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Around midtown Manhattan this weekend are a swarm of people from various fandoms going to NY Comic Con and once again, Bioware was in the vicinity to promote SWTOR. Here's what that was like. The announcement said the event was to last between 7PM and 10 PM. The line started forming up outside the bar Stitch (said bar is in the Garment District) around 6PM. They stayed true to that 7 o'clock opening time so there was a bit of grumbling on the line complaining about being on their feet. Charles Boyd - the current Creative Director for SWTOR - was in costume and answering questions mostly to one guy at the head of the line monopolizing all of his attention. Being only the 7th person in line, I saw an opportunity to ask my own question when the other guy was pausing to take a breath. As I didn't hear any suggestions from you about possible questions to ask, I asked about the problems with loot not dropping in Star Fortresses missions. (Specifically, the Bracers aren't dropping from the Paladins in those missions like they used to be. Reportedly, this has been busted since the 4.2 update.) Charles Boyd hadn't a clue about it but luckily the nondescript person next to him - Eric Musco ( Community Manager for BioWare Austin and STAR WARS: The Old Republic) - did. He asked me to meet up with him later to give him the details. While we wait, other devs hand out swag tickets and 2 drink tickets apiece. 7PM rolls around and we're let in. My and wife (that I've dragged to this event) find some seats and wait for the show to begin. It wasn't until after my wife I ordered out first round of drinks and ordered nachos that we realized there was a buffet set up in the back. At least the drinks were good and the bartender was on point. They don't start up the discussion until about 8PM. Tehy devs - at this point are set up at the railing on the second floor and give out introductions, introduce two of the voice actors (more on that a bit) and some dribs and drabs of information about the next update called "Onslaught" Those that haven't seen this information about this YouTube on various channels on on the main site, I'll give you the briefest of summaries. - Onderon, Dxun, a return to Corellian, Mek-Sha (a new location of a lawless community set in a hollowed out asteroid) are the new places - Tau Idair, a Jedi we've been introduced to in the Ossus expansion apparently has a cyborg Jedi padawan named Arn Peralun. This character is voiced by Max Mittelman, who has voiced characters in Persona 5 and One Punch Man. I'm old so you guys probably have a better idea of those properties. Max Mittleman was there as well as - Darin De Paul will be continuing to voice General Daeruun in Onslaught but you probably know him better as the voice Emperor Valkorion. He too was there at the Cantina. - Theran Cedrax is coming back - Two other characters were mentioned that will be appearing in Onslaught but will not be coming back yet as your companions. Note that I'm not naming the characters. - No trailer was shown. They neither confirmed nor denied that a Blur trailer was made, only that they didn't have one there. Interesting distinction. They then started calling out the swag numbers in order and we would go up and get it as the sets of numbers were called. The devs and voice actors then came down and circulated among the rest of the atendees. I've been one of these before and it was set up a bit differently. No question and answer session set up as after their brief announcements, as we got to meet with these folks and get to do this one on one. There was no SWTOR cosplay contest for which I was grateful for. After I grabbed the swag - to be described later - I decided to get one of the items signed. Then I bumped into Eric Musco and he asked for the information I mentioned before which I saw him jot down into his phone. (Another guy was supposed to talk to him about Recovered Relics not dropping but I'm not sure if he ever got with Musco to talk about it.) Got his signature among all of the devs I could find at the event. I also got signatures from the voice actors. I got pictures with Musco and the VO guys as shown below. Now on to the swag . . . A shirt A set of three pins Some keyart (frame not included) And a code for some flair that we can share with you. Reedem the code "NYCANTINA19" to get some free flair. That was about it, folks!

That is the appearance he has on the Xbox version, for whatever that's worth.

Having those buildings available to movie makers could eventually lead to folks redoing the Nar Shaddaa landing and take off movies so I particularly enjoy this one.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't want to change the ingame lighting too much but I'll see if I can tweak it a little for a better look. You should know the answer to that type of question, right? Currently work is still underway for the Nar Shaddaa buildings. I aim to create five different buildings based on those seen in the cutscenes. The first one is done, the second is in progress as seen here:

Saucy. Makes me want to port some of TOR's Lehon props and textures, as I think that is some of the best looking stuff they ever did.

And another skybox is done (well, actually two). As I said before it's the Unknown World: That screenshot is actually a little older though. I've since tweaked the colors a little to reduce that horrible sun glare. Apart from that the skybox is almost exactly the same as in V1. The only difference is the moon texture which I replaced with a texture from here so that it's no longer our moon you see in this alien sky. And as always, there's also two renders and unlike my other renders, I moved the camera quite a bit for these to get a more interesting foreground. But since those islands are usually only seen in the very far distance they're of course not that great looking. Better than no foreground though But as I said in the beginning, there's another skybox and that's the sunset version of the Unknown World used in the revelation and DS ending cutscenes. That one uses the same terrain of course but I remade the sky from scratch to get closer to its vanilla look. For comparison here's the very unnatural looking V1 of that skybox. The new one is just waaaay better: It's still a little cheated and not entirely realistic but it helps setting the tone of those two scenes. I even had a version with a sky that was much more red just like the vanilla sky but that was just too unrealistic for my taste. Anyway, here's the corresponding render: Those two were close to the last vanilla skyboxes for K1. The only one left now is Kashyyyk and some tweaks to Tatooine and Manaan. And afterwards there are of course still the mod skyboxes to do. TSL is also coming along very nicely with only two vanilla planets remaining, namely Nar Shaddaa and Dxun. I started working on some building models for Nar Shaddaa and I have to say that this is probably the least fun thing I've done for these skyboxes yet... 😅 But we'll see how it goes. I'll keep you updated.