Akari

The main reason for IntToObject() is because of some of the new UI callbacks that can pass an object ID along as a parameter to the gui script. Object IDs can't be passed into an executing script, so you have to pass them in as ints and then convert them to objects via IntToObject(). There isn't really anything majorly risky about using IntToObject() on dummy numbers. The worst that will happen is that functions will treat that object the same as if you passed in INVALID_OBJECT. To be safe, you can always use GetIsObjectValid() on the result from IntToObject(). Hope this helps. -Rich

The ObjectToInt() script funciton is just data conversion. The 'object' engine type in the scripting language is really just an unsigned int. Converting the 'object' type to 'int' type doesn't do anything special other than let you now manipulate the object ID as an int. For example: object oPC = GetFirstPC(); int nPC = ObjectToInt( oPC ); //nPC now equals the PC's object ID string sPC = IntToString( nPC );//sPC is now a string that equates to the PC's object ID. If you copy an object, then that object has a new ID, so ObjectToInt() on the new copy will return a different numeric value. All this function really does is give you script access to the actual IDs that uniquely identify objects. I hope this helps explain it a little. -Rich

Yeah, still around. Can't get rid of me that easily! I don't read the NWN2 forums on the Bioware site myself, so I'm not sure what's been said there either. In-house D&D games I don't participate in, so I don't know. The 'aftermath' stories sound amusing though. The LAN games consist of Battlefield 2 these last couple months, our first new game since we got hooked on UT2k4 last summer. Project NJ is mostly hiring senior developers at this point. That project is still ramping up to full swing. I'm not allowed to comment on inflatable Mira dolls. As far as KotOR3 speculations go, I can say with the utmost confidence that no one is working on KotOR3 at this time. Here's a token cat icon , since I don't think this exceptional emoticon sees nearly enough use. -Akari

The problem is that there just isn't a lot to say at this point. The restrictions on what we can share about NWN:2 haven't losened up yet, though I think that will be changing in the not too distant future and we'll be able to discuss things in a little more detail. Though, NWN2 chat generally takes place over on the Bioware hosted forum, so that might not help here much. And other than NWN:2, we can't really disclose anything at all about our other project (projects?). There a lot of new hires here, but not everyone likes talking about themselves much either. That's why we always have Chris A. do all the talking-about-himself for all of us. -Akari

Right now it's on-the-spot random because I don't know what the deck conditions are. There's 4 of each card, 1 - 10, in the deck. So 40 cards total. I found the K2 AI seemingly more stupid because they left themselves beatable at 18 or 19. I guess I just got the lucky draws. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> What do you mean by leaving itself beatable at 18 and 19? Sometimes getting to 18 or 19 is the best one can do with a given set of cards. The AI works its way to 20 with its side cards, but accepts 19 and 18 as close enough to be worth using a side card for. As a player, I'd make the same decision, personally. In any case, that wasn't a change specific to KotOR2, but rather left alone from KotOR1. Anyway, I think it's pretty neat you've made a standalone of the mini-game. Without access to the code for the original, you've done a really impressive job. -Akari

Yeah, it doesn't cheat. But most people are convinced that it does. Do you generate the 'draw' deck ahead of time or do you generate a 1 - 10 card randomly on each draw? KotOR generated the deck before , then shuffled it randomly, then had the player and computer draw from the same deck. The KotOR AI doesn't calculate probabilities, but rather has some safe thresholds that it knows it can hit on or not, depending on what cards it had in its side deck. After drawing its card, the AI then calculates the LowestPossibleTotal that it can come up with its current cards plus the current sidecard options. It then calculates how close can it get to 20 with its current cards and its side cards, as CurrentPossibleTotal. If CurrentPossibleTotal is >= 18, then its time to decide if we should play that side card, based on some other factors. { If CurrentPossibleTotal == 20, then play the sidecard no matter what. If CurrentPossibleTotal == 19, then play the side card if our LowestPossibleTotal is 11 or less, unless the player has 20 (waste of a sidecard). Since that means we have a 10% chance of busting on the next turn, but 19 is a good enough score to be worth the risk. If CurrentPossibleTotal == 18, then play the side card if our LowestPossibleTotal is 13 or less, unless the player has 19. Since that means we have a 20% chance of busting on the next turn, but that's considered acceptable risk. } After it decides what to do with its side deck, it then compares its score against the player's. If the player has a higher score, then it won't stand. If the player has a lower score, and the AI has a score of 18 or higher, it will stand no matter what. Also, when busting, it will play the negative card to save itself, unless the player has a score of 18, 19, or 20, in which case the AI decides its a waste of a side card to play it there. /Unless/ the side card played would give it a better score than the player OR it's the deciding game for the player (the player already has 2 wins, and 1 more win will end the game). That's about all the thought that goes into the NPC AI Pazaak players in KotOR. I didn't write it myself, but just modified it to work with the new cards that were added in KotOR2. Except the Tie Breaker card. The NPC AI just sees that as a +/-1 card, not a Tie Breaker, giving another small advantage to the human player that uses the card carefully. So really, the only reason the NPC players seem good is because they play a mathmatically safe game, on the whole. The real difficulty just comes down to how good their side deck is. The better their side deck, the harder they are to beat, since they have more control over the risks they take when making decisions each round. -Akari

I can't speak for the company as a whole, but here's my thoughts. Personally, I think it's awesome when people take enough interest in something I've worked on that they want to put some of their OWN time into bettering it. I take it as a compliment when I see multiples of people coming together to invest hard work and hours into shaping aspects of a project I am no longer able to improve upon myself. When I started to see fanart of KotOR2 characters, cosplayers at cons dressing up at conventions of the same characters, or deeply thought out analysis of the content of KotOR2, I was humbly honored that something I slaved over for a little over a year of my life had served as an inspiration to creative people out there. I didn't come up with those characters, nor write their dialogues, but at least I was able to help program the systems in which those characters would be shared with the world. KotOR2 was my first shipped title after having worked on 2 previously cancelled games (BG3 and Fallout3), so the experience of witnessing people take such strong interest in what KotOR2 contained in terms of characters and story was a first for me. I am definitely interested in seeing what comes out of the Restoration project's efforts. There isn't a lot I can do to help them, since it just so happens that the areas of the game that I spent most of my time on are probably not areas that they would actually have questions about. One thing that I really like about working on NWN2 now is that the end product is INTENDED to be modded, toyed with, tweaked, and adjusted by the end-user. Unlike KotOR2 where modders have to jump through hoops to implement changes, NWN2 is a chance to deliver a fun self-contained game that also allows creative individuals to create their own content. -Akari

Where have you been? Tied to a restraining bolt? On-topic: Is there an official source than one can go to? (like Nielsen soundscan). <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Been really busy. My ToDo list goes from long to short in cycles. As far as official sources go, I'm not 100% sure how it works, but I believe you have to pay huge subscriptions to some industry tracking service to have direct access to the numbers. But then the numbers tend to get leaked out to various forums eventually too, a month or two later. I only know what we've been told internally, myself. -Akari

While I'm not going to give exact numbers, I will say that the US X-Box version of KotOR2 outsold all other versions (US PC, International X-Box, International PC) of KotOR2 combined more than twice over. Keep in mind that it was the first version to be on the shelves, however. -Akari

That was my favorite way to win, too. Early on when I was going over the design docs for the new Pazaak cards, I couldn't figure out what the point of the 2 reverse-type cards would be. Until I noticed that they made it a lot more likely to be able to play 9 cards before hitting 20. So I asked design if I could make that a new win condition, and there we go! This sort've gives an advantage to the player as well, since winning by playing 9 cards is not a tactic that the AI will intentionally try to pull off. While it will still win if it manages to play 9 cards without busting, it won't actively pursue that as a win condition. -Akari

Neat project. Is your opponent AI going to cheat like the KotOR one did? Just kidding. If you need any information about how the KotOR AI made its quite-fair-and-non-cheating decisions, I'd be happy to outline some of the algorithm sometime. -Akari

*sigh* I'm probably going to regret this, but I can at least explain some of these things. General 2. I like that empty containers and looted corpses are now labelled "empty" or "nothing" but why continue to label them at all? Why not just let the labels on containers and corpses vanish entirely the way they do on looted droids? Why have a different system for droids? Well, techinically, you can put objects back INTO containers, if you wanted to for some reason. Some people used the container on the Ebon Hawk in KotOR1 to do that (don't remember if we left a container in KotOR2). Since they're labeled empty, it doesn't really matter much, does it? 3. Why wasn't Bao-Dur allowed to wear Jedi robes? (He was my best Jedi.) It's an art issue. Bao-Dur's unique arm made that difficult to pull off without needing to consume more memory, and memory was one of the main limiting factors in the development. 5. Why isn't damage to Bao-Dur's Remote ever repaired? The remote wasn't supposed to ever take damage at all. The fact that it takes damage is the bug. 8. Why does bashing an empty crate suddenly produce broken items? In fact, why have locked empty crates at all? This is a bug too. In those cases, deisgners had scripts on the containers that were supposed to execute if you bashed the container or opened it successfully. As a result, there wasn't any contents in the container until after it had been opened one way or another. The fix for that was supposed to be to have at least -1- thing always in the container no matter what, but I guess some containers still got missed. 10. Why were the dialog and feedback buttons buried in the messages menu, accessible via a button at the bottom of the journal menu? I use them often and they were all just a click (or speedkey) away in KotOR? Someone decided that the Messages screen wasn't very important so it got stuffed further into the interface. Can't remember where that decision came down from. 11. Why is it necessary to double-click the "none" button in the upgrade menus? There's no item description, so single-clicking should be enough. The listbox code used for listing those kinds of displays wasn't flexible enough to allow for completely different behavior on just one button out of the list. I tried to make it so that you could one-click save on the save screen when you click on 'New Slot', but that too didn't work out without needing to change too much of the existing List Box code. 12. Now that skills can be changed from cross-class skill, why not have the Feats selection screen appear before the Skills screen during level ups? We thought about that on our end too. Unfortunately, the 'cross-class' skill feats were added very late in the development cycle and there wasn't enough time to go through and make the major change to the character level up process to change the order. It was more complicated than you would expect. 33. Why did the main character in the rescue team swap places with any party member that interacted with the droids imprisoned on GOTO's yacht? The droids should have been flagged 'Party Member can interact', but apparently they weren't. The remainder of items are things I either know nothing about, are obviously bugs, or were just things the designers missed, so there really isn't much to say about them. -Akari

<{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yeah, those Novadex guys have visited us a couple times and demonstrated some things that have been pretty neat. If released games actually support those add-on physics cards, I'll be pretty tempted to get one. But I'll have to wait and see what comes out that supports them first. For the most part, it's a matter of scaling. An example might be: Without the hardware physics card, you have partical effects that interact with the ground, block walls that can be broken down, ragdoll stuff, and some nice smoke effects. Then you add the physics card to your computer and the game might have: The partical effects interact with the ground and also brush aside the tendrils of grass sticking up as they pass through. Smoke effects that move along the ground realistically, or rise and pool underneath ledges. Block walls that can be knocked down but the blocks themselves will be breakable as well with the right pressure applied. More demanding cloth physics. More demanding fluid dynamics. I know I'll be interested to see what games support this stuff and how it looks when they start coming out. -Akari

You've got a point. Still, while he may not be trustworthy in regards to what is going to be developed, I'm guessing he's much more reliable when it comes to what isn't being developed. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Hey, I never said anything about hooded robes. You got me on Swoop Upgrades though. I figured they were a sure thing, since about 80% of the work needed for them had been done fairly early in the project, and there was just a day's worth of interface changes left to support them. But in the end, it was decided that day's worth of work was better spent on something else, so they got the axe. Wasn't my call. But my choices are either to never say anything, or go with what seems to be the case at the time. I guess I should just couch everything I say behind 'maybe, probably, perhaps, it could happen' more often. As far as KotOR3 goes, it still isn't under development. We got a good laugh here at the office when that article went around. -Akari

I went ahead and fixed that in our copy of nwscript.nss, but I'm not sure if it's too late for it to get included with the distributed build or not. -Akari