Dragon Age Forum News (Nov. 6, 04)

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Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

David Gaider, Designer

Selectable PC Personalities
Well, let's see. Let's take Minsc and Mazzy, since you mention them.

They would have to retain their names... if you didn't have the names, VO would be impossible (or they could just never refer to their own name ever). You would also have to keep their general background, like where they're from, or any talk about their past is impossible. Now, for Minsc, you need to take out any banter or dialogue that refers to him being a ranger. Unless you enforce him being of good alignment as part of his "personality type", you also must reject any lines that refer to him fighting for good (which is a lot). Mazzy must also have anything referring to her being a paladin, following the paladin code or being a halfling removed. So what are you left with? Essentially the small set of banter lines used in BG1, though I suspect many of those would also need to be replaced with more generic lines where the character did not discuss their profession or race, as well. Did that work? To a degree. There are many people who found the BG1 NPC's have lots of character despite there not being a lot of dialogue for them. It did not, however, approach the depth that the BG2 NPC's received. But you could NOT take the style of a BG2 NPC's dialogues and just apply that to any PC you rolled up and gave a different race and class. The more things you decide can be "variable" in this PC personality set, the more generic it has to be. Trust me: there is a big gap here between the theory and the practice.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

will persistent worlds be in?
I'm discouraged from adding any feature to the Dragon Age toolset to support persistent worlds as some people use this in an attempt to exploit people and create worlds people have to "dontate" cash to play on. I know that some persistent worlds made with our software are genuine and ethical. However, even if one group uses our work for their own benifit that's one too many. I realize that persistent worlds on their own are not the problem, it's just that these are used more frequently to exploit people, and that's our job

Tim Smith, Tools Programmer

DA Translation Techniques
Back in the NWN days we used the same toolset that end users got. However, for localization we had some other things to help out. Outside of the toolset we maintain a string database. It is basically a database containing all the strings and their talk table string ids. The big question is how does the string database get populated.

MODPARSE IN 56 EASY STEPS

Periodically we "lock" the game content and do what was called a modparse. This took the game content such as the modules and scanned them. Any strings found would be added to the string database and the talk table ids would be saved back with the modules. Using this string database, we generate translation requests. When the requests are completed by external parties, the translations are saved in their proper language databases. For example, the French text would be stored in the ... French database. When we go to build the game, we use these string databases to generate the talk table files. At this point I am going to pretend to forget to talk about how it will work in DA because I can't really talk about it and I am sure you guys are tired of hearing me say I can't really talk about it. (wow, what a run-on)

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

will persistent worlds be in?
Yes. There is a toolset.