Feargus Urquhart

Don't take what I am going to say as endoresement, allowance, approval or anything else that says you should do anything without contacting LucasArts or discussing with a lawyer. Having said that, in general most publishers allow people to make things like a Pazaak game as long as they don't make money off of it through sellling the item itself or having it drive advertisement revenue that they receive any amount of on the site that hosts it. Again, this not approval to do what you are doing in any way shape or form. Just a comment on what I have seen in the past.

Personally I don't think that patents are very useful in the game's industry. Most of what we create today from a technology standpoint is going to get thrown out after a few years. An example would be 3D engines, which are put together and written very differently than they were even four or five years ago. Of the stuff that we could re-use, most of that is basic computer science which has been taught in schools for years. I would suppose that you could patent a particular method for shadows like the Creative Lab thing, but the 3D hardware might change in six months and your patent is now useless. It might be that patents would make more sense to companies that are making specific types of technology that they licence to a bunch of different companies. As for us being aware of patents. Since, they don't play a large part in the industry we don't worry about them too much. Plus, much of what we put into games is in the public domain we are usually protected. We stay in touch with possible problems by being active in game developer community forums, talking to other developers and having a lawyer who represents a bunch of different game developers.

I didn't hate BF:V, but it certainly didn't have the same feeling as BF:1942. I'm hoping that Battlefield 2 will be cool, but I'm a little worried that it's going to be more of a Quake killfest than the slower pacing of 1942.

There are a number of schools that offer computer animation and some of them focus on its application to games. If you are looking for one of the schools, I am pretty sure that Digipen, Full Sail, Ringling(?) and Cal Arts offer animation programs. Plus, I bet many community and state colleges are starting to more general purpose computer animation classes. The two software packages that get used in the industry the most are Maya and MAX. We happen to use 3D Studio MAX for most of our games and have done so for five or six years. When it comes to using MAX, there are two other pieces of software that can be used within MAX to help with character animation. The first is Character Studio, which we have used in the past and the other is C.A.T. which is what we are using now on NWN2. You can probably find a number of books at Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com on character animation in either MAX or Maya.

We actually haven't come up with the "new" ways of doing things. I'm going to be posting later in the Moderator forum to start the discussion on how we should handle things. I would like it for Way Way Off Topic to stay as un-moderated as possible. With the normal rules will still applying - no racially based posts, "bad" language used for color not for name calling, etc...

I tend to agree about them becoming boring. I'm probably coming close to my limit on WoW when it comes to time played. I generally last about 4 to 6 weeks on a MMO before moving on to something else.

I have a 38th level Hunter on a non-PvP server and a 20th level Paladin on a PvP server and while I haven't been able to play a lot lately I've really enjoyed the time I've put into the game. My experience solo-ing has probably been skewed from other people, because I've spent most of my time as a Hunter which is a fun solo class. All in all, I would say that WoW is my second favorite MMP behind Anarchy Online.

What Phosphor said.

A part of my reasons for shutting the boards down is the negativity of the posts. If I didn't take that into consideration I would just be being dumb. I need Obsidian to have a positive image to keep the company running and making it possible for us to continue getting contracts with publishers. I do, honestly whether you think so or not Grommie, want to figure some way to at limit some of the pointless posts not to eliminate the negativity, but just make it easier on me and the rest of Obsidian to answer questions without having to wade through pointless posts. That's probably selfish, because I would like to be able to respond to posts more than I have over the past six months.

For better or worse, it's the job.

Winter 2004 release date - what do you mean? Oh, and I don't mean three months - of course. I just don't have an exact date, and I shouldn't post until I do.

Actually LucasArts doesn't pay them eventhough I know it wasn't meant to be a completely serious statement. There are a few awards in the industry that can only be entered if you pay a fee, like the AIAS awards. KotOR2 didn't win any of those awards, because LucasArts did not pay to enter KotOR2 into them. As for paying with advertisements, the cost of advertising in game magazines has pretty much tripled in the past five or six years, so the magazines are not finding it hard to get publishers to put ads in their magazines. This would mean that LucasArts probably can't really put much pressure on the print magazines with their ad buys. As for on-line, I don't have as much information about how hard or easy it has been for the on-line sites. I do know most of the people who are the editor in chiefs of the major sites and they all have a lot of integrity. If there is a reason, other than the enjoyment the mags got from playing the game, it is because there were not that many RPGs released last year on the PC or the console. So the field of choices was pretty small. That isn't saying that I'm not proud of the game that we made, but I try to be a realist as much as I can.

Actually I don't think the dialog text are in there, while most of the non-dialog text will be. The reason for that is we used a certain amount of stuff from the first game and there wasn't a great way to go through the game systematically and only delete the stuff we weren't using. Text is labeled as either dialog, item descriptions, placeable name, door name, etc... Since we knew we weren't using any dialog from the first game we could just kill all of those entries off. For other things we used stuff here and there from the old game, so we couldn't prune the database as easily.

Chris Parker is still working on the complete list, but we might not be able to get it posted until the patch is actually released.

For what its worth I think we are on final approach with the patch. It should be out soon.

Well, I'm actually going to ignore good posting etiquette and completely ignore the original post. That Posting and You thing was funny.

Just a quick message to let you all know that I am reading the posts. And no I didn't just jump to the end and post this Hades. Oh, and I will come out and say the one thing that iritates Obsidian employees the most is when we are referred to as BioJr, Bioboys, Bioleftovers, Biobitches or whatever fun little moniker has been thought up for the day. That's not a reason for us to close the board down, it's just one of the things that doesn't help get us pumped up about reading the forums every day. Another random thought of mine (I'm pretty much dealing wtih sleep deprivation right now) is that it seems perfectly acceptable for people to call us names, but if we ever respond in kind then we would be the ones being childish or poor sports. Half the time I want to post "Sticks and Stones will break my bones, but why don't I just shove my fist down your throat." I'm perfectly fine with criticism - just not the "YOU SUCK DONKEY BALLS OBSIDIAN, GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK BECAUSE WHILE I PLAYED YOUR GAME THREE TIMES ALL THE WAY THROUGH I THINK IT SUCKED!1 JUST LIKE YOU DO AND SO DOES YOUR MOM!11" variety. If we were to keep the forums up, I would probably have the moderators become more strict about posts from trolls and give them more liberty in banning people.

On the issue of hoods. Not sure if this has been answered. There are no jedi robes where the player can put the hood up and down themselves. Some companions have hoods when they wear clothes or jedi robes. The issue for not including robes was not so much a time or team issue, but an engine issue. The robes that are in the game already pushed the memory set aside for Player Character armor types by a factor of 2 or 3, so we had to compromise in places. In my opinion, it was worth it because I think our robes look great.

Hi, We are trying to reproduce what you've found, but it's not something that has ever come up in the testing of the product. Can you think of anything strange you might have done? Also, if you possibly have a "special" Xbox - could you PM me and let me know that. Thanks, Feargus

I am pretty sure that you are going to see some improvement in KOTOR2. However, we are using the same engine, so while we have put a lot of effort into optimizing it, it is still the same iteration of the engine. I can say that we have done a lot of things with memory to shoe horn things like the new robes and larger levels into the game. Plus our graphics ninja, Jay Fong, has gone through everything he can and tweaked what he could do get an extra frame here and an extra frame there.

Jay, our graphics guy on KOTOR2, has been updating the game to make sure it works with the latest NVidia and ATI drivers from time to time. Before we release the PC version, I am pretty sure we will make sure that the game is working with the latest drivers from each of those cards.

Not to get into the who is BIS and who is not BIS, but the Troika guys left Black Isle in early 1998 and the rest of us didn't leave until early-mid 2003. Plus, very few if any people from Troika worked on Torment.

Before the release of the Xbox version. Let me see if I remember the chain of events. I first talked with Simon Jeffrey, the President of LucasArts at the time, about the possibility of doing the product in late April of last year. We met at E3 to talk about the budget and some of our initial thoughts about doing it. Most of the owners and a couple of other people had quit Interplay by June and we were working out of my Attic - that was a lot fun particularly when the A/C couldn't keep up with us. It was during June and July that we came up with the story, characters and the planets we were going to use. In about the third week of August the contract got signed, three guys from Bioware came down to show us how the engine worked for a few days and then we moved into our office space. We've been off at the races ever since.

Also, generally a game's hype peaks right around it's launch because everyone is looking for more information about how it is actually reviewed, walkthroughs and other info.

We started working on KOTOR2 a little before the release of KOTOR1, but not by a lot.