6 réponses à ce sujet

[Enigmatick]

Can more thought being put into to loot this time? I'm looking over Dragon Age 2 and man is there a lot of "Wild animal has armor piece that you need"

 

Not to mention the horrible junk items and the small gold bars being sold for around 20 silver.

[Allan Schumacher]

I agree about junk items (not sure the entire philosophy regarding junk loot for DAI, sorry).

 

Dragon Age 2 and man is there a lot of "Wild animal has armor piece that you need"

 

It's been years since I last played so I don't really recall.  I do know that there are some aspects of our loot that will be catered towards specific systems, such as crafting.  So I'd be surprised if it is as much of an issue as it was with DA2.

[Allan Schumacher]

You've played some of the game yeah? Shouldn't you be able to tell if it's as bad as DA2's junk already?
 

 

I actually haven't played that much of the game proper - mostly only the earlier bits.  Right now most of the work I do is creating apps and/or scripts that help other people in their testing.

 

My big task right now is creating a webapp that lets QA quickly swap out any armor piece (and some extra things that I cannot talk about) onto a character to verify its look.  It can be done slowly at the moment (typing in console commands) but I'm getting the webapp to talk to the game so that we can use a quick, searchable ListBox so that someone can quickly select the armor and click "equip" and it will do so.

 

Extra side benefits of this that I can leverage the data lookup to determine if there are any art assets that haven't been referenced (i.e. something that should be in the game, but isn't.  Sometimes there's a bug where an armor asset is incorrectly referenced in a place where it should not be).

 

 

Armor is the first piece, but the idea is that it will likely be extensible to weapons/shields without much additional effort (they are treated slightly differently than armor in the game, but the tool itself will work the same).

 

Other things I have been working on are support tools to help content QA test the various permutations of conversations/cinematics more efficiently.  Some stuff is already in place, but there's other areas we have identified as places for improvements.  We also noticed some minor bugs with console commands which don't affect the game, but affect testing.  For instance, there's a console command to quickly set the party in a certain configuration.  Very useful for "how does the conversation go with the following party members?"

 

But as we learned, it's not actually setting the PartyManagerProxy reference, so it works fine until you level transition.  Since we sometimes have conversations that happen immediately after the level loads, this causes a problem for testing quickly.  On the level load, the current party is taken from the PartyManagerProxy data, which is whatever the party was the last time it was "properly" set (i.e. through the party picker).  So I'm also working on a solution for that - I'll likely just create a console command that pops up the Party Picker, but am touching base with some of the programmers/designers to make sure that I'm not missing anything when I set up the logical prefab to ensure we're still testing the party in a valid way (it really sucks when you find a bug and you realize that it's not a legit bug, but something that only happens when using a debug tool that makes an incorrect assumption about how a system works).

 

 

So short answer... nope!

[Allan Schumacher]

What about torn trousers?

[Allan Schumacher]

Side note... would any of your applications have upstream applicability to the Frostbite engine, or would it be focused solely to Inquisition as a project?

 

If someone wanted to use the plugins, they could.  But they are created for the needs of Inquisition so they'd likely need to be modified for a different game.

[Allan Schumacher]

Prices that aren't obviously absurd.  Recall Jimmy's example of a Gold Bar that sells for 3 silver pieces.

The smelting process of turning it into currency is ridiculously expensive!

[Allan Schumacher]

Well, the developer would only need to run it once, I would think. And then creTe the game on the back of the results of said data. I don't think you'd be able to procedurally generate an RPG world with an actual plot in it, as dialogue, art assets, quest, overall story couldn't be created on the fly.

But things like kingdoms, structures, armies, materials, money, goods, etc. could. The team could then analyze the rwuslts over the past epochs of the world's past and patch together a history, add some color that the numbers wouldn't capture, insert some personality into the leaders of the world now, pull out and add in some pieces to the puzzle to spice things up and PRESTO!

Insta-RPG world, completely consistent and developed. You'd just need to actually then make the RPG to go with it.

 

I think you're somewhat trivializing the effort with "insta-RPG world" though.