BioWare Announces Open-Source Orbit Project

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.

Comments

Re:Why empathize that it's Java?

[SirSlud]

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?

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[Karmashock]

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.