User talk:Linsey Murdock/Questions

Explorable areas
Since you say that you are a/the authority on EAs: was it your idea as well to have the big statue in the The Arid Sea being used as a bridge and being seen standing when 'far' away from it? And is the statue also a 'celebrity' in GW lore?

Another question I have, you also say that you are responsible for spawns in EAs. How much thought do you put in creating the spawns? Are you also involved with the patrol-patterns these spawns use?

And who thought of creating the best Factions farm spot (which has taken a hit with the change to Spirit Bond)? Were you aware that the Famine-spirit would be used against the Shiro'ken so effectively?

(And I'm sorry for asking so many questions... you just have a really interesting part in GW.) -- (CoRrRan / talk) 23:07, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Well I wasn't working here yet for the conception of the statue in the Arid Sea. I don't think we have much lore written for that particular structure but I could ask around and see if any of the old timers know more details on it. To answer your second question, it varies a lot and yes. We script out all the movement of the mobs in an EA (that's kind of what we DO) as well as mob size and variety. We don't chose the skills on each creature, that is up to the creature designers. They hook up all the art, skills, etc to a species identifier for us to use in our EAs and from there it's pretty much up to us how they act. I say that time spent varies because it really does. For instance, I believe that all the EAs in Prophecies were done within a month of release which doesn't leave a whole lot of time for each one. We basically give each one as much love as our schedule allows. Looks like there were a few people who worked on the spawning of the Unwaking Waters reverse, but I could pretty much guarantee that whoever spawned that farm spot wasn't expecting it to be what it turned out to be. We rarely realize that type of stuff when we are working on it. Player ingenuity is something that can't really ever be truly accounted for in advance. Oh and don't feel bad about asking a lot of questions, just don't expect me to be as speedy with responses as today :P - Linsey Murdock 23:23, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, you do realize you are setting an example already? :) No, I'm not expecting much, I'm just really glad that there are more and more A.Net devs interested in getting a little bit of involvement with the players through this wiki. Like I said, Izzy is really warming up (since I see myself primarily as a PvP player, I'm mostly interested in his stuff) and Emily is really helping us out in a lot of places.
 * OK, since the Unwaking Waters farm wasn't scripted by anyone @ A.Net, is it something that you EA-people are looking at when designing new areas/spawns? Are you trying to make as many places hard/extremely hard/impossible/very easy to farm, or has that a secondary focus? Are you waiting on user ingenuity to point out the areas that are lucrative to go to, to try to farm?
 * And of course I have to ask: what is your favorite EA? And I hope you'll be able to say that there is just one. :) -- [[Image:User Corrran sig.png|CoRrRan]] (CoRrRan / talk) 23:38, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
 * It was most certainly someone from Anet who spawned that farm spot, I just meant it could have been any one of the three people who worked on that EA over the course of development. With a little extra digging I could give you a name, but I don't think that is necessary. When we spawn an EA, we do give some thought to ease of farming (as in, I probably shouldn't spawn 50 brain dead warriors right in front of the entrance to be taken advantage of by every passing 55monk) but in general we don't spawn EAs as if we are just spawning farm spots. We are trying to make it as cool, fun and interesting as possible in the time alloted. Beyond that, if a tester or QA tells us of a possible problem area, we'll address those in development but most of the attention to farm spots comes after release. Sure we can prevent really bad stuff like the 50 minos example but players really are the best ones to find the crazy farm spots and we do pay a lot of attention to patterns in the way people play the game once its been released to see how that is going.
 * In all honestly, I think of myself as more of a PvP player too, but I split my time a lot. My guild was a strictly PvP guild (HA to be exact) until we died out for a variety of reason. I really couldn't say what my favorite EA is off the top of my head, but I'll try to get back to you on that. - Linsey Murdock 23:55, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree, there's no need to divulge "who did what", it's absolutely not relevant. And I was just referring to the "player ingenuity" when I said Unwaking Waters farm wasn't scripted, not that it wasn't scripted at all. :)
 * What I do wonder about though, since you say that you try to get an EA as cool, fun and interesting as possible giving the amount of time allocated for development, isn't it a little bit strange that you can not allocate NPCs skillbars yourself, but that there is a different team for that? I can understand that it is nice to make an area as interesting as possible, but getting the skills to synergize on each spawn would be "the icing on the cake", IMO. Or am I now getting a totally wrong impression of the way such an EA is developed? I guess there is much more interaction between your 'department' and the creature 'department'...
 * And I'm sorry to hear about your guild 'dying out'. I hope it's not as bad as you portray it. Alright, it's bedtime for me. Thank you so much for answering my questions. Like I already stated, I love this kind of direct interaction with 'people in the know', and I hope it will continue to be possible! -- [[Image:User Corrran sig.png|CoRrRan]] (CoRrRan / talk) 00:13, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * There is constant interaction between spawners and creature designers. In fact the designer who did most of the EA spawning for Factions EAs is now a part of that team and doing all the skill bars for GW:EN creatures. He has been helping us synergize our groups better by guiding us on the skill interaction within each army. He is primarily a PvP player so he is intimately familiar with the ways of build creation. The creature designers work one room over from the scripters and we are all in and out of each others rooms throughout the day so there isn't much of a disconnect there.
 * Sadly, it is true that my guild has died out. Some have left for other guilds or other games, many just went inactive in favor of IRL. We were a casualty of the Heroes Ascent changes, so don't let anyone tell you that devs don't play Heroes Ascent! I did, I totally did and I know what they are going through heh. My guild is The Spearmen, we used to be fairly well known amongst HA'ers - Linsey Murdock 00:48, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Ive been dieing to know what the purpose of the statue is. Crystal Desert was one my favorite parts of Tyria. Searching the whole the desert trying to find Bleached Bones(They never made sense to me :P. But it was fun looking for them).Coming across Ancient Weapon and Statue of Glint,Back then every one did all the quests they could find. Those were some times. Then smacktards started playing GW and the desert became on big Taxinetwork ~ Kurd [[Image:Kurdsig.png]] 01:59, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I actually wrote text for about a dozen more bleached bones to go into the Desolation but never managed to get them into the game. Things were so crazy during NF development that I just plain old forgot about it and so they sit in one of my many notebooks full of ideas. Oh well =/ - Linsey Murdock 02:10, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Maybe you could add them to Stories, if not at least somewhere i can read them ~ Kurd [[Image:Kurdsig.png]] 02:15, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't think we can post lore that hasn't already been published somewhere else =/ but I'll look into it. Not promising anything... - Linsey Murdock 02:21, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Your userpage is another option something like User:Linsey_Murdock/Stories. ~ Kurd [[Image:Kurdsig.png]] 02:23, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, Like I said, I'm not sure they (being the powers that be at Anet) want us to post original lore that hasn't already been published more publicly (ie on the website, in-game, etc), but I'll find out if I could post them on my page or something. - Linsey Murdock 02:26, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * That would be really, really cool (if possible, of course). I love the attention to details we have in GW, and the little bits of text here and there are among my favourite things in the game (don't let the guys who write the mission text to know, but I like the text of quests and the texts we find in Explorable Areas - from the Bleached Bones to the random talking NPCs in Factions to things like that - a lot more than the text of the main story in the games). Oh, and to whoever it is that writes the "Yes, I'll take this quest" and "No, I won't take this quest" little texts, you have to tell him/her he/she's a genius, I really like those. The one in Factions about hugging trees is awesome : D) Erasculio 02:45, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Accept and decline text is usually originally done by the quest writer, although often times the people who edit all our text will spice them up a bit if they are too boring. For instance, the infamous "I like pie" from Diamond in the Rough was thrown in by one of the writers during edit even though I wrote the quest. - Linsey Murdock 03:01, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Koss: "Enough is enough! I have had it with these Balthazar-blasted drakes on this Balthazar-blasted plain!". Laughed so hard when i heard that ;) ~ Kurd 09:52, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * That quest was entirely Eric Flannum's project. He had a lot of fun with it. - Linsey Murdock 23:19, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * So any news on your stories section? ~ Kurd [[Image:Kurdsig.png]] 23:40, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Things are a bit crazy around here with a few major deadlines taking up peoples time plus there are quite a few people who took the rest of the week off (including the one I would ask) after July 4th so it'll probably be a while before I get any answers on this one. The moment I do, I'll let you know - Linsey Murdock 23:57, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Species
Hey Linsey, can I point you to conversation on Emily's talk page? Since you are closely interacting with the creature design team, perhaps you can shine your light on the issue that's being discussed? User_talk:Emily_Diehl. -- (CoRrRan / talk) 21:29, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I am looking into this. - Linsey Murdock 23:12, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you Linsey! -- [[Image:User Corrran sig.png|CoRrRan]] (CoRrRan / talk) 23:21, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I'll be answering those specific questions when I get home within the hour. Any future species questions can be directed to me, as I've agreed to take them off Emily's plate since I am more acquainted with the creatures of the world as well as working with them and reviewing the internal documentation of said species. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, it'll be a fun little project for me and Emily is happy to pass it off. :D - Linsey Murdock 02:18, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Spawning quests?
Is that like /wavesMagicWand *poof* it's there? :D Just a quick 'ello and a big thank you for all the hard work; I sincerely enjoyed most of the quests you list on your user page. If you have any wiki questions, there's a bunch of people who are willing to help, so ask away! I'm one. :D /pickme - Thulsey   - talk 02:42, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I wish I had a magic wand like that, but no it doesn't exactly work that way. We have an internal scripting language we use to script out all the quests and explorables. If you aren't familiar with scripting, its like a dumbed down version of coding. Thanks for the comment! - [[Image:Elementalist-icon-small.png]]Linsey talk 04:39, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

GW's programming language
Hi Linsey, i'd like to know in which language is Guild Wars programmed in, as i'm currently studying Computer Science and would like to know which language is used for modern games development. -- Pulse, 00:56, July 21 (UTC)


 * C++ &mdash; Gares 14:34, 23 July 2007 (UTC)


 * If NWN is any indication, there are mutiple layers of languages involved:
 * There is the gameplay engine which combines very sophisticated network programming with sophisticated real-time graphics rendering to ensure everything happens real time and looks like it's supposed to.
 * There is producing the art for the game which follows it's own toolsets to convery concept art into actual creatures, terrain and items and then represent them in a concise way that the gameplay engine can just pick up and use without much delay (that would be produce the texturte map you hear so much about)
 * Then there's the "spawning" tools. The scripting/mapping tools that are used to basically "make" areas. i.e. describe the terrain, the objects, the monster spawns... Where everything will be and how everything reacts to the players' actions. It also includes the huge task of coming up with quests, creative writing for dialog and consistent lore across the game.
 * So, to answer your question, the first part is likely done with C++, the client side requires intimate knowldge of Windows programming (DirectX and networking), the server side could be done on any platform... Might be Windows based or Linux based but still C++. For the second part, I am not very experienced there, but it starts with Photoshop. For the third part, each game will have it's own in-house spawning toolset (see Neverwinter Nights' tool set for a sample one). So, the specific toolset used for GW is made by ANet and the one used for WoW will be made by Blizzard. They might be using some generic tool, but it will be customized for their own usage. --Karlos 22:09, 23 July 2007 (UTC)