Even if someone 'did it before', you still have to adapt it to your current game/engine/programming language, and perhaps you'll run into technical difficulties that will render it impossible to do.
There's a lot of factors that could be the issue. Resource allocation is the most likely.Modern videogames eat a lot of computer resources to work, mostly on visuals. All those high-res textures take a lot of space and quite a lot of memory to load and show, not to mention all the shadow and light calculations, and a lot of other systems that need to be processed. I'm guessing doing a phenome system like the one FreelanceWizard mentions would, perhaps, not be that taxing to the system on its own. But you also have to consider that you can have many people in the screen talking at the same time, and for each text line you have to run the process and show the result.
In ARR, however, I think they wouldn't have much of a problem besides designing the whole system to work properly. They'd need a lot of animations to fit the words and the pauses, though, so it's hard to say. And while it looks like it should be a simple task...well, it isn't. That's the thing with programming: maybe that window with the 3D preview of your charcater that you can open and close in a second actually took a week of programming. Not because it's hard, perhaps, but because programmers run into problems, bugs and glitches all the time. Maybe the render window was rendering the wrong armor, or the wrong colors, or the wrong race, and they couldn't find the error until after a week.
Now imagine something as complex as a phenome system. It would take them a lot of time and a programmer that is stuck in such a complex system is a programmer that isn't programming other, probably more important gameplay things.
EDIT: Ninja'ed like, two times. I'm so slow and old and get out of my lawn!
There's a lot of factors that could be the issue. Resource allocation is the most likely.Modern videogames eat a lot of computer resources to work, mostly on visuals. All those high-res textures take a lot of space and quite a lot of memory to load and show, not to mention all the shadow and light calculations, and a lot of other systems that need to be processed. I'm guessing doing a phenome system like the one FreelanceWizard mentions would, perhaps, not be that taxing to the system on its own. But you also have to consider that you can have many people in the screen talking at the same time, and for each text line you have to run the process and show the result.
In ARR, however, I think they wouldn't have much of a problem besides designing the whole system to work properly. They'd need a lot of animations to fit the words and the pauses, though, so it's hard to say. And while it looks like it should be a simple task...well, it isn't. That's the thing with programming: maybe that window with the 3D preview of your charcater that you can open and close in a second actually took a week of programming. Not because it's hard, perhaps, but because programmers run into problems, bugs and glitches all the time. Maybe the render window was rendering the wrong armor, or the wrong colors, or the wrong race, and they couldn't find the error until after a week.
Now imagine something as complex as a phenome system. It would take them a lot of time and a programmer that is stuck in such a complex system is a programmer that isn't programming other, probably more important gameplay things.
EDIT: Ninja'ed like, two times. I'm so slow and old and get out of my lawn!
![[Image: DWv3oGi.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/DWv3oGi.jpg)
