Akari

I don't believe there will be bonus material. The timeline we were given to finish the PC version is pretty short and does not include time for making changes to the interface other than fixing any bugs QA finds. Should work fine with ATI cards. So far we've been able to fix any ATI-Specific issues that have been found by either fixing the engine or helping ATI fix the problem in their drivers. Using the latest ATI drivers when KotOR2 comes out will be important, as some changes to their drivers over the last six months were in direct response to issues found in KotOR2. That's pretty much the gist of it, yeah. The PC version will have higher res textures all around, but I don't know if the weapons were done. Unfortunately, I don't believe there will be any change with that. The Stationary AI mode makes it so that the NPCs hold still in combat and won't move forward to engage. The scaling for the main HUD is still locked in. It would be one of the easist things for someone to mod with a GFF Editor though. Well, you can forfeit out of Pazaak. In KotOR1 that was done by just hitting Esc. In KotOR2, there's an actual forfeit button. The ability to forfeit out of the Swoop Races was also added. There is no forfeit for the turret-like games still though, so I guess if you really have to quit during one of those, you can alt+f4 it. No idea. I doubt it though. KotOR1 was included on the distributed list of games that had issues with SP2 by mistake. It was actually another L.A. title that was supposed to be on that list. KotOR1 should work fine with SP2. Not to say individuals won't have problems running it on SP2, but that's almost a given any time there's a major OS change. -Akari

I'm open to criticism, but some of your claims conflict with the actual facts. Work on KotOR2 began after KotOR1 shipped, not before. While there were design ideas tossed around before KotOR1 came out, real work on it began around September of last year, giving us roughly 13 months to meet the December release date for the Xbox version. Any bug fixes in the patched PC version were included in our version of the code. XBox and PC version were originally announced for a Feb of 2005 release. The decision to release the XBox version in December was made sometime around mid-August. Development houses almost never have any say on release dates when dealing with a Publisher/Developer situation. -Akari

Many users have modded their XBox to allow them to dump games to their hard drive. Unfortunately, the changes this has on the load time will result in unpredictable behavior and many cutscenes may break as a result. Bugs most often caused by playing off the hard drive include: Fading to black but then never coming out of black. Crashing while an area loads. While both of the above bugs may also happen on games that are not being played off the Hard Drive, playing off the DVD legitimately will greatly reduce their frequency. -Akari

While your advice is accurate, the idea that we intentionally inserted a bug that would bite people playing off the hard drive isn't. Unfortunately, playing off the hard drive does change the timing of a number of events that fire during cutscenes which breaks some of the delicate timing for more involved cutscenes. So you'll get blackscreen problems like this by playing off the hard drive instead of the DVD. Which honestly wasn't done on purpose. If anything, I'd rather play off the hard drive to cut down on load times myself, but it probably isn't going to work too well for this game. -Akari

Some facts: KotOR3 is not currently under development anywhere. It had started development at Lucas Arts not long after we started development on KotOR2. The team at Lucas Arts working on KotOR3 was let go and no development has happened on it since. There's nothing at this point as to what systems a hypothetical KotOR3 title would come out on. That should squelch a couple rumors. -Akari

It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure what this forum software offers on the admin level to support it. Maybe GM will give it some thought. -Akari

That's right. -Akari

Uh, yeah, that 'feature' was taken out near the end. Due to the nature of the various areas, it was only available in some 11 or so actual modules (each time you load you're going into a new module). It was also very untested by QA at that time. We decided to take it out since it wasn't available much anyway, and we didn't know what would break as a result of leaving it in when it didn't see any QA time. -Akari

It should be there. It's a sub-menu off of the Journal screen now if I remember correctly. -Akari

A fair amount of bug fixing is going on for the PC Version of KotOR2. I wouldn't expect any new features though. The timeline for getting the PC version ready is pretty short. -Akari

There's four programmers and at least two designers still working on KotOR2. The art team had been off of KotOR2 since way back in September. -Akari

The HK Factory was cut near the end of the project cycle, well after the guide had been written. As to what was supposed to go on in there, I don't know off hand myself. A designer would have to speak to that. -Akari

This thread is all over the place. Locking it down. -Akari

Yeah, it's by design that it doesn't change. Some do change, some don't. Mostly had to do with art restrictions with what we were dealing with. We tried getting some to change in spite the art challenges it created, like Handmaiden, but it consumed a lot of time, so we didn't attempt it for everyone. -Akari

I don't think we deliberately fixed that bug. But it might've been fixed over the course of time as other issues in the level up code were patched. Sorry. -Akari

The trigger for that cutscene is based on when you reach a certain number of lightside or darkside points. That's what allows Visas to sense you. -Akari

It was scrapped. We couldn't come up with a behavior set for it that everyone would be happy with. Every time I adjusted it one way or another, someone in QA would complain about how it didn't act exactly as they thought it should. In the end, we decided to cut it, since it was clearly too nebulous a behavior to satisfy anyone. -Akari

The framerate issues aren't really related to graphics at all. The problem is caused by all of the other systems throughout the game engine that are running. Creature AI updates, script execution, combat AI, etc. All those things take up CPU time and make it slower for the game engine to complete '1 loop' so that it can render the next frame. Which is why you'll probably find the slowest framerates in combat. The trouble with framerates is a side effect of using what was essentially a PC game engine on a console. PC engines tend to be written with convenience and flexibility in mind. But the side effect of this 'designer friendly' approach is that the game is slower. Data is stored as strings more than binary data, and string compares are rampant throughout the code, which are overly expensive (CPU-wise) operations compared to alternative approaches. Console-specific engines tend to be written a lot tighter. They tend to be far more memory efficient and clockcycle efficient. To solve these problems in KotOR2, we would have to have rewritten a lot of the engine, which the timeline for the project did not allow for. And even still, we made amazing improvements over many of the systems, it's just that we then turned around and pushed the systems harder than they had been pushed before. Early on in the project, we roughly doubled the average framerate of KotOR1, but then added a lot more stuff to the areas and the framerate went back down. We're also loading roughly 2 to 3 times the data per area load that KotOR1 loaded, but we were able to speed the loading process up enough that the load times are roughly equivalent to KotOR1. If we were loading KotOR1 levels with our changes, the load times would have been much faster. Most of the time, we considered KotOR1 the 'as bad as we can let it get' in terms of load times and framerates, then kept adding content to areas until the game slowed down to roughly the KotOR1 performance, figuring that was a safe baseline to operate from. -Akari

I like the KotOR2 Forums better. Enduring exposure to the habits and routines of this forum have endeared it to me over time. The NWN2 forums are so cold and unfamiliar. -Akari

-Akari

I wouldn't expect a lot of changes for the PC version, though there will probably be some minor ones. But most of the team has already moved over to NWN2, including me. There's a few programmers staying on KotOR2 though. -Akari

I don't think the thing I was referencing back then made it in. The code was in place, but the data was never added, to the best of my knowledge. Sorry. It was just a thought at the time, and ended up getting lost in the shuffle among higher priority stuff near the end. Hm, actually, now that I think on it again, there are a couple easter eggs that should be unlocked by beating the game via both the Lightside and Darkside paths. They're really minor though definitely not easy to miss, but I'm sure people will find them eventually. At least, I think those made it in. For them, the code and data should be in place, but I don't know if they ever actually got QA'd. -Akari

End of the world and Mayan calandars are off topic. -Akari

Off topic. -Akari

This has kinda wandered off topic. -Akari