Re - Epic Generator

The EG is gone, though the devs have commented that they'd like to revisit it in the future due to the large amount of work that went into it.

Didn't the mod folks ask about some underlying "guts" (logging?) that would give a leg up to folks trying to build their own epics? Is that still in even though the UI part of the generator is gone?

What is this Epic Generator and why did it go?

The EG would have retold the highlighted portions of your game as if it were a story.

This would have been the single best addition to DA, and easily (IMO) worth upping the price of the game by $10 or so. If this feature can in someway, even in a primitive way, be added to the game, I would be giddy with unbridled excitement.

Well, i'm sad to see that it's gone, tho not surprised, as i understand that it was a resource hog and the AI of DA was and is much more important. I agree that it would have been one of the most exciting things about DA and look forward to seeing the EG in GC3 maybe......

Either way, i was getting DA regardless.....my hands are sweaty thinking about playing it...

If your hands are sweaty thinking about, why not get it NOW- I d/l'ed it yesterday and am playing it. You should too!

They could have done a real simple thing of just recording like...when you took over a planet at what date. Europa Universalis has a sort of similar thing in it's endgame.

An EU-like log would be a major improvement over nothing, but I can understand why a full-blown epic generator seemed too much for the effort involved.

had the EG not been attempted, what would be new in DA

I would sacrafice it for having AI that i can enjoy a nice dinner with while i'm plotting there destruction

Most of the time spent on the EG was done by myself, so I'm not sure what feature would've been attempted without the EG sucking up my soul   There would have been very little change to the AI, since I try not to touch Brad's code.

One of the big problems we found was the logging for the EG (which we were going to try and salvage for an indepth end-of-game timeline) was that after a year in you got some HEAVY slowdown when saving the game. I made the foolish attempt to save pretty much every action that could take place, and with our 'Gold' date drawing near, we really didn't have the time needed to weed out the unnecessary logging calls (which, it turned out, were most of them)

I'm going to do a post-mortem journal about what happened to the Epic Generator and in what form you may see it in future games.

In the meentime, I personally appologize to anyone that had high expectations for the EG...I did as well...but the scope of something that writes a compelling and unique story each time you play was far more overwhelming that any of us had expected.

It's one of those features that can't be done half-way....it's an 'all or nothing' mechanic, and we didn't want to blow it.

as I said in another thread that was a bad call by Stardock, they shouldn't of announced it until they were sure it was going to work, since they announced it everyone assumed well they announced it they must be able to do it, which obviously you couldn't, that was bad planning.

Well, it is too bad about the EG but you have to consider a couple of things:

1. Having a computer put words into sentences in a (semi) comprehensible manner is, even on the face of it, not a trivial effort. Just remember it takes most of us YEARS to learn how to do it (at the "semi" skill level) - and we're much smarter/flexible than computers. And then we forget how hard it was. And become remarkably intolerant at demonstrations of skill inferior to our own.

2. The popularity of AARs and the response to the EG shows that the thought processes at Stardock are in the right place.

3. The devs were pretty open about it once they realized that the EG was more a mastadon than a pygmy elephant. So the dropping of this scope from the release shouldn't have been a huge surprise.

4. If you tossed your tokens or slapped the plastic down for the expansion at the 1st opportunity SOLELY on the basis of this feature, well, you probably should'a known better. Announcements without working demos aren't called "vaporware" for nothing. I did preorder early, but that was because I trusted (with a full acceptance of risk) that whatever the final product features were, it would be a quality product. (And a chance to maybe influence some of the details...)

5. In real life I do major projects, and I can't tell you how many times something like #3 happens for any number of reasons to a portion of a project. [Background noise: "That's why they call it an ESTIMATE!"] When it does, hopefully you have experienced some offsets to compensate, but if not, you have to re-examine your 3 constraints: Money (resources); Time; and Scope; and see which is going to (or can) give. In this case, Scope gave. But as mentioned above, the effort isn't lost, and I look forward to seeing it in some incarnation in the future.

"Aim high - you might not hit the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off."

Boogie - What you did complete was really REALLY astounding. I'm mad at myself for not backing up my log files when I did a fresh install of DA yesterday, because some of the shorter missions generated AAR's that were simply amazing.

I'm disappointed the EG didn't make it, but not having it in is FAR better than putting in a crap version of it. Anyone who has done any type of coding or game development knows what it's like to get an idea and start working on it, only to find doing it right is way more involved than it initially seemed.

It's too bad the EG is gone, but I like that the developers come here and say, "Hey, it just ended up being more difficult than we thought and we ran out of time." The commitment to quality and the openness of the devs is one of the major things that keeps me buying these games.

Good stuff!

Though EG would've been much fun, imho a simple logfile is still an option. It'd be quite useful for refreshing memories after a long break in gameplay, or in such cases as mine, when I accidentally double clicked on two mega-event popups, so that I could only read the first one..

I am actually GLAD that EG is gone, i.e. that no more effort is invested in this black hole. I appreciate the idea but I did not think from the beginning that it is viable feature. It is a huge task: writing all those passages (and they better be well written!) and then writing a code that creates an enjoyable story. Unless a huge time investment is made the EG would be rather repetitive and not particularly engaging - in short, it would be lame and not worth the effort. I am sorry to say this but the "teaser-passages" from the early version of EG seemed to confirm my fears.

What I would very much like to see in the game is an extensive log with comments. We already have the excellent statistical graphs etc. It would be great if a feature analyzed the trends and made a timeline with a map, graphs and some basic comments. Like: the Earth Alliance was an economic giant until the prolonged war with Drengin drained its resources; or: Altarian fleet was large but obsolete, Thalan less numerous but modern ships easily tore it apart in the brief conflict between the Empires. The comments could be even drier: the idea is that a simple log is enough to create an epic story in player’s mind.

I appreciate, though, that devs had the guts to attempt the creation of EG. I appreciate even more their openness as regards the reasons why it was eventually dropped.

An ancient game called King of Dragon Pass did this and quite well. I am sorry that this didn't make the cut, because reading the AAR that it wrote was usually enjoyable.

Sure, the stories of early version of EG were not that bad but I seriously doubt the long term value of such prewritten passages; others may disagree, naturally.

I did enjoy stories of KoDP, I must admit. However, I am not sure whether it is a good comparison. The entire game is built on text and story and it is based on very rich RPG world.

I suspect I'm not alone in saying that if those logging calls COULD be weeded down to produce a simple timeline, rather than a narrative, it'd still very much be something I'd like to have. That's assuming it wouldn't be yet another massive investment of time, but it sounds like you knew how to do that and simply had run out of time to actually do it. Maybe in a future expansion?

While I would have liked the EG, I am more wondering why there still is no form of high score table or simple replay feature (like in CIV) or anything at all. Why???
Sure, I could submit my games to the metaverse, but I'm neither interested in having to be online nor do I always want to play a metaverse compatible game nor do I want my scores out of reach on some server I can't acess when offline.

In a game that lives from being played often, the lack of these statistics is really bothersome.

The Epic Generator was one of the key features I was looking forward to trying out. I can understand the decision to cut it, however much I wish it was there. Like others I just hope that the feature is revisited in a future expansion or patch.
Like was written in a post I read somewhere, it's fluff like this that gives a game heart and character. Even if it is at the end of the day, simply fluff.

Gameplay examples, prewritten by the game as you play is also a great publicity tool. I was planning on posting a few in a couple of places and I'm sure others would have done the same.

I second this! I was hoping there would at least be some form of logging in DA.

couldn't the logging be done in a seperate seamless thread, independant of the save file? ... but anyway some logging would of been cool. when i played eu3 i noticed it had something like that and i thought to myself, wow neat that's what i was reading about, some AAR maker! but in fact i was confusing myself with this game