776 réponses à ce sujet

[Fiddzz]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

ElitePinecone wrote...

Is this the first time Bioware has used Agile?

I don't remember hearing about it during ME3's development, or DA2 - although admittedly I didn't follow DA2 that closely. 

Just interested in its benefits compared to other methods, or why it seems to be something a lot of teams are raving about all of a sudden.

Agile has been used on each of the projects from what I know.


The counterpoint to agile is more predictive development, which attempts to plan everything out from the get go.  In reality we use a hybrid, because we do have larger scale goals of the project, but the thing about agile is shorter development "sprints" so that you can achieve deliverables to the customer so that the customer can provide feedback.  From there, iteration can occur to make sure the feature is as expected and delivers the appropriate end result.

I'm confused as to how, while sitting in a room watching great
presentations, tweeting a sentence about them is a "waste of time".

Obviously there is more productive stuff you can do while one team leaves the theater and another comes in

We use agile, but it's a bit modified.

Allan, you know there isn't!  

[Fiddzz]

Lots of concept art and things like that all over the walls, everything mark showed was DA:O DA2. I can't wait till we get some DA3 stuff painted and framed. What he didn't show was the elevators, each door is a different character from DA, there is a Hawk, Cassandra and Meredith.. Meredith gets stuck a lot, not many people take her elevator anymore. :\\

[Fiddzz]

Wiedzmin182009 wrote...

Blair, Cassandra? This ?

indeed!

also theres a reason the "dreadnought" meeting room is the least used

[Allan Schumacher]

Wiedzmin182009 wrote...

Interesting.

https://twitter.com/...034915845226496

Nice!

I was hoping we would do this!

[Allan Schumacher]

Bondari the Reloader wrote...

I'm not sure I'd ever be able to get any work done if that giant Arishok picture was in my office. I would spend the entire day in fear that he would leap out of the wall and kill me.

That's the Dreadnought meeting room

[Allan Schumacher]

It's also a somewhat cramped meeting room where the projector is easily obstructed if someone opens the door and blahblahblahblahblahblahblah boring stuff blahblablah.

I like Chateau Haine. That's a good sized meeting room with decent spacing, yet now so big it loses it's coziness. Lots of productive meetings in that one!

[Allan Schumacher]

brushyourteeth wrote...

HOLD THE PHONE. I thought this image was supposedly just concept art to show off the new armor idea, and not *officially* confirmed or denied to be Cassandra?

So... do we have confirmation that Cassandra is officially in Inquisition's concept art? I mean, I doubt the team would choose some random never-see-her-again lady to paint on their elevator. Plus Blair said...  

Just to give it some perspective, Meredith is on one of the other elevators, and Hawke on the 3rd.

[Allan Schumacher]

More just the "don't read too much into it simply because she is on our elevator door"

[Allan Schumacher]

I think that might be the case with that elevator... ¬.¬

[Fiddzz]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

More just the "don't read too much into it simply because she is on our elevator door"

tada!

Also, i've personally been stuck in the meredith one for about 20min, Mark Darrah was on the otherside (it stopped on an actual floor) and we both just pulled on the doors as hard as we could and it eventually opened.  Nerd Strength.  Was kinda worried about having our hands crushed though....

[Fiddzz]

brushyourteeth wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

More just the "don't read too much into it simply because she is on our elevator door"

Ah, but the juicy part is that we didn't have confirmation until now that the artwork definitely depicted Cassandra, and not just, as M-Law, put it, "a seeker."


I realize that Hawke and Meredith, the other two elevators, are DAII staples just like Cassandra. But their pictures weren't used as examples of neat stuff to come in DAIII. 


Forgive my rumormongering, but this is still some of the neatest information we've had to date. 

Just to clear up some things,

First, I had always just assumed it was Cassandra. (i could be wrong they were done before i joined the team)
Second, when Mark was walking around taking those pictures he said "these don't relate to DAIII".
Third, there is no painted artwork, framed art, etc on the walls of this floor of anything DAIII specfic.
Fourth, those elevators were painted waaaay before DAIII concepts were even started, so they are completly not related.

Sorry to bubble burst but none of it is about DAIII :happy:  

[Allan Schumacher]

EDIT: Ninja'd by Blair!

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 03 décembre 2012 - 08:35 .

[Fiddzz]

KiddDaBeauty wrote...

Uhh.. Jonah wrote...

Laidlaw tweeted that he showed some stuff to some fans, including a fight. We must find these people. I would post the tweet but I'm on my phone therefore I am unable.

They will likely do the nice thing and be quiet about what they saw as long as BW didn't say it was okay to talk freely. I know I would if I was in their position.

They were really nice people and we had a blast showing them around.  She won a fan fiction writing contest a while back and never received her prize, so when they happened to be in town and asked to pick it up, we thought we could do one better and show her around the studio as well

Also, anyone who comes up onto the floor has to sign a pretty hefty NDA so theres no leaky forum posts 

[Allan Schumacher]

BasilKarlo wrote...

One thing to keep in mind is that games go through numerous "builds." A barebones, completely unpolished, super-early version of the game that just showcases a few gameplay mechanics for the devs is a build. The version where everything still looks undetailed and hollow is a build. Etc.

With the way Frostbite works, we get new builds pretty much hourly.  Though we tend to stick with one build per day.

[Allan Schumacher]

ElitePinecone wrote...

I'm curious as to how (or why?) it seems to work so differently to Eclipse, is it easier for devs to add in content or change programming on the fly?

I had a vague idea that builds take a while to compile (if that's even the right verb) - is it better or more efficient on Frostbite compared to previous engines you've used? 

It's just different.  With Eclipse (and even Frostbite), we have have build machines that would do incremental builds (only build the changes) every hour.  With Frostbite the rate is actually faster as the build machines start there thing when they detect any changes (rather than timed).

This has an advantage of detecting build breakages somewhat quickly, so they can be fixed to minimize downtime (we also have services in place that attempt to detect whether or not code or content is broken before a change is even submitted).

At night, there is a "full rebuild" that occurs which is a bit more thorough in ensuring all things build properly.  Although I find at this point a full rebuild of code takes about 40 minutes.  Fully building the current "in game" assets takes about another 30 minutes.  Fortunately, 90% of the time incremental builds are sufficient.

[Allan Schumacher]

The dragon looks amazing... >.>

[Allan Schumacher]

rapscallioness wrote...
lol! a slobbery fang. and we'd be trying to analyze it.."what is that?"

I have been considering suggesting we do just this for my own personal amusement.

[Fiddzz]

rapscallioness wrote...

Wiedzmin182009 wrote...

Chase Boyajian wrote...

Fun times lie ahead #YEG #DA3

good lord. that looks like sum kinda torture chamber. (what are you ppl doing to Darrah? and where are his pants!?!)

but all this for an internal company vid? just use your iphone, zip it out to everyone and be done w/it.

it is a torture chamber for darrah, i saw him wearing a button up collar shirt for the first time today!!! muhuhahaha 

[Fiddzz]

its not pre-alpha, well it technically is, but its more like prepreprepreprepreprepreperperpeprepreprper-alpha.

[Allan Schumacher]

Blair Brown wrote...

its not pre-alpha, well it technically is, but its more like prepreprepreprepreprepreperperpeprepreprper-alpha.

I'll have to echo this statement.

It's pre-alpha in that it's "before Alpha" but don't take this as any indication that we are close to Alpha.

[Allan Schumacher]

The only one that really has a "rigid" definition is beta, which essentially means feature complete. No new features are going in. But internally, our alpha is close to the same thing. Core features are in, and newer features will generally stop unless some form of playthroughs testing indicates that we need to add or cut some features to deliver the type of product we want.

We do have deliverables for finishing levels and game features, which is a large part of the sprint reviews. We'll break things down into milestones and so forth, and milestones get broken down into sprints. For each milestone the producer types will say "We want the game at this state" and the scrum teams will commit to various work/features to deliver for the milestone goals. We typically have 3 sprints in a milestone, and at the end of each sprint, we show off the stuff we've done to the big wigs like Mark and Aaryn and so forth.

We're still very much adding new features now. We may have concepts for things we want in the game, so we aren't just randomly adding things, but as development goes along you realize that the original idea just isn't as awesome as you envisioned, so you tweak it to make it more enjoyable (this is called "iteration"), and to flesh out the gameplay aspects, the writing, etc.

[Cameron Lee]

The “pre-alpha” disc is for people to take home over Christmas to allow extra feedback on plots and the features we have in the game at this point. We're not close to alpha.

Nothing is ever simple in game dev, but you can think of the various stages as:

Pre-alpha = In production
Alpha = Feature complete (fix bugs & polish, last minute changes)
Beta = Feature & content complete (fix bugs & polish)
Final = Pray to the old gods you guys love the game

[Fiddzz]

Face of Evil wrote...

Is that the Black Cliffs of Kirkwall in the background?

yes

[Allan Schumacher]

FemaleMageFan wrote...

Cameron Lee wrote...

The “pre-alpha” disc is for people to take home over Christmas to allow extra feedback on plots and the features we have in the game at this point. We're not close to alpha.

Nothing is ever simple in game dev, but you can think of the various stages as:

Pre-alpha = In production
Alpha = Feature complete (fix bugs & polish, last minute changes)
Beta = Feature & content complete (fix bugs & polish)
Final = Pray to the old gods you guys love the game

If i am correct you guys are using scrum right? Since it's a modular based approach do you find determining these stages difficult?

We do use Scrum, but we still have goals/objectives just to keep focus on delivering the product at hand in a timely manner.  I think it was Darrah that said in the release of BG2: "Give me a developer with infinite resources, and I'll give you a game that never ships."

So it's modular, but within the scope of ideas that we get out of brainstorming and idea spitballing that comes out of preproduction.

[Fiddzz]

This thread is very informative and well put together, plus it is constantly updated and generally fun, so I thought we should re-sticky it.