Forum:Lots of questions :)

Hidraslick asked me quite a number of questions. He asked them over at CC but I'll answer them here, so search engines may find them easily:

"1. Can you tell me how much cut content the game has in some sort of list?"

There's not much useable cut content. From the looks of it Bioware tried to delete everything that didnt' make it into the final game. Some things weren't easy to delete and they were a bit sloppy about others.

About 20% of the images - textures and icons in particular - seem to be unused. There are textures for female ogres e.g. And a lot of the icons suggest that they toyed with lots of other ideas about the combat. At some point the game may have been much richer in that regard. There's a style point icon e.g. It seems they considered to make opponents drop style points like my mod does. That's pure speculation though. If they ever implemented different game rules, they either never really finished them or deleted everything.

Of all things the drunk combat - which must have been a completely alternate combat system at some point - seems to have been developed furthest. My guess is management decided that Jade Empire is not an alcoholics game :) This is something I learned from the 2das btw. One of the most interesting of the unused 2das is scoreboard.2da. Maybe there was an entire tournament going on in the Black Leopard in the Imperial City. Or maybe this was part of something else entirely - like a PvP mode. All my attempts to use the scoreboard crashed the game though.

There's a considerable amount of cut dialog lines in the larger files - the henchman dialogs e.g. The cut dialog seems to be fully translated, but it does not seem to be voiced. But voice files (and sound files in general) are a difficult topic. The files themselves are OGGs but the sound database files are in some obscure format I cannot make sense of. It might be part of a suite of tools only game companies could get from MS. I've not been able to re-use existing sounds - let alone add new ones.

Some of the combat models have unused animations. I'm relatively sure that I've seen all of them and used most of them for my "new" or redefined styles though. default.2da and animations.2da suggest that were was a loooong list of standard animations planned. Most of them I could not find. Which is not to say they aren't there. Have you seen the video I made for Youtube were Jen Zhi shows all those gem armors? It took me quite a while to find the Tai Chi movement she performs there. They are the same ones the students in Two Rivers perform. It turned out the animations are stored inside the area model.

I found virtually no trace of cut characters, locations or dialog lines. Knowing Bioware they probably created a lot more story than they actually used, but that's my knowledge of other Bioware titles speaking. I do know that there was a lot more story for Two Rivers planned. Do you remember that chest that contains a villager's savings? You can take it or not. When he asks you whether you've seen the contents you can admit to having taken them, lie about it, keep the money or return it. That's not all of it. There apparently was an entire plotline that involved your character keeping the money to teach the village something about the way of the Closed Fist. He then joins Gao's men and leads them to the village... I've never fully explored the Closed Fist path myself though, so I may not have been able to tell the difference between cut content and stuff I simply haven't seen because I played the game differently

I admit this wasn't much of a list. But if you have any in-depth questions after that quick overview, I'll try to answer them!

Aaand: I'll try to answer question 2 to 10 as well! ;) -- peco e s 12:06, October 04, 2012 (UTC)