BioWare Announces Open-Source Orbit Project 61
An anonymous reader writes BioWare, part of EA Games, have announced Orbit, their first open-source project. Orbit is a Java based framework for building distributed online services including a virtual actors system (based on Microsoft's Orleans project) and a lightweight inversion of control container. The announcement says, in part, Beginning today, we will be making Orbit open source on GitHub under a BSD license. We have been leveraging open source technology internally for quite some time, and we think the time is now right for us to give back and engage with the community in a more meaningful way.
The last-generation of Orbit powered some of the key technology behind the Dragon Age Keep and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Our plans for the next-generation framework are even more ambitious.
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Go home, you're drunk. It's not important that it's written in Java. It just is.
"Hi everyone, we wrote this library in a language, but we won't tell you what language we wrote it in, because it's not important."
That's a weapons-grade stupid way to think about it. Man, I couldn't give a shit about Java. Don't use it, don't program in it. Exactly what point do you think you're making here?
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What do you mean "You can call Java from non-Java languages"? I assume you mean from other JVM languages, not C, C++ any of the .NET languages, main versions of Python and Ruby, Perl, etc. It matters a hell of a lot whether it is hosted on the JVM or not!
Re:Why empathize that it's Java? (Score:4, Interesting)
You can call java from other environments, it is just not trivial - and you will need spawn parts of jvm inside your process.
It is also not trivial to call into C++ library which uses a lot of STL goodness in its API from some of languages. Basically, it is just plain C which got very good and easy compatibility in every language out there - and you end up with a lot of C++ libraries doing poor-man extern "C" interfaces just to make compatibility easier.
But the real answer I think is - nobody wants to. If you have your golden framework in java, there is nothing forcing you to endure C++ anymore ;)
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Having written JNI code before (that's the bridge from Java to C/C++), I feel it's safe to say that you cannot call other languages from Java and vice-versa.
It's not strictly true: you can. Using the JNI. The problem is that you can't call arbitrary C code, you can only call very specifically named and structured C stubs.
Going the other way is slightly better, you can call arbitrary Java code from C. It's just so fiddly and error prone that you'll quickly realize you never should have tried.
And, of cours
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Ofc you can call Java from C/C++
Unlike the other answer, it is in fact trivial.
You can call Java code via the C interface with any language that can call C code. However why would you do that?
And what sense makes your list of languages anyway? Why would anyone try to call Ruby code from Perl or Python from Ruby? Just to make a point that it is possible? So it is when Java is involved.
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Because we can assume that if it's written in Java, it's going to run via a VM, and thus perform poorly. That's why it's relevant.
You now have two problems... (Score:1)
So you're writing an app to solve a problem.
If you're writing apps using a framework it's good if the framework is written in the same language. So that when it doesn't do what you want (which it won't, it's a framework) you can hack it around to your heart's content.
You now have two problems...
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Suck it up. None.
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EA is not redeemable. They're the biggest pile of greedy shit in the gaming industry.
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EA is not redeemable.
They could, if they try really, really hard...
They're the biggest pile of greedy shit in the gaming industry.
signed.
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Been there, done that, got burned.
Fool me once and all that shit.
EA killed bioware years ago (Score:5, Insightful)
The company is a shriveled husk at this point. Mass Effect 2 was the last game they made before being so mangled and digested that they're unrecognizable.
Only company making games in that genre that I give a damn about at this point is Obsidian.
It is sad that EA is Lenny from Of Mice And Men.... always talking about the cute rabbits... loving them... and cuddling them... and them squeezing the life out of them and wonder what happened to the rabbit.
I respect EA's ability to make money. Largely from their sports franchises from what I can figure out. But they've killed so many studios.
Westwood was strangled to death... Maxis appears to be dead... they just can't help themselves.
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I am not trolling. I've been playing bioware games since the early days and they're not what they were.
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Re:EA killed bioware years ago (Score:4, Insightful)
ehm, that's not really important to me. What is important is writing, dialogue, plot, world building, immersion.
Those have taken a hit. ME2 was quite good but since then I've seen a lot of crap out of bioware.
ME3 was completely unacceptable and the fact that they didn't realize it spoke very poorly for their ability to manage a narrative. it was incompetent story telling.
You conclude the ME series, all those saved games imported from one game into the next with THREE endings... Red, Green. Blue. Other than that, pretty much the same. Just a color change. Utterly fucking stupid.
The fallout method of dealing with complex multithreaded plot resolutions is probably still the most reasonable. In that franchise, they just quickly summarize what happens as a result of your various actions. No animations. No complicated renderings of any description. They just have their writer work out the result, hand that to their narrator if it is even narrated, and then flash that on the screen long enough for you to figure out what happened.
that isn't ideal but in fallout there can be MANY variations on the game's ending... that's FO 1, 2, 3, and 3 NV. Too many things happen for you to be able to manage that with a scripted animated ending for each option.
And bioware didn't even do that much. They just boiled everything down to 3 endings which were Red, Green, and fucking Blue.
There's no defense for that. None of your choices mattered up to the end. You can choose red green or blue indifferent to anything else you did prior to that point. Importing your old game files which people saved through the various versions has no effect on fucking anything.
The entire thing was a huge disappointment for a reason. And that doesn't even get into issues with the DLC in ME3 where they stripped critical game elements out of the story arc OUT of the game and then forced you to buy the DLC to get them back.
Giant fuck yous to EA.
I don't want to be an EA hater... but seriously lenny, stop fucking killing rabbits.
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You should try out ME2 again. It does have a good story mostly involving the illusive man. But to each his own.
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You're saying they referencing things or said things happened that contradicted things in ME1? Be specific please.
Regardless, ME2 had the strongest story telling of the three. If that title had consumed ME1 and ME3 entirely rewriting both to better suit the narrative in ME2 then that would be been for the better.
ME1 was just a very cookie cutter struggle against an invader.
ME3 was... a very confused and disappointing climax.
ME2 however was more complex than ME1 while not so transparently obsessed with the e
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Re:EA killed bioware years ago (Score:4, Informative)
Uhm... ME2 had the most interesting characters and had real drama in it. There was that whole tension between the Illusive man, the citadel, etc. ME1 was a lot simplier in its plot.
As to ME3, that was utter shit and everyone agrees... mostly because of the ending but really if you look into the situation more you'll find out that they switched writers for ME3 and that is why the story doesn't really relate or feel like part of the previous two games.
As to DA 1-3.
DA1 was pretty good. It was nice and dark and had an interesting tension between the wizard's guild... forget what they were called, and the wild wizards/witches. DA2 is widely regarded to be a rip off joke because of the reused areas, short game play, and filler plot. There really wasnt' anything you learned in DA2... there was no plot development.
As to DA3, I haven't played it yet. I've heard mixed reviews on it.
In any case, Bioware is not what they were. I've been playing Kotor and Kotor 2 recently via GoG and Kotor 2 especially is really good if you get the restoration patch that re-adds most of the content that was stripped from the game at release because they ran out of time.
Bioware's titles have gotten more thematically simplistic and shallow over time. It isn't that I've changed, you can go back and play the older games and there is a big difference. They used to hire real writers for these things and that has increasingly gone out of fashion with bioware which becomes obvious if you pick up subtle nuances in phrasing, language, and insinuation. The writing use to have multiple dimensions of meaning and increasingly it is very playschool. Big bright colors on big simple shapes.
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As to KotoR 2, oh I forgot... it shows even then. The dialog in KotoR 2 is amazing. The little monologues by Kreia are just so good.
As to DA2 being a different sort of game... advancing the story arc a little wouldn't kill them. They didn't move it at all. And the personal story wasn't that compelling so... yeah... mayonnaise on white bread all around.
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Just started Pillars of Eternity. I preordered it on GoG and just noticed it has been waiting for me for download the other day.
Without any spoilers, I killed my entire party in the first 10 minutes. There was an auto save from about a minute before that... but seriously, I saw something, thought "hmmm, that's probably going to kill me but lets see what happens"... bam... whole party instantly dead.
I laughed and am now taking the game more seriously because typically in RPGs especially from bioware... you c
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Kay... in the first few minutes, my party wiped in pillars. Name another RPG where that can happen?
I mean, I asked for it... there was something there that looked really dangerous but I figured I could touch it anyway... this is basically what happened
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I had it coming.
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Nothing breaks immersion so much as the player character being killed. Suddenly you're jerked out of your game world and you're just a sad individual sitting in front of a computer again. It is epic fail for anyone who's trying to build a world in which players are expected to become immersed to allow the player character to be killed.
This isn't to say I think there shouldn't be setbacks, and that they shouldn't be severe. Of course they should. You get beaten in a boss battle and you should expect to lose
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Nope. Nothing breaks immersion so much as being able to touch death with a level 1 character and not be killed.
The game world is taken more seriously now. I can reload if I kill myself but now everything in the game has to be watched carefully. And that increases immersion.
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EA Games: Where good studios go to die.
Codebase is nearly totally undocumented. (Score:2)
Lightweight inversion of control container? (Score:2)
"Related" links!? (Score:2)
The "related" links /. gives me as of now are:
Could someone kindly explain to me how those articles relate to the topic at hand? I sure have not the faintest clue.
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Because it's an article about the gaming industry in general, and unfortunately, a lot of gaming industry news these days has been about gamergate idiocy and other bigoted asshats.
Akka? (Score:2)
baldur's gate (Score:1)