On the off chance you are worried about getting jumped in PVP when calling or travelling back to your ship to depart your current location you can now rest easier. Georg “Observer” Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer visited a thread today on the Star Wars: The Old Republic forums with these soothing words: Hangars are instanced. Spaceports [...]

This week’s DevTracker Highlights covers many of the technical aspects of Star Wars: The Old Republic, including system functionality with player economy. Principal Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller discusses privacy when inspecting characters, using the holocom, quests and their functionality in the quest log, server-first accomplishments, and developer communication. Lead Writer Daniel Erickson talks about what happens if a player chooses to interrupt or disconnect from a conversation. Lead Systems Designer Damion Schubert explains the cost of sending companion characters on missions and the balance of the server economy. Hit the jump to see all the highlights.

Continue reading “DevTracker Highlights For The Week of June 30, 2011″

DevTracker Highlights For The Week of June 30, 2011 originally appeared on Darth Hater on Thursday, June 30th, 2011 at 22:33:41 UTC. Please read our terms of use of feeds.

Last Friday, like probably every one of you reading this, I was eager to press play when the new Battle for Alderaan Highlight Video posted on the official SWTOR website. Before I pressed play, however, I reread the title. Noticing the word highlight, I immediately thought about the Alderaan content from E3, and figured the [...]

Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Lead Systems Designer Damion Schubert has been speaking about the Companion Character mission system and the possibility of using your CC Crew Skills for farm and fortune. A forum poster asked if he was logged-in and playing his Jedi Knight could he have, say, his Smuggler’s companions out collecting resources [...]

Last year, we had the first chance to talk with the guys behind TOR’s first, and definitive, database site – R2-Db.com

Well, they’ve made lots of progress on the site since then, and are very much in a phase where they want more folks to be a part of the community, and also to help test it out!

To that end, they’ve scheduled an IRC chat for this coming Friday, July 1, and everyone’s invited!

When: July 1st, 2011 – 5:00PM EDT (2:00PM PDT)
Where: R2-Db IRC Chat Room – #r2-db on irc.freenode.net – you can click right here to join via your web browser!

We thought it would also be a great time to catch up on what they’ve been up to with a quick Q&A. If you’re not already a member and visiting the site regularly, you owe it to yourself to check it out!

Hit the Q&A after the jump.

Hey Aaron, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions! Can you tell us a little about what you do on the R2-Db team?

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us again!

Well, that’s a rough question to answer without just saying “everything”! I’m one of the two developers on the R2-Db.com team, along with my good friend Corey (gnarf on R2-Db.com). Both of our roles overlap regularly, so it’s hard to pin down exactly what -I- do.

In general, I create a lot of the stuff you see from week to week. The recent tooltips update was my work, generating all of the different types of tips and the content contained within them. However, the actual “powered” script that creates the tooltip interactivity and allows other websites to use our information was Corey’s creation.

So, for readers who might be new to R2-Db, can you give us an overview of what it’s all about?

R2-Db.com is our attempt to merge aspects from a traditional MMO “Item Database” with social networking elements you’d find on Twitter or Facebook. We aim to create an environment that you, the players of TOR, can easily find information you need and share that knowledge with others (if you choose to do so).

We also want to create a social “hub” for players to gather and discuss specific topics, gather new information and find out peoples opinions on topics. Basically everything you do on Facebook with all of your friends and family, we want to encompass that level of intimacy and communication, then apply them to your virtual characters and the TOR universe. You will have the ability to join and create groups, create social circles and earn achievements/reputation as you provide constructive and useful information to other users.

A quick broad overview of features being developed:

• Full-fledged MMO Item Database: Items, Skills, Talents, Tools, etc.
• Tools for the Game: Talent Calculators, Tooltip Scripts, etc.
• Communication Tools: Messaging users, commenting on game information, groups, guilds, private messaging (soon), etc.
• Q&A Engine: Anyone can ask questions about the game, anyone can answer these questions. Anyone can also vote up on questions and answers they find useful, or vote down on inaccurate answers or vague questions.
• Reputation/Achievement System: As you provide useful information to others, we want to reward you. As you earn reputation on the site, you’ll gain more abilities and options on R2-Db.com, eventually you’ll gain full moderation powers.

We aren’t developing the site with intentions of telling you how to use it (obviously with exceptions, we need to maintain its integrity), we want people to use the tools we provide to organize and use how they see fit. You see this type of community building on Facebook everyday when someone starts a group or creates an interest. People share it, more people get involved and movements are created. We aren’t interested in doing that for real-life situations, but we want people to be able to do it in the “virtual world” that TOR exists in.

I’d also like to note that you can use the entire SW:TOR database without ever touching the Social Aspect of the site. We don’t want to force anyone to use anything they don’t want to.

We originally talked to you last year when you first launched the public site. What kinds of things have been happening since then?

Everything has been completely rewritten (code wise) from the ground up. We’ve had some grandiose ideas from the start, but they are finally starting to come into focus. The social aspect of the site has really started coming together and our next goal (July’s milestone) is to have the “game information” complete revamped into something better. On the horizon, we also have plans for our guild/group management system, we need to re-implement our achievement system and improve on our multimedia sharing options.

We’ve also been working with a few guilds and few fan sites to test our “powered” tooltip script, your site being one of them. It’s the reason I can write links to R2-Db.com about how the Jedi Knight can use Shien Form to increase the damage of Blade Storm! We’ve also taken our tooltips one step further and are allowing tooltips on posts, such as my post on MMO Tooltips V2.0, allowing you to preview posts in our system before clicking through. You also see this happening on the right side of the page in your Dev Tracker section!

Lots and lots and lots of new stuff coming. Like I said, we’ve rebuilt our core from the ground up and now are furiously adding features.

The social aspects sound really cool. Is this something users can sign up for and take advantage of right now?

Absolutely, and we encourage it! We’d recommend however, that those of you signing up know a -little- bit about social networking first. It’s pretty easy to jump in and get lost right now. We are still heavily in development and lacking in the documentation department right now. If you can’t figure something out, the beautiful thing about the site is we have a Q&A Engine… you can just ask your question and we will answer it! Those questions in the future will be used to mold our FAQ and knowledge base on how to use the entirety of the website.

The first thing you need to do to try out the social networking aspect of the site is log in. It’s pretty simple and we support logging in with a wide range of providers: Facebook, Twitter and (soon) any OpenID provider. Currently you can also register and use a traditional email/password login, but we may disable that in the future, so we’d recommend using an external login. Still, it’s up for debate, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Upon logging in, you are brought to your “Dashboard“, which is something we’ve been developing over the past few months. Your dashboard is an area we try to tailor content to your specific interests based on what you are following as a user. Which brings us to “Following”, it’s another major part of our social networking initiative. When you follow a person, website or record in the database, your dashboard will be populated with topics based on the things you’ve chosen to follow. You can also “Block” a record, which will trump any “Follow” command and completely block topics that are related to the subject you’ve blocked. Blocking will be especially useful for ignoring people that you really never want to hear from again.

What you do from here is all up to you, we have a few recommendations on the dashboard of things you can follow. What I personally would recommend is that you find your favorite class(es) and make sure to click the “Follow” button on those pages. Also, you could head on over to the Ask a Jedi fan site profile and follow as well! Basically anything you can find in the database, you can follow. If you’re looking for things to follow, you could check out the Fan Site List, Guild List or the User List.

Lastly, as a user you also can maintain a public profile allowing you to show off who you are and what you know. Eventually this system will also let you specify which characters you play, what server and perhaps even some sort of integration into an “armory” of sorts. This is all still obviously in the works because we still are in the dark on all stats / slots / etc due to the NDA.

I’d recommend you make sure to hover over all of the little boxes on the top navigation to see all of the options you can perform as a user and the explore menu will let you get to any section on the website. They change from page to page, ie if you are on the Jedi Knight page, you’ll notice under the “Pencil” icon you can post a comment or ask a question about the Jedi Knight.

Have you been able to work with BioWare on any possibilities for integration with TOR?

Unfortunately no, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the future. We understand the pressure they are under right now to release the game in a timely manner and don’t want to add any extra onto their workloads. We are focusing on creating our tools and website, while they focus hard on releasing one of the best looking MMO’s I’ve ever seen. Our team respects their team for the massive pressure they may be feeling, we feel a lot of pressure in our small team, so I can only imagine the stress approaching launch they must feel.

In the future I’d love to chat more in depth with them, talk about possible API integrations, not duplicating efforts and maybe even working in tandem on a project! We just don’t want to be the ones constantly pestering them, our approach is once they are ready, they (hopefully) will find us.

If folks want to be involved in helping to test R2-Db, how would they go about that?

The best way to help us right now is simply to use the site. Sign up, follow a few things, maybe head on over to a page about the Sith Inquisitor and post a comment or question, even answer someone elses question. Look through the classes, skills, and tell us what you think would be important to know about on those pages. Anything you can critique, we’ll listen.

If you find something confusing or are just lost, hover over the “Pencil” icon on the top navigation and click “Ask a Question” and ask us! Any responses to these questions you ask will also appear on your dashboard, making it easy to keep in the conversation. Feel free to also send Gnarf or myself (Jesta) a message to let us know what you think.

We love hearing from people and we try to respond to every tweet, email and message we get. You can also contact us by one of the following methods:

• Facebook: http://facebook.com/rtwodb
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/rtwodb
• Email: team@r2-db.com

If your old school and still know how to navigate through IRC, you’re welcome to join us in #r2-db on chat.freenode.net. We’ve setup a web chat client on R2-Db.com as well for those of you who aren’t! Mind you, we idle in the chat room 24/7, so if we don’t answer, we apologize, we must be AFK. We do however log the chat in the room, so know we will see your message eventually.

Any final words for all of the TOR faithful currently reading this?

Have patience? lol

The game looks absolutely amazing and the pre-launch community that already exists (YOU!) is incredible. Sometime later this year (hopefully) we will all be basking in the glory that is SW:TOR and having a great time experiencing a polished story that only Bioware could tell.

We hope to see you all in the game, and of course, if you need help with this amazing game we hope you choose R2-Db.com as your primary source for help. We’re designing it to help you, as a player, get the most out of the game while still preventing spoilers that may “ruin” your story. We hope that you can take a moment, check us out, and provide some feedback. Every voice is heard and we are a friendly bunch of nerds just like you, no corporate entity, no marketing and are just as excited as you are for the game (if not more!).

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

I still remember the conversation from Knights of the Old Republic II when one of your companions asks if you remember what color your lightsaber was. My character described that his lightsaber had been silver, like the waters in the Room of a Thousand Fountains in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.  It’s been more than five years since I played through KotOR II, and the description still rings true with me today.  My lightsaber would definitely be silver.

Many Jedi and Sith identify certain aspects of their training or background in the color of their lightsaber. Sith lightsabers are often red due to the tradition of choosing such a color. Jedi lightsabers are typically different according to training, with blue signifying a Jedi Guardian, green a Jedi Consular, and yellow a Jedi Sentinel. Other Jedi break this trend. Mace Windu wielded a purple lightsaber despite his advanced lightsaber training as a Jedi Guardian.

What color would your lightsaber be? Does your choice have some meaning behind it? Would you follow tradition?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

An interesting story over at VentureBeat on a cohort of remaining Star Wars Galaxies have considered legal action in a final attempt to prevent the December 2011 shutdown of the game. As the article says, it’s a futile attempt given they’ve all signed a EULA that protects Sony Online Entertainment pretty solidly, but it certainly…
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Lets talk dancing. Who feels that having a unique dance for both sexes of every species is important? How much does it take away from or affect your in-game fun-o-meter if you don’t have an interesting set of juicy dance moves? In WoW, I used to make a gold or two using my dance moves. [...]

The screenshot this week focuses on the Bounty Hunter and his negotiations with a potential employer on the Old Republic’s most notoriously seedy planet. An enterprising young Bounty Hunter conducts business with Nem’ro the Hutt, a powerful and influential crime lord on the foul world of Hutta.

It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time for another new image on The Old Republic’s Facebook page!

An enterprising young Bounty Hunter conducts business with Nem’ro the Hutt, a powerful and influential crime lord on the foul world of Hutta.

It’s a familiar shot in an unfamiliar setting; one can only imagine what the future holds for the Twi’lek dancer chained to Proto-Jabba! More telling, however, are the nice shader and lighting effects on the Hutt, as well as the blue light on the bottom of the bounty hunter’s jetpack. A nice technical shot for what the engine can do.

Make sure you head on over to Facebook and “Like” Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ so you get these great images posted directly onto your wall!