(Perhaps this has been brought up before, I don't know, but..)
To the developers:
I wonder if you ever intend to create your own game engine?
I remember recently seeing in some thread, Trent Oster saying that "the technical debt has been paid".
As someone who works in software development(to some extent games, but nothing close to game engine-refactoring) I understand that you do not want to pay the technical debt, that is to say, spend time, money and effort refactor and object-orient all night long for a long time only to switch to something new in the near future.
(That makes no sense programming-wise or business-wise, I think)
Will Beamdog continue to use the Infinity Engine for a long time?
There are probably a lot of factors at play which I do not understand at all(the business-side of fact that it's Bioware's engine, the inner workings of the engine, fan opinions, the relationship with WotC, etc.), but to me it would seem like a huge advantage to build a new engine:
- Get rid of old code that's been bothering you for 15 years.
- Get a chance to rethink the architecture based on lessons learned.
- Make it even more moddable.
- Shorten future contents development time by adapting everything to modern methods.
- 3D(Not necessarily perspective-wise 3D like Neverwinter Nights, but for example a locked-camera perspective-wise de facto 2D leveraging 3Ds advantage of using models instead of pre-rendered sprites, etc.)
- Ingrained cheese removal(Although then I would be scared of beholders..)
Is it like, you want to do that but it's too expensive and/or resource-consuming, or you just don't want to do that?
(I have been playing BG/IWD since it was first released, but my understanding of the Infinity Engine is limited to haphazardly opening random files in a text editor last week..)
To the developers:
I wonder if you ever intend to create your own game engine?
I remember recently seeing in some thread, Trent Oster saying that "the technical debt has been paid".
As someone who works in software development(to some extent games, but nothing close to game engine-refactoring) I understand that you do not want to pay the technical debt, that is to say, spend time, money and effort refactor and object-orient all night long for a long time only to switch to something new in the near future.
(That makes no sense programming-wise or business-wise, I think)
Will Beamdog continue to use the Infinity Engine for a long time?
There are probably a lot of factors at play which I do not understand at all(the business-side of fact that it's Bioware's engine, the inner workings of the engine, fan opinions, the relationship with WotC, etc.), but to me it would seem like a huge advantage to build a new engine:
- Get rid of old code that's been bothering you for 15 years.
- Get a chance to rethink the architecture based on lessons learned.
- Make it even more moddable.
- Shorten future contents development time by adapting everything to modern methods.
- 3D(Not necessarily perspective-wise 3D like Neverwinter Nights, but for example a locked-camera perspective-wise de facto 2D leveraging 3Ds advantage of using models instead of pre-rendered sprites, etc.)
- Ingrained cheese removal(Although then I would be scared of beholders..)
Is it like, you want to do that but it's too expensive and/or resource-consuming, or you just don't want to do that?
(I have been playing BG/IWD since it was first released, but my understanding of the Infinity Engine is limited to haphazardly opening random files in a text editor last week..)