Planet GameCube: Just how complex is the enemy A.I.? Are we really going to notice something above and beyond the norm?

Julian Eggebrecht: I don’t know what the norm would be - the A.I. of the TIEs in Battle of Endor certainly is way beyond anything you have seen on the N64.

Planet GameCube: Is the music generated in real-time by the sound chip, or are you using pre-recorded samples from the movies? Are there any original themes in the game? The title theme from the original Rogue Squadron was very inspiring (and we think it was created by Factor 5...).

Julian Eggebrecht: The Rogue Squadron theme was composed for Rogue 1 by Chris Huelsbeck, one of our musicians. We all liked it so much that Chris re-arranged it for Rogue Leader. It really is the Rogue Squadron signature tune.

The music in the game roughly is a 50/50 mixture of John Williams pieces and new, original tracks from our musicians. Since we have plenty of space on a GC disk all John Williams material is of course directly taken from the orchestral soundtrack CDs. Our own pieces were done with MusyX and are being played in real-time by a virtual orchestra. What’s great about MusyX is that it allows seamless blending between streamed and real-time tracks, giving dynamic changing music according to the gameplay. Chris really went crazy with the mixture in the end credits tune where he is going back and forth between Williams streams and his own compositions in one single piece of music. Rogue hopefully demonstrates for future games what is possible with GameCube audio.

Planet GameCube: Some people have speculated that Nintendo might eventually release a RAM expansion for GameCube, like they did for N64. Being that Factor 5 was one of the earliest (and most consistent) supporters of the Expansion Pak, what are your thoughts on the GameCube's current amount of RAM? Do you think a RAM expansion for GameCube would significantly affect the system's performance?

Julian Eggebrecht: The only RAM-expansion that would be possible would be more ARAM and 16 Megs of that are really enough. We only use 10 Megabytes of it for sound and the rest for game data and program code. In hindsight I don t think that the Expansion Pack was a great idea. It split the market and since not that many people had it, developers always had to make the games essentially for non-Expansion N64s. We went the extra mile to give Expansion Pack owners significant improvements in our N64 games but it was a burden on the development team.

An ARAM Expansion for the GameCube would have the same market-splitting effect and I don’t think that too many developers would use it. It certainly wouldn’t make a difference for the performance of games.

Planet GameCube: Why is it that Rogue Leader looks so much better than virtually every other GameCube game, let alone X-Box or PS2? Is it because you have had very early access to GameCube hardware?

Julian Eggebrecht: Maybe. I really don’t know. One thing Rogue uses extensively is bump-mapping and that’s something I haven’t seen much in other games. It makes such a difference. We spent a lot of the overall development time on our shaders and the light/shadow code. That certainly made a huge difference. Hoth without the landscape shadows, cloud shadows and the self-shadowing on all objects looked very boring. The landscape levels also use a lot of texture layers to give an organic feeling to the surfaces.

Planet GameCube: Having received a prototype build of DPLII decoder very early on, how much more has Factor5 improved on it and what are the noticeable improvements?

Julian Eggebrecht: You get 5 channel positional surround sound and even on regular DPL decoders much better surround sound than in previous games. The big breakthrough really was to get the DPL2 decoder to do exactly what we wanted it to do. Dolby themselves did not expect that to be possible and were very surprised.

Planet GameCube: Since Factor 5 has integrated the DPLII technology into Rogue Leader and vastly improved on it, what licensing issues are involved? Knowing that the technology is only currently available in Rogue Leader, will it be licensed to other development studios as well?

Julian Eggebrecht: The technology obviously does exist in our internal MusyX versions. I am hoping that the licensing issues for the general GameCube development community will be out of the way soon - at that point other developers just have to update their MusyX version, throw a switch and automatically will have 5-channel sound.

Planet GameCube: Are there any Episode II "preview" ships hidden in RL that have to be unlocked (similar to the Naboo ship that could be unlocked by a code in RS)? Is the Buick back?

Julian Eggebrecht: You don t expect a straight answer to that, do you? Let’s see what people find while playing the game.

Planet GameCube: It's been said before that the 64 simultaneous 3D sounds listed on the spec sheet is a low number that's been surpassed: how many have you guys managed to do by now?

Julian Eggebrecht: We haven t measured DSP performance for a long time, so I really don’t know. It’s a lot more than the spec, though. Rogue never ran into problems and it uses a full real-time orchestra as well as all the 3D sound-effects at the same time.

Planet GameCube: If you had another month to work on Rogue Squadron 2, what would you improve?

Julian Eggebrecht: Details. There is always so much to improve in the details. Overall, though, Rogue Leader is what we hoped it would be.

Planet GameCube: What's on the horizon for Factor 5? You guys taking a break?

Julian Eggebrecht: First there is a month off and after that we’ll see.

Planet GameCube: Is there any talk about a Rogue Squadron 3? Is there any possibility for online play or split-screen multiplayer modes?

Julian Eggebrecht: Nobody here has really thought about a Rogue 3, but if we ever should do one, it would have to be significantly different from the first two. Multi-Player is an obvious addition but for single-player you can only do so much with the arcade feeling still intact. Rogue Leader takes it as far as you can go without getting too simulation-heavy.

Planet GameCube: How about an Episode 2 game? Or would you like to stay with the "old school" Star Wars universe?

Julian Eggebrecht: We have no plans for either one as of now. Episode 2 looks cool, though.

Planet GameCube: What happened to Thornado? It was one of the earliest announced (N2000/Project Dolphin) GameCube games, we got the MP3, and then silence. We've heard rumors the project is dead. Is this true?

Julian Eggebrecht: It is on hold since the early days of Rogue Leader. Once again, we don’t know yet what we will do next. Let’s see what the team says when we come back from vacation.