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:Gotta love EA

[SirSlud]

Suck it up. None.

Re: Gotta love EA

[Anonymous Coward]

EA is not redeemable. They're the biggest pile of greedy shit in the gaming industry.

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

[zopper]

Honestly, ME2 is the worst one. ME3 was a great deal better, although still not as good as ME1 (mostly because the ending...) And the current Dragon Age: Inquisition is the best DA so far. I don't remember any of their games before ME1, so I can't talk with regards to this, but I wouldn't say they are killed.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[loonycyborg]

Bioware mostly remembered for RPG games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. Those were before ME. And ME was the turning point when Bioware finally abandoned RPG core gameplay and switched to FPS/TPS core gameplay. That's the reason many people consider it dead. Because it's no longer doing what gave it worldwide fame, namely RPGs.

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.

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:EA killed bioware years ago

[Karmashock]

I am not trolling. I've been playing bioware games since the early days and they're not what they were.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[Opportunist]

EA Games: Where good studios go to die.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[Karmashock]

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 can't really wipe your party. There's nothing you can do that will cause everyone to die. Enemies are never really threatening in a bioware game. They haven't been for a long time honestly. Back in the old Kotor days they weren't especially threatening either. The stories and plots were better but the gameplay was easy mode. Pillars killed my entire party at roughly the same stage in gameplay that you're killing rats in someone's basement in an MMO. Full party wipe. Too funny.

It served as a really good introduction to the game because they were basically telling you upfront "we are totally happy to kill your entire party at any time if you fail to respect warnings we're giving you."

So you keep your eyes peeled and don't do dumb stuff. :D

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[C0R1D4N]

Except of course Jade Empire which also had action based combat.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[loonycyborg]

Jade Empire still existed alongside proper RPGs. Could be considered a side project.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[Karmashock]

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?...

I had it coming.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[Simon Brooke]

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 all your accumulated weapons, armour, loot. You should expect to be left for dead, and have to crawl until you can find herbs, salves, bandages or aid. It could even leave you with permanent scarring or disabilities which make future battles a bit harder to fight, or have an impact on what endgames are available to you. It should be an outcome which motivates you highly not to lose the next battle. If a non-player-character companion is killed in a battle, their death should be permanent, no matter how important they are to the plot. But you should not die.

If you die, it isn't you who have failed. It's the designer.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[Karmashock]

You should try out ME2 again. It does have a good story mostly involving the illusive man. But to each his own.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:EA killed bioware years ago

[Karmashock]

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 end game which ultimately was a complete insult to the players.

Anywho, back to pillars of eternity for me.

Re:Why empathize that it's Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Codebase is nearly totally undocumented.

[vikingpower]

...and probably chock-full of bugs. On casually browsing through the source code, I found - and posted - a probable issue with the implementation of the Container state-machine. Does not really inspire confidence.

Re: Gotta love EA

[qpqp]

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.

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.

Re:Why empathize that it's Java?

[abies]

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 ;)

You now have two problems...

[Hognoxious]

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...

Re:Why empathize that it's Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 course, in both scenarios, I'm ignoring one very important factor: using the JNI ties you to a single version of the JVM. JNI code written for Oracle's JVM won't work anywhere else. JNI isn't a standard part of Java, it's Sun/Oracle Java specific. So using JNI to call out to another language would leave your code base very, very fragile indeed.

To the point where ultimately you're best off simply not bothering, which is why most Java libraries are written and pure Java and never try to use another language. It may be theoretically possible to use non-JVM code with Java, but you absolutely should never do it.

Lightweight inversion of control container?

[zifn4b]

Gee, that sounds like new, innovative technology about 10 years ago...

"Related" links!?

[silanea]

The "related" links /. gives me as of now are:

• Anita Sarkeesian, Creator of "Tropes vs. Women," Driven From Home By Trolls
• Combating Recent, Ugly Incidents of Misogyny In Gamer Culture
• The Daily Harassment of Women In the Game Industry
• Gen Con Threatens To Leave Indianapolis Over Religious Freedom Bill
• Intel Drops Gamasutra Sponsorship Over Controversial Editorials

Could someone kindly explain to me how those articles relate to the topic at hand? I sure have not the faintest clue.

Re:"Related" links!?

[KingSkippus]

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.

Re: Gotta love EA

[Opportunist]

Been there, done that, got burned.

Fool me once and all that shit.

Re:Why empathize that it's Java?

[angel'o'sphere]

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.

Akka?

[vix86]

How is this different from Akka?

baldur's gate

[ElAngelo]

Baldur's gate is still their best project so far though :) Classic game !!!