Dragon Age - Toolset Press Release

BioWare has whipped up an official press release on the Dragon Age toolset, which debuts at PAX:


BioWare Reveals Dragon Age Toolset Details


Toolset to Debut at 2008 Penny Arcade Expo

Penny Arcade Expo

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Leading video game developer BioWare™, a division of Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS), today announced that it will continue in the studio’s long tradition of delivering powerful content-creations to the gaming community by releasing the Dragon Age™ Toolset. BioWare will be presenting the Dragon Age™ Toolset at the Penny Arcade Expo in the Washington State Convention & Trade Center today through Sunday. Designed specifically for the highly-anticipated Role-playing PC game Dragon Age™: Origins, the Dragon Age Toolset provides players with developer-grade tools that will allow them to produce their own content.
Attendees of the Penny Arcade Expo will be the first ever to see the new toolset in action as BioWare will provide a live demonstration of some of its exciting features and capabilities. The Dragon Age Toolset will be part of a stage demonstration during the Penny Arcade Expo at 1:30pm, August 31, on the main stage at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center in Seattle, Washington. Key features include:

• Create Original Adventures – Using the rich set of Dragon Age assets and locations as starting blocks, users can modify these stunning areas by adding new quests, characters and scripting to craft their own adventures, fate-defining conversations and cut-scenes.
• Powerful Script Editor – Users can fully customize combat and creature AI, allowing them to create detailed action sequences full of heart-pounding party-based tactical combat.
• Content Creators Community – BioWare plans to have a dedicated community area online where content creators can share content easily and get content updates for the toolset.
• On-Going Toolset Content Updates – BioWare plans to release additional assets and features for the toolset in the future, allowing for expanded creation of new areas.

BioWare has a long history of delivering powerful content-creation tools and support to its community. In 2002, the studio released a Toolkit for the ever popular Neverwinter Nights™ which has allowed fans to create over 5,000 adventure modules of their own design, the most fan-created content in BioWare’s history. Fans have not only created stand-alone adventures with the trailblazing Neverwinter Nights toolset, they still continue to create modules, five years after its original release and have crafted thousands of completely new monsters, hundreds of thousands of in-game objects (eg. weapons, armor, food, special effects, building facades, etc.) and dozens of worlds.
For more information about Dragon Age: Origins, the latest updates, or to join BioWare’s Dragon Age community, visit www.dragonage.com.
More information.

The only thing this press release tells us, which is no surprise from Bio, is that they are going to control their own site for submissions instead of relying on an active community like NWVault. Its a bit of a mistake if you ask me because by using the Vault, they had enthusiastic individuals running the thing and they didn't constantly have to enforce their own EULA. I believe doing so will require them to be more hands on on the site and probably effect the freedom.

Again the announcement hints that area creation is impossible. It would be nice if they confirmed for good if the scripting engine is in fact a version of C++.

Why a version of C++ ? What benefits do you expect from this language ?
Wha not a different one ?

Because the Toolset was written in C++. They made it so clear that it hints that the scripting language for the Toolset is too.

The benefits are obvious: everyone knows it. It may have gone out of fashion (finally) in wake of Python, Perl, et al. but there seems to be a revival of sorts in the Universities as something new programmers need to know before moving on to whatever the latest fad. Another benefit to C++ over, say, the Aurora Toolset? Its Object Oriented.

The Tourque engine, for example, uses a scripting engine based on C++.

Originally Posted by Lucky Day
Another benefit to C++ over, say, the Aurora Toolset? Its Object Oriented.

I thought nwscript was object oriented for most intents and purposes? We certainly use it as such.

A language that isn't object-oriented can be used in an object-oriented way. The language doesn't need OO features to do that, although it does make it a whole lot better and easier, of course (inheritance, for example). I don't like C++, really, but I suppose their version of it will be better than plain C++ as it's a scripting language (dynamically allocated variables?). I don't know, I kind of got used to LUA as a game scripting language.