David Gaider Interview

The Dragon’s Breath Forge has posted up another set of questions that were asked of BioWare’s David Gaider concerning the original Baldur’s Gate and its sequel, Shadows of Amn. Here’s a snippet:

Q: What was the most difficult spell animation to put in the game?

A: I understand there was considerable difficulty in getting the gas spells to look right and not slow down the entire system to a chug. The hardest one, though, was probably implementing the dragon’s breath. Really it should have been done as part of the dragon’s animation sequence…but the way the engine is set up there’s no way for us to include a special ‘breathing’ sequence just for the dragon, so they had to try and time the visual effect so that it looked at least half-decent…lots of work done on that.