Dragon Age News Thread

I actually happen to play MMOs - ESO is basically my 2nd life. So nice of you to disregard my knowledge just because I disagree with what you say and then continue to tout your opinion as fact. Sorry, that's not how it works - and that's all that can be said here, because you're not a person to continue serious discussion with.

Well, for starts,  instead of quoting all my entire "opinions" like you called, and answer that, you instead grabbed what better suited you and call it "your opinion it's not a fact", automatically denying common knowledge and what it's clearly a thing, seems like no one remembers in fact that this game was meant to be a mmo, you don't need even common knowledge, you just have to look to the very huge and big the maps are.

so yeah, there is nothing much to say, good night.

in the majority of rpgs, the loot system it's scripted, clearly it's not in DAI.

what is SP? sorry i'm not a native english speaker and i don't know all the net lenguage, i barely know the net lenguage of my native lenguage.

if you mean Main Story, you can have clear examples of that with SWTOR, and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, what ironically the core of this games are Main Story. Not only offline games can have a good main story and plot.

It's not massive? so their big, huge multiple maps what are? a joke i guess.

Well DAI has multiplayer ironically hahaha, but yeah it's not tight to the main content, that call is yours.

Why are ya'll arguing about mmos? Did I miss something?

(also DAI is not an mmo. All I ever did in an mmo was run around in circles doing the same group events over and over again. That and getting yelled at for not taking dungeon runs seriously enough.)

ah okay, thanks for the meaning info.

DAI obviously isn't an MMO. But I do think it is fair to say it has MMO style fetch quests. It is really my only major criticism of the game. It is in my top 5 overall despite that.

Patrick Weekes‏ @patrickweekes
I'm pretty sure I now reflexively slap, "It's for work," onto stuff just like Solas adds, "...I saw in the Fade."

I once came across a bug like that playing DAI! I somehow managed to get Gatt killed fighting the Vints during Bull's personal quest, and he did not get up again after combat. This lead to Bull and the Inquisitor delivering a bunch of important dialogue to an empty patch of air while Gatt's corpse lay on the ground some distance away.

A creature is dead/dying when it has less than 1 HP. It gets hit again while playing the death animation? No problem.

A dead/dying creature becomes immune to any further status effects. Any status effect must check whether the targeted creature is eligible for its application anyway. Healing? Not happening. No problem, again.

No wonder their games get delivered in such a state. These are effing rookie problems.

Very interesting!

In non-game software, it would be more typical not to add a transitioning state. Instead, the flag would be immediately flipped to the end state, with the animation playing afterward. More as decoration than to actually indicate the state changing - the state has already changed.

That way unit tests (and developers) don't have to think about animations too much. When bugs happen, the animation gets cut short or skipped, but at least the underlying flag is already correct.

Of course, there's a key difference: in most software, animations are ultimately optional. By which I mean, a design team will ask for them, but if there are edge cases where the animation is skipped, those bugs are the lowest possible priority, if they're even reported at all. Engineers are usually given a lot of leeway to sacrifice animations, especially for experienced teams that have run into lots of animation-induced bugs in the past.

I'm guessing that's not the case for games. If a monster teleports from "standing with 0 hp" to "lootable corpse" instantaneously, that's a little more obvious than if a button or menu skips its animation.

No, I'm not, and I don't have to be, because these are extremely basic problems. Checking whether a creature has exactly 0 HP or any number smaller than 1 is an utterly trivial variable check. If you can check for exactly 0, you can check for smaller than 1 in the same way. And that's what this entire problem is built on. The problem is the idea to check for exactly 0 instead of less than 1, not its execution.

I get it. You like BioWare and you don't like it when they get criticized. But you're reaching for some very thin and short straws here. You completely ignore how I explained that the thinking is the problem here, not the execution, and keep repeating how I need to be a Frostbite expert.

Checking and manipulating the contents of variables is the most basic tool of any programming language or engine, including Frostbite. Without that, you practically can't code. Frostbite does it too, as anyone with any PC Frostbite game can check for themselves. Pull up the console and let it spit out a few variables.

I suspect that you're probably not actually interested in understanding the problem and merely want to deflect criticism by constantly questioning my competence to make that criticism, but I'll try to explain one last time again.

There is a way to check if a creature's hit points are 0.  This means there is a way to have the engine report a creature's hit points to the game's code and check that value.  Whether the code checks that value for exactly 0 or less than 1 is irrelevant at that point. The flaw is the idea to check for 0 in the first place instead of less than 1. It would be a problem with any coding language and any engine, because the thinking is flawed. And that's why it is a rookie mistake.

To give a general example: if you want a car's fuel gauge light up a warning sign when your fuel is low, you don't check whether your fuel is, say, exactly at 20%. You check whether it's 20% or less. This is a simple, obvious logic problem that does not require you to be an engineer or an expert of the car model in question. It applies on a general level.