC was the end result.
Stratovarius Now, on to Dragon Age and the Toolset.
Stratovarius I'm going to be talking about the bit that made Beerfish run away before, in that I'll be mostly focusing on scripting, character creation, and character generation
Stratovarius Most of you have probably at least taken a glance at the scripting editor in NWN 1 or 2, even if it was just to close it in horror and run away again. Dragon Age, at a quick glance, looks more or less the same, and it is. If you're used to NWScript, you'll find DAScript pretty comfortable, but there's a few important changes lurky
Stratovarius Well, more than a few, to be honest. Because what Bioware has done is taken all those requests that people had for NWN, and listened. It's now possible to edit characters using scripts, to edit combat using scripts, and so on.
Stratovarius I'll speak about a few of these things in turn, starting with editing the character.
Stratovarius In NWN1, this needed multiplayer and LETOScript, or the LETO character editor. In Dragon Age, it's possible to write a script that bumps up a character's strength score by 1, or reduces it, to show the effects of a permanent curse.
Stratovarius This allows you the freedom to make any sort of character you want, especially as a mod builder. If you want your story to feature the main character aging, and want his scores adjust to reflect this, it's as simple as a basic script
Stratovarius Likewise, you can do the same thing with abilities. These are split into spells (Abilities that use Mana), and talents (Abilities that use Stamina).
Stratovarius Functionally, these are identical. They occupy the same place on the GUI, they look the same, they act the same. It just differs on a class by class basis, as Mages use mana, while the other two use Stamina
Stratovarius If you wish to give a player a new ability, perhaps have him learn a spell as a reward for defeating a particularly difficult dragon as part of a sidequest, one function will add the ability to the player's list, and even drop in on the quickbar if there is space.
Stratovarius As fluffy and Tenjac alluded to earlier, bioware has created a lot of wrapper functions that allow builders the freedom to call one function, and have it take care of a whole host of details in the background. This means that creating complex scenarios or abilities is quite a bit easier, as more of what you'd like to have is prepackkaged.
Stratovarius Another area where this new functionality has been applied is to passive abilities. For those who have ever looked in the PRC code, you've probably seen a file called "prc_inc_function" referenced somewhere.
Stratovarius It's our system for creating fake passive abilities in NWN, as all of the existing bioware ones, such as weapon focus or luck of heroes, are hardcoded into the game.
Stratovarius Now, instead of having to do something like that in Dragon Age, you can just mark an ability as passive in the 2da, ensure the scripting is done right, and there you are, it's a permanent passive ability. Far easier and less error prone than the style that had to be used for NWN1.
Stratovarius Combat has also been opened to access by scripters. It is entirely driven via scripts, with none of the work (aside from animations and a few other small features) being driven from the hardcoded game engine.
Stratovarius This has its good and bad points. If you want to make a new ability that attacks to do +5 damage, it's dead easy, and for people creating new abilities (such as us at the PRC), it's a great boon.
Stratovarius The bad point arrises in that the game was fairly carefully balanced around the Dragon Age combat system as it stands, and that changing it can cause more than a few unforseen things to happen. Let me go into a little more detail on this
Stratovarius Combat in Dragon Age uses a dynamic balancing system. If you give a monster the Monster - Tank trait, its got better physical resistance and more life than a normal creature of that type.
Stratovarius If you give it the High Damage type, well, you can see what that does.
Stratovarius You can also turn a monster into anything from a "weak" all the way up to Boss, or even Elite Boss. All of those control just how dangerous the monster is to the party.
Stratovarius For making things easier and quicker, this is far better, because it allows the fast creation of multiple creatures without the constant tweaking of changing abilities or adding spells and feats that occured in NWN. Now, those features are still there if you want them, but if the monster is generic, you can spend a few minutes getting it to look right, set the properties
Stratovarius and it will behave more or less as you like, without all of that fiddling.
Stratovarius There are one or two things in Dragon Age scripting that have caused some dislike, this mainly been the Variable 2da.
Stratovarius Every creature, placeable, area, everything, has a 2da defining what local variables are available on that object.
Stratovarius The old NWN system of just typing out the variable name no longer works. Although the script will compile, and then fail in the background, which is annoying.
Stratovarius We've asked Bioware about changing this, but until then, we've got to live with it. Thankfully, they took the time to predefine a whole array of variables for each type of object, and so it's likely that most things can be accomplished with what's already there. It's only for those complex systems that you'd need something more
Stratovarius The last big change in the Dragon Age scripting that I'll talk about is the Event system.
Stratovarius Dragon AGe is event based, and each object uses one script, usually called X_core, such as monster_core, player_core, and so on.
Stratovarius When one of these scripts is called, it runs through a giant case statement and catches the event number, then does whatever it's supposed to. This means that there is generally only one script for most things in the game. All abilities are called from ability_core, and then there are lists of what each ability is and what it does.
Stratovarius If you want to do a custom one, you can simply create your script, add a check for the one event that you want to change, and then pass the script off to the normal, Bioware functions, where it will go through all of the standard processing.
Stratovarius This makes it a lot easier to get access to the events in Dragon Age than in NWN, although in one or two cases you need to make sure that a local variable is set for the event to trigger.
Stratovarius For those who've worked with NWN style scripting, it will take a little getting used to, but once the mindset has changed over, it makes it quite a bit easier to get everything done in a timely fashion.
Stratovarius Everything, from scripting to cutscenes to plots and conversations, has been upgraded to make using them faster and easier than they were in NWN.
Stratovarius That brings me to my last point: There is one area of the game that is almost completely non-moddable, and that is the GUI. It is built using a scustom Scaleform implementation, and while there are a few hooks into that, it's almost ipossible to change from the community end.
Stratovarius However, we have already begun passing recommendations back to Bioware, and they've come up with some of their own, so pretty soon, that should be much friendler for everyone as well (fingers crossed).
Stratovarius So, for those of you looking into building, I can say with all certainty that anything you wanted to do in NWN will be faster, easier, and better looking in Dragon Age. It's a great new playground for modders, and we're looking forward to see what people can make with it.
Stratovarius This concludes the speaker section of the irc chat. We're now going to start posting in the questions that you have been asking, and seeing what our esteemed panel has to say about them.
Stratovarius Don't forget to send questions to myself or TigerDragon, either.
Question and Answer
Stratovarius Adinos second question for Q&A: Which tutorials are being worked on, and expected to be available when the game is released?
Stratovarius Well, I'll begin with this
Stratovarius While we were there at Edmonton, several of the BioDevs gave tutorials to us
Stratovarius for about the first day and half, before we got handed the module challenge
Stratovarius All of those seminars were filmed and recorded, and so they will be made available at some point.
Stratovarius There is also the content that BryanD has been working on, as well as the community tutorials from Beerfish, Sunjammer, and others that are already underway.
Stratovarius There will be quite a wide array of available material come release day.
Stratovarius XavierGrimwand Question for DAScript's Event system: How is it similar to, and how is it different from NwN1's custom events?
Andarian I'll comment on this...
Andarian If you're familiar with how tag-based scripting works in NWN1, it has some similarities to that.
Andarian The script has an event handler to identify which event it is handling and how to respond to it.
Stratovarius Demitar For the Q&A: One thing that bugged me in the nwn1 toolset is the slightly lacking introspection, ie while maintaining a module I every now and then find myself wanting to ask the module "what areas use script X on enter" or "which npcs have no perception scripts" or why not "give me a list of the each goblins total treasure value excluding scrolls sorted descending". Do we know if there's any tools
Stratovarius Demitar towards this effect in the DA toolset?
Ranlas I haven't come across any... it would be a handy tool to have if it isn't already there.
Jassper As for the scripts part.
Stratovarius Dragon Age runs on a MSSQL database in the background, using it to store all of the module and game information. Right now, this means you can query the SQL, but aside form that, there isn't such a tool just yet
Sunjammer Ask Adam Miller to do us some more SQL queries
Jassper THe events make that easier to trake
Jassper trak
Stratovarius Do we know how mods are published / updated, and how those updates interact with games saved while playing an older version of the mod? Will it be feasible to patch a mod to fix bugs or add a bunch of new content, for example, without breaking people's saved games for that mod?
Ranlas I think this is addresed by the concept of AddOns
fluffyamoeba well, firstly, we never saw any savegames. what is stored in a save will determine how big a change can be made
Ranlas I asked this question and the basic answer is, it's probably feasible, as long as the player has a saved game from before the patch takes effect.
Ranlas Because of the way it loads and saves data.
Ranlas But it's not something we did firsthand.
Stratovarius 9. Is there any gore modifying function in the toolest? I mean can we affect gore in the OC from the toolset, in case there isn't any such choice in the game itself?
Tenjac Yes.
Tenjac by script at least
fluffyamoeba gore is scriptable for some things - by default the script looks to check for the player's gore setting iirc
BioBryanD Gore in combat is set by scripts, that can be changed. Cutscenes have a "set gore" action, you might need to go through all the cutscenes and edit them to change that.
fluffyamoeba next: Helekanalaith Script Event Question: What options are available to us to measure the passing of time? We know that day-night cycles are a thing of the past, but surely time still matters in the game. So can we, for instance, still create races against time such as seen in the Kingmaker story (NWN Premium Module)?
Ranlas there are functions for getting the game time, though I can't find one for setting it
fluffyamoeba there's no day/night cycle, but ther'es the ability to get the time that has passed
fluffyamoeba so you can do it, but you will have to entirely do it through scripting and tracking the time passed yourself
Tenjac Bryan Derksen - The large-scale passage of time is not handled by default, if you want to have days pass and keep track of dates and so forth you'll have to script it up.
fluffyamoeba and the next one: XavierGrimwand Question on Builder to Builder and Builder to Player files: Once the downloader downloads the file, what does he do with it? (In each case; B2B & B2P)
Ranlas builder to builder doesn't matter where it is. You browse to open it form the toolset
Ranlas It's really a glorified ZIP file.
Tenjac Yep.. it's right under Builder to Builder Load
Sunjammer In the case of B2B there is a Builder to Builder Load function: you simply point it to the B2B file and it will display a list of all the filese therein. You can then select which ones you want to import.
Ranlas I think there was a special folder where builder to Player went, but we were shown that very quickly and didn't use it very much at all.
Tenjac IIRC you could download content from the site within the game, and it was pretty much handled for you
Sunjammer In the case of B2P there is a content installer: you simply drag the B2P file onto it (or I assume point the installer to the B2P file) and it will install it for you. Once in the client you can then select which AddOns you want active or inactive. This allows the Player to avoid using incompatible add-ons.
Tenjac that's right... listen to him :P
fluffyamoeba the installer worked for our challenge modules without any trouble
fluffyamoeba next one:
fluffyamoeba Helekanalaith Class Question: Do the three classes each have their own animations for combat, movement and ambience purposes? More specifically, will we be able to see our rogues sneak around?
Sunjammer Additionally as Tenjac says their is a seemless version for official DLC where you download, install it and start playing it without ever leaving the game.
Annihilator-X17 There are individual animations on an ability basis, especially with regards to spells or the later level abilities that are flashier.
Annihilator-X17 For combat, they are more generic, as the humanoid skeleton is reused for the standard swing, shoot arrow, block, and so on gestures
Annihilator-X17 Most ambient gestures are handled on a generated basis, and there are thousands of possibilities there, as you can blend from one into another, as well as an automated tool that does this for ambient dialogue
TigerDragon BioCraig "After the game is released, do you see yourselves released regularly content for the toolset, such as additional environments, monster models, etc...?" -- As has already been announced, there are two years of post release content planned already. I'm currently working on some of that myself.
Andarian I'll comment briefly, since I'm not really a cc person...
Andarian I mainly see myself releasing story modules, rather than toolset content. But I think that many others will likely be releasing things like prefab areas and models.
fluffyamoeba Helekanalaith Cutscene and/or Scripting Question: In NWN1 it's possible to move placeables through the use of a somewhat intricate script, which basically destroys and creates new instances of the object in different states and locations. Am I correct in assuming that we'll be able to create such a scenario in the cutscene editor and possibly also have this scenario play out outside of a cutscene?
Ranlas I've got to go myself, but I can see myself perhaps releasing some small content packs and helping improve the wiki after release.
Ranlas You can set the position of an object.
fluffyamoeba to quote biobryand...
fluffyamoeba " Placeables can be moved around freely inside cutscenes using the built-in position keyframing system, with no need for scripting."
Ranlas and with that I depart!
fluffyamoeba which i don't think any of us tried at the event :)
Beerfish Not sure exactly what the person had in mind but you can make items invisible and visible during a cutscene, you can also move things during a cutscene. You could easily have have a destoryed version being invisible and a good version visible and then during the cutscene reverse them.
Sunjammer Beerfish has done a very impressive cutscene which involves people getting squished by rocks.
Beerfish Also the use of a variety of cameras can help you in this regard. View something with camera1, change to camera2 and view something else, go back to camera1 and druing the time you were using camera2 tou can change things that might be viewed in camera 1
Jassper You could make a movie instead of a game if you wanted to.
Tenjac very easily
TigerDragon Hakmon Hello, a question about the head morph editor: I realize you wont be able to give a face scars out of the box, but would it be possible to add some as "tattoos"?
* fluffyamoeba channels biobryand again: "I'm not sure how the files are stored internally, but there are textures you can overlay onto faces that include scarring."
TigerDragon BioBryanD I'm not sure how the files are stored internally, but there are textures you can overlay onto faces that include scarring.
fluffyamoeba lol
TigerDragon :)
Beerfish Although there is no 'Scars' attribute in the morph editor you can in effct make heads look like they have scars...hey he stole my answer!
fluffyamoeba there's tattoos as well, but you may have seen someof those on the DA screenshots
Beerfish The tattoos themselves will not look like scars. And we do not know about custom content of that nature at this time.
Annihilator-X17 Helekanalaith Script Event Question: In addition to my previous question concerning time, I'd also like to know if there are any module-wide events that support the creation of timed events? Does this game support timers that we can specify to run every second, minute, hour?
Sunjammer This one is a bit tricky to answer but I'll give it a shot
Sunjammer There time and date related functions we were used to in NWN have not been implmented in DA (at least not yet)
Sunjammer There are a couple of new ones however
Sunjammer GetTime returns the game time, GetLowResTimer returns a system tick count (i.e. milliseconds)
Sunjammer There doesn't appear to be a heartbeart on anything by default
Sunjammer (at least I haven't seen it in the template scripts or EventType summary on the wiki)
Sunjammer however there is a InitHeartbeat and EndHeartbeat function for creatures
Sunjammer the former allows you to set the interval of the heartbeat
Sunjammer finally there is a DelayEvent function
Sunjammer which is analogous to the DelayCommand function only for events :)
fluffyamoeba next one
fluffyamoeba XavierGrimwand Another question on the Social Site: The social site has been compared to many existing sites, one of which is SourceForge. Besides having a place to store files, are files also tracked or versioned, and can overwritten files be restored? (Basically, please elaborate on a project's file repository's capabilities.)
TigerDragon Annihilator-X17 The answer is sort of a sidestep: the SQL DB does versioning
TigerDragon Annihilator-X17 by checking content in and out
TigerDragon Annihilator-X17 so the toolset does, the website does not
Annihilator-X17 Let me expand on that a little :)
TigerDragon :)
Annihilator-X17 It takes some getting used to, to use the database versioning system that comes with the toolset
Annihilator-X17 If you make a lot of changes but don't check in, you can't revert to that point
Annihilator-X17 So you get in the habit of doing a mass check in/out every now and then to make sure you have version save points.
Annihilator-X17 So, no, the website does not provide that functionality. However, most to all of it comes built into the toolset's database itself.
fluffyamoeba i'd say that the sourceforge elements are the ideas of projects and groups and of the release page. rather than the version control eg. https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-install/files/ (mingw's release page)
fluffyamoeba the idea of having a project's links and released files all in one place
Annihilator-X17 Adinos third question: is there any built-in way to "record" a cutscene to make a stand-alone movie (for YouTube or whatever) or do you just use a regular external tool for that?
Andarian I didn't see any way to do that outside of using something like Fraps to record the scene...
Andarian But I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work fine for the purpose.
Beerfish I have found no way to record a cutscene in the manner asked. You can send cutscenes in a builder to builder file for those with the toolset/game. I think you would need to have a screen capture bit of software to create a movie out of it. (Of course I could be wrong too. :) )
TigerDragon XavierGrimwand Followup question: So if you want group versioning, you need to set up an Internet-accessible SQL server?
fluffyamoeba short answer is yes - specifically MSSQL
Tenjac Or something like SVN or CVS
fluffyamoeba however, this is clearly out of most people's budget and mssql express only does 3 concurrent users
fluffyamoeba the builder to builder packages are actually just zip files
fluffyamoeba and inside they have the resourses in an xml-based format
fluffyamoeba so there would be a possibility to do versioning on those for people who didn't want to do the dtabase thing
fluffyamoeba (versioning the xml files not the zip files)
fluffyamoeba :) i may have harrassed the devs at the event for an answer to that one... ;)
Tenjac Scared half to death might be more accurate :P
* fluffyamoeba looks innocent
Annihilator-X17 What fluffy says is a slight understatement. Almost everyone there got up, stood in a ring around Scott Meadows (toolset lead), and then lobbed questions at him about external version control until he capitulated somewhat.
Annihilator-X17 Helekanalaith Level Editor Question: Interiors and exteriors, how do they vary? Can we blend them together in one area where we can move from one to the other without facing a loadscreen?
TigerDragon BioBryanD You can avoid loadscreens by putting several areas together into one "area list" - all areas in an area list are loaded into memory together when you enter one of them. The main difference between interiors and exteriors is the presence of a terrain mesh, I believe. You can use all of the same tile pieces and props in both interior and exterior layouts.
TigerDragon BioCraig when trying to include multiple tilesets in one area the main issues you will run into are performance ones, I believe
TigerDragon BioBryanD As I understand it, the main problem with walking inside buildings in an exterior level is handling the fade cutaway. As far as I'm aware we don't have that set up right now.
TigerDragon BioBrianC memory mostly, due to all the textures and models and objects being in memor
Beerfish Scotts fatal flaw was saying 'But why would you want to do that?'
TigerDragon XavierGrimwand Is the DAO toolset compatible with MySQL?
TigerDragon "no" so far as we know
Annihilator-X17 Currently, it's just windows and MSSQL. Haven't recieved indications otherwise.
fluffyamoeba however, xml is platform agnostic
Annihilator-X17 Is the world map scrollable (like BG2)?
TigerDragon BioBryanD "Is the world map scrollable (like BG2)?" - No, just a static image. You can have any number of worldmaps, and "child" maps depicting more local regions, but they don't scroll.
TigerDragon Tenjac So play at a high resolution :P
TigerDragon BioCraig You can also zoom in and out on the map screen.
Annihilator-X17 Helekanalaith Level Editor Question: Is it possible to create a level with geometries that are out of the ordinary? Roads leading up into the sky, floating platforms or horizontal tunnels in vast landscapes?
Andarian I remember that we were told that things like overhangs were possible, although the walkmesh is supposed to be planar (as with NWN)
Beerfish I think you can make the overhang but then you can either go over or under but not both? Floating platforms? Yes from what I've seen.
Beerfish Roads into the sky? I think yes but not sure how it would relate to walk mesh.
Annihilator-X17 I believe as long as there's only one layer of walkmesh, you can do almost anything with the outdoor areas
Tenjac BioBryanD For the level editor one: Yes, but you may have to use a few tricks for some of that. The main limitation is likely that the pathfinding walkmesh is "two dimensional", in that you can't have it overlap itself vertically. A level can be set up so you can easily walk over a bridge or under it, but not both without some additional creativity.
TigerDragon Six Can placables or similar in DA affect the walkmesh (eg bridges) or is it just the scupted area's
TigerDragon Six Or alternatively, is the walkmesh made entirely seperately from the area so you can make changes relative to placables
TigerDragon fluffyamoeba and so they get included in the walkmesh generation
TigerDragon Annihilator-X17 walkmesh being autogenerated by the area, yerp.
fluffyamoeba you can place things in a level as the equivalent of "static" placeables in NWN1. these are there when the walkmesh gets generated
Annihilator-X17 With that, we're going to end the chat today. It's been a lovely three and half hours, and I'd like to thank everyone who made it out here to participate. Now, I know a few of you have questions on custom artwork and sound that you'd like to have had answered, and they haven't been.
Annihilator-X17 There's a good reason for this: We've been told by Bioware not to comment on custom artwork for Dragon Age. They're still working things out, and will make the announcement when they feel ready.
Annihilator-X17 So, we've had to not answer those questions today. Hopefully, custom artwork will become more apparent soon.
Annihilator-X17 Also, while you were sending in questions during the speaker portion of the chat, we were feeding them to the BioDevs who came round, and so when we post the logs for the chat, we'll also have all the responses that they gave us before leaving.
Beerfish And don't forget to hit the DA toolset forum when you can!
Annihilator-X17 Yup, it's where all of us hang out, and we're more than happy to talk about what we can with regards to Dragon Age, and modding for it.
Tenjac Which is a lot that still haven't covered
Tenjac *that we
Annihilator-X17 I'd like to extend a special thanks to all who came here today to speak, and to Bioware for making this possible, by building the game and then by flying us all out there to see it. And with that, you are all free to talk.
Stratovarius For a little back ground, Bioware has had two builder's events, inviting 8 of us the first time and 12 of us the second to take a look at the Dragon Age toolset, make some recommendations, and generally get a feel for where they were going with the game.
Stratovarius fluffyamoeba and I have been lucky enough to make it up there twice, and everyone who'll be speaking today was at the second event. We've also managed to rope in a few Bioware employees who were there, showing us around the toolset and the available content
Stratovarius As well as working on Dragon Age and the creation process.
Stratovarius Bryan D, over there, does all of the wiki content that will make building for Dragon Age much easier when it comes out, while Craig is a scripter and builder on the game, and has helped us both times we've been up there.
Fluffyamoeba and Tenjac
Stratovarius Now, I have a feeling this might go on for a little, so I'll hand it over to our first two speakers: fluffyamoeba and Tenjac, creators of ZombieModding while at Edmonton this last Builder's Event
fluffyamoeba heya, i'm the prc minion that does the behind-the-scenes scripty systems stuff
Tenjac And i'm the one that breaks it all.
fluffyamoeba and also does spells
fluffyamoeba :)
Tenjac that too
fluffyamoeba one of the things that we had to do at the builder's event was the module challenge
fluffyamoeba we had about 5 hours over 2 days to make a module with 10 minutes of gameplay, some dialogue and 2 npcs
fluffyamoeba this was done in teams of 3
fluffyamoeba ( http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/dragon-age/1005288p1.html ) here is where they're talked about on gamespy, with screenshots
fluffyamoeba as we had a team of 3 scripters and no writers, our team went for infinite zombie spawning to make sure we had 10 minutes of gameplay...
Tenjac That was a bit of a cheat which we marketed as being unlimited gameplay
fluffyamoeba we used a prebuilt area - it's possible to reuse any existing area's art to make a new area with
* BioBryanD notes that that particular endless-zombie module uncovered a minor bug in the game itself because it did a thing that none of our internally-build modules have tried doing.
fluffyamoeba yup. leveling party NPCs
fluffyamoeba or rather, leveling party NPCs to a level that isn't the same level as the PC
Tenjac That bit did give us a bit of trouble for a while
fluffyamoeba 3 hours and 4 biodevs later...
fluffyamoeba we had the pc level to 3 to get around that problem
BioBryanD Heh. I was thinking of a different one, actually; when you auto-levelup the player for the first time with tutorials enabled, it pops up the leveup tutorial but you can't dismiss it because the levelup process is already complete.
Ranlas Oh yeah. I hated that bug.
fluffyamoeba that too
fluffyamoeba what is nice about the PC creation system is that if you *want* to pre-define the PC for your story, you can as it's controlled through scripting
Ranlas And predefine we did.
Tenjac One thing that really struck me was that if we had been trying to do this in NWN or NWN2, there is no way that we could have possibly done as much as we did. Prebuilt area aside, the tools themselves are so good. They are a real leap ahead in making creating your own modules easier and of a higher quality.
fluffyamoeba and that there's a lot of utility scripting functions already done and in files wit hdescriptive names
Ranlas On top of the built-in documentation for scripting functions. That really let us move forward quickly.
fluffyamoeba we essentially called a DoAddingNPCsToParty() function and it handled adding them, leveling them and whether they're fully player controlled
fluffyamoeba oh, and as for dialogue...ours was done in 2 minutes including generated VO
fluffyamoeba Gamespy Article -- what you see in these screenies is pretty much all there was :p
Ranlas robot-voice generated dialogue made for some entertaining VO
fluffyamoeba yup - there's a photo on the blog of us laughing at the screen - that's what we were laughing at
Tenjac But, the toolset will generated VO for you dialogs automatically and sync the lips to it. It's another nice feature that's made easy now.
Tenjac not sure how in depth we want to go into that at this point in the chat though
BioBryanD Granted, it's the default Microsoft text-to-speech engine. We call it "robot voice".
BioBryanD Oh, fooey, already mentioned.
Stratovarius RoboBrad being the exact name in the Toolset, I'll point out. Unfortunately, we don't have a screen shot to show you that
BioBryanD Actually, RoboBrad is a different system - it's what automatically puts emotions into facial performances, I believe.
fluffyamoeba i do like that the conversation carried on when the party were fighting - this didn't always happen in nwn
BioBryanD It's named after Brad Prince, who used to do that stuff manually back in the day.
Tenjac Not with DA :P
BioBrianC Brad was the lead cinematic designer on Mass Effect 1, and said tool was made to help speed up the conversation scenes.
BioBrianC He's at the Austin studio now working as lead world designer for the MMO I believe
BioBryanD Yeah, "back in the day" being a previous game entirely. :)
Stratovarius Alright, that concludes our little overview of what the module building challenge was like, and what's possible in a short amount of time. Certainly, everyone was impressed with how capable the toolset is for people who have not seen it before.
Stratovarius Now, before we get onto our next speaker, there's one thing I'd like to speak about.
Stratovarius This chat is a question and answer session after we finish talking, and we'd like to get your questions sent in as early as possible
Stratovarius The best way to do this is type "/msg TigerDragon" or "/msg Stratovarius", followed by the text of your question. And don't worry if you think you'll need to leave before the question is answered, we're posting a log of this
Stratovarius TigerDragon and I are the only two people serving as question takers for this chat, by the way, so please don't message others.
Andarian
Stratovarius And now, I'd like to introduce our next speaker, Andarian: Head of the Academy for Modding Excellence, and a Hall of Fame module builder, he's here to share a few of the insights that he's gained from working with Dragon Age
Andarian Hi everyone. First, I want to thank the PRC folks for hosting this event, and of course Bioware for hosting us at the Builder Event that we're talking about (not to mention building the game and the toolset itself :))
Andarian As Strat said, I'm the current Chairman of the Academy for Modding Excellence (AME), and author of the NWN1 Module Series Sanctum of the Archmage
Andarian I'm just back from vacation and haven't had time to prepare anything extensive, so I'm just going to talk for a few minutes a bit extemporaneously about the DA Toolset from a builder's perspective.
Andarian Some of you may know that my focus as a module builder is primarily on dramatic storytelling, and that I approach modding as a new medium for narrative art. So let me start by saying that I was extremely impressed by what I saw in terms of the tools that Bioware has provided that appeared to me to be aimed at enabling precisely that kind of work.
Andarian One of the key ways to build drama in a module is through the use of carefully crafted details that work together to set or sustain a mood. This includes not just static details, like placeables in an area, but dynamic details like poses, action, movement, animation, music, and so on.
Andarian The Dragon Age toolse provides a lot of tools to enable the module builder to exercise exactly this kind of cinematic control, through things like stages, cutscenes, facial editing, and so on.
Andarian *toolset
Andarian Cutscene control in DA no longer needs to be done by scripting, but rather uses a "timeline" based editor that allows precise control over the composition of views, movements, animations, and the like.
Andarian The dialog editor has incorporated a number of features into the interface that used to need to be scripted, such as the manipulation of boolean plot variables. It's another example of a pattern that I saw in the toolset, of Bioware identifying common module building tasks and building tools into the interface to automate them and make them much easier to use and to work with.
Andarian My own experience with participating in the "mod challenge" bore out many of these impressions that I got from the tutorials and playing with the toolset.
Andarian Fluffy and Tenjac mentioned that their team was light on writers, so they focused on an action challenge...
Andarian Our team had the opposite: two well known strongly story-oriented mod authors, and a third member who was very good with area layout
Andarian So we focused more on trying to brainstorm a story concept with dramatic elements and dialog. That's the challenge mod on page 2 of the Gamespy article -- "The Magic Cat"
Andarian You can see it here: http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/dragon-age/1005288p2.html
Andarian We scripted it to open into a dialogue in which you have a closeup view of a strange cat that starts following you around, and of course turns out to be important to the story
Andarian We were very impressed with the way that even the default cinematics made this opening scene very effective visually
Andarian We made the cat into a companion, and after a few test playthroughs we realized it was even more fun to play the mod from the point of view of the cat :)
Andarian The conversation editor was very familiar to most of us who had used NWN1, but with some new features that made it more powerful and easy to use -- including tie-ins to the staging, cutscene, and scripting tools
Andarian I was very interested in the scripting tools as well, particularly from the point of view of integration between scripting and conversation nodes. There are some new features there...
Andarian ...including a limited ability to pass parameters to scripts, which I've always found very desirable as a feature.
Andarian I think Sunjammer will talk more about scripting in the DA toolset, so I think I'll pass the torch over to him now. Thanks to everyone for listening!
Sunjammer
Beerfish Scripting? I just got here for the boring stuff eh? (*runs*)
Sunjammer Thank you Andarian, and thanks to both Team S, sorry the PRC team, and to BioWare.
Tenjac lol
Sunjammer Actually I'm not here to talk about scripting.
fluffyamoeba Beerfish, you can come back now...
Sunjammer And you'll be glad to know I'm not going to regale you with the tale of how, despite my 34-hour, transatlantic travelling ordeal, I still managed to be the first builder into the conference room!
* Sunjammer foolishly selected the Missing Scotsman Origin
Sunjammer Instead I'm going to provide an overview of the eagerly anticipated BioWare Community Network site (to use its official name) and mention the Dragon Age Toolset Wiki, which is really BioBryanD's baby.
Sunjammer Social Site & Wiki
Sunjammer The Beta Testers have had access to an internal version of the Wiki since about February however we didn't get to see the new version or the "social" site until just before lunch on the first day of the Builder's Event.
Sunjammer Since then some of you may also have had a sneak preview but by now most of you should have at least heard of the "social" site and/or the wiki.
Sunjammer However for anyone who has been living under a proverbial rock for the last month, suffice it to say that BioWare's plans for the Dragon Age Community go much further than they were able to go with Neverwinter Nights.
Sunjammer Instead of merely hosting the forums and having to leave everything else to third parties, such as NWN Vault, BioWare is intent on creating a one-stop-shop for all things Dragon Age.
Sunjammer How would you describe it?
Sunjammer For Players it's probably going to be a combination of the BioBoards; Facebook; Xbox Achievements and PlayStation Trophies; and the Modules download section at NWN Vault.
Sunjammer For Builders it's going to be all of those plus elements of the BioBoards Guilds, SourceForge. In addition there will be an official wiki for all things technical and/or toolset related.
Sunjammer Why is it become known as the "social" site?
Sunjammer Well fluffy has a threory ...
Sunjammer However SocialEngine is the name of the software package BioWare are using as the base and it has been installed on the social.bioware.com subdomain. While we are on the subject I should also mention that the new wiki uses MediaWiki.
* Sunjammer waits from everyone to return from the uncooperative login screen
Sunjammer Features
Sunjammer The first thing you should do when you get access is to update your Profile. This allows you to do the usual things like add your real name, date of birth, choose and avatar, etc., which is
Sunjammer likely to be all players will be interested in.
Sunjammer However the profile page also has a dedicated Builder Information tab that lets you list your Proficiencies and indicate if you are Available to work on projects. This information will be used for matchmaking builders and projects.
Sunjammer After that you'll want to manufacture some Friends so that you can Message them; comment on their Blog; and flame them on the Forums. If they really like you they might even reciprocate.
Sunjammer Moving on ...
Sunjammer This is where the features start to get more interesting because you're newly created friends might belong to one or more Groups which might have one or more Projects. If they think you can help they might invite you to join a group. Alternatively you just Subscribe to them and monitor their progress.
Sunjammer Groups have their own Discussions (usually private for members) and Comments (usually public for all users) however the owner and/or officers can control the visibility of these.
Sunjammer Projects also have their own discussions and comments however the key feature for projects is the ability to host and manage Files. Project members can, for example, upload their Art Resource files; their Builder-To-Builder (B2B) package files; and miscellaneous files such as design documents.
Sunjammer In addition when you are ready to release your content you can nominate a Featured File and make it public. When players read about the new content and view your project they will be presented with an almost-idiot-proof big green Download button.
Sunjammer There are a couple of other features that exist but may not be available initially, simply because there isn't time to fully polish them: Polls are available for members, while Albums (photos) are available separately for members, groups and projects.
Sunjammer At the Builder Event we also asked for and IRC server and client to be added so that chats like these could be hosted on the social site. There hasn't been an official answer but the indications were positive.
* Sunjammer crosses his fingers
Sunjammer Our Experiences
Sunjammer So that's the theory and the features but what's the site actually like?
Sunjammer I think it's only fair to point out that site only went live the night before the Builder Event (while I was stuck in Torronto). Despite that it's safe to say that when we saw it we were all impressed: we'd been making feature suggestions in the Beta Tester's forum and the social site appeared to check every box.
Sunjammer Obviously it is still in a very crud form and far from being ready but it is usable (we're using it constantly) and, more importantly, the site is improving every day as Jesse van Herk and his team work continue to develop it.
Sunjammer When Andriana and Fernando informed us that we had to make a mini-module Stratovarius set up a group for "Team 5"; set up a "Little Red Riding Hood, Redux" module as a Dragon Age Addons project; invited Markus and me to join the group; and later that day uploaded a B2B file containing resources for me to import to the base module.
Sunjammer All of that went smoothly, though only being able to currently invite firends to join a project is a little cumbersome.
Sunjammer Unfortunately due to issues with the hotel's wireless network our team was unable to download anything but the smallest files. That said I was able to upload a conversation from my laptop that evening and download it the next day in the conference room so we at least proved the concept worked.
Sunjammer However since getting home from the Builder Event we've been creating groups, project, swapping files, discussing projects and commenting on Jesse's blog.
fluffyamoeba and constantly bugging them with requests and bug reports
Sunjammer When the site's address appeared in the first GameSpy article and the membership tripled overnight it proved to be a little disconcerting. However that in itself was a useful test because the signal to noise ratio plummeted and all the Beta Testers started begging for various filters.
Sunjammer Conclusion
Sunjammer Although still a little rough round the edges the BioWare Community Network is already a huge step forward from what we have available today. It is being actively supported and developed by BioWare so I suspect it is only going to improve both in terms of features and usability.
Stratovarius Maybe that Missing Scotsman origin is worthwile after all... I wonder if its a hidden feature for DA? ;)
Stratovarius Now, before we get onto the next speaker, I'd like to remind everyone to send their questions to TigerDragon and myself. For those of you on the java client, the best way to do this is "/msg Stratovarius" or "/msg TigerDragon".
BioBrianC It'll be our first downloadable module for our next game, BioWare: Origins - role-play a game developer and fight forum trolls
Jassper
Stratovarius Our next speaker today will be Jassper, one of the best scripters from the NWN1 community, and one of the lucky few who was able to make it to Edmonton this time around.
Beerfish Snort....BioMods do that every day (*flex*)
Jassper I just have a few genral commnets on the DA toolset
Jassper I my opinion the DA toolset is the cream of the crop. As already mentioned, it give us power over all aspects of the game.
Jassper The tools are very versatile as well. They are laid out so basic users can create simple things, but allow advanced users to do complex things.
Jassper As some of you know, I have been anylising the VFX editor. I tryied to do this in the NWN2 toolset but got very frustrated because all I could make was a streaming colunm of - somthing. LOL
Jassper The DA VFX editor is much more intuitive and easy to get results quickly. In it's most basic usage, anyone can create nice looking VFX's without the need to learn all the advanced stuff.
Jassper All the nice advanced stuff is there however, for those that want to make very complex effects.
Jassper I am currently producing a tutorial series for the VFX editor and will be available on the DA Wiki/Social site that Sunjammer talked about
Jassper Another nice feature in DA is the Builder to Builder and Builder to Player Tools.
Jassper The Builder To Builder tools halp ease the task that groups must go through when sending mod builds over email
Jassper In fact, They can now use the social site to exchnage mod builds
Jassper The builder to Player tool packs you mod and resource files into a nice single downloadable file for the Player
Jassper Thats about it for me at this time.
Bioware's Bryan Derksen
Stratovarius Next up, we've managed to nag one of the Bioware Developers into talking. BryanD is someone you'll all be quite thankful for, as he's spending his days at Bioware building up the Dragon Age wiki, filling it with all the cool things that are possible in Dragon Age for us builders to play around with, and he's here now to give us a little talk about that.
Sunjammer yay!
Stratovarius Although, he did have to go rather soon and this hopefully doesn't mean he's been called away
BioBryanD Heh. Well, as previously mentioned, there's a MediaWiki-based wiki built into the social site to serve as documentation central for the toolset.
BioBryanD I've been spending the past eight months or so building the content so that it'll be as comprehensive and well-formed as possible for when we launch. Wikis need a good foundation to build from, and I think this is shaping up very well.
BioBryanD In fact, I know of a few internal developers who've been using it already. As one might imagine, sometimes in the heat of developing a big application the internal documentation can get a bit erratic. :)
BioBryanD Sunjammer's been helping out recently with some of the work too. He's created some GeSHI highlight scripts for the DA scripting language, and is gearing up to do a great big parsing job to create wiki pages for each of the core game's functions.
fluffyamoeba *cough cough* ;)
Sunjammer based on fluffeeeamoeba/TK's excellent NWN version of course
BioBryanD Heh. Of course, lots of other people are helping out too. It's a wiki, after all. :)
BioBryanD The wiki's got a bunch of tutorials in it too, ranging from the most basic introductory stuff up through the complexity levels. I expect those will continue to be added to over time.
Tenjac I can vouch that they're handy :P
BioBryanD Especially since so far I've been writing most of the content, and I certainly don't know everything about the toolset.
BioBryanD Not yet, anyway. :)
Stratovarius I'd like to thank the BioDevs for stopping by, since two of them will need to leave soon. And don't worry about them answering your questions, we've been passing them along and will post all the answers we got after the chat.
Beerfish
Stratovarius Next up in our list of speakers, we have Beerfish, long-time BioMod, expert woodcarver (His work decorates some of the rooms at Bioware's Edmonton office), and expert on the Head Morph and Cutscene tool. He was the only person not from Bioware to give a demonstration at the Builder's Event in Edmonton.
Beerfish Hello world, I'm just going to make a few brief points on a couple of things. Think of me talking like William Shatner.
Beerfish The Head Morph editor is very easy to use, you can make some very attractive faces and some damn ugly or nasty looking faces from the same base head morph.
Beerfish I can see people having fun playing around with this whether they are intent on making full modules or just playing around.
Beerfish The Cutscene tool is a wee bit more invloved but once you learn a few key things about it you re on your way. I really think some fantastic stuff will come from that tool.
Beerfish I encourge all of you to drop into the Dragon Age toolset forums at BioWare as time progresses if you have any questions that come to you after this chat. New info and discussions on various aspects of the toolset are ongoing.
Beerfish And to repeat a bit of a mantra, there is no such thing as a silly question. Our goal is to make help available to mod builders of any level of expertise, including total beginners.
Beerfish Even if one has no intention of ever making a module of their own, some of these tools are fun enough to play around with that people will be able to use them to make contant and share that with builders or the community.
Beerfish The one suggestion I'd make for any new user of the DA toolset is to not worry about the large picture at first, the toolset has a fair number of different great tools but looking at them all togther can seem daunting. Just pick one that interests you and learn about.
Beerfish Then pick another, before long you will have a good general knowledge of many of them.
Beerfish That's about it from me for now. Thanks for listening!
Stratovarius Alright, alright. We're nearly done with the speakers now.
Stratovarius Once more, I'd like to remind everyone to send their questions to TigerDragon and myself. For those of you on the java client, the best way to do this is "/msg Stratovarius" or "/msg TigerDragon".
Stratovarius
Stratovarius And the final speaker is... me! Shocking, I know.
Stratovarius For those who don't know me, I'm the founder of the Player Resource Consortium, an above average scripter, and proof that listening to the advice that Beerfish just gave works.
Stratovarius I picked scripting with no prior programming experience, found someone to teach me a bit, and the PRC was the end result.
Stratovarius Now, on to Dragon Age and the Toolset.
Stratovarius I'm going to be talking about the bit that made Beerfish run away before, in that I'll be mostly focusing on scripting, character creation, and character generation
Stratovarius Most of you have probably at least taken a glance at the scripting editor in NWN 1 or 2, even if it was just to close it in horror and run away again. Dragon Age, at a quick glance, looks more or less the same, and it is. If you're used to NWScript, you'll find DAScript pretty comfortable, but there's a few important changes lurky
Stratovarius Well, more than a few, to be honest. Because what Bioware has done is taken all those requests that people had for NWN, and listened. It's now possible to edit characters using scripts, to edit combat using scripts, and so on.
Stratovarius I'll speak about a few of these things in turn, starting with editing the character.
Stratovarius In NWN1, this needed multiplayer and LETOScript, or the LETO character editor. In Dragon Age, it's possible to write a script that bumps up a character's strength score by 1, or reduces it, to show the effects of a permanent curse.
Stratovarius This allows you the freedom to make any sort of character you want, especially as a mod builder. If you want your story to feature the main character aging, and want his scores adjust to reflect this, it's as simple as a basic script
Stratovarius Likewise, you can do the same thing with abilities. These are split into spells (Abilities that use Mana), and talents (Abilities that use Stamina).
Stratovarius Functionally, these are identical. They occupy the same place on the GUI, they look the same, they act the same. It just differs on a class by class basis, as Mages use mana, while the other two use Stamina
Stratovarius If you wish to give a player a new ability, perhaps have him learn a spell as a reward for defeating a particularly difficult dragon as part of a sidequest, one function will add the ability to the player's list, and even drop in on the quickbar if there is space.
Stratovarius As fluffy and Tenjac alluded to earlier, bioware has created a lot of wrapper functions that allow builders the freedom to call one function, and have it take care of a whole host of details in the background. This means that creating complex scenarios or abilities is quite a bit easier, as more of what you'd like to have is prepackkaged.
Stratovarius Another area where this new functionality has been applied is to passive abilities. For those who have ever looked in the PRC code, you've probably seen a file called "prc_inc_function" referenced somewhere.
Stratovarius It's our system for creating fake passive abilities in NWN, as all of the existing bioware ones, such as weapon focus or luck of heroes, are hardcoded into the game.
Stratovarius Now, instead of having to do something like that in Dragon Age, you can just mark an ability as passive in the 2da, ensure the scripting is done right, and there you are, it's a permanent passive ability. Far easier and less error prone than the style that had to be used for NWN1.
Stratovarius Combat has also been opened to access by scripters. It is entirely driven via scripts, with none of the work (aside from animations and a few other small features) being driven from the hardcoded game engine.
Stratovarius This has its good and bad points. If you want to make a new ability that attacks to do +5 damage, it's dead easy, and for people creating new abilities (such as us at the PRC), it's a great boon.
Stratovarius The bad point arrises in that the game was fairly carefully balanced around the Dragon Age combat system as it stands, and that changing it can cause more than a few unforseen things to happen. Let me go into a little more detail on this
Stratovarius Combat in Dragon Age uses a dynamic balancing system. If you give a monster the Monster - Tank trait, its got better physical resistance and more life than a normal creature of that type.
Stratovarius If you give it the High Damage type, well, you can see what that does.
Stratovarius You can also turn a monster into anything from a "weak" all the way up to Boss, or even Elite Boss. All of those control just how dangerous the monster is to the party.
Stratovarius For making things easier and quicker, this is far better, because it allows the fast creation of multiple creatures without the constant tweaking of changing abilities or adding spells and feats that occured in NWN. Now, those features are still there if you want them, but if the monster is generic, you can spend a few minutes getting it to look right, set the properties
Stratovarius and it will behave more or less as you like, without all of that fiddling.
Stratovarius There are one or two things in Dragon Age scripting that have caused some dislike, this mainly been the Variable 2da.
Stratovarius Every creature, placeable, area, everything, has a 2da defining what local variables are available on that object.
Stratovarius The old NWN system of just typing out the variable name no longer works. Although the script will compile, and then fail in the background, which is annoying.
Stratovarius We've asked Bioware about changing this, but until then, we've got to live with it. Thankfully, they took the time to predefine a whole array of variables for each type of object, and so it's likely that most things can be accomplished with what's already there. It's only for those complex systems that you'd need something more
Stratovarius The last big change in the Dragon Age scripting that I'll talk about is the Event system.
Stratovarius Dragon AGe is event based, and each object uses one script, usually called X_core, such as monster_core, player_core, and so on.
Stratovarius When one of these scripts is called, it runs through a giant case statement and catches the event number, then does whatever it's supposed to. This means that there is generally only one script for most things in the game. All abilities are called from ability_core, and then there are lists of what each ability is and what it does.
Stratovarius If you want to do a custom one, you can simply create your script, add a check for the one event that you want to change, and then pass the script off to the normal, Bioware functions, where it will go through all of the standard processing.
Stratovarius This makes it a lot easier to get access to the events in Dragon Age than in NWN, although in one or two cases you need to make sure that a local variable is set for the event to trigger.
Stratovarius For those who've worked with NWN style scripting, it will take a little getting used to, but once the mindset has changed over, it makes it quite a bit easier to get everything done in a timely fashion.
Stratovarius Everything, from scripting to cutscenes to plots and conversations, has been upgraded to make using them faster and easier than they were in NWN.
Stratovarius That brings me to my last point: There is one area of the game that is almost completely non-moddable, and that is the GUI. It is built using a scustom Scaleform implementation, and while there are a few hooks into that, it's almost ipossible to change from the community end.
Stratovarius However, we have already begun passing recommendations back to Bioware, and they've come up with some of their own, so pretty soon, that should be much friendler for everyone as well (fingers crossed).
Stratovarius So, for those of you looking into building, I can say with all certainty that anything you wanted to do in NWN will be faster, easier, and better looking in Dragon Age. It's a great new playground for modders, and we're looking forward to see what people can make with it.
Stratovarius This concludes the speaker section of the irc chat. We're now going to start posting in the questions that you have been asking, and seeing what our esteemed panel has to say about them.
Stratovarius Don't forget to send questions to myself or TigerDragon, either.
Question and Answer
Stratovarius Adinos second question for Q&A: Which tutorials are being worked on, and expected to be available when the game is released?
Stratovarius Well, I'll begin with this
Stratovarius While we were there at Edmonton, several of the BioDevs gave tutorials to us
Stratovarius for about the first day and half, before we got handed the module challenge
Stratovarius All of those seminars were filmed and recorded, and so they will be made available at some point.
Stratovarius There is also the content that BryanD has been working on, as well as the community tutorials from Beerfish, Sunjammer, and others that are already underway.
Stratovarius There will be quite a wide array of available material come release day.
Stratovarius XavierGrimwand Question for DAScript's Event system: How is it similar to, and how is it different from NwN1's custom events?
Andarian I'll comment on this...
Andarian If you're familiar with how tag-based scripting works in NWN1, it has some similarities to that.
Andarian The script has an event handler to identify which event it is handling and how to respond to it.
Stratovarius Demitar For the Q&A: One thing that bugged me in the nwn1 toolset is the slightly lacking introspection, ie while maintaining a module I every now and then find myself wanting to ask the module "what areas use script X on enter" or "which npcs have no perception scripts" or why not "give me a list of the each goblins total treasure value excluding scrolls sorted descending". Do we know if there's any tools
Stratovarius Demitar towards this effect in the DA toolset?
Ranlas I haven't come across any... it would be a handy tool to have if it isn't already there.
Jassper As for the scripts part.
Stratovarius Dragon Age runs on a MSSQL database in the background, using it to store all of the module and game information. Right now, this means you can query the SQL, but aside form that, there isn't such a tool just yet
Sunjammer Ask Adam Miller to do us some more SQL queries
Jassper THe events make that easier to trake
Jassper trak
Stratovarius Do we know how mods are published / updated, and how those updates interact with games saved while playing an older version of the mod? Will it be feasible to patch a mod to fix bugs or add a bunch of new content, for example, without breaking people's saved games for that mod?
Ranlas I think this is addresed by the concept of AddOns
fluffyamoeba well, firstly, we never saw any savegames. what is stored in a save will determine how big a change can be made
Ranlas I asked this question and the basic answer is, it's probably feasible, as long as the player has a saved game from before the patch takes effect.
Ranlas Because of the way it loads and saves data.
Ranlas But it's not something we did firsthand.
Stratovarius 9. Is there any gore modifying function in the toolest? I mean can we affect gore in the OC from the toolset, in case there isn't any such choice in the game itself?
Tenjac Yes.
Tenjac by script at least
fluffyamoeba gore is scriptable for some things - by default the script looks to check for the player's gore setting iirc
BioBryanD Gore in combat is set by scripts, that can be changed. Cutscenes have a "set gore" action, you might need to go through all the cutscenes and edit them to change that.
fluffyamoeba next: Helekanalaith Script Event Question: What options are available to us to measure the passing of time? We know that day-night cycles are a thing of the past, but surely time still matters in the game. So can we, for instance, still create races against time such as seen in the Kingmaker story (NWN Premium Module)?
Ranlas there are functions for getting the game time, though I can't find one for setting it
fluffyamoeba there's no day/night cycle, but ther'es the ability to get the time that has passed
fluffyamoeba so you can do it, but you will have to entirely do it through scripting and tracking the time passed yourself
Tenjac Bryan Derksen - The large-scale passage of time is not handled by default, if you want to have days pass and keep track of dates and so forth you'll have to script it up.
fluffyamoeba and the next one: XavierGrimwand Question on Builder to Builder and Builder to Player files: Once the downloader downloads the file, what does he do with it? (In each case; B2B & B2P)
Ranlas builder to builder doesn't matter where it is. You browse to open it form the toolset
Ranlas It's really a glorified ZIP file.
Tenjac Yep.. it's right under Builder to Builder Load
Sunjammer In the case of B2B there is a Builder to Builder Load function: you simply point it to the B2B file and it will display a list of all the filese therein. You can then select which ones you want to import.
Ranlas I think there was a special folder where builder to Player went, but we were shown that very quickly and didn't use it very much at all.
Tenjac IIRC you could download content from the site within the game, and it was pretty much handled for you
Sunjammer In the case of B2P there is a content installer: you simply drag the B2P file onto it (or I assume point the installer to the B2P file) and it will install it for you. Once in the client you can then select which AddOns you want active or inactive. This allows the Player to avoid using incompatible add-ons.
Tenjac that's right... listen to him :P
fluffyamoeba the installer worked for our challenge modules without any trouble
fluffyamoeba next one:
fluffyamoeba Helekanalaith Class Question: Do the three classes each have their own animations for combat, movement and ambience purposes? More specifically, will we be able to see our rogues sneak around?
Sunjammer Additionally as Tenjac says their is a seemless version for official DLC where you download, install it and start playing it without ever leaving the game.
Annihilator-X17 There are individual animations on an ability basis, especially with regards to spells or the later level abilities that are flashier.
Annihilator-X17 For combat, they are more generic, as the humanoid skeleton is reused for the standard swing, shoot arrow, block, and so on gestures
Annihilator-X17 Most ambient gestures are handled on a generated basis, and there are thousands of possibilities there, as you can blend from one into another, as well as an automated tool that does this for ambient dialogue
TigerDragon BioCraig "After the game is released, do you see yourselves released regularly content for the toolset, such as additional environments, monster models, etc...?" -- As has already been announced, there are two years of post release content planned already. I'm currently working on some of that myself.
Andarian I'll comment briefly, since I'm not really a cc person...
Andarian I mainly see myself releasing story modules, rather than toolset content. But I think that many others will likely be releasing things like prefab areas and models.
fluffyamoeba Helekanalaith Cutscene and/or Scripting Question: In NWN1 it's possible to move placeables through the use of a somewhat intricate script, which basically destroys and creates new instances of the object in different states and locations. Am I correct in assuming that we'll be able to create such a scenario in the cutscene editor and possibly also have this scenario play out outside of a cutscene?
Ranlas I've got to go myself, but I can see myself perhaps releasing some small content packs and helping improve the wiki after release.
Ranlas You can set the position of an object.
fluffyamoeba to quote biobryand...
fluffyamoeba " Placeables can be moved around freely inside cutscenes using the built-in position keyframing system, with no need for scripting."
Ranlas and with that I depart!
fluffyamoeba which i don't think any of us tried at the event :)
Beerfish Not sure exactly what the person had in mind but you can make items invisible and visible during a cutscene, you can also move things during a cutscene. You could easily have have a destoryed version being invisible and a good version visible and then during the cutscene reverse them.
Sunjammer Beerfish has done a very impressive cutscene which involves people getting squished by rocks.
Beerfish Also the use of a variety of cameras can help you in this regard. View something with camera1, change to camera2 and view something else, go back to camera1 and druing the time you were using camera2 tou can change things that might be viewed in camera 1
Jassper You could make a movie instead of a game if you wanted to.
Tenjac very easily
TigerDragon Hakmon Hello, a question about the head morph editor: I realize you wont be able to give a face scars out of the box, but would it be possible to add some as "tattoos"?
* fluffyamoeba channels biobryand again: "I'm not sure how the files are stored internally, but there are textures you can overlay onto faces that include scarring."
TigerDragon BioBryanD I'm not sure how the files are stored internally, but there are textures you can overlay onto faces that include scarring.
fluffyamoeba lol
TigerDragon :)
Beerfish Although there is no 'Scars' attribute in the morph editor you can in effct make heads look like they have scars...hey he stole my answer!
fluffyamoeba there's tattoos as well, but you may have seen someof those on the DA screenshots
Beerfish The tattoos themselves will not look like scars. And we do not know about custom content of that nature at this time.
Annihilator-X17 Helekanalaith Script Event Question: In addition to my previous question concerning time, I'd also like to know if there are any module-wide events that support the creation of timed events? Does this game support timers that we can specify to run every second, minute, hour?
Sunjammer This one is a bit tricky to answer but I'll give it a shot
Sunjammer There time and date related functions we were used to in NWN have not been implmented in DA (at least not yet)
Sunjammer There are a couple of new ones however
Sunjammer GetTime returns the game time, GetLowResTimer returns a system tick count (i.e. milliseconds)
Sunjammer There doesn't appear to be a heartbeart on anything by default
Sunjammer (at least I haven't seen it in the template scripts or EventType summary on the wiki)
Sunjammer however there is a InitHeartbeat and EndHeartbeat function for creatures
Sunjammer the former allows you to set the interval of the heartbeat
Sunjammer finally there is a DelayEvent function
Sunjammer which is analogous to the DelayCommand function only for events :)
fluffyamoeba next one
fluffyamoeba XavierGrimwand Another question on the Social Site: The social site has been compared to many existing sites, one of which is SourceForge. Besides having a place to store files, are files also tracked or versioned, and can overwritten files be restored? (Basically, please elaborate on a project's file repository's capabilities.)
TigerDragon Annihilator-X17 The answer is sort of a sidestep: the SQL DB does versioning
TigerDragon Annihilator-X17 by checking content in and out
TigerDragon Annihilator-X17 so the toolset does, the website does not
Annihilator-X17 Let me expand on that a little :)
TigerDragon :)
Annihilator-X17 It takes some getting used to, to use the database versioning system that comes with the toolset
Annihilator-X17 If you make a lot of changes but don't check in, you can't revert to that point
Annihilator-X17 So you get in the habit of doing a mass check in/out every now and then to make sure you have version save points.
Annihilator-X17 So, no, the website does not provide that functionality. However, most to all of it comes built into the toolset's database itself.
fluffyamoeba i'd say that the sourceforge elements are the ideas of projects and groups and of the release page. rather than the version control eg. https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-install/files/ (mingw's release page)
fluffyamoeba the idea of having a project's links and released files all in one place
Annihilator-X17 Adinos third question: is there any built-in way to "record" a cutscene to make a stand-alone movie (for YouTube or whatever) or do you just use a regular external tool for that?
Andarian I didn't see any way to do that outside of using something like Fraps to record the scene...
Andarian But I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work fine for the purpose.
Beerfish I have found no way to record a cutscene in the manner asked. You can send cutscenes in a builder to builder file for those with the toolset/game. I think you would need to have a screen capture bit of software to create a movie out of it. (Of course I could be wrong too. :) )
TigerDragon XavierGrimwand Followup question: So if you want group versioning, you need to set up an Internet-accessible SQL server?
fluffyamoeba short answer is yes - specifically MSSQL
Tenjac Or something like SVN or CVS
fluffyamoeba however, this is clearly out of most people's budget and mssql express only does 3 concurrent users
fluffyamoeba the builder to builder packages are actually just zip files
fluffyamoeba and inside they have the resourses in an xml-based format
fluffyamoeba so there would be a possibility to do versioning on those for people who didn't want to do the dtabase thing
fluffyamoeba (versioning the xml files not the zip files)
fluffyamoeba :) i may have harrassed the devs at the event for an answer to that one... ;)
Tenjac Scared half to death might be more accurate :P
* fluffyamoeba looks innocent
Annihilator-X17 What fluffy says is a slight understatement. Almost everyone there got up, stood in a ring around Scott Meadows (toolset lead), and then lobbed questions at him about external version control until he capitulated somewhat.
Annihilator-X17 Helekanalaith Level Editor Question: Interiors and exteriors, how do they vary? Can we blend them together in one area where we can move from one to the other without facing a loadscreen?
TigerDragon BioBryanD You can avoid loadscreens by putting several areas together into one "area list" - all areas in an area list are loaded into memory together when you enter one of them. The main difference between interiors and exteriors is the presence of a terrain mesh, I believe. You can use all of the same tile pieces and props in both interior and exterior layouts.
TigerDragon BioCraig when trying to include multiple tilesets in one area the main issues you will run into are performance ones, I believe
TigerDragon BioBryanD As I understand it, the main problem with walking inside buildings in an exterior level is handling the fade cutaway. As far as I'm aware we don't have that set up right now.
TigerDragon BioBrianC memory mostly, due to all the textures and models and objects being in memor
Beerfish Scotts fatal flaw was saying 'But why would you want to do that?'
TigerDragon XavierGrimwand Is the DAO toolset compatible with MySQL?
TigerDragon "no" so far as we know
Annihilator-X17 Currently, it's just windows and MSSQL. Haven't recieved indications otherwise.
fluffyamoeba however, xml is platform agnostic
Annihilator-X17 Is the world map scrollable (like BG2)?
TigerDragon BioBryanD "Is the world map scrollable (like BG2)?" - No, just a static image. You can have any number of worldmaps, and "child" maps depicting more local regions, but they don't scroll.
TigerDragon Tenjac So play at a high resolution :P
TigerDragon BioCraig You can also zoom in and out on the map screen.
Annihilator-X17 Helekanalaith Level Editor Question: Is it possible to create a level with geometries that are out of the ordinary? Roads leading up into the sky, floating platforms or horizontal tunnels in vast landscapes?
Andarian I remember that we were told that things like overhangs were possible, although the walkmesh is supposed to be planar (as with NWN)
Beerfish I think you can make the overhang but then you can either go over or under but not both? Floating platforms? Yes from what I've seen.
Beerfish Roads into the sky? I think yes but not sure how it would relate to walk mesh.
Annihilator-X17 I believe as long as there's only one layer of walkmesh, you can do almost anything with the outdoor areas
Tenjac BioBryanD For the level editor one: Yes, but you may have to use a few tricks for some of that. The main limitation is likely that the pathfinding walkmesh is "two dimensional", in that you can't have it overlap itself vertically. A level can be set up so you can easily walk over a bridge or under it, but not both without some additional creativity.
TigerDragon Six Can placables or similar in DA affect the walkmesh (eg bridges) or is it just the scupted area's
TigerDragon Six Or alternatively, is the walkmesh made entirely seperately from the area so you can make changes relative to placables
TigerDragon fluffyamoeba and so they get included in the walkmesh generation
TigerDragon Annihilator-X17 walkmesh being autogenerated by the area, yerp.
fluffyamoeba you can place things in a level as the equivalent of "static" placeables in NWN1. these are there when the walkmesh gets generated
Annihilator-X17 With that, we're going to end the chat today. It's been a lovely three and half hours, and I'd like to thank everyone who made it out here to participate. Now, I know a few of you have questions on custom artwork and sound that you'd like to have had answered, and they haven't been.
Annihilator-X17 There's a good reason for this: We've been told by Bioware not to comment on custom artwork for Dragon Age. They're still working things out, and will make the announcement when they feel ready.
Annihilator-X17 So, we've had to not answer those questions today. Hopefully, custom artwork will become more apparent soon.
Annihilator-X17 Also, while you were sending in questions during the speaker portion of the chat, we were feeding them to the BioDevs who came round, and so when we post the logs for the chat, we'll also have all the responses that they gave us before leaving.
Beerfish And don't forget to hit the DA toolset forum when you can!
Annihilator-X17 Yup, it's where all of us hang out, and we're more than happy to talk about what we can with regards to Dragon Age, and modding for it.
Tenjac Which is a lot that still haven't covered
Tenjac *that we
Annihilator-X17 I'd like to extend a special thanks to all who came here today to speak, and to Bioware for making this possible, by building the game and then by flying us all out there to see it. And with that, you are all free to talk.
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