Introduction

The Massively Multiplayer Online Game, Star Wars: Galaxies was released over 20 years ago. The game was shut down on December 15, 2011; but from at least late-2006, an on-going emulation project has been attempting to recreate the game.

One of the most interesting and complex systems in SWG was the Bio-Engineering profession. This is an attempt to reverse-engineer it from historical data.

Data

All data is scraped from Furrycat’s archives. The raw data has been archived to this git repository, and scripts to construct CSVs and import in R as dataframes are provided in the scripts/ folder.

Assumptions

  1. The real game logic is probably rounded to human-friendly whole numbers. For example, linear regression may indicate values such as 14.995 – here we’ll round this up to 15, assuming that it’s unlikely that game developers were tuning parameters to that level.
  2. The real game logic was certainly efficient on C++ 98 running on hardware from 2003. It was unlikely to be very sophisticated or computationally expensive.

Attribute Analysis