sanitystream

I was having troulbe with some movies not appearing - I could hear them, but I couldn't see them. I finally figured out it was the frequency refresh program that I use to override Win XP's default low refresh rate. This appears to conflict with KOTOR 2's own built-in refresh rate option. As soon as I disabled my program, the movies appeared!

I just got to the part where I asked the old lady (Keira) what her story is and the game then loaded a movie of some sort to show her history. Problem is, I can't SEE anything, I just hear the audio. Also, when the game first loads, I never do see the logos or anything, yet I can hear them. No video though. Yet some other movies throughout the game DO play fine. This makes no sense. Anyone else having the same problem? I'm playing on a Radeon 9800 Pro.

You really think so? With a PS3 or Xbox 2, I imagine you'll have a persistent broadband connection and as soon as you load a game it will automatically patch itself, no user intervention required. You probably won't even know it's happening. Now think about the current KOTOR 2 debacle on the PC -- what exactly are we patching? The graphics driver? The OpenGL driver? Which version to use? And that's all before Obsidian even releases a REAL patch!

I'm a big PC fan, but all this nonsense surrounding bugs, crashes, and poor performance is why people just give up in frustration and buy consoles. I've been reading through the threads trying to solve my troubles on a Radeon 9800 Pro, and I cannot *believe* the workarounds that some people are finding necessary (download the 4.2 Cats, uncompress the OpenGL driver, swap it with the newer one, etc.) This is nuts. Somehow I doubt the Xbox version of KOTOR 2 required people to mod their Boxes and install patches. Whatever. As soon as the PS3 or Xbox 2 hit the market, I think I'm giving up on PC gaming. I'm sick of this. KOTOR 3 (if there is one), is going to be played in my living room while I sit in my couch. I figure it'll all be HDTV by then.

I've got a Radeon 9800 Pro and I'm wondering if anyone else is getting crappy framerates on the mining colony? Things were going decent enough until I got down into the tunnels where there are lots of droids and all of the sudden I'm getting major lag. I've disabled AA, anistropic filtering, frame buffer effects, tried Cats 5.1, 4.11, and the 4.2 openGL driver, but nothing seems to help. Anyone else getting the same problem? It seems to me the smoke/fog effects have something to do with it. I know everyone loves Bioware, but their KOTOR graphics engine is one of the crappiest I've ever seen.

Then you won't like what you hear on this one. I'm the same way - an MP3 at 128K bugs me, so this REALLY bugged me. Or how about the fact that all the voice acting and sound FX *are* high audio quality, yet as you're listening to it, there in the background lurks the mono, low-fidelity music score accompanying it all. A bizarre combination that I've never heard before. Worse, the idiots at Obsidian include an option in the Main Menu called "Music" which lets you play the music tracks outside of the game. Cool idea in theory, but in reality it only calls attention to their idiocy when you actually listen to the mono encoded crapfest of what would otherwise be cool new Star Wars music. This is certainly a first in gaming, as we take a GIANT LEAP backwards in audio presentation -- and worse, it comes from Lucas! The company who pioneered THX!!! My old Atari ST and Amiga could do better than this. Heck, at this rate, I wish they'd just done a MIDI driven score, or how about we just yank our soundcards out and go back to the built-in PC speaker! (Yes, I'm disgruntled).

Wrong. They did update the core engine for KOTOR 2 somewhat by adding new graphical touches and I think they sacrificed audio quality to do it. It's a tradeoff -- more graphical bells and whistles for lesser audio quality. As anyone who played KOTOR 1 knows, it's not a very fine-tuned engine and was pretty slow at times even on good machines. KOTOR 2 is probably worse, and I think they tried to compensate by shaving off the higher music quality so it would still run on roughly the same PC specs as KOTOR 1. As for content length -- from the reviews I've read on the Xbox version, KOTOR 2 might actually be a bit shorter, so I doubt CD space had anything to do with it and adding a fifth CD wouldn't have been a problem in this day and age. I also disagree with your belief that the textures and models are higher res -- I don't think so. All looks the same to me. The bottom line is Obsidian has released a AAA title with cut-rate, muddled music quality that sounds like it was done in 1995 on a 386 machine and an 8-bit Soundblaster. In this day and age of 3.6Ghz machines and Audigy soundcards, I *know* they can do better.

I don't think CD space has anything to do with it. The first KOTOR came on the same number of CDs and still featured high quality music. I think this is purely about performance. The higher quality sound files require more memory and processing power... which takes away from the graphics, and that's probably why they sacrified it. It's stupid coding to blame. Like I said before -- if Far Cry or Half Life 2 can have all the bells and whistles and still have CD-quality music, then why can't KOTOR 2? Answer: BAD PROGRAMMING.

Yep, I posted a rant about this last night myself a couple pages back. It's true. KOTOR 2's in-game music is all low res mono. As near as I can tell from using Soundforge, the music files are all 22Hz, 8-bit mono instead of 44Hz, 16-bit stereo, which makes very muddled, low-grade quality. The difference is VERY noticeable to anybody who appreciates music, and especially anybody who appreciates the Star Wars music. The only time the quality is high is the main title crawl (Star Wars fanfare) in the very beginning. After that, it's mono city. I find this unforgivable and it really pisses me off that Obsidian did this. I can only figure they needed to milk performance gains for the graphics, so they short-changed the music quality. Considering the graphics are not very great to begin with, this is mystifying and I guess we chalk it up to horrible coding. I mean, Half Life 2 or Far Cry have stunning graphics and they can still feature music that's high quality, so WHAT GIVES?!?!

Well here's an update to my earlier message. I used Soundforge to nose around the KOTOR music directory. While I can't seem to actually play the music files, it does say they are all 22Hz/8-bit/mono! Can you believe it? We had better quality music back in 1995! What the heck is up with this? It doesn't appear to be a setting you can change either, like picking "High" or "Low" Quality music. These are the only files installed in the folder --and they're all 8-bit mono crap!

I'm not sure this is even a bug, but I just started playing KOTOR 2 and immediately noticed the in-game music isn't in stereo. The main title crawl (Star Wars "fanfare") IS in stereo, but right after that, once the game starts the music switches to mono. And it isn't even very good quality either -- it sounds like a 96K MP3 mono file. (However, the rest of the sound FX are in stereo, go figure) Also, from the main menu they let you play the individual music tracks and those are mono as well. I'm positive KOTOR 1's music was both stereo and high quality, since I was just playing it a few weeks ago. So what gives? Why would a brand new game released in 2005 have mono music? Huh?