DDI Progress

[tomBitonti]

The thing about the 3D application is ... why the heck do they have any 3D development to do at all? Aren't there enough 3D engines out there that they could take one off the shelf, and plugin in their tile and figure models, and attach the character visualizer to that?

Heck, they probably don't even need to put in that much of their figure modules, as long as they have a handful working and have the interactive feature working. They can fill in the rest after they get the basic app function going.

I'm thinking the actual hardest part will be figuring out how to productize their stuff, and in setting up the pipeline for updates and new content, including the in-house personel to manage the whole shebang.

 

[tomBitonti]

Double Post

 

[Scribble]

I think the real push will be to have this thing up and running (at least a good portion of it) by November.

November is when the new "intro" set comes out, and when I'm guessing there wil be a big push for the new players they're looking for.

Get it ready for Christmas.

Having it ready at release date would have been great, but really, the people who bought the game at release are for the most part, already D&D fans.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

I think the real push will be to have this thing up and running (at least a good portion of it) by November.

November is when the new "intro" set comes out, and when I'm guessing there wil be a big push for the new players they're looking for.

Get it ready for Christmas.

Having it ready at release date would have been great, but really, the people who bought the game at release are for the most part, already D&D fans.

If the stuff isn't to Beta yet then it won't be ready by November, or if it is it will be very buggy because it won't have been in Beta long enough.

 

[Montague68]

I'll say here what I couldn't say over on the WOTC boards.

Likely massive non-conformance project failure. They literally had to start over from scratch.

 

[Tewligan]

Heavens. This news certainly is strange given that The Rouse assured us many months ago that he had personally used the functional Game Table.

 

[Montague68]

Heavens. This news certainly is strange given that The Rouse assured us many months ago that he had personally used the functional Game Table.

A project can be "functional" yet still fall significantly short of deliverable.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The thing about the 3D application is ... why the heck do they have any 3D development to do at all? Aren't there enough 3D engines out there that they could take one off the shelf, and plugin in their tile and figure models, and attach the character visualizer to that?

Heck, they probably don't even need to put in that much of their figure modules, as long as they have a handful working and have the interactive feature working. They can fill in the rest after they get the basic app function going.

I'm thinking the actual hardest part will be figuring out how to productize their stuff, and in setting up the pipeline for updates and new content, including the in-house personel to manage the whole shebang.

This is what confuses me, too. There are tons of suitable engines, many of them with extremely competative licensing fees (tens of thousands of dollars or less), many of them where it would be very easy to find programmers who had experience working with them, and yet they seem to have decided to start from scratch. It's utterly bizarre.

They could even have easily bought out one of the existing and fully-functional gaming table companies, and simply bolted a 3D engine on, yet they seem to have intentionally taken by far the hardest path on this, and so far with the expected results.

 

[Shemeska]

I'll say here what I couldn't say over on the WOTC boards.

You think it would be deleted? Maybe dumped into some obscure thread by G0?

Likely massive non-conformance project failure. They literally had to start over from scratch.

I was thinking along the same lines. When WotC was hiring people for in-house a while back for their "transition" from Radiant, they probably started over from scratch.

[Speculation]
At this point, I'm figuring that one of two things happened:

1) Radiant Machine was not in any way up to the task of making Gleemax and the DDI. They were very likely the lowest bidder for the job and WotC went with it. I strongly doubt that WotC was willing to shell out the salaries for top notch programmers. A year passed with things still in Alpha, or released in buggy or incomplete state, and WotC may have decided to simply give up, scrap most of Radiant's work and start over in-house with a new group of coders (who may or may not themselves be up to the task or be the people who accepted lowball salary offers).

2) Radiant had some decent coders, but WotC grossly bungled management of the project and gave them poor goals and project specs to work with. Gleemax from the start felt like a vague cluster of ideas that marketing came up with, and Radiant's programmers may have been handed little more than that and expected to create a finished product with nonexistant or shifting specifications.

3) Might be a nightmarish combination of both.

[/speculation]

 

[renatoram]

They're developing the thing in-house? Heavens... like WotC was a software company, let alone a videogame developing software company...

But let's say they hired some competent programmers, modelers and so on.

But there are FREE engines, for heaven's sake. How much graphic effects does a fricking shared table need, anyway?

It needs usability. It needs, being the "dnd virtual table", to have practical access to all the content (creatures, powers, feats, monsters, and so on). But ubersnazzy graphic effects? Really?

People have been playing just fine with maptool (and fantasy grounds, and so on) which have 2D graphic with no animation.

The 3D equivalent could be handled by the Quake engine, probably, and that's free.
Or one of the many free alternatives:

CrystalSpace
Ogre3D
Panda3D

But then, obviously there is still a TON of work to be done (almost ALL of it!): modelling hundreds of creatures and texturing them. Plus all the logic and the UI.

Really, it would be a daunting project for an expert company. And WotC is not one.

If they say they are in Alpha, don't expect to see it in less than a year.