BioWare - InGame Tech Licensing for Dragon Age @ ShackNews & Gamasutra

magerette

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Shack News provides a little information on some new in-game tech licensed by Bioware for it's long anticipated PC RPG, Dragon Age, as well as for Bioware's other projects in development. There's also a quote from Dragon Age programmer Peter Woytiuk:
PipelineFX's Qube! is the latest piece of software to be added to BioWare's ever-increasing stable of development tools, the two companies have announced.

Described as a "distributed processing and render farm management system" that enhances "productivity through pipeline acceleration," Qube! will be used in the creation of future BioWare releases, including its long-known return to PC role-playing, Dragon Age.

Recently purchased by EA, BioWare is best known for the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series of PC RPGs, Mass Effect (X360), and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC, Xbox). Among other projects, it is currently working on a Sonic the Hedgehog RPG for Nintendo DS and an untitled MMO, heavily rumored to be set in the Knights of the Old Republic universe.
"We were able to integrate Qube! into our pipeline in less than a week and immediately started seeing results," said Dragon Age principal programmer Peter Woytiuk. "Qube! has given our artists more time to produce and iterate on content, which is key to creating the next generation of BioWare games."
Gamasutra has a little more detail on the tech itself:
...Qube’s features include cross-platform support, fully exposed C++, Perl and Python APIs, client-server architecture for scalability, global resource tracking, stable MySQL database backend for data retention and production tracking, floating shared license management to maximize use of servers and desktops, and customizable job dependencies and priorities to handle complex asset dependencies.

Qube ships with an array of custom jobtypes for 2D and 3D applications, including Maya, 3ds Max and others. Each jobtype contains a submission GUI integrated into the application itself, a submission form for the queue management GUI, a command line submission tool, and a backend execution module specifically developed to interface directly with the application.
More information.
 
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Can someone please translate for me what the hell that means?
 
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Well, it means that Dragon Age still has staff working on it anyway. ;) And probably that we can expect more cross-platform development. AFA the actual techspeak, your guess is as good as mine.
 
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Bioware licensed some incredibly expensive piece of software named Qube. It handles all the boring formalities like license tracking, keeping track of different file versions, efficient resource allocation, etc. Their artists can concentrate on their real job and leave this crap to Qube. Now everybody is happy and the Bioware production pipeline is teh r0xoR!
 
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If they're going to implement this develop kit does that mean that production is going to slowed/overhauled/restarted from scratch?
 
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Sounds like it might speed things up, if anything:

"We were able to integrate Qube! into our pipeline in less than a week and immediately started seeing results," said Dragon Age principal programmer Peter Woytiuk. "Qube! has given our artists more time to produce and iterate on content..."

but who really knows?
 
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O_O

I thought pipelines were only used when transporting oil? On the Bioware forums, evil Chris Priestly made a comment about Q-bert, I didn't quite understand, though
it was pretty funny :D

I guess the days of waiting for their compilations is done for Bioware's artists?
 
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