Sawyer and ToEE, Troika, BIS and Bio

[Nomad]

Perhaps the amount of relative change between BG1 and BG2 does not appear to be as great as Arcanum and ToEE (I don't know - perhaps it is), but BioWare released BG1 in December of 1998 and BG2 in September of 2000 and BG: Tales of the Sword Coast in between. That's a whole other product cycle that they had to endure which Troika did not.

Again, what both companies had to do within their time frames and with the resources they had available is impressive. Saying otherwise just doesn't seem accurate.


N.

 

[JanC]

If I'm not mistaken, of the 225k lines of dialogue, 100 or 120k were reused from BG1.

I read that in a BG2 postmortem in Game Developer Magazine.

Really? Which ones? I dodn't notice any repeats except with the 'insignificant' characters, beggars and so on. Certainly no repeated conversations.

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

If I'm not mistaken, of the 225k lines of dialogue, 100 or 120k were reused from BG1.

I read that in a BG2 postmortem in Game Developer Magazine.

Really? Which ones? I dodn't notice any repeats except with the 'insignificant' characters, beggars and so on. Certainly no repeated conversations.

Possibly item and spell descriptions, or books. Those seem to be repeated. I'm not sure if the Umberlee priestesses dialogues are repeated, and also am not sure about temples' basic dialogues.

By the way, are those 'K's in terms of thousands or in terms of Kbs? :

 

[Psilon]

Yeah, they're probably talking about DIALOG.TLK, which contains essentially every string in the game. I can easily see those being recycled from one IE game to the next.

Also, it's probably talking about thousands of lines, not thousands of strings or 1024s of bytes.

 

[ecliptic]

In this context, k = 1000 lines of dialogue, correct.

 

[Elwro]

Yes, and you simply have to have a black cloak in order to do any cloak'n'dagger adventuring.

I'll admit to being a D&D idiot, but I don't understand daggers. The only person a dagger will ever go to is a mage, and they can't do much with it anyways. (Although the mage's dagger I got early on in IWD that granted an extra 1st level spell was extremely usefull.) If I've missed something important, please point out the folly of my ways.

Nah, you're right perhaps, but it's just that I'm not a native speaker and I thought that "cloak'n'dagger" is a fixed expression.
And:
1. In Polish PHB there's a typo in the Rogue's Kit stating that dagger's critical capabilities are 19-20/x20 .
2. A dagger is a light weapon, so you can take advantage from your Weapon Finesse feat - but I'm sure you know that.

 

[Ibbz]

The rules didn't change much as far as i remember.
The animations stayed largely the same. Dwarven females still looked liked males, and Dwarves/Halflings/Gnomes still had almost no difference in avatar. The Half-Orc was a joke. What was added however, (and this is quite visible) were new monsters and respective animations.

The weapon proficiences were completely redone. Hence why it asked you to repick your proficiences if you imported a character from BG1. If you look at a trailer for BG1 then watch one for BG2, you'll see the character's use considerably more frames for animations in attacks than they did in BG1. {I can remember realising that when i watched the BG2 trailer for the first time, thinking that the attacks looked much better than BG1.} Human Avatars {As in what was displayed if you werent wearing any armour} were changed, Not sure about the other races

Possibly item and spell descriptions, or books. Those seem to be repeated. I'm not sure if the Umberlee priestesses dialogues are repeated, and also am not sure about temples' basic dialogues.

All the basic item and spell descriptions are the same except where there was new items/spells {Obviously.}

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

The weapon proficiences were completely redone. Hence why it asked you to repick your proficiences if you imported a character from BG1. If you look at a trailer for BG1 then watch one for BG2, you'll see the character's use considerably more frames for animations in attacks than they did in BG1. {I can remember realising that when i watched the BG2 trailer for the first time, thinking that the attacks looked much better than BG1.} Human Avatars {As in what was displayed if you werent wearing any armour} were changed, Not sure about the other races

Well, Ibbz in terms of animations i remember the dual-wielding animations being added, and a general increase in quality of the animations because of amount of frames. I remember the Human avatars now had those small shoulder pads, and had larger gauntlets. I think their hair was also changed... iirc the females had their hair lenghtned, and males had their hair shortened. But i don't remember any other differences. At least not out of the blue.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

In trying to adhere to the forum's new guidelines, I give you the following post.

Just ignore the rules, I do.

In 18 months Troika had to deliver:

* a modified version of the 2D graphics engine used on Arcanum, one of their earlier titles* a modified version of the single-player game engine, also used on Arcanum, that uses the D&D 3.5 Edition ruleset, an update to a ruleset that's been out for 3 years.
* an implementation of a story that _everyone_ that's played PnP D&D already knows.

Ummm.. The graphics engine for ToEE is new. The parser was kept from Arcanum as were some data structures for item creation. Everything else is new.. The 3D characters, the bitmap tiling as opposed to traditional layered flat tiling, the character system, the combat engine, and so on.. All new.

As for the story, a lot was added to make the town seem more lively. Of course, about a third of that got the axe from Hasbro shortly before release, but oh well!

In 5 years Bio had to deliver:

* a new 3D graphics engine.

Which happened to be the MDK engine with some modifications done, actually. Not to mention the fact that new 3D engine has more in common with DOOM than it does with QUAKE. Try to make a bridge that you can walk under AND walk over if you don't believe me.

* a new game engine using WotC's then unfinalized D&D 3rd Edition ruleset.

Which had been out over a year by the time NWN came out. Troika had to write their 3.5E system from scratch as well.

* a user-friendly toolset.

Game developers typically make toolsets for games anyway. The main difference between NWN's and others would be the wizards.

* multiplayer capabilities.
* a dm client.
* a dedicated server

Things with Nihilistic did in less than 3 years, BTW.. On a smaller budget with a smaller dev team.. Did I mention Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption had cloaks? :D

* an "original story" (i.e. one which was not based on an existing PnP D&D module) that worked in both single and multi-player.

Not very original, considering it's pretty much ripped from Raymond Feist's works.

However, it's far, far easier to borrow a concept, like BioWare did for NWN's plot and 3E rules, than it is to do a faithful translation.

The fact that Troika included robes and cloaks in ToEE (did it get both or just one?)

Both.. And they stack.. Including monk robes, which you can wear over chainmail. You can also wear bracers and gloves together and they show up on the paperdoll.

should not be held against BioWare just as the lack of multiplayer in ToEE should not be held against Troika. I'm sure Troika was capable of adding multiplayer support to ToEE, but it was probably not consistent with the vision of the game given the rest of their feature set. Ditto for BioWare and cloaks / robes in NWN.

Why shouldn't it? Cloaks aren't exactly the hardest thing to impliment, and it's not like Johnny Programmer would be sitting in front of 3DSMax modelling them instead of adding wizards to the toolset. He might be the one that puts them in the rendering pipeline, but things like cloaks and the animations for them are mostly the work of the artists.

And ToEE's models and animations beat the CRAP out of NWN's, hands down. The animations for critical hits are superb, especially the one for the monk where they do that cartwheel kick. The idle animations are also based on what class the person is and what weapons they have. I dual wielded a paladin just to watch the animation for idling tonight, it's pretty neat. Monks practice moves while idling, which is pretty neat.

 

[Nomad]

Of course, I would expect all the content in ToEE was new but I was unaware that they completely redid their graphics engine from scratch. The only time I've heard anything about this it's always been said that they used the Arcanum engine and they weren't differentiating. Point conceded.

I'm pretty sure I read though that the graphics engine for NWN, while based on the one they used for MDK2, was completely rewritten. I don't have a link to confirm or deny this, do you?

While the 3.5 Edition was new, I'd guess that it was less different from 3rd than 3rd was from 2nd. I would expect Troika had a better understanding of what they were getting into than BioWare did.

I've already done the NWN vs. V:TM-R thing but since you brought it up... I really enjoyed that game and have a lot of respect for the guys at Nihilistic, but you can see where they made their compromises, too. The smaller team and less development time is apparent in the "size" of the game compared to NWN. NWN had more art, more complex game systems to take into account the D&D rules, and a more polished and useable end-user toolset that actually shipped with the game while V:TM-R even licensed their toolset from id. Please note that I'm not saying that was the wrong thing to do or bad for the product. They made their decisions based on the resources they had to work with just like BioWare did.

As I said, I'm not trying to take anything away from Troika. I think they did a great job considering all their obstacles but I also think NWN was a terrific accomplishment for BioWare, too.


N.

[edited for typo]

 

[AlanC9]

[
However, it's far, far easier to borrow a concept, like BioWare did for NWN's plot and 3E rules, than it is to do a faithful translation.

Well, I'd say adapting D&D 3rd ed to quasi-RT is sort of hard, too. God knows Bio had trouble with it. The whole Knockdown/Discipline fiasco, for instance

And one of these days Troika's going to have a great implementation of the 3.5 rules. Hope they can get all the fixes into one patch. But it's really surprising how many features of the PnP module were either botched or never attempted. I'm starting to wonder if maybe their engine doesn't let you script complex NPC behaviors. More likely they just ran out of time.

Why shouldn't it? Cloaks aren't exactly the hardest thing to implement, and it's not like Johnny Programmer would be sitting in front of 3DSMax modelling them instead of adding wizards to the toolset. He might be the one that puts them in the rendering pipeline, but things like cloaks and the animations for them are mostly the work of the artists.

The closest thing I ever got to an explanation of this was that Bio set up a character modelling system very early in development that would result in horrible clipping with cloaks and robes. Apparently, nobody thought about them until it was too late. So it's terrible requirements gathering, as opposed to bad programming.

In Bio's defense, NWN characters have to do things that ToEE characters never do, like sit on chairs. They also get much closer to placeable objects that ToEE characters can, and are viewed from various angles and much more closely.

There's also a weird sort of paranoia at Bio about releasing something flawed. (As opposed to buggy, which can be fixed). We saw this when SoU was released. Anyone who installs the expansion has all modules he builds or edits flagged as "SoU only," and they can never be played by anyone without the expansion, even if the modules contain no SoU content. The reason was that if they didn't set this flag, it would be possible for someone to accidentally make a module require SoU without knowing it, and this module would crash whenever someone without SoU encountered an SoU creature, etc. Bio decided that they had to make this impossible.

Of course, this is irrational -- if the builder uses SoU modes in a non-SoU mod, it's his own damn fault the mod's crashing, and nobody would think to blame Bio. This flag has meant that builders supporting NWN-only mods have to maintain two installs. But that's the way Bio guys think. And since they can't get cloaks to stop going through stuff, they refuse to do cloaks at all.

Personally, I never thought robes were practical adventure wear anyway. None of my mages wear them.

And ToEE's models and animations beat the CRAP out of NWN's, hands down.

Yes, ToEE's models and animations look great, though ToEE's missing a lot of things that NWN has. Facial features, different phenotypes, different skin colors, noncombat animations besides idle, and a lot of hair colors. None of which are actually useful for ToEE, of course.

 

[Walks with the Snails]

Well, I'd say adapting D&D 3rd ed to quasi-RT is sort of hard, too. God knows Bio had trouble with it. The whole Knockdown/Discipline fiasco, for instance

Oh, somebody else will cover the rest. But what does the discipline skill have to do with it being RT? I think the D&D rules for trip work just fine, it seems more to me that it just would have looked bad if fighters had no class skills since they didn't implement most of them (climb, swim, ride, ...). So they had to throw in that little gem and mess up the balance for everyone else. I also never figured out why monks of all classes don't get discipline as a class skill, either. Deftly sidestepping some brute who tries to push them over is, like, what they do.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I'm pretty sure I read though that the graphics engine for NWN, while based on the one they used for MDK2, was completely rewritten. I don't have a link to confirm or deny this, do you?

It was in one of the dev diaries somewhere about the game. There's a lot they could keep from MDk2, like the character animation/display/load routines, but they would have had to rewrite the environment stuff(MAYBE) to allow for tiles. It depends on how the geometry worked in MDK2 versus how the tiles work. If MDK2 used brushes, then it's not much of an issue.

While the 3.5 Edition was new, I'd guess that it was less different from 3rd than 3rd was from 2nd. I would expect Troika had a better understanding of what they were getting into than BioWare did.

Going from STEAM to 3.5E D&D would be a much larger change than going from 2E to 3E, don't you think?

NWN had more art, more complex game systems to take into account the D&D rules, and a more polished and useable end-user toolset that actually shipped with the game while V:TM-R even licensed their toolset from id. Please note that I'm not saying that was the wrong thing to do or bad for the product. They made their decisions based on the resources they had to work with just like BioWare did.

Both V:tM and D&D have fairly complex rule systems, and in both cases here, many of those rules were fudged to make for the real time combat. Nihilistic's editor, while using a modified version of QER, is designed for editting fully 3D maps. The map geometry in V:tM-R is fully 3D, while NWN's is basically 2D like DOOM's was.

 

[Voss]

A point- The V:tM computer game didn't use much at all of the Storyteller system beyond concepts and in a fairly vague way, disciplines. They didn't 'fudge' the Storyteller rules, they essentially used their own.

 

[AlanC9]

Well, I'd say adapting D&D 3rd ed to quasi-RT is sort of hard, too. God knows Bio had trouble with it. The whole Knockdown/Discipline fiasco, for instance

Oh, somebody else will cover the rest. But what does the discipline skill have to do with it being RT? I think the D&D rules for trip work just fine, it seems more to me that it just would have looked bad if fighters had no class skills since they didn't implement most of them (climb, swim, ride, ...). So they had to throw in that little gem and mess up the balance for everyone else. I also never figured out why monks of all classes don't get discipline as a class skill, either. Deftly sidestepping some brute who tries to push them over is, like, what they do.

Yeah, you're right. Come to think of it, the only class skill fighters get in ToEE is Intimidate, right?

It's just that whenever I think of things that Bio goofed on, Discipline pops to the top of the list.

 

[Volourn]

Just to let Snails, monks do get discipline now. And, on this subject, I like the discipline skill. Very useful; but not overpowering. I've even used in my own pnp world and works fine.

 

[Sol Invictus]

In Troika's defense and to add to Saint's argument, I should say that Troika went from STEAM to 3.0 and then to 3.5 during their development, which they had to spend a lot of time on converting due to game balance issues and such.

 

[Walks with the Snails]

Just to let Snails, monks do get discipline now. And, on this subject, I like the discipline skill. Very useful; but not overpowering. I've even used in my own pnp world and works fine.

What do you mean? I made a monk with SoU and it still wasn't there. I could fire up NWN right now to make sure but I don't have the time right now. Are they putting it in HotU or something? Only took them 2 years to figure it out, if so.

 

[Ibbz]

Going from STEAM to 3.5E D&D would be a much larger change than going from 2E to 3E, don't you think?

The MDK2 engine never had any RPG rules built into it in the first place. At any rate, i believe they used the MDK2 engine as a base and went from there and ended up changing it significantly.

I dont think they ever made it clear how much they actually started with from the MDK2 engine however.

 

[Volourn]

This is odd. Accoridng to Troika themsleves, the reason they chose to use the Arcanum egine for TOEE was to specifically safe time so they could actually meet the deadline. Hmmm..

Walks, hmmm, my monks have discipline as a class skill..

 

[Walks with the Snails]

Walks, hmmm, my monks have discipline as a class skill..

Did you edit your configuration files or something? I just tried making a monk with 1.32 to make sure and still no discipline as a class skill. Though they gave it to paladins for no apparent reason.

 

[Volourn]

No, I didn't. As far as I know every warrior type class has it except rangers and they'll get it in HOTU. I actually think paladins having it makes the most sense.

 

[Walks with the Snails]

Sure, paladins having discipline makes sense. More sense than bards anyway. It's just giving it to them and not to monks doesn't.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

This is odd. Accoridng to Troika themsleves, the reason they chose to use the Arcanum egine for TOEE was to specifically safe time so they could actually meet the deadline. Hmmm..

As stated, also by Troika, the only thing they kept from the Arcanum engine were the data structures for things like items and the scripting parser.

 

[Rosh]

I'm going to answer some points, though they may have been tended to already. I just got back from a vacation, and then I find out that my e-mail notification that I was going to be gone for a bit was belched on by the SMTP server.

As stated, also by Troika, the only thing they kept from the Arcanum engine were the data structures for things like items and the scripting parser.

Which makes the following rather...ludicrous.

If the IWD team of slobbering morons could produce a mediocre game with someone else's engine in 14 months, surely the people at Troika could make a terrific game using their own engine in 18 months, right? It certainly makes sense on paper.

This is why still I consider you a junior developer, or at least someone who is still very green, Bishop. One (AWD) was built off of a game that had at least one previous incarnation at that point, the Inbred Engine having an initial development time that was a bit long. Working on a pre-built engine versus having to develop one in which you're developing the base engine as well as developing the game on top of that. It doesn't take much brilliance to figure out which one takes a hell of a lot more work. So taking 18 months on a game AND an engine versus making what was nearly a modification-level project for someone's engine with 14 months...

You knew you had it coming: MORON!

It also should have been quite obvious that a great amount of the ToEE engine had little to no relation to Arcanum. I couldn't expect you to be pick it up at an instant, Bishop, as you're a designer first and foremost and not an AI developer nor a code monkey by trade, but still...holy fuck.

[EDIT]
Actually, it should have been REALLY fucking obvious that they would have had to do a hell of a lot more work to alter any engine they had for the 3.5 ruleset. They just didn't have what the Asswind Dale team had, which likely had a major portion of the AD&D rules implemented in it already so changes would have been relatively minor. Does it, Bishop?
[/EDIT]

It's easy to see how ToEE has an AI routine that has an attrition of unresolved or routine limit overflow pathfinding checks, which Arcanum certainly didn't have. In fact, Arcanum's pathfinding wasn't too bad. ToEE's pathing is nowhere near as good as the roaming pathfinding found in Geneforge, though. That's the funny thing. Roam pathing is generally able to be tweaked within most rulesets, even given different rates of movement as implemented in ToEE. Movement is a different thing than pathing search resolution, after the pathing script does its work the little people on the magic box move across the screen by means of the movement script. Survey says: they did significant amounts of the engine, likely from the ground up if it was that much of a change. (On a side note: The map screen needs a point refocus function for the main game window, as well as needing more label flags or auto-labeling where exits go to. I would have hoped they would have used the Arcanum map screen as it wasn't too bad.)

Nevermind the fact that an elementary familiarization with both games could have shown that they were *quite* different, especially since it would be quite bad for the pathfinding in ToEE to be worse than that in Arcanum if it were an engine descendent.

Although, I do have to give points for this chuckle. :D

But really, I just can't wait to say, "This is what Fallout fans have been waiting for since TORN!"

Are you making cracks on Chucklehead Cuevas, too? :D