Beamdog engine?
drakir
Member Posts: 61
(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..)
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Comments
"I had reached out to Obsidian to discuss licensing the Pillars tech, but given both our busy schedules, a discussion hasn't happened yet. I think it would be a funny reversal as Icewind Dale was built upon the Infinity Engine, which was Licensed from Bioware when I was a Project Director there. We're still talking through our future technology options as there are many paths we could take."
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2msl96/we_are_beamdog_developers_of_baldurs_gate_i_ii/cm77b6o
I'm sure they have had enough time to discuss licensing the Unity engine during the passed year.
Why you hating on unity?
I've worked with both unreal and unity in the past, more intensively with unreal, but from what I so of unity back in 2010-2012; it was definitely kicked unreals -beep-
I haven't worked with any engine since I left game design though.
Licence/fee: UE,Unity,Frostbite,Cryengine,IE...
Free: Godot 2, Monogame(framework)
Phillip Daigle: "Me too holding out hope the next project will be a modernized engine. We want to leave the IE-era games in an excellent state and then move on to something more modern eventually. Those are basically plans for the future: a new engine would give an improved ability to create content."
https://www.reddit.com/r/baldursgate/comments/48tw5i/siege_of_dragonspear_collectors_edition_and/d0mm06r
ICEWIND DALE 3 WITH INFINITY PLUS PLUS CONFIRMED!!!
And maybe some tie ins to Age of Empires 4?
It'd be cool to see more games using the Eternity Engine. There's already PoE and T:ToN, and Tyranny is supposed to come out this year as well.
Except for the UI elements, it wouldn't even look like Neverwinter. It would look like Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment or whatever other sprites were loaded and used. With simultaneous 64-player online support and a Windows toolset more or less out of the box, to name a few perks. This is one aspect of the Aurora engine I consistently notice being overlooked.
“Basically, Baldur’s Gate III, every two weeks when we call [Dungeons & Dragons publisher] Wizards of the Coast, something comes up,” said Daigle. “The Baldur’s Gate III thing, when are we going to do that? I think the answer is when the right people and the right partners line up, something big will happen.”
Beamdog president Trent Oster emphasized that doing the Enhanced Editions and Siege on Dragonspear has also been a means of cultivating a strong relationship with Wizards of the Coast. Siege of Dragonspear, he said, was very much an ongoing collaboration, a back-and-forth conversation especially when it came to matters of lore and how to best leverage obscure portions of the D&D universe.
Despite all that, nothing’s set in stone. I asked Oster if Beamdog has considered the possibility of going their own way, making their own universe fantasy universe. He doesn’t want to leave the past behind, he told me. Not yet.
“There’s the idea of making all our own stuff, like BioWare did with Dragon Age,” said Oster. “We created all of our own lore, created all of our things. It’s just, that’s a lot of hard, hard, hard work. If you don’t do the work right, when people play the game it comes off hollow. Even if you go crazy in your world building there’s kind of the opposite, it can hurt the experience.”
“In [Obsidian’s] Pillars of Eternity, they told me about all these gods and these things that are going on, and I’m just getting hammered with lore,” he added. “I’m like, ‘Dude, I just want to get in and start learning about this world.’ Whereas D&D, I have all that knowledge and if I want some more knowledge I can just go on the internet or pop open a rule book. To me, that’s just the power that D&D has that crafting your own stuff from scratch just cannot have.”
I agree with Trent on this, agree a lot!
But what about the ornery old Infinity Engine Beamdog’s been slowly gutting and replacing with newer, better guts? Surely there’s a temptation to build out a shiny new engine, ala the one the aforementioned Pillars of Eternity used, right? Beamdog has mixed feelings on that front.
“The Infinity engine is old, there’s no doubt about it,” said Daigle, “but at the same time it has a certain flavor that other games don’t have. The D&D rule set here is so deep and interesting you and you can do some crazy things that you can’t just do with other games. It would be great if we had beautiful 3D characters on top of a rendered environment and all that, but we can accomplish all of that in the Infinity engine.”
“Our stance with the Infinity engine games is that if we ever move on from them into a more modern engine or something, we need to leave the Infinity engine in a state that is excellent so that people can enjoy it for another 20 years. If we leave it behind and you can enjoy this with your kids in 20-40 years then we’re extremely happy.”
http://kotaku.com/the-struggle-to-bring-back-baldur-s-gate-after-17-years-1768303595
PS:T did a good job there. it looked extremely modern when it came out because of the big sprites. animations were really good too. even today, when 2d game art and 2d animation is more appreciated than back then (and seen as something with a distinct aesthetic value, and not something that must be replaced with 3d in the future), similar graphics in higher resolution would still look sufficiently modern for the genre.
Btw, Cryengine V introduced pay-what you-want licence with percentage fee. Altough, it has steap learning curve.
Unity with latest beta introduced quite polished lighting renderer and it's the easiest engine to handle. We'll see will it shift toward something devs can rely on.
UE4 is all-in-one engine but also can take a long time to make a game for a small team. I believe there are some Bioware's Mass Effect gameplay programmers in Beamdog team who have some experience with UDK/UE4.
Also, CDProjekt is licencing REDengine. It has quite 3rd party tools like Havok and Scaleform GFx...
Every engine mentioned has console port so BGNext can target wider market and I think it's important that it should.
I like 2E well enough but I really like the character building in 3E better there's just not enough choice in 2E.