Georg Zoeller
Senior Technical Designer
Joined: 27 May 2003
From: Austin, TX
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 Posted: Friday, 25 June 2004 12:39AM
Quote: Posted 06/24/04 22:52:05 (GMT) by Role-Player Quote: Posted 06/24/04 22:35:27 (GMT) by Syrsuro
True - but the toolset they use does not have to be one that is useful to amateurs not used to using professional development tools.
Carl
Yup.
I tried the Silent Storm editor yesterday and found it quite unfriendly for a first time user, it took me quite a while to figure out how things work. can't really judge how powerful it is based on a couple of hours, but my impression is that our internal toolsets are by default more accessible and ergonomic than many tools used at other companies and even "enduser" editors that ship with many other games. I have no doubt that someone who was reasonably skilled with the NWN toolset *could* adapt to the Jade Toolset relatively fast, even if it is only an internal one.
Sure, you will miss a lot of the "make it easier" features and it might not be so tolerant on you when you try something you shouldn't do, but still.
So I guess when you say "no toolset", you say "spend no time on making the internal toolset user friendly/error tolerant/polished for the end user. Keep in mind however that saving time on that end wouldn't magically make the story longer, add a z-axis to the game or otherwise do stuff you would notice, because tools programmers are tools programmers and don't add z-axis or horses to a game, etc.
I'm not saying that it isn't a lot of work to make the toolset accessible and user friendly so it is easy to use for Trent's Grandma (it sure is *a lot* of work), but I'm saying that any "zots" you save there do not necessarily add up into new game features or a longer story as the free tools resources could also be allocated to other projects, improving our internal tools (which would cause a general productiveness increase for the rest of the team but not necessarily impact the game currently being worked on) and so on.
I think some of you guys should really stop trying to blame the toolset or multiplayer or the GM client for the fact that you didn't like how the NWN OC ended up, because the reasons why the NWN OC ended up the way it ended up are multi fold and complex and while those features have contributed to it, there were a lot of other reasons as well (i.e. you not agreeing with general design decisions - no party control like BG, etc - no amount of additional programming time would have changed that ).
Yes, by making the game use a tileset system (for easy end user modability), things like exciting unique places as seen in the BG story didn't make it for NWN and that had impact on the game's atmosphere (and we tried to remedy this for HotU by using specially crafted tiles for important places (i.e. well room, V's temple, etc).
DA is not going to use a tilebased system as a result, so it's not that we are not aware of the problems out there.
But anyway, the approach in this thread is highly flawed as it doesn't take BioWare's structure into account. Saying 50% zots for writing is a great idea, we just move all the programmers over to writing for a while and I'm sure we will get some wonderfully complex and challenging math puzzles 
If you want to speculate, try something more like this
Art
* Animation
* Creatures
* Areas
* 2D Art / GUI, Portraits, Icons
* Cinematics/Cutscenes
* Concept Art
* 3d art, VFX
Programming
* Game Engine
* Game UI
* Network
* Graphics Engine
* Sound
* Goodies (Physics engine, etc)
Technical Design
* Game Rules (Classes, Combat, etc)
* Balancing
* Level Scripting
* Cutscenes
* Global Systems
* Goodies
Writing
* World Background (incl. Race backgrounds, etc)
* Story
* Dialog (NPCs)
* Dialog (Henchmen)
* Dialog (Romances)
* Origin Stories
* Goodies
Tools (project specific)
* Specific Tools (i.e.Art)
* Toolset (core)
* Toolset (enduser friendlyness)
* Additional tools (i.e external compilers)
Production
* VO
* Soundtrack
* Localization
* ...
Of course this is inaccurate and incomplete, but at least it gives you a bit better picture. Happy zot distribution!
_________________
georg zoeller
senior rules and systems monkey
[da | me]
My custom NWN content
ceterum censeo ambulatiuncula esse delen
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