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

[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: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 ;)