Ask Paradox Development Studio anything!

[Simoleum]

That's not a big deal. What we really want is Victoria 2.5!

Paradox just sowed the wind, and they will harvest the whirlwind

 

[AndyTheEskimo]

Hi there Paradox,

My name is Andy. I have an idea for a new game that will change the way people think about games.
You will want to hear this and it is in your company's' best interest to contact me.
This will be the game that people talk about for decades. I have run some polls and talked to a lot of people about this idea and it has come back with a 100% success rate of the public wanting this game to come to life. I already have people wanting to buy the game even though it has not even started.

I would like to talk to someone in your company about what we can do to get this done.

Again I say you will want to message me. This will make your company millions and put you above the rest.

Contact me Asap.
Thank you
Andy

 

[lordboy54]

Hi there Paradox,

My name is Andy. I have an idea for a new game that will change the way people think about games.
You will want to hear this and it is in your company's' best interest to contact me.
This will be the game that people talk about for decades. I have run some polls and talked to a lot of people about this idea and it has come back with a 100% success rate of the public wanting this game to come to life. I already have people wanting to buy the game even though it has not even started.

I would like to talk to someone in your company about what we can do to get this done.

Again I say you will want to message me. This will make your company millions and put you above the rest.

Contact me Asap.
Thank you
Andy

lol.

As its a pretty given they probably wont bother contact you, and because im curious, and i find it kinda funny(me being kinda tipsy) what is your idea?

 

[Svip]

My name is Andy. I have an idea for a new game that will change the way people think about games.
You will want to hear this and it is in your company's' best interest to contact me.
This will be the game that people talk about for decades. I have run some polls and talked to a lot of people about this idea and it has come back with a 100% success rate of the public wanting this game to come to life. I already have people wanting to buy the game even though it has not even started.

I would like to talk to someone in your company about what we can do to get this done.

Again I say you will want to message me. This will make your company millions and put you above the rest.

Have you considered starting a Kickstarter for your bulletproof idea? Why do you need Paradox when you clearly have this thing sown up? The people will come. Don't wait for Paradox to come.

 

[lordboy54]

Have you considered starting a Kickstarter for your bulletproof idea? Why do you need Paradox when you clearly have this thing sown up? The people will come. Don't wait for Paradox to come.

lollll svip... kickstarter ppl have been shown to be dumb enough to fund this shit b4 and be butthurt about it when nothing happens, so dont tempt him

 

[Svip]

lollll svip... kickstarter ppl have been shown to be dumb enough to fund this shit b4 and be butthurt about it when nothing happens, so dont tempt him

Please, lordboy. You clearly cannot see talent when it is right before you. People will speak of this game for decades! Hell, I'll predict we will speak of this game for millennia. This game will redefine what a game is. To think we have been satisfied so far with what we pretentiously call 'games'. No, we have not experienced a game yet.

Mark my words. Even before this idea have been revealed, the anticipation is rising and people are already getting out their money for this game. This cannot be denied. 100% success rate. Everyone wants this game. Paradox will be fools to ignore this opportunity. They will be able to change gaming history, nay! history itself; the future of mankind is at hand.

 

[loup99]

Hi there Paradox,

My name is Andy. I have an idea for a new game that will change the way people think about games.
You will want to hear this and it is in your company's' best interest to contact me.
This will be the game that people talk about for decades. I have run some polls and talked to a lot of people about this idea and it has come back with a 100% success rate of the public wanting this game to come to life. I already have people wanting to buy the game even though it has not even started.

I would like to talk to someone in your company about what we can do to get this done.

Again I say you will want to message me. This will make your company millions and put you above the rest.

Contact me Asap.
Thank you
Andy

Honestly, what are Paradox Development Studio supposed to do? They do not publish, they develop their own games. And also, if you have an idea, share it without doing what seems like exaggerating like this at start as it will be confusing.

 

[Maarten99]

Please, lordboy. You clearly cannot see talent when it is right before you. People will speak of this game for decades! Hell, I'll predict we will speak of this game for millennia. This game will redefine what a game is. To think we have been satisfied so far with what we pretentiously call 'games'. No, we have not experienced a game yet.

Mark my words. Even before this idea have been revealed, the anticipation is rising and people are already getting out their money for this game. This cannot be denied. 100% success rate. Everyone wants this game. Paradox will be fools to ignore this opportunity. They will be able to change gaming history, nay! history itself; the future of mankind is at hand.

Does the funding of your game involve sending 100$ to a nigerian bank account in some way ?

 

[generalolaf]

What genre of game do you love to play that Paradox would never develop/you'd hate to be a dev on it?

 

[Johan]

What genre of game do you love to play that Paradox would never develop/you'd hate to be a dev on it?

Why would anyone hate to be a dev on a gametype they love to play?

I had worked on action, sport, rpg & strategy before 1999, and loved all of them..

And even if i dont really like a genre, its still a damn fun job.

/ 21 years as a game developer.

 

[Svip]

Have any of you read The Writer Will Do Something? Ars Technica has a fine review, that showcases how tough game development can be. I've heard plenty of stories (and bad ones at that) about game development, crunch and deadlines.

 

[lordboy54]

Have any of you read The Writer Will Do Something? Ars Technica has a fine review, that showcases how tough game development can be. I've heard plenty of stories (and bad ones at that) about game development, crunch and deadlines.

Thing is, paradox has a pretty good small-ish development team and usually pretty clear cut ideas for where to take their games. Not that pdox neccesarily has it easy, but that sort of stuff as in "The writer will do something" isnt really as meaningful considering how strong the core concept of the games are from the start, and how much shorter the hieracrchy of change is for pdox games.

 

[Svip]

Thing is, paradox has a pretty good small-ish development team and usually pretty clear cut ideas for where to take their games. Not that pdox neccesarily has it easy, but that sort of stuff as in "The writer will do something" isnt really as meaningful considering how strong the core concept of the games are from the start, and how much shorter the hieracrchy of change is for pdox games.

I realise the shoe might not fit for Paradox, but I hope PDS is aware that being a game developer can easily be terrible if in the wrong company. And a lot of big games are developed by these studios. I understand why Johan enjoys what he does (and I am slightly envious of him), but be weary, being a game developer in any company will not necessarily be as fun as Johan's tenure.

 

[Darkath]

Have any of you read The Writer Will Do Something? Ars Technica has a fine review, that showcases how tough game development can be. I've heard plenty of stories (and bad ones at that) about game development, crunch and deadlines.

Thing is, paradox has a pretty good small-ish development team and usually pretty clear cut ideas for where to take their games. Not that pdox neccesarily has it easy, but that sort of stuff as in "The writer will do something" isnt really as meaningful considering how strong the core concept of the games are from the start, and how much shorter the hieracrchy of change is for pdox games.

Meetings for runemaster towards the end might have looked like that though. Just saying.

Anyhow the Writer Will do Something mini-game actually look like any crisis-meeting in any company when a project is tanking and people start pointing fingers.

 

[Wagonlitz]

I can pull up an example from optimizing the Crusader Kings II recently. The statistics were quite incredible and I will take out a slice of 2 000 characters in the game, these people together were running about 1.4 million events triggers between them every day. If you scale that up to the full population of 40 000 it becomes 28 million triggers that would be run every daily tick. So we do have quite a performance demand when it comes to our scripts.

I think more rather than replacing the script language with something external language we should focus on developing and improving the current language we have. It does the job, it does it well and it is really required with the demands we have on our language. And as you see in almost every patch to CK2 and EU4 the script language is given more and more tools without a loss of performance. I think it was in the Sons of Abraham patch that we added a runtime optimizer to CK2's Pdxscript to try and organize triggers to be more efficent if the scripter failed to do so himself and that is a feature that modern compilers today have.

PS: Compiling our scripts aren't really that demanding actually, it goes really quickly. The loading times are because of the sheer amount of data we process.

Doesn't dead people still have to be evaluated---obviously not for events, but for other things---thereby adding to the game getting slower over time? Or have I been running child killing events for nothing? (Many dead children throughout the game means less lag.)

 

[Groogy]

Doesn't dead people still have to be evaluated---obviously not for events, but for other things---thereby adding to the game getting slower over time? Or have I been running child killing events for nothing? (Many dead children throughout the game means less lag.)

Dead people are only there for smaller things like history information or reference in events(we both share the same father, etc.). The only thing they add to that is big really is inheritance. Killing children still adds dead characters, it doesn't eliminate potential dead characters or anything like that. So what you've been doing hasn't added less dead characters but actually more than usual. But since it removes more living characters it means less characters are evaluated on a day to day basis.

In essence, more dead characters doesn't make game slower. More alive characters does. But what really hits performance are large empires because it increases the amounts of realms (every ruler technically holds his own sub-realm) meaning more evaluations per character has to be made. For instance I discovered late game that huge greek/byzantine empires were slowing down the game because each greek person was evaluating against each other person in the realm "can I castrate?", and this took up like a huge chunk of the performance of the AI. I hink 70% of the AI demands were about castrating or blinding someone when I loaded late-game byzantine saves. Luckily this is fixed in the coming 2.4 patch. A fun little anecdote.

 

[Cymsdale]

I hink 70% of the AI demands were about castrating or blinding someone when I loaded late-game byzantine saves. Luckily this is fixed in the coming 2.4 patch. A fun little anecdote.

Sounds like a pretty sweet optimization then. Love learning stuff like this!

 

[Thrake]

Dead people are only there for smaller things like history information or reference in events(we both share the same father, etc.). The only thing they add to that is big really is inheritance. Killing children still adds dead characters, it doesn't eliminate potential dead characters or anything like that. So what you've been doing hasn't added less dead characters but actually more than usual. But since it removes more living characters it means less characters are evaluated on a day to day basis.

In essence, more dead characters doesn't make game slower. More alive characters does. But what really hits performance are large empires because it increases the amounts of realms (every ruler technically holds his own sub-realm) meaning more evaluations per character has to be made. For instance I discovered late game that huge greek/byzantine empires were slowing down the game because each greek person was evaluating against each other person in the realm "can I castrate?", and this took up like a huge chunk of the performance of the AI. I hink 70% of the AI demands were about castrating or blinding someone when I loaded late-game byzantine saves. Luckily this is fixed in the coming 2.4 patch. A fun little anecdote.

To castrate or not to castrate, that is the question.

 

[Simoleum]

Do you guys go in for making one game series have its own unique thing? Like Victoria 2 with its population, Crusader Kings with its family/royal focus, etc. Cause Vicky's population stuff is amazing

 

[Raph]

I think 70% of the AI demands were about castrating or blinding someone when I loaded late-game byzantine saves. Luckily this is fixed in the coming 2.4 patch. A fun little anecdote.

Wow... you can't make this stuff up. Things like this is what makes PDS games so magical to me.