4 réponses à ce sujet

[Guybrush_Threepwood]

 I'm getting more and more frustrated by the lack of pause during cut scenes in the last several Bioware games. Without fail something real-life related will happen during cut scenes to  force the player out of the game, usually several times each game. Autotalk makes this much worse as the game/scene happily plays conversation and interaction between NPC, PC, companions etc. while the player is AFK.

Add to that that you can't exit the conversation to reload a save during a cutscene/conversation (if the game paused waiting for player input). Rather the player has to sit through many long (and seemingly increasing with every game) minutes of cutscene and conversation before you can go back and see what you missed. At that point I personally probably don't care any more and just move along, just a little more less interested in the game as a whole. 

This is a feature that was available in older games and needs to be brought back.

[Allan Schumacher]

This is something I support and it's something I actually champion when I get chances!

It is tracked in our backlog of features for the digital acting crew (of which I am a member), but it is a "nice to have" which effectively means it's a stretch goal at this point in time. Sadly, this means that I should encourage you to NOT expect it.

It's not a task that we'd expect to be superbly time consuming to do, it's just when you have hundreds of tasks that aren't superbly time consuming to do, they do add up and lines have to be drawn somewhere.

Sorry to be the bearer of not entirely super awesome news, but it was something that I had actually mentioned in the past as well so I just wanted to stay open about it.

[Allan Schumacher]

In the past BW was a developer that just did those things prerelease to deliver the best game possible. I understand EA wants to throw the games on the market as soon as possible, but both DA2 and ME3 suffered because of this hurry.

In the past, BW was a game developer that never once got every single feature that they wanted to put into a game into the game. This is pretty common across all types of software development, not just games.

Part of it is that gamers never hear about them though, which is in large part why we don't really announce features (EDIT) unless they are already in. Though my mistake was commenting on it in the past (in that it's been recognized as a feature), so I was following up on it here.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 26 octobre 2012 - 07:50 .

[Allan Schumacher]

I kinda miss the old days before console certification. There was a time when someone would mention a minor bug or just a quality of life feature on the forum. A Bioware dude would read the post, agree that is something he'd like in the game, promise to do something about that persons wish, and at 2am the next day, they'd post an unofficial fix, and mention that the official fix would be in a coming patch.

This issue has nothing to do with console certification. In fact, as a result of console certification, there's a greater likelihood that going to the 360 Dashboard or PS3 home will actually provide you the ability to pause your game.  (EDIT:  Although upon looking it over further, I realize you're talking about the ability to simply hotfix an issue which is more complicated with consoles)

What you don't hear about is the time that a programmer has a pet feature, and implements it without it being an acknowledged feature coming down the pipe, only to find out that when 3 different programmers all make check-ins, they have to deal with unanticipated conflict resolutions and crashes that are introduced because something was added to the game that they weren't expecting. As a result, our daily build is now failing and people are being pulled off other stuff to investigate and it can start to cascade.

Every programmer (and designer, and artist, and so forth) has pet features that they'd love to get in. Doing so of their own volition, however, is effectively scope creep and isn't as risk free as many make it seem to be.

Now the example I made up is just that (made up), but stuff like that DOES happen and when it does, if you have 5 or 6 people get derailed for a half day, suddenly you've lost about 3 man days of work on the project. Which means that of all the hundreds of tasks that will probably only take 1-3 days, you've now compromised 1-3 other tasks that now must either be cut, or require crunch work to compensate.

While I pretty much accept that crunch will be inevitable, I understand that this inevitability comes with a plan that ideally requires no crunch. That is, things unexpectedly go south and crunch happens to stay on schedule. I'd prefer to not have a hell march of working 16+ hour days for months/years because that just leads to burn out and attrition. Good developers end up quitting because the lifestyle isn't accommodating, especially if you have families and whatnot.

Planning around doing features with crunch time is expectionally risky.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 27 octobre 2012 - 08:37 .

[Allan Schumacher]

Depends on the stage of the project.

At this point, if I file a bug it gets assigned a bug weight (assigned by me, and occasionally altered by the Digital Acting Programming Lead if he feels it should be escalated). Programmers are usually free to fix them at their leisure, though unless it's a higher priority bug the focus is more on specific tasks, with the odd week focused on just fixing bugs for the whole team/project.

The closer you get to release, bugs effectively become "triaged" by a group (that we appropriately call "triage") made up of senior leads/producers for effectively authorizing and assigning the bugs to be fixed. This is all based on the severity of the bug and what it affects.


I don't want to derail this thread too much about this though. If you have any questions or follow ups, feel free to start up a thread and I'll try my best to answer. (though I'm off to bed, so I won't see it for some time   Send me a PM if you do).

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 27 octobre 2012 - 09:08 .