Akari

No other info I can give out about that character at this time. That's press release material. To be perfectly honest with everyone, right now it looks like the option to toggle the possition of your hoods will not make it in. I won't bore you with the technical reasons right now. I know this is something a lot of people were wanting. Sorry. -Akari

I don't know the answer to either of those. I don't really know the answer to this either. I know who won't be JOINING you at any point in K2 from K2 (like, say, *whisper*Juhani*/whisper*), but I don't know who or who is not making a cameo appearance. I do know a couple that are in the game somewhere, but I don't know specifically who isn't. I shall go investigate... *walks over to Morgan's office* I see only one water bottle in near proximity to his desk. So if he claims to have a substantial number, then he's either making that up or he's got the stash well hidden. -Akari

Right now there's nothing you can specifically turn off in the HUD. On the X-Box, the action bar and party character portraits will fade out over time if you're not doing any actions or focusing on any object at the moment. -Akari

Right now I was fixing some bugs with the equip screen and weapon swapping stuff. Exciting, I know. I don't really know the answers to any of those. Sorry to disappoint, but I don't really know if there's any change in this. There's probably all kinds of technical reasons why that happens, but I don't know off the top off my head. I'm in my mid-to-late twenties. I was hired by Chris Jones as a Junior Programmer for the Jefferson Project at Black Isle. I then went on to work on the Van Buren project. I moved over to Obsidian October of last year when there was room for a Junior Programmer here and was among the first employees of the company (i.e., not one of the 5 owners). I can't remember if I was the second or third programmer aboard. I've been here ever since, obviously, and am no longer a Junior Programmer. I had always wanted to make games for a living, but I didn't really believe that I would actually ever do so when I was growing up. So I went to Medical School instead, thinking I'd just go for what was a safe, practical job. Somewhere along the way I realized 8 years of Biology wasn't my thing and I switched to computer science. I still never thought I'd be a game programmer until my last year or so of college when I decided that if anyone can be a game programmer, I can too. Thus began my year long process of sending out resumes and letters. My early programming, outside of college courses, was on MUCK code. MUCKs are highly customizable but generally smaller MUDs, if you're familiar with those. It was the fact that I headed up my own open source project that got my resume looked at, at Black Isle, which got me an interview. That should be enough to answer that. -Akari

Not going to say. But when I stop working weekends, you can bet we're done with our part. You're welcome. During the normal work week I don't have time to do this because I'm usually talking with other devs while waiting on compiles. But I'm glad I've had the time to talk with so many of you this weekend. -Akari

You sure like your HK chips, don't you. I don't believe the ship will have one installed. -Akari

No new minigames. We've taken the existing 3 and changed them around substantially, but we didn't add any new ones. I think I've said all I'm going to say on this for now. -Akari

I don't really know off hand, and I don't have the time right now to dig up the documents on it. Sorry. -Akari

I believe at least one planet will be like that. Coruscant? Nice try. -Akari

The date by which we, as in Obsidian, has to be done working on the game is not affected by the seemingly shifting release date. The date we have to be done was fixed in the contract we signed when we started the game and that date has not changed. So no, we're not rushing things to get done. We've had the same deadline from the start. As far as the release date, one of the Lucas Arts people said December at the San Diego Comicon's Star Wars Spectacular (or whatever it was called) last week. That's probably a safe bet, but we haven't been told with absolute certainty what the release date will be. I believe at this point there still isn't an 'official' release date. No idea. I hope there's some more info released soon so that we can talk about more stuff! -Akari

I'm not sure what this is referring to. Negative to both. Sorry. I don't THINK so... I didn't implement it, but I believe that it's just an insanely high damage move. It might do enough damage to instant kill the average enemy though. No idea. -Akari

A designer could definitely answer this all better than I could. My understanding is that GL has nothing to do with the game, really, in the sense of being actively aware of what's being done with it. But there are people at Lucas Arts that the story has to be cleared through. I'm not sure when the overall story was figured out, but the writing is still ongoing even to this day. All the designers had to do research to make sure their stuff was consistent with the SW universe, but I think Chris Avellone makes most of the judgement calls on that sort've thing. Keep in mind, this is a lot of speculation on my part. -Akari

I haven't heard any of the new score yet. It's being worked on now. -Akari

Okay, back in for another day. I'll just go ahead and re-open this topic for today, rather than making a new thread for this weekend. Moving back to the questions from where I left off... Hm... that's hard to say. I'd say Adam and Anthony (both programmers) are the best two all around just from experience. They play some on their own time, I think, whereas most of us just play the game during the hour or so that we do the games around the office some evenings. As far as an arranged game goes, that might be doable. But it'd totally have to be after we're done working on KotOR2. Too busy right now to schedule something like that. -Akari

I think he mentioned it kind of like that gray spherical ball in ANH.... Akari's lurking btw... Edit: Damn, he's gone.... I'm going to have to turn on that toggle to hide my presence. Then I can lurk undetected! -Akari

Whew. Thanks for all the questions, everyone. You were sufficiently distracting. But I'm headed home now, so that's all the question answering for today. I think I'll lock and sticky this thread for reference, so it doesn't get too cluttered up. I think I'll start a thread like this each weekend day that I work. -Akari

I've been trying to think about how to answer this without it being a spoiler but I just can't come up with a way that I'm happy with. So I just can't answer that, sorry. -Akari

There's some more cards you can get give you a lot more options... of course, the CPU opponents might have them too. One such card is a Tie Breaker card. Normally it works like the +/- 1 card from KotOR1, but it has the added advantage that if the round ends in a Tie, you win if you played that card. There's 4 other new cards with special abilities like this. There may be a Pazaak tourny. It hasn't been decided. It's one of those lower priority things that may or may not make it into the schedule. -Akari

In the tutorial T3M4 you can control T3M4 as he makes repairs to the ship. I'm not sure if it comes up again anywhere else though. I don't have any information about the swoop races. Other than that you can jump in them now. -Akari

Not off hand. Hm... I can't go into details on this... but let me just say that the designers did have one of the programmers add support for changing Party NPC classes via script... -Akari

Yeah. More KotOR2 heads too. It'll do like it did in KotOR1, where heads you didn't use for your PC could end up used by random NPCs. Not during character generation. -Akari

Trade secret. Unable to reply. -Akari

No problem. Wow... I bet the list of things I didn't touch at some point or other would be shorter. But some of the things would be cut scene scripting (Though that isn't my main focus anymore). Any and all code that affects the interface (The start button panels, and any other panel that comes up, as well as the main interface). This encompasses MOST of my work over the last few months. Because changes on the surface (like say listing save games by timestamp and character) often require lower level changes (like changing out save games are written out, adding timestamps to them, etc). But I try to fit in other, non-interface stuff as much as possible just for a change of pace. I've added various actions to the game (like the weapon swapping action). I added the pet support. I sometimes do other little scripting requests for the designers for non-cutscene related events in levels. I made the Pazaak overhaul. I didn't touch the swoop race or turret mini-games so far, myself. That's some of the stuff I've been working on. No idea. As a game-function, not really. But there could be story-line elements that involved that sort've thing? I don't know. -Akari

Man, I totally don't know the answer to that. Sorry. -Akari

No idea. -Akari