Fanciful creation of ludicrous tasks

On the Bethesda Games Fallout 3 Forum member The Crustacean asked this to Ricardo “socrates200x” Gonzalez:

Is there really that much UI left to code? I’d have thought you’d be done by now, or do you also have a hand in coding dialogue interfaces/interfaces for the hacking game and any other hypothetical mini-games.
Or does everyone just come up with ludicrous tasks for you to perform, and pretend they need a whole new UI? Or do you just sit there tweaking the damn thing?
Or is “UI coder” too selective a term, and you do loads of other stuff?

He got this reply from socrates200x:

A bit of each. As a UI coder, I handle anything that allows the “user” to “interface” with the game, so to speak, visually or otherwise. Things that fall under that rather broad definition would be the HUD, any menu ( including the various Pipboy menus ), any hypothetical mini-games; basically anything on-screen that’s not the player, NPCs, or the 3D environs. Multiply each of these tasks by three since the UI requires minute changes for each of the platforms we’re aiming for. Multiply that number by four since you’re grossly underestimating how many subtle ways a UI can go wrong ( Just try to build a generic scrollbar from scratch. I dare ya. I double dare ya. ), and that’s about how much there’s left to do. Each UI task is pretty small in scope, but there are a ton of them.

As for the fanciful creation of ludicrous tasks, the designers and artists do their fair share of coming up with the car-aziest feature requests. “Can we have a menu that handles branching dialogue and responses longer than a few words?” “Can the health meter not disappear at random?” “Can opening the Pipboy not crash the game?” And on and on, jeepers. Bunch of whiners, if you ask me.

This guy should have made a few dialogs for the game.

Fallout 3 spanish preview

From the Bethesda Blog:

Spanish gaming site HardGame2.com seems to have enjoyed their screening of the demo at GC. The game walked away with their award for “Best RPG” on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. The game also captured their “Best Xbox” game award, as well as the “2nd Absolute Best Game in the Show” behind Mafia II. If you’re fluent in Spanish, you can also read Roberto Hidalgo Burgos’ preview that’s on their site. We’ve got a bit of it translated below:

“Even if at E3 it was barely shown, at GC we enjoyed an in-game demo of more than an hour, where Bethesda left us completely stunned in the same way they do about a year ago with Oblivion. Fallout 3 unites again in a title a wide and diverse gaming experience, with top-notch graphics, all wrapped with a rich and highly immersive background, promising dozens of gaming hours.”

The author of the piece seems to believe Bethsoft picked Van Buren and is rebuilding it, which isn’t correct, has some complaints about the animations but states that the faces are much better than what we saw in Oblivion.