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

EA killed bioware years ago

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:Why empathize that it's Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.