iamthelorax

I'd much rather use .ogg as well, but .wma is much more supported. My portable CD player will play .wma and .mp3, but not .ogg. Besides, WMP10 has a good interface and gets CD info well, which I have come to appreciate while building a ~350 CD (and growing) collection. If someone built a WM emulator, especially if it showed numbers next to each category (i.e. # of artists) like Kazaa did, I'd dl it immediately just for the sake of not supporting MS. I hate them just as much as y'all, I promise; I just haven't done anything about it. The worst part is, I'm forced, basically, to buy Windows and Office and who knows what else, cuz they're included, secretly, in my student fees. And to think that I was so excited when I learned that I could get XP Pro at the campus computer store for $5. I just figured, at the time, that MS was just trying to cement its monopoly. How na

Well, if the xbox's music files are wma and the PC's mp3, both at the same bitrate, it would be worth it to transfer the XBOX music to PC, since an x kbps wma is roughly equivalent to a 2x kbps mp3. I personally only record at 192 wma, but the transfer would still very worthwhile. It also means that LA actually downgraded the PC music even from the XBOX version. Daaaamn. (Ha Ha, catch that, censor-matic).

Never occurred to y'all, huh? That's interesting, cuz I know I mentioned it in at least two posts on dev questions forums back in Sept or Oct., at least one of which was replied to by a programmer (although the reply didn't reply to my HUD question in particular). If we could just set the resolution from whence our HUD comes in our .ini file, independently of resolution, everyone would be happy. For instance, you could run 1600*1200 with the HUD from 1024*768. K1's fixed-res HUD was designed for 800*600 resolution, at which it was huge. I ran K1 at 1280*960, though, so I was fine. What I'm asking for (and asked for 6 months ago) would have been easy to implement before release, but hoping for it in a patch is wishful thinking. However, as long as the HUD elements are in four pieces and simply stick in the corners of the screen, it should be fairly easy to mod. If, on the other hand, each res's HUD has the HUD elements on a transparent plate, modding it might be hard. Why they would do the latter, though, I don't know, so hopefully they didn't. BTW, does K2 have a HUD trasparency option?

From what I understand, the x800/850 cards aren't particularly different from their predecessors, whereas the 6800/6600's have a very different core than previous nVidia's. This means that the nVidias have more room to grow with driver upgrades than do the ATI's. But it also means that rendering the same frame requires more power on an nVidia than on an ATI, at least until nVidia gets the 6800's drivers more efficient. This probably doesn't matter to you though as I'm sure you always have your laptop plugged in while gaming anyway. I can't speak to whether the 6800 or x800 is gimped more to be fit into, powered by, and cooled in a laptop. I should think the 6800, since it is more of a power hog in desktop versions. Which might make the x800 better in laptop cards.

ROFL. That's the best bugfix I've ever heard of. Are you sure it's reproducible?

Kiwegapa, I was actually figuring the same thing, that OE stands so much to gain reputation-wise with the community by posting that their not doing so must mean they aren't allowed to. I just wish that some of the dev's would pose as regular members and post temporary bugfixes that will get peeps through the time before a patch. Perhaps even everyone could know that it was devs who posted it and realize that OE does care, but without LA being able to prove that it was them. While this is at least the third post about the sh*tty music encoding, and I completely agree with ya'll, and it's actually more important to me than the bugs (and second only to finishing the game as it was supposed to be), LA controls the soundtrack so posting about it here is unlikely to do anything. OE probably won't pass it on to LA as a bug, even though it kinda is (what with the low-pass filtering and all). It is, at least, definitely not OE's bug. Oh yeah, technically, the music is sampled @ 20,050 Hz iirc from a previous topic's post, but the highest frequency you can resolve at a sampling rate is half the rate, hence the ~10kHz low-pass filter (whereas the 44.1 kHz sampling rate of CD's is for resolving 20 kHz waves, the upper limit of at least our single-frequency hearing).

You could also try DNA drivers, based off nVidia beta drivers at 71-something I think. 61.76&77 are notoriously bugged. Doesn't mean their bugs would show up in K2 though, of course. I've also heard people refer to Omega drivers, which are probably similar.

Obsidian mentioned probably 8 months ago that they were going to make the HUD scale with res. such that it would always be the same portion of the screen as it was in 800x600. I put in a question to dev's months ago to get a HUD resolution override in the .ini, but apparently to no avail. If half size would be alright, you might be able to scale it down. Any digital image shouldn't be resized by any factor other than an integer or reciprocal of an integer (so 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). Actually, the easiest thing to do would be to rename the HUD image files, if they can be located, so that you get the 800x600 one while playing at higher resolutions.

Yeah, to my knowledge .ogg is open source and free for dev's/pub's to use. I didn't say otherwise. The music isn't down at 48 Kbps just because it is low quality. It is also compressed into an mp3, I assume. The topic starter didn't mention this, but he shouldn't have had to. Decompressed, it would become a .wav at about 176 Kbps, 1/8 of a normal .wav's 1411 Kbps. Also, music files are probably decompressed upon installation, into .wav's, as K1 did. Takes more HD space, but less game CD space, and doesn't cut into the CPU clock cycles significantly; the soundcard processor will probably be used regardless though.

Does anybody know if the K2 XBox music was alright, and if so, whether it could be ported by the community to the PC? K1's music, while it wouldn't play in WMP, was listed as wave files one installed, so hopefully it wouldn't be too hard to reverse engineer some encoding. Or perhaps music files could just be put in as overrides and a script made to play them at the right times (if set as sound effects, perhaps they could be heard while (original crappy) music is muted). I personally don't compress anything to less than 192 Kbps WMA. I can hear crappiness in 128 K mp3's. Godd*mn. This just totally ruins the game for me. I can't believe the reviewers didn't mention this. Maybe they were given copies with decent sound. And yeah, why don't all dev's/publishers use ogg's? They're the same quality as WM, acc and Real, and don't require insane liscensing fees. Epic has used ogg's for forever.

Alright, so I was wrong. I made the logical assumption that LA/Obsidian would never give an old build to a reviewer, and that they would fix enough of the bugs to get people like me to buy it quickly. They really don't seem to have any business sense. They will almost certainly will lose more money from everyone being turned off by the reviews than they would have spent on QA. And it's not really a time issue; they had enough time, but weren't investing enough resources in QA. Hopefully even if LA doesn't fund it, OE will realize that it's probably in their best interests to make a patch pro bono to avoid makng a bad first impression. As a precedent, I doubt Hades_One is the only one who will never trust Troika after ToEE and VtM:B. And if Obsidian or a moderator reads this, please realize that I'm not flaming; I think it's in OE's best interests, as well as mine, to do some QA regardless of LA.

It just made no sense to me that Obsidian or LA wouldn't give the reviewer the most recent build. It certainly seems like giving a reviewer an old build is unlikely to lead to the best possible review.

A Gamespy lead article today talked about playing a "98% build" of K2. It looks like there's no way it could get finished, even slightly tested, and manufactured in a month. So here's to March at the earliest, ya'll! I wasn't going to play it 'til Spring Break anyway, but I was hoping it would be cheaper and well-patched by then. Oh Well. BTW, I know tech support isn't the right place to post this, but we seem to have lost the rest of the PC forum.

My cousin told me over Christmas break that Microsoft fixed the issues with SP2, so I installed it and KotOR indeed still works.

My Athlon 2000 always runs at about 70C, but then it's always at 100% usage. During the winter anyway.