Bioware makes Orbit framework open source
"Orbit was somewhere we could make a contribution that would be useful to others"
Mass Effect developer Bioware just made its Orbit Java framework, the one it used in the creation of Dragon Age: Inquisition and the Dragon Age Keep, open source.
It "makes it easier to build and maintain distributed, secure and scalable online services," and includes Orbit Actors and Orbit Container, and is available under the BSD 3-Clause License.
You can find the software, which is still a work in progress, as the official site.
"When we were unable to find a framework that met our needs it seemed obvious to us that other people must be facing the same problem and also deciding to build that technology in-house. It therefore made sense to us that Orbit was somewhere we could make a contribution that would be useful to others," lead developer on BioWare's Online Services team Joe Hegarty told Gamasutra.
"As we evaluated existing solutions it became clear to us that there wasn't an existing framework available in Java that met our needs. This was the motivation to build the framework that ultimately became the second iteration of Orbit and it is this version that we have now released as an open source project."