beancounter

This debate has been going on forever. About three years ago I broke down and bought an Xbox, mainly for the reasons listed here. I had an old computer, and my wife was in graduate school so I did not have a whole lot of money to upgrade my computer. At the time, the Xbox had a lot of potential. It had a huge hard drive, the marketing promised new downloadable content for your games and it promised Broadband internet support with Live. Plus, there was a ton of good titles coming out on the Xbox - Fable, Halo, KOTOR, Morrowind, Mech Warrior, Unreal Tournament and Jade Empire. It sounded like the perfect replacement for a PC. However, I have been very disappointed with the Xbox. The hard drive was a complete waste and the downloadable content was a joke. The majority of games do not support downloadable content, and the content that is available usually amounts to one or two extra maps that the developer had probably already created when the original game was released. Just marketing hype. Xbox Live was good, but you can only play Deathmatch for so long with the same maps. And this will never change because Mirco$oft has made it clear the Xbox will never be opened up to user made maps and mods for fear of piracy. The last thing I *hate* about the Xbox is the crappy controller. If you have never played Halo or UT with a mouse & keyboard you do not know what you are missing. Once you do that you will never want to use the Xbox controller again. I will say though that it is sweet to hook the Xbox up to your home theater system. So, last year I went ahead and upgraded my computer. I purchased a 9800 pro, an AMD2500, new motherboard, hard drive and memory for around $650. Basically a brand new system less a monitor. You could buy the same system today for probably $500. Like everyone has been saying, you do not need to spend a lot of money. On a whim I purchased some of the games I was playing on the Xbox for the PC. Right, off the bat I was blown away at how much better the graphics were. There is just no comparison. And my favorite thing about the PC - user made mods and maps. There are tons of new maps and mods available that really increases the replay value of your games. I feel sorry for all of the Xboxers that still have to play the same vanilla game over and over again. Since, I upgraded my computer over a year ago I have only played my Xbox a couple of times, mainly to play Halo2. There just is no comparison between a computer and the Xbox. It is like comparing Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer to Corona. Pabst is cheap and will get the job done, but Corona tastes a whole lot better.

Alraic, forget XWA for now. If you have not finished your mod after 7 years, you might as well wait a couple more months! I have adjusted Kotor's AI so that the NPC would consistently reapply shields, cast force breach at your character and cast master speed. But there is a big show stopper with this. Some of the individual NPC's will use their own AI battle script for a couple of rounds. This causes these NPC's to act very erractily for the first couple of rounds.

Interesting. What kind of changes have you done with the AI? Are you actually changing the AI scripts or are you just giving them new powers? I have experiemented with changing the actual AI scripts. To be honest, the AI is not that bad and I have seen a lot worse. Morrowind always comes to mind for the absolute worse AI. The AI just seems bad for TSL because the NPC's have such a poor selection of powers and feats to use. If you give the NPC's higher level feats/powers and then switch them to run the Boss AI, they are much more dangerous. This is something I have been testing for the next version of the Hardcore Mod.

You should have no trouble picking up scripting for KOTOR. The language style is very simlar to C++. I am a programmer myself and it did not take long to pick it up. Dealing with the source scripts are pretty straight forward, the hard part is trying to Mod the decompiled scripts. The code is very simular to assembly, and it relies on the stack pointer to retrieve variables. It is not fun to play with. This website is the best one I have found that explains the decompiled files. http://www.torlack.com/index.html?topics=nwndata_ncs Here is the link to Fred Tetras great program Kotor Tool. http://kotortool.home.comcast.net/ Aurora, good luck on the Mod. It would be awsome if you make it. If you get stuck, just post your question over at Holowan. There are plenty of people over there who would be willing to help out on a specific problem.

A cool idea, but a little unrealistic in my opinion. Even with a full team working on the mod it would take a lot of time to put it together and bug test it. Heck, it would probably take Obsidian a fair amount of time to put it together. Don't forget Obsidian ran out of time and they had a dedicated team working probably 15 hour days, seven days a week trying to complete it. (In case you don't know the game industry works long hours) A completely new ending is extremely ambitious. Aurora, it is a great idea but you really need to focus in on what you want to do. Maybe add one or two cutscenes or a dialog. Something along those lines is possible. Really scope out what you want to do and post it over at Holowan. Start small, and build on it. Trom, you should really come over to Holowan and check it out once you get your user ID. The k_ai_master is the main script driver so to speak, but there is a lot more to it than that. Also, I really doubt that there is one GOTO statement that you can unblock that would add all of this content back in. It looks like Obsidian stoped half way through and switched directions completely. But I guess it can not hurt to look, who knows you just might get lucky. :cool:

Go to ATI Website and download their 4.11 Drivers Here is the link for WINDOWS XP http://www.ati.com/support/products/radeon...ousdrivers.html Go to the add/remove section (Start - Control Panel - Add/Remove) and get rid of all the old drivers - anything with ATI in the name You could also run Driver Cleaner just to be safe - here is the link http://www.drivercleaner.net/ But it is probably not necessary Restart your computer Run the download from the ATI Website which will install the drivers If you run into some problems try this website www.anandtech.com - Check out the forums for Graphic Drivers Restart your computer one last time Hope it helps

I am running the 4.2 and it looks up right after the first movie. I am getting ready to install the 5.2 drivers now. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> OK, I uninstalled by old drivers the 4.2 and installed the 4.11 drivers with success! KOTOR 2 now no longer hangs up after the first movie.

I am running the 4.2 and it looks up right after the first movie. I am getting ready to install the 5.2 drivers now.