swaaye

When I walk out of Ep3 next weekend I fully expect a new release from LEC. I want my damned music!. Or else. !!! (Grumble....Mumble.....)

please release some new music Feargus

I'm assuming from now on that all LucasArts games are betaware upon release. Republic Commando is decent, but REALLY short. Galaxies has been poor since its release, KOTOR 2 is a ridiculous mess, KOTOR 1 was buggy but better..... It just goes on and on.. I haven't played KOTOR 2 since March when I stopped because of the state of the game in both buggyness and audio quality. I've been waiting patiently for these patches that have been at least unofficially promised. Well, how many extra developmental months do they need? Maybe the plan was to release it officially while leaving it unofficially in a development state. With our money they could continue development.

Heh, I've put about 25 hours into Guild Wars now and have yet to even do PvP. The game has a huge story based coop mode where you run around with a party and complete quests. It's pretty fun, runs awesome, looks beautiful. You start in a city (there are many cities), which is the only place where you can see people outside your party, but when you leave the city you get your own instance of the world, alone with your party. It's like a multiplayer KOTOR to be very honest.

Well if they are actually doing QA testing on these patches, I can't really complain. They are just looking out for us and their rep. But, if there is some business reason behind it I'm going to explode and take the universe with me.

Well I'm completely behind you. I think that the biggest part of PC gaming (always has been the biggest prob) is the sheer level of research and learning that the user has to do to understand everything. The high turnover tards at the mega stores almost never have a real clue (they have some weird twisted version of the facts usually, lol). So, people have a REALLY tough time knowing what to buy. Whether consoles will finally take over: I dunno. It's been said this would happen since the '80s. Has it happened? No. More people are playing games than ever before now days. But, still PCs have very unique titles that can not be done with a console controller. These are the games I care about. Many action titles, and hybrids like KOTOR, can be easily ported though. It does't mean hardcore sims are doomed, or intricate strategy titles are either, etc. I can see how it would be enormously frustrating for two games with the same engine to suddenly become incompatible with chipsets with a new release. It's understandable that they'd want to add features though. Both games officially support the same chips as far as I know though, which makes the additions accepatable, however. You were lucky that it worked before, but the additions to the engine (of arguable value) have affected that luck. It's sad I agree. If they really added serious appeal, then it'd be different, but it seems that it broke things more than anything else. If someone is complaining about how their desktop is running it with Intel Integrated that isn't really acceptable to me. You can buy a GF3, GF4, Radeon 8500, Radeon 9000, etc for quite cheap on eBay. PC Gaming has never been cheap, but it's definitely at one of the cheapest levels in history right now. Parts other than the highest-end stuff are very affordable. Laptops are a bit different because it's almost difficult to get a discrete, capable 3D chip. Most notebooks are sold with integrated graphics to keep those wonderful bottom lines at the bottom for that all important revenue. So, if you have Intel Integrated, well that sucks. But it was going to be a problem eventually. I dunno what to say other than it is NOT Lucasarts or Obsidian's fault that they wanted to spiff up the engine. Whether they succeeded or not is sorta moot. They certainly wanted to impress, even if it all fell apart. Lol. You just really can't expect a newer title to have the same or lesser requirements than the original which itself didn't officially support your chip either.

Oh give me (and LEC, Obsidian, and Bioware) a break. Hardware T&L has been a standard feature on graphics cards since 1999's Geforce 256. That's almost 6 years ago now. If Intel can't be bothered to support things correctly and completely in their integrated graphics, you are going to blame the game developer? Laptop owners are certainly frustrated to find out that their system has garbage graphics. However, it is their ignorance that is the problem. You are buying high tech electronics and you need to research things before you buy them. Integrated graphics is garbage for gaming, and always has been. It will always be far slower by nature (i.e. it is put there to reduce cost of the overall system, and it has a very strict transistor budget as a result.) Laptop buyers who are gamers must always hunt down discrete graphics if they want a chance at good performance and compatibility with relatively modern games. KOTOR2's engine was designed around OpenGL 1.4, which is similar to DirectX 8. Intel's Integrated stuff (pre i915) is DX7 at best, DX6 in many cases. Does the game run on a NVidia Riva TNT2 (another DX6 card)? A Matrox G400? An ATi Rage 128? Or maybe a 3dfx Voodoo5 5500? I don't think so. DX7 refers to enhancements that include hardware T&L, and Intel's integrated graphics just emulate HW T&L. So, not only do you lack some real DX7 features, but you are completely void of all DX8 pixel/vertex shading. BTW, even i915 probably would have issues with the game as 1) it's not supported 2) it's another hackjob DX9-capable chip that's slower than a GFFX 5200. I believe it also lacks hardware vertex shading (sorta programmable T&L) and just emulates it by the CPU. Granted the engine does a lot of inefficient stuff. Bioware is to blame for that. However, it's definitely not a poor engine and can be pretty stable, as shown by KOTOR1. You can't expect and bitch about your inadequate, accidentally purchased hardware being unable to play a basically state-of-the-art game. READ the damned box please. If your GPU isn't on there, well that's how it is and that's what you bought. Maybe we need little logos instead of text cuz people can't read anymore. Sorta like roadsigns. Developers aim for the high end of technology available when they start development, figuring that 3 yrs down the road this will be the mid/low range. Intel's Integrated stuff has never been anything but low-end. It's "value added" garbage. Its drivers are buggy too, and its feature set implementation is of questionable quality and speed. Why didn't Bioware/LucasArts/Obsidian go WAY out of their way to support it? Because most people who end up with integrated Intel graphics aren't gamers and don't give a damn if they can run a fancy Star Wars game or not. They balance their development time and budget to meet the demand as best as possible and working around yet another piece of cheap, poorly supported, buggy hardware was apparently not the way they went. BTW, Myst 4 supports Intel Integrated, but it also isn't truly 3D. It's still a beautiful game though with amazingly animated scenery. But guess what? Myst is targeted for more casual gamers with more casual systems.

I have some great doubts about this assertion... Remember, it is classical music. It does not like lossy compression. Ars Technica said one time that under 128 kbps ANY codec begin to be quite crappy. The best way would be reencoding at proper bitrates from the original master. And I think the developpers are quite present in these forums, I see a lot of icons saying "developper post here". <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I wouldn't encode it with anything other than LAME 3.90 (not higher) with --alt-preset standard. That would give you 180-200kbps. --alt-preset extreme would give you 220-280kbps. This would also be joint stereo variable bitrate which is always better than constant bitrate, stereo. LAME was used to encode what's in the game now but they used some really bad settings, like shown in the first post. I don't think a lossless encoder is realistic. Size isn't a non-concern, but what they did was way too extreme. I do not recommend anyone use WMA. OGG or LAME, or lossless. Only open source stuff. I do not like how MS controls WMA. It creates problems with 3rd party software decoding it. Like Winamp has problems with outputting it to DSP plugins.

It's just an example of how terribly competitive the game industry has become. Companies are determined to get games out at peak buying season, just to stay alive. Go load up Curse of Monkey Island or Full Throttle (or TIE Fighter: check avatar) and tell me that LucasArts has no potential. I mean this company used to be one of the most innovative, forward-looking developers on Earth. But, now they just publish Star Wars games, and they outsource those! It's depressing....very saddening. I guess I really hope Obsidian steps forward with some additions to our beloved KOTOR2 universe. You know these are just people, and they put a lot of long, hard hours into this game. And LucasArts is run by people too, people that probably love games. I'd imagine both wish they could do more for every game they make. Unfortunately, deadlines and development times, and money are becoming harder and harder to make in our industry where people are less and less easily impressed.

Yeah but a A64 @ 2Ghz will obliterate a AXP 3200+. My laptop's 1.8Ghz socket 754 A64 is competitive with a 2.6Ghz Athlon XP. I have both and have run lots-o-benchmarks for fun to compare them. Only in pure calculation (CPU benchmarks like Sandra, or some of Sciencemark) will the AXP be a strong competitor. If the program heavily hits the L2 cache or RAM, the A64 is absolutely ahead of AXP. Games strongly desire low latency RAM access and that is why A64 is above all other CPUs for games. Nothing out there can touch A64's onboard memory controller. The only difference between Socket 939 and 754 is that 939 adds dual channel RAM capability. This makes Athlon 64's RAM access akin to a giant L3 cache. It is just amazigly fast due to incredible efficiency. Also, Athlon 64's L2 cache doesn't work very well without dual channel so that gets a boost too. I built one for a friend, a A64 3000+ 939 (runs at 2200Mhz now heh heh). In Sandra 2005 and Everest he was ON TOP of the RAM charts for writes, reads, and latency. Ahead of all P4s significantly. If that's not impressive, I don't know what is.

You should go after either a Radeon X800XL or a GF 6800GT. A 6600GT is not going to be a very noticeable improvement. Nothing is going to improve KOTOR2 much. My 9700 runs the game pretty damn well, considering all the bugs. You also need to remember that you need a beefy CPU to take advantage of the newer cards. Say around at LEAST a Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2Ghz). An Athlon64 Socket 939 is the best way for gamers to go.

Anyone consider that the reason the patch hasn't come out yet is because there are more and more bugs showing up and the patch is developing a bug "feature creep"? Hahahahahahah. Hahahhaha! HAhahahahahaha. What a messed up game. You people should just stop playing KOTOR2, like I have, and wait for the patch. In fact, go out and buy Nexus : Jupiter Incident or some other competitor's title to play instead, in the meantime.

Heh. I sent a not-so-short email to them and have received no response whatsoever. Not very professional, nor very comforting. I also went through the hoops of putting a DXDiag listing in there, and filled out their many drop-down boxes (filled with obsolete hardware no less, so I couldn't even be accurate)

Yeah, you're pretty well off there. You just need to get yourself something like a Geforce 6600 GT or a Radeon 9600 Pro (or better). I don't recommend any of the Geforce FX 5x00 cards or any of the ATI SE/LE suffixed cards (ex 9600SE).

Actually, it's worse than that. Go back and read the first post. Obsidian used LAME 3.93 to encode the MP3s. Great encoder, but the user didn't exactly research proper settings. He used some really terrible custom options, including a 10,900 Hz Lowpass filter. This means everything above 10,900 Hz is gone even though LAME used a 32khz sampling rate. Welcome to the world of basically AM-radio quality people. There's not much left of the high frequencies in these mp3's. It comes down to 2 things. We don't know why they used such low quality. Saving space wasn't an issue cuz there is 80MB available on CD4. Secondly, they didn't know how to use LAME. Constant bitrate 48kbit/s, 32Khz, 10.9Khz lowpass, Mono doesn't make much sense......that is just horrific quality. It's like they thought they just had NO space left for music (the music directory containing the entire soundtrack is 37MB! lol) LucasArts/Obsidian: You want to use LAME? Great choice. Next time use "--alt-preset standard" or at least "--alt-preset 160". Thanks.

? I hope you are referring to replacing KOTOR2 music with KOTOR1 and are not saying that getting a HQ KOTOR2 soundtrack is a bad idea....

I'm telling ya I NEVER heard any latency from my friend's nForce 2 system linked to his DD5.1 receiver thru optical. He never complained either. 60ms is 6 hundredths of a second, assuming you are even correct in that figure, which is certainly NOT a big deal. Hell, DirectSound probably has latency like that and maybe you're seeing that? You'd need ASIO to get ultra low latency out of any program.

I'm pretty sure that it is based on Radeon 7000. ATI's IGP340M page (there is no specific 345M page) mentions only Radeon 7000/7200 features (charisma engine, pixel tapestry garbage), nothing about pixel or vertex shading. http://www.ati.com/products/radeonigp/features.html I'm also certain that his system would have a sticker on it saying "ATI 9100IGP" if it was that. I've seen that at Best Buy with the 9000IGP. You could download 3DMark2001SE and see what score you get, and if it will run the Nature or Pixel Shader tests to be certain. If it doesn't, it lacks Pixel Shader units and is basically a stripped down original Radeon 7200/7500, otherwise known as a Radeon VE/7000.

Negative. That thing is related to the R100 series from ATI. Basically it's a stripped down Radeon 256 / Radeon 7x00. It would run the game very poorly if at all. It people with Radeon 7500's can't play, you are definitely out of luck.

bump

You must have fixed some 3D audio problems with sound positioning perhaps. There's nothing that can be done with the music other than reproduction by LucasArts or Obsidian.

I've sent out a letter to LucasArt's tech support. Let's see if they respond.....

The tech support doc that comes with the game says they recommend Cat5.1 so maybe that's the best one to use? I haven't had too many problems with it and didn't see a difference between 5.1 and 4.11.

You people have to upgrade. The 7500 is the same core as the original Radeon 256, which came out in 1999-2000. That sucker is a bit too old now, I'm sorry. Asking Obsidian to make their engine run on it, when they specifically state they do not support it, is just not realistic. There are several possible reasons that the GF2 is supported over Radeon 256/7x00. GF2 has better T&L performance, and a LOT more fillrate. GF2 is also a bit more capable than the Radeon 7500 with regards to texturing capabilities. The old Radeon lacks the NV15's register combiner functionality, and the old Radeon is likely to be partial to D3D since it was developed in a time when ATi was not good with OpenGL at all. I get the impression that the old Radeon's core is a bit buggy and there are things that couldn't be worked around adequately. Unless you people can't afford to eat, you can afford a substantially better card. Here are some options: Radeon 9000 (same as 8500/9200) $47 http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....-102-386&depa=0 Radeon 9600 (lots better than a 9000) $72 http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....-164-023&depa=0 (btw, stay away from LE and SE variants. They are crippled) Or you could hit eBay and go after a Radeon 9700 and be totally good to go. (for example) http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...5167578911&rd=1