So you're admitting you were wrong in the above statement and the CS doesn't show any effort made to help modders? It's just there, a release of what they use themselves. It isn't proof of effort, it just is.
Sigh. No, I just thought if I highlighted key words someone might see the point, but apparently I have to elaborate. Perhaps with an example. I'm a programmer right? And I want to make a cool tool to empower...lets say artists. To make art. Now lets say I have a
large art department sitting directly upstairs, who are far more likely to know what type of requirements artists have and what features they'd want to enable them to make art. Would I not then, logically, go to said art department, get their specs, then come back down and design a nice tool for art creation based on those specs?
Now we release this tool out there for everyone to use, and a bunch of amateur artists on the forums begin to cry that this isn't a tool made specifically for amateur artists.
Because it doesn't have feature X. Well, we say, reasonably enough, we designed it around what our in house artists said they needed to make art.
Ah well, obviously your designs didn't intend to support amateur artists then, they cry, rather melodramatically!
No. They made a tool to make art. Naturally they got the input of their artists on this. This is not proof they didn't intend to help amateur artists. The fact that they got their functional spec from their own artists doesn't mean they didn't put effort into making it fit for the public, to improve usability.
You've jumped on this "the program only has the functionality that our internal designers requested" as proof that they just metaphorically tossed it over their shoulder to the starved modding masses once done with Oblivion. I'm telling you NO software gets that polished for public use by accident. And it is very rare for internal use software to be that polished. I've certainly never seen it.
Explain to me how, considering Bethesda prefers their in-house designer software to be user-friendly (probably because of the size of their staff and their production method this is preferable, whatever
Ah, that innocence, I'm trying to remember when I lost it.... Now I feel old, thanks guy :/
Big companies are some of the worst culprits for shoddy in house tools. I'm curious, are you guys all students or what? Sounds like you have a kind of happy pipe-dream of what the industry is like.
By the way, I thought you were an amateur designer/programmer.
Amateur RPG designer. However, to clarify (at the risk of coming off like I'm blowing my own horn) I am :
A professional programmer with 4 years experience, previously I worked in image analysis and 3D vision systems. I am now a professional game developer, although probably not in a field the Codex would appreciate. Online gambling games. Yes, we have game engines, script systems, in house tools, designer departments, large staff etc etc. Heh, it even says "Game Developer" on my job contract, which is kinda neat.
Before that I completed my honors degree in computer science and mathematics, from which I graduated Cum Laude. During my degree I took a fancy to gfx and game programming, culminating in me writing my own 3D game engine and game on top of it for my honors project. I then scrapped that and began building a more advanced engine for my RPG (based on my research of pro game engine techniques including Unreals). After a while, realizing I'd be spending the next few years writing an engine and tools instead of a game, I looked around at existing engines to license. Torque looked the best product, mainly for it's robust toolset and scripting engine, so I moved to it. And now it is 2+ years later, bringing me to a total of 7 years researching and developing game dev technology and techniques. During my development of the RPG framework on top of Torque I have done a lot of research on other systems. Both NWN and CS have influenced my design. Dialogue for instance is heavily inspired by NWNs powerful system.
Hopefully that is a good enough pedigree to call myself a professional, and to comment in these matters.
However, if Bethesda wanted to support modders, they could have polled for the most important script functions and added them in as a design requirement. As I understand, Bethesda failed to provide appropriate documentation for the program, and this is a good proof they don't care much about modding beyond the basics.
Mmm, see above example about the artists. Sure, they could poll the community. But their internal designers are going to have a better and more realistic idea of what is a good suggestion and what isn't. Your suggestion is just asking to be bogged down for ages. And if you reject an idea without explaining why, modders will be up in arms as well. I'm sorry, the reality is that isn't a good idea.
"The basics"? You can build entire RPGs and customize the experience quite a bit via powerful editors which hide significant complexity from users who don't really have the technical knowledge. What are these things beyond "the basics" and how does that show Beth doesn't care? Because you can't make total conversions? Meh.
Actually, letting people use "fugly" tools is not a really good decision. The fact that companies have chosen to do so for one reason or another throughout the years doesn't mean that it is a good idea.
That's stating the obvious eh? But you will find it difficult to convince someone to give devs the time to really polish a tool unless the management can see a money value DIRECTLY assigned to it. And no, saying "it will improve productivity!" doesn't work as well as you think. Companies are under pressure and long term thinking doesn't happen as often as you'd like. The fact that the tool is so polished implies someone with power in the business structure championed it.
or maybe they simply wanted to allow people with less technical skills do the job.
Ain't it great when you can kill 2 birds with 1 stone. I'd lump modders into that category.
I think he means things like:
#include <stdio>
#include <stdlib>
int main (int args, char* argv[]) {
printf("Hello World!");
return(0);
}
Any other programmers here see the immediately obvious flaw? Anyone? No? Ok, I'll point it out.
That function is built off the stdio and stdlib libraries, which are built off other libraries etc etc like an iceburg with only the tip, your printf statement, peaking out of the water. Want to take a bet there aren't bugs in those libraries? That there isn't some user system or hardware config that this would act in an unforeseen manner on? Or perhaps you don't think all the libraries and suchlike that you make use of to do even simple things like that count as part of "your" software? If not then yes, that is a very nice printf statement, well done.
Formal specification could prove a code is bug free [bold] according to its specification [/bold]. While this doesn't guarantee that the software does what you want (the specification may be wrong) it is closer to that ideal anyway.
Pointless, practically, like most blue-sky ideals. If a user encounters a bug, your software is bugged. Get any professional programmer alone, give him a beer and ask him if he is willing to guarantee his code will work 100% bug free all the time and see what he says.
Didn't the Civilization 4 SDK manage to do both? (note: this is an actual question) I seem to remember you could change the gui as well, so maybe that is how they did it, but while I didn't use it too much, it seemed like a powerful tool.
Dunno, never looked at it. I've never heard of any wildly "non-civ like" mods for it though. Can you change the UI, or actually change the fundamental civ subsystems?
Five easy steps to greater understanding:
(1) Find yourself a copy of "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software".
(2) Find page 185.
(3) Read through to page 193.
(4) Repeat stages (2) and (3) until you realize that the façade pattern isn't always evil.
(5) Read the rest of the book.
Personally I found "Head First Design Patterns" a much more approachable introduction (it's in Java, but it really doesn't matter), but "Design Patterns:..." is a more complete reference. I found it pretty useful, and I guess you would too - unless you're so "professional" that you've realized that no book could teach you anything you don't already know.
I don't think it is "evil", stop being so melodramatic.
Dude, look. I'm not trying to be an ass about this. But in the real world cost versus payoff makes certain theoretically awesome designs simply unfeasible. I am seriously getting the vibe that this is theoretical knowledge you have and you are simply unaware of the sheer scope of what you are proposing. This would add upwards of 6 months to a year of design and development on the underlying system (6 months multiplied by X programmers salaries) never mind the gui, dramatically increase complexity which translates into bugs and Q&A budget...the offhand way you refer to how they should have done it that way implies to me you truly haven't got an idea of what it would take to implement. There are limits to what is reasonably achievable. Have you ever implemented anything like this yourself, for a large scale system with guis and suchlike?
Again, I'm not saying that this would be a cheaper/better way to do things - clearly the versatility has a cost. However it's a perfectly viable model, GUI or no GUI.
You're underestimating gui creation difficulty. If you've never had to do a gui system they seem pretty trivial. Ha! nooooo.
That said, Bethesda could have relatively easily exposed a little more functionality without any GUI-screwing worries - things like more versatile GMST access wouldn't cause any trouble in this area.
Perhaps. But do you have any idea how the internal systems handle those GMSTs? Where, when and how the processing around them occurs? Again, dude, if you were a professional programmer you'd understand how sometimes things that seem really trivial aren't. If they allowed you to alter them at an arbitrary point during run time it *could* set certain systems out of sync. Depends on how the system was designed. I can't say since I haven't seen the source but I'm not going to take this as a sign they don't care about the modding community.
@NN A few questions on the architecture for SoW:
Where exactly are you drawing the line between hard-coded systems and more versatile/moddable elements in SoW? (I don't think there's anything about this in the forum/blog) Is any versatility you aim for mainly to give yourself options to change things up down the road, or specifically for modders?
How clear are/were you on exactly what you want from the gameplay when deciding on how versatile you'd make things?
Where you aren't/weren't clear, have you run into restrictions that would lead you to adjust things in retrospect? On the other hand, have you created any versatile elements which haven't been of any use to you (though they might perhaps be for modders)?
The line is based around most reasonable gain vs cost. I'll elaborate after this :
Is any versatility you aim for mainly to give yourself options to change things up down the road, or specifically for modders?
Both, sorta (It's not really to give myself options, since I can always rip out and redo the code pretty easily. I have maximum options available to me already. It is to provide ease of game and content creation. Create flexible and powerful tools, work smart not hard blah blah). I consider it a 2-birds-with-1-stone scenario. I have in the past learned the follies of hard coding things so I aim to make it as flexible as possible/reasonable. Both myself and modders benefit from this in the future. But in an effort to make it usable by modders I'll be building a modding guide explaining the principles, describing
functions and varables, ensuring there are tooltips and whatnot so that it isn't just a jumble of menus that makes sense to me because I built it....etc. I'm also making an effort to ensure game play scripts are stored in the DB (not hidden in encrypted source files) so that modders can modify not just variables but actual functionality. And All RPG variables are modifiable in the editor or via script calls. For example, changing how many skill points a char gets on level up, how quickly health regens etc etc is simple.
Believe me when I say that that effort isn't really necessary if it was just for me. Nor is it trivial, time wise. I have more powerful editing tools that would not require me to write new guis and suchlike. They are less friendly but I have enough technical and domain knowledge that I could be just as productive with them. I believe that letting people customise their experience is a great concept, very empowering to the community and honestly it would just give me a kick to see people creating their own modules/settings/stories/gameplay.
I draw the line based around "reasonable effort". For example, you mentioned Fallout. You won't be able to make Fallout, sorry. Implementing a system which would allow the modder to alter the game so as to be turn-based/action points instead of realtime...shudder, that isn't a reasonable amount of effort on my part. It is a hellova lot of effort. Likewise, you might think a good isometric camera/control scheme is trivial to implement? It isn't really. There are some existing options for 3rd person cameras which I'll include.
So basically, core architecture systems are mostly off limits (you use the functionality the system has). The RPG layer I built on top of that is almost entirely scripted, a good chunk of that script will be available to you. Certain fundamental aspects of the RPG subsystems will be set. You won't be able to alter how dialog works (very similarly to NWN), but you can add all the script checks and script triggers you want to your dialogs. Write a custom script which tracks player "werewolf kills" or something and runs scripts/mods dialogs based on that combined with faction standing,gender, skill level and time of day is all possible, for example.
How clear are/were you on exactly what you want from the game play when deciding on how versatile you'd make things?
Pretty clear. But I tend to design for the most flexible system I can within the sphere I'm working with. So for example, I didn't design for any system from RPG to RTS to turn based to multiplayer. I designed for 1st person real time RPG. But within each subsytem I made it as flexible as possible. The abilities system is incredibly flexible and will allow you to make spells, special combat moves or special scripted story abilities for example.
Some things are a little bit of a trade off. You won't easily be able to add new player attributes, but you will be able to add, remove or modify player skills and abilities. You will be able to modify the game settings that control how player attributes work though (how much damage does strength X add? How much does it let you carry? etc).
Where you aren't/weren't clear, have you run into restrictions that would lead you to adjust things in retrospect? On the other hand, have you created any versatile elements which haven't been of any use to you
Mmmm, no design is ever perfect and you will always look back and think that you could have done things differently. I'd have liked to make a dynamic economic subsytem for example. If it makes it any better I intend for this architecture I've made to grow and support future games. I DO NOT want to throw it all away between games. So I'll add things in future versions, which will trickle down to the community. If people suggest additions, and they are reasonable and/or I might use them in the future, I'm not adverse to adding them. Reasonable effort.
Created any elements which aren't of use to me? Nah, not really. Torque has some FPS stuff which I don't use, like vehicles (both wheel based and flying). But I haven't come close to plumbing all the possibilities of the systems I personally implemented. For example, abilities can have a script callback which in theory could do all kinds of crazy stuff. Torque can load web pages for example, I can't think of any game play reasons for it but you could have a "Spell of Browse The Codex" if you wanted. :D :D :D
Or, more practically, spawn a couple of hundred Creature X which wipe out anyone in the region who isn't the player, or rain longswords from the sky...
If you knew script fairly decently you could use the gui editor to implement mini-games like poker or whatever...*shrug*....or even chess using the in-game 3D chars if you really knew what you were doing.
And since I'm an indie and you can talk directly to me I'd help out with questions from modders, sure. Depending on what people were asking for I may even implement it if it's reasonable. Community is an important aspect for indies in general.
@DraQ : So none then?
We're comparing the quality of modding tools here. If both tools allow cobbling together some content similar to original game using provided prefabricates and/or imported resources, but only one allows for in-depth modification of gam's mechanics and objects, it's pretty obvious which one is better.
Nope. Your argument was that UED could do everything CS could do + flexible whatnot. My point is it could...but to get it so that users can add RPG content as simply you'd need to build the RPG framework on top of UED which would :
A) Take 2+ years.
B) Bone your flexibility.
It's like comparing an empty plot of land with a plot with a house built on it. Your argument is that the plot of land is better because you could build the same house on the empty plot or any other house you want! Your belief that this fact makes the empty plot better does not take into account the cost of time and effort you'd need to build the house, and the fact that once you build whatever house you no longer have any space to build any other houses. The act of building the house removes the inherent flexibility of the empty plot.
Empty plots of land are great for people with the time, resources and skill to build a house. A lot of people just want to buy a house and decorate/modify it with their own stuff. modify...mod...modder...sound familiar?
And btw, good luck building an RPG purely in UEDs scripting system Some things you will find you need engine source code access to do.
- being hit on the money side of things seems to be the only language this sort of businesss understand these days...
