Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Mega ambitious..
Published on November 20, 2006 By Brad Wardell In GalCiv Journals

The idea behind the Epic Generator feature of Dark Avatar is pretty straight forward:

Turn your game into readable story complete with HTML and images showing how your empire grew. 

But implementation, woha.  By far, this has been the most expensive single feature of Dark Avatar requiring an immense logging system to put together keys that can later be turned into a story. 

And after 5 months of work, I have a feeling it may end up getting cut from Dark Avatar.  It's really a matter of resources -- which is more compelling to players? It's a tough call. But the practical reality is that the Epic Generator really may need AI programming which would bring me into it.

The problem with bringing me into helping with the Epic Generator is that that means I wouldn't be working on the AI. And I think the AI really needs as much time as humanly possible.

So the Epic Generator is on notice -- we'll know within 2 weeks whether this feature is going to have to be cut or not.  It'll be a bummer if it is.  To my knowledge, no game has ever tried to retell the story of a given game with this kind of narrative before.  And there appears to be a reason for that.

If it does get cut, I'm sure there will be a lot of bummed out players. I know I'll be bummed out. I love this kind of thing.  Today, for instance, I spent a lot of time putting in flavor descriptions for ship components and such. It's pure fluff (like the epic generator) but it adds heart to the game.  I love that kind of stuff.

So we'll see how things progress.  We'll know pretty soon.


Comments (Page 8)
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on Feb 09, 2007
thats bad, I mean yeah AI is more important but it was a nifty feature that I would have loved, to be honest that was bad planning by stardock, they should have seen the time that would of been required for it and should of said in the early updates incldues and epic generator! (may be cut from the final release) they should of never said its definatley going to be in.
on Feb 09, 2007
thats the problem, they DID plan for the time they THOUGHT would be necessary to finish it, but it turned out to need a lot more time... no one had (or has) ever done this before, so they had nothing with which to gauge how long this would take... it will most likely get done, it just couldn't be by final commercial release, but heck, they updated DL 4 different times (major updates anyway) so perhaps before 2.0 we will see the Epic Generator.
on Sep 08, 2007
Can't it be realeashed in TA?
on Sep 08, 2007
Great question, i'll bump for some notice.

on Sep 08, 2007
I'd really hate to see it delay TA into next year.

I'd love for even simple logging information to be made available, but I doubt it'll make an appearance...
on Sep 08, 2007
This was originally one of my most anticipated features for DA. I would love to still see it, but being as the devs haven't said a word about it since then I highly doubt it will be seen anytime soon.
on Sep 11, 2007


I'd definitely love to see this - we've been theorizing about it in English Literature classes at Heidelberg University: Write yourself into literary history, Frogboy!
on Sep 11, 2007
We've worked an event log into the 1.7 release (beta this friday)...hopefully that will tide players over until we can do the E.G. correctly.
on Sep 11, 2007
We've worked an event log into the 1.7 release (beta this friday)...hopefully that will tide players over until we can do the E.G. correctly.


yea right
on Sep 11, 2007
Thank You Boogie, even that will help out AAR peoople a lot.   

(beta this friday)...


Great news.
on Sep 11, 2007
This friday???....Whoo hoo!

Nice work.
on Sep 11, 2007
is it friday yet
on Sep 12, 2007

Please don't hate me

I misunderstood and it turns out friday's beta is for internal testing, but that means that the public beta isn't far off

Can't wait to get these changes into you're hands!

on Sep 12, 2007
We've worked an event log into the 1.7 release (beta this friday)...hopefully that will tide players over until we can do the E.G. correctly.


yea right


on Sep 14, 2007
The most original and greatest concepts in games always seem to get cut.

I'd be willing to pay for this feature by its self! It adds something that needs to be attempted in a strategy game and i'm willing to pay an expansion pack price for just this. Well maybe $20.... but still i'm sure many would agree with me.

I'd pay full stand alone retail game price for Dark Avatar if this feature were included.
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