Dragon Age Forum News
Posted Sunday, June 27, 2004 - 17:39 CET by chevalier
David Gaider, Designer
Large Army Battles Possible?
I think we've said previously that we've been playing with having lots and lots of individual creatures on a single screen. I know I watched a big battle between elves and skeletons one day that one of the programmers was running in DM mode to test things and it all seemed very Myth-esque, almost, and quite impressive. I think part of the trick is also to find a way that each creature model doesn't have to run individual AI routines, as well, at least as far as I understand it. So, yes, big battles. Whether or not the RTS-like ability to control stuff on a unit level will be possible, I'm not even sure. Too early to comment much.
Georg Zoeller, Designer
Linux client?
Wow, not looking good... nothing encouraging from Bioware about the Linux ports and heavy rumors about Micro$oft involvement abounding... In my worthless opinion, no linux server will hurt the community on a whole! But once MS buys a company integrity goes out the windows anyway... We'll just have to wait for another smaller more ambitious dev company to take their place and let Dragon Age sit on a shelf next to Dungeon Siege... Yet another PC game MS will ruin hoping we all magically get the urge to buy an Xbox, just cause PC gaming is not what it used to be.. Thanks again Bill... Alot of Mac users were looking forward to Halo at one time, nice how that turned out...
Err, in case you didn't notice, rumours != facts. I guess that was a typical "how a rumour builds" situation
User A: X could happen
User B: I heard X is a possiblity
User C: It would be soo (good|bad) if X happened
User D: Is it true that X happened? Must be, they didn't deny it. Thats (awesome|aweful)
User F: what??? X happened! What a (grand event|mess) [goes off and posts on other webpages]
That rumour came up before E3 (as every year) saying "Microsoft will buy BioWare and announce it on E3" and it was just that, a rumour. Well, E3 is over. I'm sure it will come up next year again. Dragon Age has no signed publisher at the moment, once it has one I'm sure everyone and their grandmother will come to this forum and find good reasons about why publisher [put random publisher name here] is a bad idea because they want to take over the world and your wallet, screw over [put group dedicated to a certain API or OS here] and force you to use [put name of random copy protection software here]. (note that it doesn't matter which publisher will be signed, there will be always people complaining about it). However posting it here will just serve venting frustration because it won't have any impact on the publishing agreement. But please, could we delay the above described situation until it has actually happened? That would be great.
You will not get any responses from us on the topics "linux" or "mac" support until we have decided to either do it or not and until we know if our publisher (which we don't have at this point) supports this decision. So please let's drop the "nobody has said something encouraging in the last 5 pages, it must mean X (because if they do not deny it, it must be X for certain)" game and wait until we make a public service announcement about the topic? And just in case somebody tries to read anything into my words here: "just don't do it", I'm working on a different project and I have no information regarding possible or not possible linux and mac (clients|servers|toolsets).
Brenon Holmes, Programmer
Toolset - Import Functionality
I'll answer for them. No. From engine to licensing issues this just won't happen.
What he said.