Kiwegapa

Omega doesn't change the OpenGL driver itself. He takes the original Catalyst and fixes bugs and tries to increase performance. Usually Omega drivers will be good to get you a few performance points in a benchmark or one or two extra frames per second in a game. They're good drivers, but they don't work miracles. 9mak9, unfortunately your card does not support OpenGL 1.4 in hardware, which is a requirement for KOTOR 2 on ATI chipsets. It's not the driver but your actual hardware. KOTOR 2 requires OpenGL 1.4 on ATI chipsets and OpenGL 1.3 or 1.4 on nVidia chipsets. Current ATI drivers support up to OpenGL 1.5 and so do current nVidia drivers. But in order for the driver to work, the hardware functions must be there. airic, I have a fairly high-end system and when playing in 1600x1200 I get about 60 FPS in most places, though it goes as high as 80 and as low as 20. Dantooine got me 2 FPS before the DVBO fix and about 50 after.

Cleaning out the dust and lower temps should help, but try to make sure that you're running the latest video drivers after a clean install (i.e. Uninstall the old drivers, reboot into Safe Mode, run Driver Cleaner or a similar util, reboot, and install the new drivers.) If you can, make sure your power supply is powerful and that the voltages it provides don't fluctuate much. As far as game settings go, disable Soft Shadows and Frame Buffer Effects, and open swkotor2.ini and add the line Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1 under the [Graphics Options] section.

The international 1.0a patch does NOT fix any game issues. It replaces the corrupted PDF manual that shipped with the European version. Many bugs in KOTOR 2 are intermittent...you can have them some times and later they'll vanish for no apparent reason. I myself was unable to complete swoop races on Telos, but now when I load the save I made at the Telos track, I can race and win just fine.

I understand how frustrating it is to have to deal with these bugs. I'm having a few myself, though not as many as a lot of people are. The problem is that Obsidian does not control release status. Lucasarts controls QA and authorizes release and any further support or patches. As the publisher and owner of the rights to Star Wars, they can make Obsidian finish working whenever they want so that they can ship the product and meet their schedule. Obsidian may or may not have made mistakes. I don't know. But Lucasarts is the group that has the power. This also means that they are the group we need to contact nicely so that they can authorize Obsidian to create a patch. It sucks, but right now in the software industry, the publisher is God. That's why Bioware is working on their own games right now, thought up by them and published by them: So they can take some control back. This meant letting someone else work on KOTOR 2 and NWN 2. Since they could help pick who should work on those projects, Obsidian was given them as a friendly gesture to help start the company off in remembrance of the good relationship that Black Isle Studios and Bioware had. Yeah, the bugs suck. But I'm putting my faith in Obsidian that they'll do the right thing if Lucasarts will let them.

Alienware is good quality, even if their price is higher than I'd want to pay. Not only do you get a solidly designed product, but you get more configuration options from them than from any other pre-built manufacturer, and from what I hear, good support. The other two high-end system builders are VoodooPC and Falcon Northwest. I haven't really heard much about the Alienware swappable laptop graphics from anyone who actually has one, just people wanting to get one.

Well, I had that problem on Nar Shaddaa, but it wasn't related to any crystals. The lightsaber had no crystals in it except the color crystal and it was held by another party member, not the main character. The way I fixed it was to switch to the character who had the lightsaber permanently on and then hit X to flourish the weapon. It extinguished itself and behaved normally after that.

I'm learning how to mod KOTOR myself, and having all the heads available from the first game would be great. I think my first modding priority is going to be upgrading the KOTOR 2 textures to a higher resolution, though.

As has been stated elsewhere, the movies were made low-res for XBox and not redone for PC. Right now there is nothing we can do to make them look better except ask Obsidian nicely to re-do them. With the amount of time that would take, think we're better off to ask for patches and more vital things.

Odd...I tried editing swkotor2.ini and neither Disable Movies=1 or Disable Intro Movies=1 had any effect. The in-game movies and the intro movies would still play. This isn't too much of a problem, though. I just renamed leclogo.bik and ObsidianEnt.bik and replaced them with dummy files. The game loads much quicker without the movies playing.

I can't help with the crashing bug, but the slowdown on Dantooine is easily fixed. Open swkotor2.ini and add the line Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1 under the [Graphics Options] section. This works on all video cards.

If you're having problems in smoky areas, try disabling Frame Buffer Effects in the graphics preferences and adding the line Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1 to swkotor2.ini under [Graphics Options]. If you're using an ATI card, also make sure to disable Soft Shadows. They absolutely kill performance. Other than that, reducing AA and Anisotropy may help in smoky areas.

Actually, UnlockedPlanetSongs controls how many songs are available in the main menu when you start the game. They're supposed to be unlocked as you travel around. PCGender, I believe, is which gender you told other characters that Revan from KOTOR 1 was. GameCompleted is of course whether you've finished the game once or more yet. CurSithLord I believe controls which Sith Lord appears standing next to the main meny when you load the game. EnableScreenShot is self-explanatory, but the odd thing is that the game seems to take screenshots whether it's set to 0 or not. Reverse Mouse Buttons is of use for left handed mouse users. Reversing the Y axis is an option present in KOTOR 1 too that may or may not make mouse use MUCH more natural to you. With it, back is down, forward is up. Without it, the game defaults to an airplane style forward=down, back=up. The other options I didn't list I believe do control the variation of appearance in NPCs, although AppearanceType might be which look you chose for your character.

Well, I hate to say it, but it is a pretty old card. From what I'm seeing when I did a websearch, there are a lot of people having driver problems with the card. If you're already using the last drivers made for that card, then you may be out of luck, A new low-end card is fairly cheap though..$30US should do it, or free if you have a recent motherboard with onboard sound. As far as getting KOTOR 2 to work with your current card, try opening swkotor2.ini in the game's install directory. Under [sound Options] you can try these options: Force Software=1 Number 3D Voices=8 Number 2D Voices=16 EAX=0 If that doesn't help, then someone more knowledgable about the Creative/Ensoniq sound cards might be able to help. But a new card would be good.

ATI claims their cards are good up to 120

When I played the original KOTOR, it was on a GeForce 4 Ti4400. I had similar problems until they released the 1.02 (I think) patch. Unfortunately, they used the old pre-patch code to make KOTOR 2 so that those problems are back. Once they release a patch, nVidia users should be fine. I'm an ATI guy now, so I'm more cautious in my optimism.

I'm not sure why you are unable to see the movies. It's happening for a lot of people with older or badly installed ATI drivers. You may want to uninstall your ATI drivers, delete all DLL files starting with ATI, and install the latest 5.2 Catalyst driver again. I can tell you that the movies are recorded at 640x480 and that playing them in a different resolution won't make them look better. You may want to try changing the settings under [Display Options] in swkotor2.ini to get the movies to play in another resolution or at least change the refresh rate and see if that improves things for you. Sorry I did not have a better answer.

You can get the file by downloading the installer for the Catalyst version you want. Run the installer, pick a directory for the files, and exit before installing. Find the file atioglxx.dl_ and you're ready to expand it. Under Windows XP, atioglxx.dll belongs in C:\Windows\System32 if you have Windows installed in the default location. Make sure to rename or make a copy of your original file first! Extract the file to a directory and then in a command prompt or DOS window, type expand atioglxx.dl_ atioglxx.dll OR you can add a path to the file if you want to expand it in a different dir, such as expand c:\temp\atioglxx.dl_ c:\windows\system32\atioglxx.dll I tried this with the file from Catalyst 4.9 and with Catalyst 4.11 and with both files I was able to run the game, but it loaded slower and when I tried to enable Frame Buffer Effects, the game crashed every time. Not sure why.

The Savegame Editor is out! It's at StarwarsKnights.com Good luck folks. Savegame editing is tricky stuff sometimes, especially with an unstable and soon to be patched game.

MANY people are having this problem, myself included. I have emailed Lucasarts, but I encourage you to do so as well and politely explain the issue and give a detailed explanation of your system and when the issue happens. I've also contacted the head of ATI's driver development team and he's taking reports on KOTOR 2 and KOTOR issues so that they can get fixed. If you're interested in posting a report, this is the thread at DriverHeaven.

Motherboad Monitor is a great tool, but it takes practice to set it up properly. Someone just wanting to check their video card temps can open the Catalyst Control Center or download ATITool or RivaTuner. Keep in mind that only later ATI cards such as the X300/X600/X700/X800 line and the 9600XT/9800XT generation with the XT suffix have temperature monitoring.

Odd. The next best thing I can suggest is to wait until the movie is playing and use the buttons on the front of your monitor to change the horizontal and vertical positioning and size. If you cannot do that, then in the advanced options of your video driver are controls for doing so. If you cannot adjust the monitor, post what your OS and video card are. Then I'll try to post the method for fixing that resolution for you.

From what I understand, temps of around 60

Does it do this every time you hit that point in the game, biscuit? I had a glitch like that, but I rebooted and all was well.

Yes, and the 5.2 Catalyst is very good, although some have reported problems. I myself find it the best ATI driver I've used yet. Be aware that Catalyst 4.12, 5.1, and 5.2 do not currently support glows around lights and lightsabers, but I've contacted the head of ATI's driver team and he's looking into it.

I agree. Relax, folks. I want a patch just as much as you do, but it's going to take time to code and to get that coding approved by the publisher, Lucasarts. I'm certain we'll either have the patch or hear word of a fix before the month is out. In the meantime, please be polite and email Lucasarts with detailed reports of your issues. Obsidian worked hard on this game and while it does have some major issues, they'll be able to help us a lot better if we explain what's wrong and tell them we need help rather than shout and be angry. The patch will come. The fact that they fixed the manual for the Europeans and fixed the SWUpdate server shows that work is being done. Once they decide which issues to fix in the first real patch, we'll hear an announcement, I bet.