Russki Bear

Right, I have given up waiting. I shall not then finish KOTOR2 more than once. But in fairness to Obsidian I at least owe them a why. I was dissapointed with KOTOR2 mainly because of expectation, in all honesty, however I don't beleive that expectation was unfounded. I expected a resolution to KOTOR (which doesn't mean closing off the series, it means resolving to some extent the characters of the original, and I made sure I met Carth, found out it was Canderous etc...but it was still quite lacking) that didn't open new and wildly deviant plotlines. Kreia was a bad move, IMO. She was a bitch, she was blatant and the most difficult character to converse with, yet held some fairly important content that could be missed simply through character choices with no other avenue for discovery. While I finished it once, I started it several times and I have not heard anyone else mention other paths. This tends to restrict the player to a particular character alignment, or an (even moreso) unfulfilling storyline. I have a bone to pick with Kreia's crap. It contradicts, or at least adds, massive plot developments relating to Revan that were in no way indicated in the first. It essentially came down to re-writing that part of the story - this hidden threat crap....how do you strengthen an empire by attacking it with limitless resources from the Star Forge? Bombing Telos which eventually becomes a fulcrum for the Republic's survival is strengthening the Republic? To be saved by a Jedi that is a 'void in the Force'? This seems to imply that Revan in fact generated such a character to defeat this threat. And the death of the Force would be the death of all living things, wouldn't it? Furthermore in KOTOR, you destroy a *major* source of Sith power and it is the Republic that is now exceedingly weak? When you play KOTOR, don't you get the impression that the Star Forge is what Revan knew was out there, with it's dark aura and all? Can I fit an A380 through there yet? Or is it just that none of this was reasonably resolved at all? Open ending people say, but KOTOR1's ending was suitable as either. Different style of ending sure, but one worked and one did not. The shortness of the game was dissapointing. With KOTOR, I thought it was to be short and then there was a new planet to explore before the Star Forge which made it of reasonable length. Hmm....nope. Fairly straitforward and boring here. The missing plot elements apparently removed 'cos they made no sense....well I didn't know what the f*ck was happening when things were just happening for no apparent (apparently nonsensical) reason. All that time could have been taken up with meaningful dialogue, or hey, not been there at all. What the hell was going on with the Ebon Hawk dissapearing, only to have it all shiny again to fly away in on Malachor? COME ON GUYS. This is intended as constructive criticism. I do not know the reason why things are as they are, but I tend towards the 'bit off more than we can chew' theory coupled with a tight schedule that resulted in "****, just add an ending and cut the **** that ain't done and slap a piccie on the cover that never occurs in the game". I'll look at NWN2, but I am gonna make sure it is very worth it before I buy it, even though NWN is one of the best games ever. And I won't be doing that via 'reputable, independent gaming websites' - I'll be listening to forums. So if someone at OE reads this, I can see the talent there, but it was smothered in other stuff. See you when NWN2 comes out.

Are you using a modified exe, like a noCD patch?

What I do is save my game, exit to the main menu and then reload it. Seems to work, but it is a bitch. To any concnerned: A64 3500 1GB RAM GF5900 Audigy 1 using EAX 3 ingame

Right - for example; A while ago when there was more than two graphics card makers on the planet, there were two different methods of rendering fog. Direct X knows what the card can do and it allows programs to query what capabilities are available. Some programs didn't bother and just presumed one type would be available because they developed with only one card in mind initially and then did a bodgy 'port' to support other cards, which did actually occur. So if that particular fog wasn't available, it would either crash, render inefficiently or not at all blah blah blah. So, hardware can affect what bugs or problems you get with a game.

Some of you need to understand a few things. Yes the game is in a poor state even after the patch. I agree. I have the small problem of beleiving the story is just a bit....errrr....let's just say I think they struggled, especially by seeming to explain the AI behaviour as your Force connections, and adding to much to Revans story when KOTOR1 dealt with that as much as was needed, in my opinion. And I HATE Kreia. I would have done without the old bitch myself. Blah blah blah she goes. However, Programming isn't as clear cut as a lot of people beleive. To have a problem solved you can have literally hundreds of different, but equivalent solutions. There will be many that haven't been thought up yet. Large programs are arguably the most complex products of the human mind and for even an experienced professional, 10,000 lines of code is approximately the largest amount anyone can get their head around. To a game like KOTOR2, that is nothing, and if you were to try and generate a mental picture of what hundreds of thousands of lines of code does, you'd fail. So, cut them a little slack. Go after the QA tester that didn't find that Telos bug instead (oops). And if you called me an imbecile, I wouldn't patch your game.

No, SP2 is not required for your graphics card. If SP2 is too big, just go and get the firewall and virus scanner I mentioned and run them whenever you are on the internet if you don't already have anything. To find your AGP version: Go into your Control Panel. Make sure you are in classic view, and find the system icon. Open it and click the hardware tab. There should be a button named Device Manager. Hit it. It will list the categories of all hardware installed in your system. You need to open the System Devices category. You should see something with AGP in there, and hopefully with a revision number. If not, go to www.cpuid.com and download CPU-Z. It is free and small. Run that on your system and look on the Mainboard tab. There is a Graphic Interface section and the first field under that is your AGP version. If it is AGP2 your new card should work at the 4x rate. If it is AGP3 then it will work at 8x. If it is AGP1, a new card will not work at all. This is because the AGP1 standard calls for a 3.3V supply where 2 and 3 are 1.5V and 0.8V. Newer cards draw their power from a standard power connector the same as you have connected to your hard disk, and only work under AGP2/3. Good Luck! Ask, if you have any other questions. Russki Bear

Aye, I get crashes and the odd black screen as well as a funny thing on Dantooine where I get massive slowdowns, but when it recovers I am running at lightspeed into the other side of the level or whatever I hit before then. I get bad slowdown in KOTOR1 now, on Dantooine. Never had it before so I am thinking some later driver revisions have buggered something. It is more excusable for KOTOR1 than 2 if that is the case... My specs: AMD Athlon 64 3500 939pin 1GB DDR400 RAM Nvidia GF5900 128MB Audigy 1 WinXP SP2 And I happily run the game at 1024*768 4*AF 4*AA smoothly in all but a few problematic areas, like Dantooine. And I get the stutters in the residential module on Telos, but nowhere else.

With any consumer product in a fast moving industry, buy the best you can afford at the time. This includes video cards, if you can get a decent 6xxx series, do so. That way if you decide you can afford an update later on it will serve you better than an FX card will. It will not be the card bottlenecking the system, it will be the rest of it, so it doesn't matter to your current system what card you buy, but it might to any future system you have. Secondly, try to find out what version AGP port you have. It should be under the system devices in the device manager. If you don't know where that is, ask. You will want no less than AGP2 or AGP3. SP2 is pretty much essential for your system - it tidies XP up a fair bit in general, meaning that it is harder for your system to be compromised while on the internet. If you have a software firewall, and there are good free ones available like Sygate Personal Firewall, and a good free virus scanner like AVG 7 Free Edition (www.grisoft.com) SP2 is less important, but you are still going to be vulnerable to certain threats. I have SP2 installed but I use SPF instead of Windows Firewall which SP2 includes just because it is easier to manage yet still has all of the features Windows Firewall has. Only the newer Athlon and P4 chips support an NX flag, so that part of SP2 won't bother you. It just allows Windows to make sure some parts of memory which are not intended to be executed actually unable to do so. Viruses can exploit older versions of Windows and hardware that doesn't have this feature. Russki Bear

There is no point to this post, except to say it is the first time I have seen 6 foot invisible rabbit and I would like to congratulate that person on the best internet avatar I have seen so far. I think that's pretty good!

Thankyou for the workaround. I should have a save game earlier on. Russki Bear

Aye, I have that one as well. I didn't lose my weapons even though I went peacefully, I had those dialogue options with handmaiden and I had to talk to Atris to get stuff moving (oddly, like you said), although I think if I try again and speak with Atton and select one of the options, so that the camera switches to Kreia's empty cell and she says "A critical moment approaches", the characters might all be in the right place as it also triggers the cutscene. But I couldn't even get T3M3 out of his cell. And Atris didn't have my lightsaber, although she did last time. Anyways, now I would like this resolved. I have no savegames further along. Russki Bear

It boasts a fancy new title? Probably very little as far as the end user is concerned. Goes faster, basically. It is an updated Pentium-M with a 533MHz FSB, 2MB L2 cache and the Centrino feature set. The WLAN chipset uses less power, updated driver software, 802.11a/b/g. There is Intel's "High Definition Audio Technology" too. You'd barely notice except for better performance from the PIV-M, and the price.

It is a development of the Centrino for laptops.

Errrr, you say they are dying, I say the market has grown a bucketload for consoles where the PC is remaining fairly steady - else NVidia and ATi would be in the ****, and AMD and Intel wouldn't be selling $1300AU processors (ooohhhh....P4 EXTREMEly Expensive Edition, funnily enough I steered clear and got an AMD. I can be cynical. Quite.). I also beleive that if people don't develop for the PC at all then there will be a great loss in innovation. Some of the greatest RPGs I have played were by Squaresoft on the SNES (Super Nintendo). They were awesome. The SNES actually had a large amount of RPGs available even in Australia. That bloody Piece of **** PS1 introduced snazzy 3D graphics and the average CONSOLE game quality went through the floor. Release after release of expensive utter crap. I honestly couldn't beleive that people were buying the ****. But they did, for some reason. Yeah anyway, I don't count the PC out yet. Maybe we'll see a movement of open source games starting up? Wait....we already have.

It is more complex than that. I am sorry to the fellow above, but don't open your case. If you open up device manager and look under System Devices you should see something like "VIA CPU to AGP2.3/AGP3.0 Controller" which is off my current system. AGP v1 supplied the card with 3.3V, AGP2 went to 1.5 or 3.3V, AGP3/3.5 is 0.8V or 1.5V. From AGP3, if the card couldn't function with 1.5V or less iti had to have a power connector on the back so you could plug in a system power plug. AGP 1.0 was 1X/2X, AGP 2.0 was 4X and AGP 3.0/3.5 is 8X. I *think* any card that is AGP3 compliant can go in an AGP1/2 slot but check, even though it will definitely be at reduced efficiency if it does. If you have an AGP 3.0 slot, then you can't use an earlier video card that needs a 3.3V supply from the motherboard. Russki Bear