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.

Only LA can control the manufacturing. If they wanted to know how important a DVD release is to people, they would probably run an official poll on their forums, since from what I understand they don't pay any attention to their boards in general. But I suspect that more people have DVD drives now than had CD Drives when Myst came out, and CD Drives were quite expensive then iirc. So it is inexcusable. KotOR is supposed to have problems with SP2, as are several other games and many websites. Thus I haven't installed it. What happened to the penguin, DSLuke? You're avatar isn't unique anymore.

Having read the forums for hours, I discovered that Obsidian's deadline for sending the game to LA stayed the same even as LA moved up the XBox release date by at least 2 months. This implies to me that LA decided to rush the game out for Christmas (whats wrong with Mid-December though?). But hopefully the PC release date is based off the same QA commitment as the original XBox date, not the actual one. And hopefully LA rushed it because they decided the XBox community was too stupid to care that reviews said the game is buggy, but that they won't misunderestimate PC'ers as well (though reviewers' experience with K2 bugs seems to pale in comparison to that of peeps on the XBox forums, and I don't necessarily agree that the XBox community is stupid or more X-Mas materialistic than PC'ers). I would prefer that to the PC version really needing 2 months of work just on compatibility issues in addition to finding and fixing the quest and engine bugs from the XBox, compressed into 2 months total. Or perhaps the XBoxers' problems are mostly not software problems. That would also be nice.

Well, I concede that, and had forgotten it was so. Regardless, I still use at least 15 buttons on most games, and I play mostly fps. IMHO, CRPG's are the most complex games out there, and the controls have to be simplified for consoles, at least for KotOR and apparently Morrowind. SC:PT's only control consolidation was scroll menus for actions and weapons/items, the latter of which was annoying and probably left over from console controls. I have never heard of a Console to PC Port being simplified, but have heard so of PC to Console ports. $300 for the Box and $200 for a Mod is a lot, but pales in comparison to a good gaming PC, which costs well over a K MORE than a non-game PC, and has to be replaced or heavily upgraded more often than a console. And the mouse is still vastly superior for fps, and necessary for any RTS. If I thought Halo's multiplayer was as engaging as millions of people seem to think it is, and they hadn't defected to Halo2, then I might just buy Halo PC just for the satisfaction of whooping people who are trying to make do on micro-joysticks. (Assuming PC's can actually play XBL on Halo as I was led to believe). I'd even say that the mouse is necessary for third person shooters like SC if you plan to do any headshots. The mouse also makes control smoother and thus less visually grating. Mostly though, I just couldn't deal with the crap resolution. If you could play consoles at 1080i/p it would be fine, but somehow I doubt that's possible, even if you turn off all the effects that make such a resolution worthwhile. Even XBox2 or whatever probably won't be better than the best contemporary PC hardware. It will be cheaper but only b/c M$ is planning to get their money back on game licensing, so you probably pay as much in the end if the hardware is comparable. Consoles get more titles, and mostly sooner, but I don't think that allows them to overcome their shortcomings.

NASO, didn't a dev already say that the game was running fine on his ATI card? I've spent hours reading nearly all the "dev" forums so I am nearly positive none of this has been answered, and mostly not even asked. My post count is misleading; I've lurked extensively. Copied and Edited from Q's to Dev's Take 5: 1. AKARI, as a corollary to your comment on engine efficiency: is part of the framerate disparity between K1/2 and Halo on XBox because Halo was programmed very specifically for XBox in addition to KotOR's programming being more 'lazy'? On my 2yr old PC for which the CPU is the bottleneck, K1 ran fine at 1280x960 except during particle effects like smoke and grenades, while Halo PC, which has no nifty effects like grass blades and speed blurring (frame buffer FX) and rarely has necessarily high-poly surfaces like human faces, ran poorly at 1024x768 whenever there was anything reflective around (which was a good chunk of the time). No FSAA on either one and 32 bpp on both, as I recall. I noticed the fps drop during combat when getting movies with fraps, so I don't think I'm just pausing too often to notice. 2. Oh yeah, and can ya'll make higher-res textures for the blasters for K2 PC? K1's looked terrible, as do what I've seen of XBox K2's. I realize its third person, but jeez! Are you assuming that better textures would make the low weapon poly counts (e.g. square or hexagonal 'cylinders' as I recall) so obvious that the blasters would still look bad? 3. I have only seen this asked once and never answered, but it is quite important: will the targeting system ignore mines when enemies are about (you couldn't target enemies with mines in your l.o.s.). 4. I realize that a retreat command would be hard to implement, but what about a hold command? Is that included in defensive 'stance?' 5. Will there be an option (in .ini file perhaps) to choose the res. of the HUD instead of having its scaling locked in? The K1 HUD at 800x600 takes up far too much screen real estate; at 1280 'twas was fine, probably best at 1024. I would literally wait for a mod for this before buying K2. 6. Will we be able to get to game menus from minigames and game-rendered (non-PC dialogue) cutscenes? (I remember seeing someone, but not a dev, say no, while devs said the cutscenes simply wouldn't be annoying) KotOR was the only game I ever had to regularly exit by killing it with the task manager. <_< 7. Will Alt-Tab'ing (or the game in general) be stable? Will K2 not randomly create corrupt/invalid auto and quicksaves? Don't get me wrong, I loved KotOR, but it was despite a lack of polish/debugging. At least the 'empty' box moniker shows you've on the right track in the polish department. EDIT: OK, so from after forum reading it seems that many PC'ers had huge bugs (esp. on ATI's), and many had absolutely none. My bugs, however, were on an internally compatible, well-cooled nVidia/AMD system. So very varied hardware-specific testing seemed to be lacking. I am assuming that OE is using these 2 mo. between XBox and PC data being given to manufacturing to do just that this time. *Fingers crossed*

EnderWiggin, among PC games only RTS's and crappy shooters require few buttons. With RTS and RPG's, the mouse is worth more than its weight in buttons, and comparing button counts on PC and console is misleading (the mouse can effectively use movement and 1 button to replace 10 other buttons, as in KotOR). That said, keyboard shortcuts are faster, and once I finally started using them (on my 5th time through KotOR) they were indeed a lot faster than mousing. On the other hand, the K2 XBox screenshots (don't know about K1) make it obvious that there is a scroll menu for actions, which implies that the control system has been simplified for XBox, at the expense of time efficiency. If the K2 PC control system is the same, it would probably be my biggest complaint about the game. Even amongst PC shooters, look at Splinter Cell: PT, which requires AT LEAST 20 BUTTONS.

Well, the Int XBox being delayed/not being rushed is the only thing that seems to support only my ****amamie theory, if indeed Christmas materialism is less rampant elsewhere. So is it?

Well, you seem to need 20 Persuade to do certain things, so I would get to 17 then my 12 Charisma +5 from Master Valor would get me to 20. Though I suppose you could keep trying to get an 'automatic hit' roll instead. I didn't notice that persuade is a class skill for Jedi cuz for NPC jedi in K1 this isn't the case, as I recall. I always started Scoundrel so I didn't know anything about PC jedi class skills except that computer use and repair weren't among them, and treat injury was.

I didn't say it was why I thought the PC was delayed; I said it was a possibility for why the XBox seemed rushed, and that PC compatibility testing was probably all that caused it. As for DSLuke: does the rest of the world care that much about commercial Christmas? I think Christmas started in Europe, but Americans are the ones known for being materialistic. Translation definitely shouldn't take that long; I don't know about NTSC-PAL conversion (though I doubt that it's time consuming).

There is another possible reason: XBoxers are mostly younger than PC'ers and more likely to be in college, from whence they will have to depart homewards for Christmas break (while XBoxers in HS have their gaming equipment at home anyway). If LA/OE had released the PC version Dec. 6, it would have wrecked a lot of finals and not been accessible for quite a while after getting it for Christmas for many of us. Not to mention that College kids' parents don't get them presents that will distract from their kids' studies. Which is to say they rushed the XBox version to get it out before Christmas but didn't see any reason to for the PC version. For what it's worth though, hardware compatibility testing is the most likely issue. I am amazed that it took ya'll a 1 1/2 pages to mention this. A lot of people, myself included, had bigger bugs (and seemingly non CRPG-related) with K1 than any other games, while a lot of people had absolutely none. It would have been obvious to the devs at OE that very varied hardware-specific testing was needed for K2 PC.

Not only does it need to be offered on DVD, but the DVD needs to be in a jewel case. Then I can put it in my CD rack and the box in my cabinet. Should be cheaper to produce than plastic movie DVD(like) case. Eidos uses DVD-like cases for CD games and they suck. Won't hold a manual well for one thing. And we NEED a good physical manual, esp. if K2 has the same Alt-Tab problems as K1. No part of actual computer building is hard anymore. The only hard part there ever was was jumpers on MB's, and they're all jumperless now by default, I think. Making sure stuff is compatible and equally capable is now the hardest part, and that's not really part of building it. The only problem I've see with DVD drives is that mine plays audio CD's too fast and noisily, but it's a problem with fast CD-only drives too, and might be correctible with firmware updates.