Comment Re:Neverwinter, and graphics in interactive fictio (Score 1) 99
I agree with your claim that NWN's Aurora toolkit is essentially an Interactive Fiction toolkit. In fact, as evidence, I would not point to the Neverwinter Nights campaign or any particular one of its user-made modules (although I haven't played many), but to Planescape: Torment, which was essentially created using a precursor of Aurora, has a similar interface, yet features an extremely sophisticated story with far more raw text than any Infocom game I've ever played (granted, Infocom games were limited by the memory of the "lowest common denominator" computer in their day).
What I do have contention with, though, is the ease of creating something unique with the Aurora toolkit--as you pointed out, Aurora is to film as Inform/TADS/etc are to books, and as such I think Aurora does require a lot more effort on the part of the author (or authors), especially when they want to create something that isn't already a "prop" created by Bioware or another designer. When I was using the Aurora toolkit, I found myself constantly having to find the "closest thing" to whatever objects or people I wanted populating my world; and the final result always looked a lot like something out of the Neverwinter Nights campaign, no matter how unique and "different" I tried making it. In fact, the only things that really separated my module from something Bioware or anyone else might have made were the item descriptions and dialogue I wrote: pure, simple words. With text-based interactive fiction, however, words shape far more than descriptions and dialogue.
Using Inform or TADS, it would be possible for a single person to write a fantasy epic, a contemporary coming-of-age story, a futuristic social commentary, or a science fiction mystery. If they were to try the same thing with Aurora, the only one they could really do on their own would be the first; any others would require a good bit of 3d modeling, texturing, 2d art, sound effects, and (optionally) music.
On the programming end, I would also contend that making any major modifications to Aurora would be fundamentally more difficult since you're dealing with a real-time 3d world, whereas text-based IF uses a turn-based textual one.
Granted, these two things are like apples and oranges, but I felt that using Inform was far easier than using Aurora; with Aurora I spent a lot more time trying to figure how to do what I wanted to do, whereas with Inform I just "did it" and things almost always seemed to work the way I expected them to. Granted, a lot of this is because Inform and TADS are also far better documented than Aurora (at least when I used Aurora, which was back in 2002).
What I do have contention with, though, is the ease of creating something unique with the Aurora toolkit--as you pointed out, Aurora is to film as Inform/TADS/etc are to books, and as such I think Aurora does require a lot more effort on the part of the author (or authors), especially when they want to create something that isn't already a "prop" created by Bioware or another designer. When I was using the Aurora toolkit, I found myself constantly having to find the "closest thing" to whatever objects or people I wanted populating my world; and the final result always looked a lot like something out of the Neverwinter Nights campaign, no matter how unique and "different" I tried making it. In fact, the only things that really separated my module from something Bioware or anyone else might have made were the item descriptions and dialogue I wrote: pure, simple words. With text-based interactive fiction, however, words shape far more than descriptions and dialogue.
Using Inform or TADS, it would be possible for a single person to write a fantasy epic, a contemporary coming-of-age story, a futuristic social commentary, or a science fiction mystery. If they were to try the same thing with Aurora, the only one they could really do on their own would be the first; any others would require a good bit of 3d modeling, texturing, 2d art, sound effects, and (optionally) music.
On the programming end, I would also contend that making any major modifications to Aurora would be fundamentally more difficult since you're dealing with a real-time 3d world, whereas text-based IF uses a turn-based textual one.
Granted, these two things are like apples and oranges, but I felt that using Inform was far easier than using Aurora; with Aurora I spent a lot more time trying to figure how to do what I wanted to do, whereas with Inform I just "did it" and things almost always seemed to work the way I expected them to. Granted, a lot of this is because Inform and TADS are also far better documented than Aurora (at least when I used Aurora, which was back in 2002).
