Darth Hater

Star Wars: The Old Republic News, Interviews, Media & Podcast

  • Star Wars: The Old Republic to use Monolith Monitoring

    Early today, Gamasutra revealed that BioWare and LucasArts will be utilizing Monolith Software for their IT management. They believe Monolith will provide a server monitoring solution with the customization and speed required by an MMO on the scale of Star Wars: The Old Republic come launch. Quoting Gamasutra's Eric Caoili:

    [Monolith] says its software is a "multi-tenant, fault/event management and availability/performance monitoring solution" that collects, analyzes, and correlates data through web-based dashboards, which allows developers and publishers to visualize and monitor that information in real time.

    BioWare chose Monolith's solution for its ability to manage the real-time monitoring of thousands of devices at several data centers in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The developer says the solution also fits into its Linux environment and met all of its requirements, including specific customizations.


    Hat tip to Chronium.

  • Retention as it Relates to Star Wars: The Old Republic

    We previously touched on our opinion regarding BioWare and LucasArts focusing on avoiding common MMO problems as a basis of our speculation articles. Many of the common problems relating to the retention success and failures were highlighted in BioWare Austin's Co-Studio Director Gordon Walton and consultant Scott Hartsman's GDC session, "MMO Retention -- Learning From The First 25 Years." During the talk, these industry veterans provided some insight into possible retention strategies in Star Wars: The Old Republic. We spent over a month listening to this presentation, debating all of its points, and dissecting it to find all the clues we believe are hidden within.

  • BioWare's Ben Cloward on Facial Animation

    A thread on the official forums highlights a lecture by Ben Cloward, Senior Technical Artist at BioWare. The session, entitled Automated Emotion: Facial Animation in Star Wars: The Old Republic, goes into detail about the methods used by BioWare to generate facial animations for the huge amount of dialogue in The Old Republic. Calithlin, who attended the session, shared his experience with the community.

    There were a lot of topics discussed, but the main focus was on getting all the facial animation for the dialogue to be generated by software, rather than completely hand-keyed. (If done by hand, it would take four animators TEN YEARS of work around the clock, 24/7, no breaks, solid work to get it all done for every bit of dialogue.)

    More after the jump.

  • GDC: BioWare's Walton on Adding Space Combat to Star Wars Galaxies & Customer Retention

    One of larger portions of BioWare Austin's Co-Studio Director Gordon Walton and consultant Scott Hartsman's GDC session, "MMO Retention -- Learning From The First 25 Years," highlighted some of the game change management issues MMO developers encountered trying to retain existing customers. Although we plan on issuing a more comprehensive article on how some of the topics discussed in this session may relate to Star Wars: The Old Republic, we decided to release this very telling quote about Walton's experience with introducing space combat in an expansion for Star Wars Galaxies.

  • SWTOR is EA's Biggest Development Project Ever

    Eurogamer reports on a quote from Electronic Arts' Chief Financial Officer Eric Brown, who spoke at a Wedbush Morgan conference in New York on March 10th. Eric Brown stated that Star Wars: The Old Republic is "[the] largest ever development project, period, in the history of the company."

    When you take a look at previous projects created by Electronic Arts, this speaks volumes. EA has several big name franchises, such as "The Sims," and "Command and Conquer". The news that The Old Republic exceeds these titles in terms of the scope of development certainly reinforces the idea that the game is being given a high priority within Electronic Arts.

    Brown mentioned production costs of similar games, like World of Warcraft, which Blizzard spent "$100 million, perhaps more" to bring to market in 2004. This shows the general scope of the game as well as the quality that Bioware, and indeed EA as a whole, are aiming for. One reason they are likely investing so much is because they know they only have one launch and an MMO can be a make or break deal.

  • BioWare Licenses Graphic Tech from Umbra

    We learned from a recent Gamasutra article that BioWare has licensed Umbra occlusion culling technology for use in multiple titles, including Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect. This adds to the growing list of relatively high profile third party technology being utilized in BioWare products, and could be another interesting point of conversation in the constant debate about graphics in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

  • The Hero Engine may have some growing pains

    The Gamasutra Article we linked to earlier has given us an interesting look at what issues can arise when developing a game the size of Star Wars: The Old Republic. During the Austin Game Developer's Conference, Bill Dalton, Technical Director for BioWare Austin, revealed some of the more unique challenges they have encountered while working with the Hero Engine.
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