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In short: here are today's posts of note.
1) Raph "Holocron" Koster (Creative Director), Haden "Shug_Ninx" Blackman (Lucas Arts Producer) and Kevin "Q-3PO" O'Hara (Community Relations Manager) have all three replied to a fan's inquiry about their educational background in this thread.
2) Holocron on a question about auto-combat:
You know what I don't get? How people can dismiss every single RPG ever made as sucky. That's what "auto combat" is, after all...
Seriously, though. We're not making a twitch game, and you won't be aiming your own shots. We're making an RPG. This comes up periodically, and this is the final word--it's not a twitch game.
BUT we do think that we're going to have a really cool, deep, and exciting RPG combat system.
3) Holocron on the game world and how it will influence the max number of players on a server etc.:
Let me take you thru a train of logic.
Building homes, shops, facilities, mining installations, factories, etc, is a big part of this game.
Every character has a certain number of lots they are allowed to build on. This is a known area, call it A.
There's some percentage of the total game map that isn't buildable (terrain, whatver). Call this B.
To avoid urban blight, we want to cap the amount of wilderness that could ever possibly be built on. I think we're currently saying no more than 25% of the available space can be built on, AFTER deducting all the non-buildable terrain.
Therefore, if you take the total landmass, subtract B, divide that by 4, you now have the max possible building land in the game.
Then you divide that by A and you have how many characters a server supports. And we will CAP the server at that many characters.
This means that yes, servers may fill up. But it also means that every character on a server has full access to all the gameplay. Nobody gets gypped out of a house or a mining site because of crowding.
Then you take 20-25% of that, and that's how many simultaneous users at peak usage times...
This is a vastly simplified version of a spreadsheet we have here in the office that we've been using to determine # of server boxes we need, # of planets we want, how many simultaneous users we want, etc etc.
4) Holocron once again. This time on different architectural styles and the necessity of generic structures:
1. If it is too hard to design variations of the installations and facilities, then does that mean that the developer cities will lack variety as well?
Insofar as the list that we were cutting from is the same list, yes. We will not be able to do unique architectures for every planet and every city. We will represent the key recognizable architectures, but many structures will be generic--spaceports will be spaceports pretty much everywhere.
2. Are houses and shops considered "installations" and has this variety been cut as well?
We left variety on the houses.
3. If the developer cities do NOT lack variety, then why should the player cities?
We're allowing you to use the developer structures AS houses, so it's sort of the same list.
Did this cut suck? Oh, heck yeah. But when we looked at the amount of buildings to make versus the amount of everything else to make, and looked at how many manyears we had budgeted to spend on buildings, we needed to cut the list by 3/5 or so. Very painful. This was BEFORE applying the extra 30% time for adding roof popping btw.
The tradeoff would have been less clothing, or less creatures, or less kinds of terrain. It all comes from the same manpower.
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Star Wars: Galaxies - Infobits
