Georg Zoller made, what is probably, the funniest post on the official forums in weeks (or evah!). It was a response to one of the people that commented something about Stephen Reid cutting the swimming feature out of the HERO engine while Bioware modified it for SWTOR. I don’t know if the person that made this “accusation” ever again appeared on the forum, since I can’t think of a comback to this post.

Let me fill you in on a secret.

Stephen, in his function as Community Manager, prints the source code of the game engine we are using onto giant paper sheets. Daily. He then proceeds to personally use a pair of oversized, green scissors to cut out vital parts of it. We then scan the results, run them through optical character recognition, synthesize the output into wave files and feed them to the lip synching program that outputs the result using a mockup of Admiral Ackbar placed in an empty test level.

Our valiant IT department has set up a webcam pointed onto a giant 50′ monitor, focused on Admiral Ackbars lips. The image from the webcam is translated to a programmer equally skilled in COBOL and lip reading, who inputs the resulting source code directly from the screen into the source code repository, where it is stored on magnetic cards that are swiped by several dozen interns and flown via pigeon to London, UK, to deliver the latest and greatest demo to the showfloor.

This estemeed gentlemen and ladies, is how games are made.

(In other words – Stephen didn’t cut anything, and decisions on swimming were made long before he even arrived in the building.)