Akari

I didn't care one way or another about Ep3 until reading all those notes, Tyrell. Not because Ep1 or Ep2 turned me off or anything - I'm just a casual fan of Star Wars in general. But after reading all those comments, I'm really looking forward to seeing Ep3 now! Thanks for posting them. -Akari

The answer for KotOR2 is 'no'. -Akari

There is also a 2 CD release of Torment. The 2D pre-rendered areas took up a lot of space. And the movies were over 200 megs too, if what I see in my install directory is any indication. But movie compression has come a long way since Torment came out, and large, pre-rendered 2d areas seem to be a thing of the past too. Disk space isn't exactly an indicator of technical proficiency. That being said, we do intend to develop our own engine to use on games we do down the line. It's way too early for me to say anything about it though. -Akari

This bug, at least, has been fixed. The NPCs will path to you instead of to the last several places where you just were. I still see pathing problems in other ways though. Like the one mentioned where you can't go through a door even though there's no obstruction, until you move around randomly and can move on. We'll see what we can do to fix these. It's hard, because they're not something we can reproduce on demand for debugging. We're aware the problem exists though. -Akari

I have no idea if it's correct or not, but the closet approximation I can come up with, based on what the designers call it when talking about it, is: 'ducks-un', with the emphasis on the second syllable. -Akari

Just thought I would take a moment to weigh in on this before too much guessing gets out of hand. It is true that the release date of the game may be in flux. However, it has no impact on when we at Obsidian would have to be done with our part. Our deadline to turn the game in for final approval is the same either way. It's more of a matter of Lucas Arts getting their part done in time (music, voice overs, marketing, etc.), as well as a number of other factors that determine when they think it would be best to release the game. So a change in the release date will not affect the time we have to work on the game on our end. Just so everyone knows. -Akari

In KotOR2, there is an inventory filter that lists only datapad items, so that will help cut down the list. Also, whenever you obtain a datapad for the first time, the game will pause and a window will come up displaying the text of the datapad. So you can opt to read it then, or cancel the window and pull it up later in your inventory. That's interesting. So even though you leveled NPC feats, they would often resort to using lower levels of the same special attacks? I'll put a report into our internal bug tracker to have that investigated. We are currently planning to include more scripts to chose from, as well as streamlining the process of selecting the scripts for your NPCs. In your opinion, what would be the best way to get NPCs to flee with you when you turn to run? How do you distinguish between running away or just moving back to give yourself some room? Thank you for the thought out post. -Akari

No problem. -Akari

I'm not sure off hand what the plan is for that. I think KotOR1 can be run in windowed mode by changing some .ini settings, can't it? FullScreen=0 AllowWindowedMode=1 are the settings I'm using in the swkotr.ini to get windowed mode here. But maybe that isn't stable in KotOR1? I don't know if we have plans to actually make it a supported config option in the in-game configuration menus. -Akari

Thanks for bringing that up. I ran into that a lot in Neverwinter Nights. I'll make a note about it. I never really noticed here, since the copy we run for development runs in windowed mode. -Akari

Yeah, she has a wrist-mounted rocket launcher. It may or may not have been useful in the demo. We hadn't undergone the balance pass over all the weapons/items/armor by E3. We have a designer working on that right now. -Akari

I think you'll be satisfied with what we've done for that. -Akari

We looked at adding Day/Night cycles way early on, just as a visual thing. But it was going to end up at least doubling the art resources because we found we couldn't simulate the change of time convincingly enough by just adjusting the lighting system in the game. We would have had to make day and night textures for everything, and that's more than we could justify just for adding day/night cycles. I've always been a big fan of the day/night stuff, myself. Observing the exceptionally well done changes in weather and time in Morrowind was one of the few attention grabbing details in that game for me. I hope we can get to it in future projects. -Akari

Since the engine doesn't support altering the look of faces in the game, we can't really make every NPC look different like you can in a game that allows more detailed character appearance control, like, say, Star Wars Galaxies does. In SWG, you can just have the engine crank out a random looking character, throw on randomly generated clothing, and you have a new looking NPC. In KotOR, we would have to have the artists draw, texture, and animate each seperate face. This is the downside of having more detailed graphics, I guess. Back in the 2D era of RPGs, NPCs looked the same all over the game, but since the detail wasn't there, no one really cared. Now that we have more detailed graphics like KotOR has, it's more in your face that they all look the same. Unfortunately, if we actually did want to make every named NPC look different, we would have to cut way way down on named NPCs, which would definitely hurt other content. The next generation of 3D engines will probably put more emphasis on making it easier to generate unique looking NPCs, but that technology isn't going to be available in KotOR2. In short, we're adding more faces, so the variety will be a little bigger. But most of them are still going to assigned from the heads you don't use for your PC, just like in KotOR1. Maybe there'll be an attack of some other NPC throughout the game! -Akari

That's what I was thinking when I heard of the "trees". In the interiew posted earlier in this thread, MCA goes on to say. "The current game mechanic we

I'm curious as to what the original source of that preview was? Was that someone's comments in the forum itself? Or did they get it from somewhere else? While a lot of the stuff written there seems pretty accurate, there's a few things that are news to me. I won't list specifics, but some of those things would require programming changes I haven't been told about, yet would fall into the category of things I tend to take care of. As such, unless there's a reliable source cited for that preview, I'd be skeptical of some of its contents. Of course, I was off Friday, so who knows what might've changed in a day! -Akari

Saves will be listed by character now, so you don't have to sort them into folders yourself. That would require you to come up with at least a slightly different character name for each playthrough though. -Akari

I was planning on making all 3 options available on the message box that comes up. Quit to main menu Go to Load Game screen And, if I get the approval (internally) to do so: Load most recent save. Would the most recent auto-save be good? Or would you rather have it be the most recent manual save? (Or quick-save on the PC version). -Akari

I like that idea. I'll bring it up. The requests for menus and stuff wouldn't work. The engine doesn't support bringing up the menus while in the middle of a dialog. On my TODO list is: Add an option to go straight to the Load Game screen when you die. While I'm thinking about it, would you also like a button on the 'End Game' panel that lets you just launch the most recent save, rather than going back to the Load Game panel? -Akari

How about the ability to "jump to the end" to each individual script ? It may have been my imagination, but in some cutscenes you could "fastforward" it by clicking a couple of times, by others you couldn't. It was as if you had to wait for the voice over to finish, before the script could progress. One from top of my head is the introductions to the duel arena, where some lines of text could be skipped, others you had to wait for the guy finishing his introduction lines... If you could "speed up" things a bit. it wouldn't need to skip it entirely. Especially nice if reloading before long scenes or even when playing through the game for the umpteenth time. Yeah... what you saw there in the Arena was a certain 'delay' that you had to wait through before you could start skipping over the dialog nodes quickly. That delay was the time necessary to set up a lot of things via script in order for the arena to work right. To keep you from breaking the arena, they keep you from skipping over certain key nodes, or skipping too quickly, until the stage has been set. While it seems to tie in with the voice-over, it's actually not connected. It was just an issue of 'necessary delay so that things work'. There will be places in KotOR2 where you run into some of the same things unfortunately. It's something we can't get around in the engine. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that we'll be more careful in forcing you to undergo a cutscene over and over again. I found the opening to the arena tedious as well, especially since I kept dying and having to do it over and over, and couldn't just skip over the intro to it. Then again, maybe we want to force you to watch a cutscene over and over so you can get a feeling for what it's like debugging one! -Akari

Part of the problem is the need for a consistent meaning for the word 'cutscene'. In reading this thread, you're all using the same word, 'cutscene', but seem to be applying them to different things. Internally, we call the movies (like the ships taking off and landing in KotOR1. Shots of Taris getting blown up, etc) 'rendered movies'. Even if they do include shots that look like they were made with the engine (like I think was done on the bridge of the Leviathan when Malak ordered Taris destroyed), they're still very time consuming to create on our end. And of course take up a sizeable amount of space, since they're basically compressed video. Anyway, for clarification, we call those 'rendered movies' internally. Blizzard makes some awesome rendered movies for their games. They also only have 3 - 4 full length ones per game. 'Cutscenes', as we call them internally, are pretty much every single dialog in the game. They're all created the same way, via the Dialog Editor we're working with. Some involve more moving around, action happening, etc., while others are just a simple exchange of words with the camera switching to focus on different speakers depending on who's speaking. About the only difference is how many scripts we wrap into the dialog when making it. I guess one more way to describe cutscenes, in the perspective of KotOR1, would be that cutscenes are all of the in-engine sequences that took place without your character in them or where you have no control over anything (not even control over replies). I don't think that happened all -that- often in KotoR1. I have no idea how often it will be happening in KotOR2. I can say with confidence that we are pushing the Dialog Engine support a lot harder than it was pushed in KotOR1. We've added tons of additional scripting functions to pull off things that could not be done before. But cutscenes will always be rendered in the same graphics as the rest of the game. I noticed many mentioned the desire to be able to skip cutscenes. Unfortunately, that's a very difficult thing to support without breaking the game. Many tracking variables are set during cutscenes, many objects are made or destroyed, many doors opened or closed, or even characters or creatures created by a script that needs to be called from somewhere in the cutscene. If you just skipped over the cutscenes, all the needed scripts wouldn't get executed and any number of things would break as a result. Skipping rendered movies on the other hand is harmless enough, because no scripts are being called while the movies are being played. I hope I've been able to clarify a couple things. -Akari

I wouldn't go that far. I'd much rather have someone that's much better at writing than I to handle something like that if we do one. -Akari

According to an interview with Feargus linked to elsewhere in this forum, we'll be looking at adding varied lightsaber hilts. That's all I know about that, myself. There's no plans for that at the current time. Character creation will be similiar to KotOR1, except there will be more heads to chose from. -Akari

Rather than just answering questions all the time, I've been trying to think of things I can post that maybe you haven't thought to ask. Or maybe the questions have been asked but missed in the flood of text. There isn't a lot though, since the questions have been very thorough. As has been mentioned, we're trying to give the party NPCs unique abilities to make them handy for different things. One of the magazines mentioned Atton's Revival ability, but the description for it was sort've unclear. What that ability actually does is let Atton get back up in combat after he's been KO'd for a certain number of seconds. He'll get back up with just a few HP, but if you act quickly, you might be able to heal him up and have him rejoin the battle instead of being out one of your party members for the remainder of the battle. Note that this isn't Atton's only special ability. There's a number of other character-specific abilities in the game. Anyway, there you go. There was something else I had contemplated mentioning as well, but I've forgotten what it was. -Akari

Happy Birthday. -Akari