markussun

This higher age of gamers in this poll isn't surprising to me at all. I think it was last year that a report conducted by the gaming-industry was released which showed the average age of the gamer (across all platforms) to be 27. This of course was a wake-up call for game developers/publishers, who were still catering to the young teenage demographic, which they thought to be the majority. Not so. The gaming community is maturing -- and I love it, because I consider gaming an art form just as books or film. We may see many more "mature" (in the sense of sophisticated) game releases in the coming years. The only alarming development is the consolidation of the big publishers. But as with all things in life, the bigger fish are slow and unflexible. There might then be a renaissance of innovative gaming coming from small up-start companies who will soon be able to self-publish on the internet.

Yeah, it's hard to say which composer was better at this task. Jeremy Soule is very strong with melodies -- literally every track he composed for KOTOR1 is a theme in itself, and these themes were beautiful and evoked certain feelings. The musical style though sounded more like general fantasy, I have to criticize. Mark Griskey on the other hand wrote tracks that aren't necessarily themes. They are not so strong on melody, but rather feel like commentary, to evoke the proper feeling for the situation. This is of course a valid approach, very close to how music is composed for film. And he totally succeeded in capturing that signature Star Wars style, that John Williams created. What I dislike in both games is the fact that the composers were only allowed to compose a maximum of 1 hour of music for the games. This is way too little for such long games as RPGs tend to be. Both KOTORs are loop-fests when it comes to the music... the music repeats itself constantly, since the tracks average only one minute in length. So you get a 1-minute track for one location for example, that constantly loops. Of course you have to thank LucasArts for this, since they have to pay the composers by the minute. And LucasArts, being as miserly as they obviously are about music, won't pay for more than roughly an hour of music. Apparently other developers/publishers seem to understand the importance of music in an RPG much better. Look at the excellent work in Neverwinter Nights. I was shocked when I found out that NWN contained roughly 210 minutes (!) worth of music. That's 3 hours and 30 minutes of composed music! Wrap your mind around that. I'm sure Griskey would have loved to compose more music for KOTOR2, to make it less repetitive and give it a richer experience. If Atari/Bioware can afford three and a half hours of music for NWN, LucasArts should be too, for a AAA flagship title such as K2. Oh, and get ready for this: In the expansions for NWN (like Hordes of the Underdark), Jermey Soule contributed another one hour of additional music. That's just for an expansion, which typically re-uses a lot of the main music already. So, here is the irony: An expansion to NWN has as much Soule music as either of the KOTOR games. And those are full games which have a much longer playtime than either the NWN expansions or even the NWN original campaign. If you can get a chance to listen to the whole NWN music, do so. Altogether, Jeremy Soule composed over 5 hours of fantasy music, and each and every track is outstanding -- no fillers, no shortcuts! I have to say I'm totally flabbergasted at this effort. I consider Soule's music in NWN to be his masterpiece effort so far, both in sheer size, depth and quality. He seems to really love fantasy, because he put all his heart into it. Even his music in KOTOR1 cannot compare. It just doesn't sound as rich and sophisticated as the work he's done in NWN. I don't know why... maybe his full talent only comes to play when he's less restricted by time and is allowed to compose longer tracks. Or maybe he's even annoyed by such miserly music budgets demonstrating an underappreciation of music by the game companies. At any rate, Soule can compose incredibly haunting music, some of it touching the genius of Hans Zimmer's best efforts (listen to 'mus_templegood2.wav'). His range and diversity are so far best demonstrated in the magnificent NWN score. I think for the fantasy RPG genre, Jeremy Soule is the top choice, bar none. And for this reason, I truly hope that for NWN 2 the developers will again commission Soule's talent to compose the score, and will again allow the budget to accomodate 3+ hours of in-game music. Obsidian, I hope you are listening! And don't dare to degrade the music to MONO...

The project is right on track, and if there is enough demand in the end, I will go through with it. I wouldn't call it "upsampling" anymore... it's more like "audio forensics"... LOL. Or stereo field reconstruction. It's a pain in the ass, but the end result is worth it. But first and foremost we need to get LucasArts to realize their big mistake and have them release the full/proper/original STEREO music in a forthcoming patch. That is top priority if we want the music to be properly fixed. To this end, I again appeal to everyone to email LucasArts and tell them (in a polite manner) you want the 44kHz *STEREO* music back in the game. Do not underestimate the power you have as a customer. Every voice/email counts...

Excellent. Thanks for all the comments, guys! This is going in the right direction. Keep it up. If more people let LucasArts know how they feel about this MONO music issue, something will soon be done about it. Please contribute to this effort by emailing LucasArts and letting them know directly. Let's all pull together on this.

Excellent. Thanks for all the comments, guys! This is going in the right direction. Keep it up. If more people let LucasArts know how they feel about this MONO music issue, something will soon be done about it. Please contribute to this effort by emailing LucasArts and letting them know directly. Let's all pull together on this.

Very well put, MacGamer! Particularly the last 2 sentences. I would like to encourage everyone reading this thread to email LucasArts (even if it's just a quick line or two) at the following valid email addresses: pr@lucasarts.com ((!) official LucasArts Public Relations address) mbihr@lucasarts.com ((!) Mary Bihr -- she's the Vice President, Global Publishing, and cares greatly about customer opinion) rscott@lucasarts.com ((!) Ronda Scott -- Community Relations Specialist, it's her job to collect & report customer feedback) I have researched these emails high and low (LucasArts has NONE on their website; they make it very hard to be contacted) and confirmed their validity and importance. Send one copy each of your feedback to all of these 3 email addresses. LucasArts can intentionally or unintentionally ignore all the posts in the forums (they are a busy company after all, and reading forum threads is very time-consuming). But I assure you, if only half of all the 130,000 people who viewed this thread (or even just the ~700 posters from this thread!) would use these email addresses to let LucasArts know directly how their customers feel about the unfinished release of KOTOR2, it would create a small earthquake over at LucasArts which they simply wouldn't be able to overlook... These 3 emails I researched to be the most effective in dealing with LucasArts. It's the only way you can make a noticeable difference. Save your energy from this thread and channel it properly to where it has the largest effect. If you don't give direction to your criticism as a game-purchaser, then all the good will and effort here on the forums will just be that -- background noise. If you want their attention, email them. PS: I'm sorry if any LucasArts emails have already been posted in this thread (although I doubt it, since these are not widely known), but I just didn't have the time to read through all the ~700 posts of this mammoth thread right now. But I fully support the effort. Either LucasArts restores the game, or the community will do it. And I will certainly do my share (i.e. restoring the proper STEREO music). Remember: Every voice counts.

Maybe we can convince the composer to post more of his music he did for KOTOR2 on his website. Go to Mark Griskey's website and check out his music downloads. On the front page you can find his email address. I for one would love to see the Jedi theme (mus_jedi) available on his website in high quality STEREO. Any other suggestions for requests? Go email him!

Yes, it's beautiful. I'm very impressed by Mark Griskey's talent as a composer and look forward to hearing much more of his music in future games. In my opinion, no other composer ever came as close in style to emulating John Williams' signature Star Wars score as him -- and he did more than 1 hour of it. That in itself is a small feat. It's the first Star Wars game by LucasArts (featuring a newly created score) that actually sounds like a Star Wars game, music-wise. This only makes the soundtrack in KOTOR2 that much more important. There have been several attempts to emulate John Williams' style in LucasArts games before, but they never quite hit the mark. After KOTOR1, I actually thought about suggesting Michael Giacchino to LucasArts. He's terribly gifted (of Medal of Honor fame, and now scoring on the big screen; his latest effort being "The Incredibles"), and after scrutinizing his style and certain passages, I was convinced that he could pull it off and create some very authentic Star Wars music. Don't get me wrong: What Jeremy Soule scored in KOTOR1 was also beautiful and effective. I'm a fan of Soule's various game music myself. But he has a very distinct style and "sound" to his music, that doesn't seem to change much from game to game. Especially his percussions. He is a master of themes and melodies, though. That is clearly his strength. However, the small issue I had with Soule's KOTOR1 music was that, while beautiful, it didn't quite belong in style to the Star Wars universe, that Williams has created. Griskey's score in KOTOR2 is a perfect match. I doubt that Giacchino could have pulled it off any better. I applaud LucasArts for having picked a composer who can create such authentic Star Wars music. But then of course, I can't ignore the fact that they have then butchered that score to MONO quality in the end.

And it was well-deserved for a blunder like this. LucasArts should be ashamed to be associated with a parent company who has perpetually strived to raise public awareness for high-quality audio reproduction. I know no game in the industry that would deliver music in MONO and at such a low quality. Only titles 8 years and older would do that, and that's because of technical limitations at that time. That's why MIDI music was so prevalent in games 10 years ago, and it was of course also in STEREO. I'm glad for you that you were able to enjoy the music in its current state. Ignorance is bliss, as they say. Some people can't see (or hear) what they're missing until they have a chance to A/B compare. If I could demonstrate to you the impact it has on the game's atmosphere to go from MONO music to STEREO music, you wouldn't want to defend the MONO music in its current state anymore. I have done these tests within KOTOR2, and I can assure you it makes the game come alive! You go from a narrow & small atmosphere to a grand & epic one. Words are very lacking to express concepts that touch on audio and music. You simply don't know what you're missing... (w00t) KOTOR1's music was in high-quality *STEREO* (like all other games in the industry). Give me one good reason why KOTOR2 should not!?

Hi everyone, I've updated my original post in this thread with a link to LucasArts' online feedback form, which is the only way you can send them feedback and let them know what's troubling you about KOTOR2. I've supplied this direct link here, because I found that many people can't find it on LucasArts' website. They make it very difficult to find (only after using their online troubleshoot system and then only after it fails to help you, and even then the link isn't obvious). It seems LucasArts isn't too keen about hearing from their customers... Anyways, if you are one of the people who enter threads at the last page, I encourage you to read the original post on PAGE 1 of this thread to learn about the music issue in KOTOR2. If you're not in the mood of reading a lot, here is my short plea: Please contribute just a few minutes of your time to make a difference and email LucasArts: CLICK HERE to request the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2 Telling LucasArts how you feel about the degraded music is arguably the single-most effective way you can contribute to this effort. If continuing feedback shows them that this is a bothersome issue to more than a handful customers, they will do something about it (as history showed with KotOR1).

Hi everyone, I've updated my original post in this thread with a link to LucasArts' online feedback form, which is the only way you can send them feedback and let them know what's troubling you about KOTOR2. I've supplied this direct link here, because I found that many people can't find it on their website. They make it very difficult to find (only after using their online troubleshoot system and then only after it fails to help you, and even then the link isn't obvious). It seems LucasArts isn't too keen about hearing from their customers... Anyways, if you are one of the people who enter threads at the last page, I encourage you to read the original post on PAGE 1 of this thread to learn about the music issue in KOTOR2. If you're not in the mood of reading a lot, here is my plea: Please contribute just a few minutes of your time to make a difference and email LucasArts: CLICK HERE to request the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2 Telling LucasArts how you feel about the degraded music is arguably the single-most effective way you can contribute to this effort. If continuing feedback shows them that this is a bothersome issue to more than a handful customers, they will do something about it (as history showed with KotOR1).

No, not yet. <_< Have you? I tell you, we need more people giving feedback to LucasArts about this issue, or nothing will come of it, and we'll be stuck with MONO music forever. It's a pathetic status quo, that I just won't accept. And I swear, I have a surprise in store for you Meshugger (and Swaaye, and Kiwegapa, and Mark, and Ace, and everyone else I can't remember who spoke up about this issue!), and for all who appreciate good sound quality and music in games. I can't talk about it yet, but I swear here and now, that if LucasArts/Obsidian won't do anything about this horrid music issue -- I will! Either way, the music will be fixed. It can either be done properly by LucasArts' chosing, and if not, it will be done on our (the community) terms. As a long-time gamer and Star Wars fan, I won't put up with this rubbish they've thrown us... :angry:

I see. Oh, don't get me started on the hard-coded mouse-buttons. I lobbied Bioware more than a year ago to make mouse-buttons mappable in the game (all three buttons for that manner), but they're just not flexible enough to do it. If that functionality would be present, I could configure myself a much better control scheme, and would be a happy gamer. For example, I don't friggin need the left mouse-button be "run forward" when I'm playing in mouse-look mode. I don't know of any PC gamer who runs with the left-mouse-button. Movement is what the WASD keys are there for. Rather, I would map "default action" to the LMB (when in mouse-look mode). That would be more intuitive, since mouse buttons are action buttons, and I'm used to playing like that. It's a simple rule on the PC: MOUSE = looking and action/interacting Keyboard = player movement and selection (at least in 3D games that give direct control over the player character) Right now, my workaround is to map "default action" to the spacebar, which is the closest I can get to intuitive controls (since jumping isn't necessary). But the proper solution would be for a developer to allow gamers to remap everything to their liking. You can impossibly accomodate everyone's preferences in a hard-coded control scheme...

I hope not, because it's actually a feature, not a bug. The <SHIFT> key is being used as a modifier-key to cycle through the action menu commands for each category. Its use is the same as in KOTOR1: E.g. SHIFT-1 cycles through your attack feats... or SHIFT-4 through all available friendly force powers, and so on. I always play that way, since it's much faster to use the keyboard for this than aiming with the mouse and clicking those arrows to find the right attack/power/item etc. It also frees up the mouse for other tasks. If you're a mouse-only user playing the game with just one hand, then you won't use that feature of course. But I can't play like that, too much of a click-fest. If you play efficiently using both mouse and keyboard with both of your hands, then you'll find the SHIFT key to be very handy: 'target enemy'... SHIFT-cycle through a category number... and then press the number again to use it. But if you are playing the game with mouse-look ON (as I'm trying right now, and it's quite more immersive), then you absolutely need this feature, since you don't have the mouse pointer, but instead use the mouse to look around and have direct control of the camera. In this case the keyboard controls are essential. You should always be able to select your attacks/items with the 1-9 keys, and for that you need the SHIFT key to be able to access them all. But it's of course annoying if keys are hard-coded. I totally agree, because I have criticized this point already in KOTOR1, and they haven't improved it. There are several keys hardcoded in KOTOR2, and it's just not a good way to design games like that -- always give the user the option to remap keys! They should allow us to remap this "cycle categories" feature to ANY other key. There is no excuse why it has to be hardcoded to <SHIFT>. I for one always prefer to map the walk/run modifier to the SHIFT key, which is also a standard in PC games, btw. Now I'm forced to map it to some other key (how intuitive is the default "B"? geez...), and there aren't many more keys left that could be easily reached with either my pinky finger or thumb. I would use the <ALT> key instead, but guess what? It's hardcoded, too. To this day I haven't figured out what <ALT> is used for. But it's a dead key. If anyone knows what <ALT> modifies, please tell me. <_< Oh, and Kiwegapa, I'm not surprised that you thought the unmappable <SHIFT> key is a bug. Nothing of this is mentioned in the manual! (in both KOTOR games). I happened to find out by accident when playing the original KOTOR. So, please Obsidian! Don't fix this "bug"... :D

Reinoc, yes, I think you're right and I was assuming too much. Obsidian after all was just contracted to do this game and it's LucasArts who decides what goes in and what goes out. They own the IP. And they provide the funds to make Obsidian work. But I just expected more out of the relationship of these two companies. I always thought that Mike Gallo from LucasArts is a reasonable and affable guy, a person who is approachable and who will listen. And given the clout that Obsidian should have in the industry (being comprised of so many esteemed veterans with proven track records), I would have expected a much closer relationship of mutual respect and equality between Obsidian and LucasArts. I can't believe that Obsidian was perfectly happy with the end result, probably in agony over abandoning several aspects of their design for KotOR2. It seems to me they really put their heart into it, and any developer who does so wants their product to shine in the end. Which means, they were likely eager to finish and polish certain things which they had to abandon for the rushed holiday release. No, I don't want Obsidian to work for free. But I think they were still under contract and pay since they released the Xbox version, leading all the way up to the PC release... all those months. And right now, they still seem to be paid by LucasArts, since they just announced they're working on a patch. THAT is what puzzles me... what happened in all those 3 months between Xbox and PC release? They obviously were paid. But it seems nothing much has happened to polish and improve the game. And that's why I don't know who to blame for this. Either Obsidian doesn't truly care for their game (which is hard to believe, but I don't know for sure now), or they got bullied into submission by LucasArts to not do anything to improve the game (which is hard to believe, too, since it's counter-productive). All I know is, that I would have expected much more action from Obsidian, given their history. They should have influence enough to convince LucasArts's Mike Gallo that some aspects of the game are unfinished and that they want to complete them for the PC version. They're not some start-up garage developer who has no say, for crying out loud. At the end, whatever petty politics are behind those inactions, it surely rubs off on Obsidian's fledgling reputation as a new company in the public eye. Gamers are a very vocal bunch and reputations spread quickly through word-of-mouth. This is the age of the internet, both a curse and a bliss, depending on how you look at it. I just wish it had worked out differently for KotOR2, both for our sake (as gamers) and Obsidian's sake (as a developer with potential). Of course, a lot can change in a patch or two. I just don't expect it to happen after what I have (or haven't) seen from this LucasArts/Obsidian relationship. But I'd love to be proven wrong, of course.

Adraeus, thanks for reminding us of the hard realities of the game industry. I can see your point, and there is much truth in it. However, you're being a bit unfair in regards to id-soft, jumping on the bandwagon of the popular cynicism that id's games are mere "3D engine showcase applications". Yes, id's games don't necessarily offer super-deep statistical/tactical gameplay (as in RPGs/RTSs) as we have grown to expect in recent years even from 1st person shooters (NOLF, Far Cry, Tron etc.). But that is just a trend from recent years and there is nothing wrong with designing games that are more visceral than cerebral. Don't forget what 'id' stands for in psychological terms and why id-soft has made that a philosophy for their game-designs. From the Doom-series, through Quake, all the way to their recent efforts, id's games have always had great/fun gameplay, as well as breakthrough technology. But instead of having "deep" gameplay, they have something else in spades: ATMOSPHERE. And that creates fun gameplay, too. Great game-design doesn't always have to have a cerebral paradigm. I will never forget the experience of playing Quake1 and its atmosphere which has since been etched into my mind forever (I still sometimes dream about that dark and bizzare world). Calling John Carmack a game developer/designer is a bit off. He's always been in the role of technical director. He likes mathematical challenges. He doesn't design games. It was always guys like Tim Willits, John Romero, American McGee, who did the game design and map creating. These guys come to him and tell him what kind of experience they want to achieve, and it's John's job to write an engine that enables them to do so. He has never been known as a game designer. It's not a one-man team after all... Doom3 is their most balanced effort so far -- balanced between cutting-edge technology and cutting-edge artistry and design. I'm not an id-fanboy, but I appreciate that what they do, they do right. And that doesn't happen a lot in this industry.

Sloth, well, I didn't want to contribute to making you feel even more confused, sorry. I would wait for the 1st KotOR2 patch, which should be imminent. However, if these screen artifacts appear in other games as you stated, then it's a global problem you have, particularly when it happens in 3DMark. KotOR2 is an OpenGL game, while 3DMark is DirectX. Two things you want to try (that you haven't tried yet): 1. Unplug your Geforce from your slot and plug it back in firmly. Often simple things like a slight misalignment can cause the weirdest issues. 2. Re-install DirectX9.0c If you have a friend who can supply you with an equivalent Geforce card, do that to ascertain if it's a hardware issue on your card, or rather a problem of the rest of your hardware and software. Good luck.

adrich81, CMSS2 on Creative's cards is actually a very cool thing. I love it. First, it (or CMSS1) is absolutely needed if you want positional audio also work in the *virtual* positions around you, i.e. where there is no real physical speaker. With CMSS you get the full 360 degree surround virtual placement of sounds through HRTF algorithms. That holds true for both playing with real speakers or with headphones. Second, in CMSS2 you'll get an extra subtle room reverb added to the sound. CMSS1 is totally "dry", i.e. no accoustical effects added. The reverb in CMSS2 is not a strong reverb, i.e. it doesn't make sounds "echo", but rather a simulation of a small room's accoustical first-order reflections. It's quite subtle. But it helps make the sound space sound bigger and more natural. It sounds like you're in a real room rather than in an accoustically dead recording studio. CMSS2 is especially useful when playing with PC surround speakers or headphones, since it makes it sound as if you are playing back on a much larger home theatre setup (with bigger speakers that are much wider apart). Note though: If you activate 5.1 you won't get the HRTF virtual surround placement of sounds! Creative does not have HRTF algorithms for a 5.1 speaker setup. What that means is that the sounds will only come out straight from the direction of the speakers and when a sound is placed somewhere between two speaker, you only get a simple mix of the sound between the two speakers! For example, if a sound should come straight from your left, there is no physical speaker there, and in 5.1 it won't be positional... CMSS is deactivated in that case. Gaming in 5.1 very much limits and destroys the positional surround virtualization. The center speaker for example interferes with the natural panning of the sound between front-left and front-right speaker. If you are playing by yourself and are sitting in the sweet spot right between the left and right speaker, I do not recommend playing in 5.1, at all. 5.1 is best used for movies with prerecorded Dolby Digital 5.1 information, where you need a center speaker for the dialogue coming from the center of the picture, especially when you don't sit in the sweet spot and are watching with other people in the room. For gaming, 5.1 is totally inappropriate. Use 4.1 instead. In an interactive sound simulation, the sound can be positioned in realtime anywhere in a circle around you, and very precisely. 4.1 speaker setup best simulates this circle, and it's there that Creative's HRTF algo's kick in (once you activate CMSS) and make sound appear from any direction even between your speakers. It's as close to a smooth circle as you would expect. In 5.1 the 3D sounds "jump" and "shift" between your speakers, and the surround "circle" is very broken and inaccurate. You can do these tests yourself by downloading Sensaura's 3D Player. Creative doesn't offer useful tools like that. It uses DirectX and you can load a sound and make it circle around you at a constant speed. I use either 4.1, or more often than not, headphones, because I turn it up much louder. The headphone HRTF algo's in Creative's drivers aren't the best in the industry (Sensaura is known to have the best virtual positioning), but they work well enough. So, with a good set of headphones (I would always recommend Sennheiser without hesitation), and CMSS2 activated, you actually get an incredible 3D sound experience, and can play at much louder and more immersive sound levels, without bothering or waking up the neighborhood. And CMSS is really cool for listening to STEREO sources like music. Or when a game only supports STEREO, because it makes the stereo source sound much wider. Even MONO is improved (although i rarely get any mono sources... KotOR2 being the only recent case with its butchered mono music). I hope this info is helpful to someone. EAX in KotOR2: Well, it works but I wish they would also make speech and player sounds (e.g. footsteps) be affected by the EAX reverb effects. They should be part of the 3D environment! I don't like the speech to be played back "dry" (2D), it would sound much more realistic and immersive if the characters' voices would also reverb naturally in the environments/rooms they're standing in. Same goes for the player/footstep sounds. It bothers me a little. I can understand why developers sometimes opt to playback dialogue in 2D (to make sure it plays loud and won't be missed), but it's jarring and unrealistic, and shouldn't be done in a virtual 3D game. It destroys the illusion of being in a natural sound environment if half the sounds are played in 3D and the other half are played in 2D (exaggerating here). The only time sounds should be played in 2D, is if they are either background music or some non-positional looping ambient soundscapes. I wish they would fix that for KotOR2 in a patch.

Erm, I think I have to address some misconceptions Mark, you're right, the uncompressed wave format of the music files in KotOR2 is defined with a 32kHz sampling rate. The truth though is that only up to 10 kHz are really inside the wave. They used a 10900 Hz lowpass filter for encoding, so all the 32kHz are wasted... they could have easily sampled in 22kHz and it would have had the same effect. That's how bad the music has been degraded, which I have explained in this thread: http://forums.obsidianent.com/index.php?showtopic=30375 So, saying it's "32000 Hz mono" is giving LucasArts more credit than they deserve for this butchering of the music. It's much worse than that (myself, I like to say it's 10kHz mono, because that's what's practically left and audible). But technically you're of course right. As far as EAX 4 goes... it's just a minor update (API extensions) to "improve" something that has already worked in EAX 3: something called 'Multiple Environments/Morphing'. What this basically does is make the transitions between rooms of different reverb settings (the EAX late-order reflections, or "echos") more seamless and smooth, and also lets you hear different room reverbs simultaneously. Without 'Environment Morphing' when you cross the reverb boundaries of two different rooms/environments, the switch is abrupt and noticeable (more or less depending on the listener's perception, of course). Without 'Multiple Environments' all sounds you hear will only have the one reverb setting of the room you're currently standing in, even if they came from other rooms that have other reverb properties. It's actually not a new EAX API, as far as I understand it, just an extension. Creative simply devised a new increment number for their EAX "standard" in order to make their recycled Audigys for the holiday season appear as if they have new features. Very cheap marketing tactics... but when it comes to Creative, I think nobody is surprised anymore. So, in order to benefit from EAX "4" you basically have to install the webupdates of last year that "enable" that feature. They're just bugfixes, that's all there is to it. All smoke-screen. In games themselves, you only need EAX 3 support, since 'Multiple Environments' was always already defined and a part of EAX 3. I hope this clarifies things. Btw, EAX 3 is not an open standard, i.e. it's a proprietary Creative API, which they don't allow other sound card makers to use. EAX 1 and EAX 2 are open standards and have since been included in the DirectX API. Kiwegapa, I think you confuse something with 3D positional audio support and the sound being in mono. The music being in mono is of course very sad and we've discussed this already in other threads. That's because music doesn't have to be positional, in facts it's always used as a 2D sound in games (think about it, you don't want music to come from a certain direction, since it's not tied to any objects in the game... well, unless e.g. you have a radio on a table in a game, then that music needs to be positional :D ) But generally music is to be played back 2D, i.e. coming out "plain" from the front stereo speakers as it was recorded. However, all other *sounds* that are emitted by sound-emitting objects in a 3D space HAVE to be in mono. You need the sound to come from a distinct direction, so using them in stereo would make no sense. It would be pointless and a waste of resources. Any sound effects you hear in games are always (with rare exceptions) MONO, because they have to be, coming from a single source. Stereo is an invention that was made primarily for music. Stereo is actually nothing but an early and crude attempt to capture & position sounds in a virtual space in front of you, if you think about it. It's what 3D sound cards for the PC now do in realtime, and much better: in a 360 degree circle around you. EAX works as expected, since Miles Sound System (which the game uses) has never let me down before. The music in KotOR 2 is the biggest offender, really, because being MONO, the whole music "sound-stage" collapses into the middle and sounds hollow, narrow and dull. Man, I can't get over that. I will never forgive LucasArts for doing that to us gamers and to the composer. Unless, of course, they fix it... then I might forgive and forget. "

Yes, I can tell the difference, too. In my listening tests (with a very good "monitor") I think 190 kbps at VBR (!) (variable bitrate) for encoding MP3 with a good encoder like LAME v3.90 results in very transparent audio, practically indistinguishable from the original source. Personally, I don't use MP3 for private encoding anymore. I've switched to OGG Vorbis. That superior codec has convinced me that MP3 is outdated. At any rate, I think that 128 kbps is the absolut MINIMUM acceptable encoding quality for MP3 music in games. 190 kbps VBR would be nice, but given that game music plays with many other sound streams concurrently, any encoding artifacts would likely be masked and much less offending. In a game's case I find 128 kbps acceptable. On the other hand, in KOTOR2's case, when a developer offers a built-in music player in their game to give the gamer a chance to listen to the pure music tracks outside the game, one would expect that they realize that even 128 kbps is too little for such a feature. It is apparent that the developers thought of their symphonic music so highly that they put in the extra effort to enable us to enjoy it separately from the game. The music player feature literally screams: "Here, enjoy our great music because we think music is such an important aspect of this game". And then you wake up to the fact that they perverted the music to MONO 10kHz at one of the lowest MP3 bitrates imaginable... It's all schizophrenic to me. Makes you wonder... why didn't Lucasarts instead offer this music player feature as a 1-900 playback service over the telephone line? They could have made some extra profit and the quality and experience wouldn't be much of a difference to what it is now. Now, there's a brilliant idea. " Go to Mark Griskey's website (the composer) to download and listen to a few KOTOR2 music tracks -- in full quality! Only makes you weep more... Anyways, thanks to all of you for the comments so far. Keep this thread going and please stay on-topic. And don't forget to email LucasArts (!) and tell them you want the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music back in the game. It only takes you a minute, but is arguably the best thing you can do if you want to see an effect... because Obsidian is powerless, and I doubt Lucasarts is following this message board. The more people do this, the higher the chances for a fix.

Sloth, I have some interesting news for you. The screen artifacts you captured in your BMP... I have just reproduced them by chance. The black dots you see there follow exactly the polygonal edges of the scene geometry. It's like seeing the wireframe of the scene as an overlay. Now, this happened simply by chance when I mistakingly ALT-tabbed out of the game and it then had restore the rasterizer/framebuffer. The game is pretty unstable when doing that, so I wasn't surprised. But the fact that it happened to me might be interesting for you, because it tells you: 1. It's not your PSU (although changing to a good one is always desirable) 2. Your GPU is not damaged (very unlikely) 3. It's very likely a driver/API problem I'm asserting this, because my GF6800GT runs flawlessly in all games, and still I could reproduce these artifacts, which points to a software<-->hardware conflict. I know this isn't much help, but I thought you may find this interesting.

Sorry for the long rant below to get my point across, but if you don't like long reads, here's the short version: To all who read this, Please contribute just a few minutes of your time to make a real difference and email LucasArts: CLICK HERE to request the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2. Telling LucasArts how you feel about the degraded (MONO 10 kHz muffled) music is arguably the single-most effective way you can contribute to this effort. If continuing feedback shows them that this is a bothersome issue to more than a handful customers, they will do something about it (as history showed with KotOR1). Please, be proactive -- every voice counts! Why is the music in KOTOR2 such a muffled, narrow-sounding, low-quality mess? Because it's all compressed in the lowest bitrate with a 10 kHz-filter, and, to make things even worse, converted to MONO! Why MONO?! Is this a bad joke? I was very much looking forward to this new Star Wars-like soundtrack, particularly since LucasArts had created enough buzz about KOTOR2 using a live symphony orchestra this time around to achieve a "big, powerful sound", with legendary Skywalker Sound mixing it. Yeah right. This game goes back for a refund first thing on Monday. KOTOR 2 is buggy enough, but as a gamer seeking quality entertainment I won't accept such sub-standard audio quality in a 2005 game release that comes on 4 CDs! There is no excuse for that. I won't take space concerns as a poor excuse: The whole music assets in KOTOR2 take up a measly 24 MB in its current butchered state. There is over 80 MB (!) unused space left on the 4th CD. If the music were encoded in standard 128 kbit/s STEREO, it would just need an extra 41 MB (2.7x more bytes) -- which would have easily fit on the 4 game CDs. This is preposterous. No... outrageous! Music is *half* the experience for me both in gaming and in movies. It totally creates the atmosphere of the setting, characters and story. Music can generate emotions and feelings and thus pull you into this fictional world -- an effect of immersion that (apart from being there for real and experiencing your own emotions) cannot be achieved by starring at 3D graphics on a flat (2D) 19" monitor alone and listening to some dialogue. Gaming on a flat screen is like looking through a small window into a larger world. But it's the music which opens it up and enlarges that world for you. I'm sure many gamers here are with me on this. Music is the most powerful tool any storyteller can have, because it acts like a second narrator, who can comment on things that are too hard or impossible to put into words. As long as game graphics are still so cartoony and artificial-looking, it is the music's job to add proper gravity and seriousness to the fictional world and story. Ok, enough of this rambling. I'm sure you get my point of how crucial I regard music in this medium (particularly RPG/story-based games). And LucasArts gives us music in MONO (!) at 10900 Hz (half the frequency) at the lowest bitrate?! Excuse me? Are they out of their minds? This ignores and erases more than 10 years of progress in game audio! Music in MIDI at that time was already presented in STEREO. Even games such as Quake (released in 1996) efficiently used pre-recorded STEREO music tracks streamed from the CD (which made a huge difference to the scary atmosphere of the game). LucasArts' own Grim Fandango used a great STEREO soundtrack in 1998 to create an epic experience. That was in the "golden days" of LucasArts of course, when such brilliant minds as Tim Schaffer were still employed there. The original KOTOR from 2003 supplied Jeremy Soule's epic music in 16-bit 44Khz *STEREO* at 128 kbit/s, which is close to CD quality, and the proper way to present Star Wars-like music. It's a symphonic score for crying out loud! Do you people know what MONO 10kHz 48 kbit/s does to the music? In case you don't, let me spell it out: 10 kHz: The music files are technically encoded in 32kHz, but the shocking truth was revealed when I analyzed the MP3 file-header (thanks Swaaye!), which stated that the music was encoded with a "Lowpass Filter: 10900 Hz". I couldn't believe that, so I fired up CoolEditPro and did a Spectral Analysis on the music files: There is absolutely nothing above 10900 Hz! That's what a lowpass filter does, it discards all frequencies higher than that. I was sitting there in disgust upon discovery of this fact. The human ear can hear up to 18-20 kHz. What this practically means is that all the "highs" of the original music were cut out -- half of the frequency range of the music is missing. It will sound muffled and dull because of that. And it does. 48 kbit/s MP3 lossy compression: It is well-known that the MP3 codec utterly fails at lower bitrates (less than 128 Kbit/s). At such a low bitrate as used in KotOR2 the music will be garbled and muddled due to excessive audio artifacting (aliasing) because of running out of bits. This in turn will affect the mid-range and make the music sound "hollow" and "metallic". Symphonic music with its strings and trumpets is particularly prone to this. MONO: Do I have to comment on what MONO does? Come on people, think about it, MONO! Is this the 50s? Playing back a symphonic (!) score in mono will make the whole range of the soundscape collapse. The musical score will not sound wide and epic, but small and narrow, like through a telephone. If you play your games with headphones, mono will give you a very unnatural music-in-your-head experience, which can become quite distressing to your ears after a while (listening fatigue). Why didn't LucasArts encode the whole soundtrack in telephone-quality (~8kHz mono) right away? :angry: Man, I'm really upset about this. Releasing a full-priced title in such a poor quality is an INSULT to the gamer and also to the composer (Mark Griskey, who btw did an incredible job making this soundtrack much more Star-Wars-sounding than even Jeremy Soule did in KOTOR; Soule used synthesizers, Griskey a live orchestra and a style very similar to John Williams!). A game company's job is selling an experience to the gamer -- to involve the gamer emotionally. That's the holy grail of game development. LucasArts has just shown me that they don't care about or understand the meaning of gaming "experience", and how that is achieved by a large degree through music. A shame for a company associated with arguably the greatest pioneer in sound-mastering and reproduction in the history of cinema. Some readers might think I'm silly for missing out on the good things that KOTOR2 has, by returning the game because they bastardized the music. Well, try to see it trough my eyes (or ears): The original KOTOR for me really came to life through the epic music, more than anything else. It made the game for me. I was looking forward to KOTOR2 already after having heard the preview music, simply because the new music captivated me. And now this! Who made this insane decision to present this beautifully composed symphonic live music in MONO 10kHz at the lowest bitrate? I'm certain that it wasn't Mark Griskey. I would love to find out how he feels about his work being disregarded and mistreated in such a way. He must be in agony as an artist and composer. What's wrong with LucasArts? Why bother recording with a live Symphony Orchestra (which needs a bigger budget) to achieve a more organic higher musical quality, when you then pervert it by degrading it to near-telephone "quality" for the gamer who pays $50 for the experience? This is utterly pointless. Let's not forget that LucasArts is under the auspices of George Lucas, the very man who repeatedly stressed the fact that music and sound make up for 50% of the entertainment experience (I couldn't agree more). Are we surrounded by hypocrites here? Is LucasArts still a Lucas company? How come a game from EA like "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" gets THX treatment (!) (and it really made a difference, it sounded incredible), and LucasArts' own games have never received THX treatment since the program was introduced (by Lucasfilm) for games almost 1.5 years ago? Something is really wrong with this company, and how they treat their own games. Some would call such behaviour schizophrenic. The final product's quality stands in direct contrast with what they promote in such features as the Designer Diaries. Have you people read the "Designer Diary #5 - Music" where Mark Griskey writes about his work on KOTOR2? If not, go read it! You will be surprised how much care and expertise supposedly went into creating and recording the soundtrack. And then you will ask yourself even more why none of that effort ended up in the final game. I'm totally baffled about this. Here are some interesting tidbits from that interview: Yes, and I as a customer would also be thrilled if what was captured by John Kurlander would actually be reproduced when I play the game. As you can see, an incredible effort was undertaken to live-perform, record, and mix the musical soundtrack for KOTOR2. Even Skywalker Sound was involved, the top address for sound recording and mixing in the movie industry. And then some moron in the game design process made the unexplicable decision to degrade it all down to near-telephone quality for the final product. I truly wonder who made that stupid decision, and I wish the person(s) responsible for this mess will be fired. To Obsidian: Weren't you able to have some say in this? Why did you let yourself be bullied towards such a questionable decision? The question still remains why they did that. It's not a space issue (as demonstrated above already). It's certainly not a performance issue either. Decoding and playing MP3 music needs only one decode stream. MP3-decoding is very cheap on today's CPUs, it's a non-issue performance-wise (the bottleneck in the KOTOR engine is your gfx card, not the CPU). It makes no difference to CPU load if the music source is a 128kbps or 48kbps file (original KOTOR had 128kbps music and ran just fine). To give you an idea of how insignificant MP3 decoding in games is performance-wise, take games like the recent Doom3 which have to decode OGG streams (which need roughly twice the CPU decoding power than MP3). Doom3 uses OGG encoding for almost all sound files, not just for music! At any given moment, Doom3 has to decode 10-20 OGG sounds in realtime (in a fight even more), which is a lot. Still, sound decoding in Doom3 takes up less than 6% of CPU load on a ~1500Mhz minimum spec system (which I confirmed via email with Robert Duffy, lead programmer at id-soft). And that is in Doom3. MP3 decoding in KOTOR1 or 2 is a cakewalk compared to that, especially when we're talking about only 2-3 streams that need realtime decoding, i.e. the music stream, ambient stream and speech. Other sound effects are in WAV. So, that is not the reason why LucasArts/Obsidian decided to butcher the music files. Do you know what I suspect? It just dawned on me: Maybe they supplied the music in such a low quality so they could later sell a potential Soundtrack Audio CD to the public, and make some extra profit from that. Then customers would have a reason to purchase the high-quality CD, since the in-game music was so crappy. But that ploy won't work with me. I want to experience the full-quality music while playing the game, not while driving in my car. If I'm wrong, LucasArts/Obsidian, then prove me wrong: Release the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2 as a separate download (patch) to the public, so that we PC gamers can enjoy the music as it was meant to be. Then I will again consider buying the game. Because, the other possibility is that this audio blunder was a big slip-up. After all, why are the music files encoded in the exact same format they used for their voiceover files? 48 kbit/s in MONO is sufficient for speech (I can accept that), but no sane person would encode music in that same quality. Maybe in the rush to release the game, they accidentally batch-encoded all the files in the same format they configured for speech. Another fact substantiating this is the inclusion of a music track player (!) within the game, as a menu option feature (similar to the cutscenes player). This is pure irony: Who in their right mind would include a music track player so that you can listen to the great music in pure form (without sound effects) if the whole soundtrack is reduced to this sad telephone-quality state? This shows me that the music was always planned to be of CD-quality. If not, why code a CD-Player-like feature then? Also, the splash screen (game launcher) on the Windows desktop features the music in CD-quality STEREO. This is the only time you'll ever hear the epic soundtrack (a short segment) in the proper way -- in the launcher window! How ironic. Once you hit the game's main menu, it's all muffled & narrow mono. If they offered us the proper 44kHz STEREO music in a patch, it would only be a 60 MB download for the music, according to my estimates. That's not too big, considering that many game-patches these days have similar (and even bigger) sizes: Rome Total War - 60MB, Armies of Exigo - 50MB, Star Wars Battlefront - 173MB. In the meantime, I urge the fan community to come up with our own solution to this. Maybe someone can somehow gain access to the higher quality stereo music files and then we could create a MOD to fix this mess ourselves. At least we would make enough noise about it to get noticed. I think if enough of us push in the right direction and let them know what we think about this blunder, they will eventually do something about it. This is unacceptable. Nobody who bought the game should accept this. If you go to a multiplex theater and pay 13 bucks to watch a new movie, would you just accept watching it in analog MONO? Would you allow them to rob you of the full experience (Digital Surround) if you know better? Go email LucasArts! CLICK HERE to request the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2. Telling LucasArts how you feel about the degraded music is the single-most effective way you can make this happen. If they receive continuing feedback on this issue, the chances are good they will do something about it. If you just sit here idly, nothing will come of it. We need to make noise about this -- and act NOW, before the first patches are coming out, because now is the time when Obsidian is still funded by LucasArts to implement any such changes. Later it will be in vain. Also, it might help to add your comment to this thread and thereby let Obsidian know what you think about this blunder. It'll ensure that this thread stays a hot topic. But don't forget: It's LucasArts who needs to get the feedback from you... *they* need to be convinced in order to make the decision to fix this. The music playback in KOTOR2 is below standards -- more than 10 years backwards. We consumers need to speak up about this to let game companies know that we don't accept sub-standard audio! Otherwise they will increasingly treat us like gullible pushovers, who shell out the money and won't know the difference. If we stay passive and don't demand quality, more and more developers will adopt the habit of only doing as much as they can get away with in order to ensure sales. Their marketing team will do the rest. Quality and artistic vision will then begin to erode. Do you want this to happen? It's in your hands. Vote with your gaming dollar and make your voice heard. Small steps can make a difference. And yes, there are always more important things to worry about in life. I can imagine some readers thinking "geez, this guy is extreme, is that all he worries about? I can't even run the game properly!" etc. etc... It's all a matter of perspective. There are many other things in life I worry about, too. But that doesn't mean we have to ridicule things we deem less of a priority. We all have our own convictions and priorities. Right now, I have set my focus on this issue, and it's important to me. And that's really all there is to say. I wrote this big post to inform and to make a difference. Help to make this effort not be in vain... Also, check out Kiwegapa's useful KOTOR 2 Game Issues Guide. It is a comprehensive guide to the game's Issues & Bugs, and a central collection of Feature Requests & Performance Tips.

Sounds good. Can you provide a link to your guide please? Also, if you could link back from your guide to this thread, and thus bring more readers to this article, I'd appreciate it.

It enables the game's internal audio engine and mixes the sounds in software, instead of using your soundcard's hardware buffers. This should be your last choice, and only be activated if you have severe sound issues or compatibility problems between the game and your sound card. In most cases, software mixing will only give you basic STEREO output and stress your CPU unnecessarily, since the mixing is done in software.

Sorry for the long rant below to get my point across, but if you don't like long reads, here's the short version: To all who read this, Please contribute just a few minutes of your time to make a real difference and email LucasArts: CLICK HERE to request the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2. Telling LucasArts how you feel about the degraded (MONO 10 kHz muffled) music is arguably the single-most effective way you can contribute to this effort. If continuing feedback shows them that this is a bothersome issue to more than a handful customers, they will do something about it (as history showed with KotOR1). Please, be proactive -- every voice counts! Why is the music in KOTOR2 such a muffled, narrow-sounding, low-quality mess? Because it's all compressed in the lowest bitrate with a 10 kHz-filter, and, to make things even worse, converted to MONO! Why MONO?! Is this a bad joke? I was very much looking forward to this new Star Wars-like soundtrack, particularly since LucasArts had created enough buzz about KOTOR2 using a live symphony orchestra this time around to achieve a "big, powerful sound", with legendary Skywalker Sound mixing it. Yeah right. This game goes back for a refund first thing on Monday. KOTOR 2 is buggy enough, but as a gamer seeking quality entertainment I won't accept such sub-standard audio quality in a 2005 game release that comes on 4 CDs! There is no excuse for that. I won't take space concerns as a poor excuse: The whole music assets in KOTOR2 take up a measly 24 MB in its current butchered state. There is over 80 MB (!) unused space left on the 4th CD. If the music were encoded in standard 128 kbit/s STEREO, it would just need an extra 41 MB (2.7x more bytes) -- which would have easily fit on the 4 game CDs. This is preposterous. No... outrageous! Music is *half* the experience for me both in gaming and in movies. It totally creates the atmosphere of the setting, characters and story. Music can generate emotions and feelings and thus pull you into this fictional world -- an effect of immersion that (apart from being there for real and experiencing your own emotions) cannot be achieved by starring at 3D graphics on a flat (2D) 19" monitor alone and listening to some dialogue. Gaming on a flat screen is like looking through a small window into a larger world. But it's the music which opens it up and enlarges that world for you. I'm sure many gamers here are with me on this. Music is the most powerful tool any storyteller can have, because it acts like a second narrator, who can comment on things that are too hard or impossible to put into words. As long as game graphics are still so cartoony and artificial-looking, it is the music's job to add proper gravity and seriousness to the fictional world and story. Ok, enough of this rambling. I'm sure you get my point of how crucial I regard music in this medium (particularly RPG/story-based games). And LucasArts gives us music in MONO (!) at 10900 Hz (half the frequency) at the lowest bitrate?! Excuse me? Are they out of their minds? This ignores and erases more than 10 years of progress in game audio! Music in MIDI at that time was already presented in STEREO. Even games such as Quake (released in 1996) efficiently used pre-recorded STEREO music tracks streamed from the CD (which made a huge difference to the scary atmosphere of the game). LucasArts' own Grim Fandango used a great STEREO soundtrack in 1998 to create an epic experience. That was in the "golden days" of LucasArts of course, when such brilliant minds as Tim Schaffer were still employed there. The original KOTOR from 2003 supplied Jeremy Soule's epic music in 16-bit 44Khz *STEREO* at 128 kbit/s, which is close to CD quality, and the proper way to present Star Wars-like music. It's a symphonic score for crying out loud! Do you people know what MONO 10kHz 48 kbit/s does to the music? In case you don't, let me spell it out: 10 kHz: The music files are technically encoded in 32kHz, but the shocking truth was revealed when I analyzed the MP3 file-header (thanks Swaaye!), which stated that the music was encoded with a "Lowpass Filter: 10900 Hz". I couldn't believe that, so I fired up CoolEditPro and did a Spectral Analysis on the music files: There is absolutely nothing above 10900 Hz! That's what a lowpass filter does, it discards all frequencies higher than that. I was sitting there in disgust upon discovery of this fact. The human ear can hear up to 18-20 kHz. What this practically means is that all the "highs" of the original music were cut out -- half of the frequency range of the music is missing. It will sound muffled and dull because of that. And it does. 48 kbit/s MP3 lossy compression: It is well-known that the MP3 codec utterly fails at lower bitrates (less than 128 Kbit/s). At such a low bitrate as used in KotOR2 the music will be garbled and muddled due to excessive audio artifacting (aliasing) because of running out of bits. This in turn will affect the mid-range and make the music sound "hollow" and "metallic". Symphonic music with its strings and trumpets is particularly prone to this. MONO: Do I have to comment on what MONO does? Come on people, think about it, MONO! Is this the 50s? Playing back a symphonic (!) score in mono will make the whole range of the soundscape collapse. The musical score will not sound wide and epic, but small and narrow, like through a telephone. If you play your games with headphones, mono will give you a very unnatural music-in-your-head experience, which can become quite distressing to your ears after a while (listening fatigue). Why didn't LucasArts encode the whole soundtrack in telephone-quality (~8kHz mono) right away? :angry: Man, I'm really upset about this. Releasing a full-priced title in such a poor quality is an INSULT to the gamer and also to the composer (Mark Griskey, who btw did an incredible job making this soundtrack much more Star-Wars-sounding than even Jeremy Soule did in KOTOR; Soule used synthesizers, Griskey a live orchestra and a style very similar to John Williams!). A game company's job is selling an experience to the gamer -- to involve the gamer emotionally. That's the holy grail of game development. LucasArts has just shown me that they don't care about or understand the meaning of gaming "experience", and how that is achieved by a large degree through music. A shame for a company associated with arguably the greatest pioneer in sound-mastering and reproduction in the history of cinema. Some readers might think I'm silly for missing out on the good things that KOTOR2 has, by returning the game because they bastardized the music. Well, try to see it trough my eyes (or ears): The original KOTOR for me really came to life through the epic music, more than anything else. It made the game for me. I was looking forward to KOTOR2 already after having heard the preview music, simply because the new music captivated me. And now this! Who made this insane decision to present this beautifully composed symphonic live music in MONO 10kHz at the lowest bitrate? I'm certain that it wasn't Mark Griskey. I would love to find out how he feels about his work being disregarded and mistreated in such a way. He must be in agony as an artist and composer. What's wrong with LucasArts? Why bother recording with a live Symphony Orchestra (which needs a bigger budget) to achieve a more organic higher musical quality, when you then pervert it by degrading it to near-telephone "quality" for the gamer who pays $50 for the experience? This is utterly pointless. Let's not forget that LucasArts is under the auspices of George Lucas, the very man who repeatedly stressed the fact that music and sound make up for 50% of the entertainment experience (I couldn't agree more). Are we surrounded by hypocrites here? Is LucasArts still a Lucas company? How come a game from EA like "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" gets THX treatment (!) (and it really made a difference, it sounded incredible), and LucasArts' own games have never received THX treatment since the program was introduced (by Lucasfilm) for games almost 1.5 years ago? Something is really wrong with this company, and how they treat their own games. Some would call such behaviour schizophrenic. The final product's quality stands in direct contrast with what they promote in such features as the Designer Diaries. Have you people read the "Designer Diary #5 - Music" where Mark Griskey writes about his work on KOTOR2? If not, go read it! You will be surprised how much care and expertise supposedly went into creating and recording the soundtrack. And then you will ask yourself even more why none of that effort ended up in the final game. I'm totally baffled about this. Here are some interesting tidbits from that interview: Yes, and I as a customer would also be thrilled if what was captured by John Kurlander would actually be reproduced when I play the game. As you can see, an incredible effort was undertaken to live-perform, record, and mix the musical soundtrack for KOTOR2. Even Skywalker Sound was involved, the top address for sound recording and mixing in the movie industry. And then some moron in the game design process made the unexplicable decision to degrade it all down to near-telephone quality for the final product. I truly wonder who made that stupid decision, and I wish the person(s) responsible for this mess will be fired. To Obsidian: Weren't you able to have some say in this? Why did you let yourself be bullied towards such a questionable decision? The question still remains why they did that. It's not a space issue (as demonstrated above already). It's certainly not a performance issue either. Decoding and playing MP3 music needs only one decode stream. MP3-decoding is very cheap on today's CPUs, it's a non-issue performance-wise (the bottleneck in the KOTOR engine is your gfx card, not the CPU). It makes no difference to CPU load if the music source is a 128kbps or 48kbps file (original KOTOR had 128kbps music and ran just fine). To give you an idea of how insignificant MP3 decoding in games is performance-wise, take games like the recent Doom3 which have to decode OGG streams (which need roughly twice the CPU decoding power than MP3). Doom3 uses OGG encoding for almost all sound files, not just for music! At any given moment, Doom3 has to decode 10-20 OGG sounds in realtime (in a fight even more), which is a lot. Still, sound decoding in Doom3 takes up less than 6% of CPU load on a ~1500Mhz minimum spec system (which I confirmed via email with Robert Duffy, lead programmer at id-soft). And that is in Doom3. MP3 decoding in KOTOR1 or 2 is a cakewalk compared to that, especially when we're talking about only 2-3 streams that need realtime decoding, i.e. the music stream, ambient stream and speech. Other sound effects are in WAV. So, that is not the reason why LucasArts/Obsidian decided to butcher the music files. Do you know what I suspect? It just dawned on me: Maybe they supplied the music in such a low quality so they could later sell a potential Soundtrack Audio CD to the public, and make some extra profit from that. Then customers would have a reason to purchase the high-quality CD, since the in-game music was so crappy. But that ploy won't work with me. I want to experience the full-quality music while playing the game, not while driving in my car. If I'm wrong, LucasArts/Obsidian, then prove me wrong: Release the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2 as a separate download (patch) to the public, so that we PC gamers can enjoy the music as it was meant to be. Then I will again consider buying the game. Because, the other possibility is that this audio blunder was a big slip-up. After all, why are the music files encoded in the exact same format they used for their voiceover files? 48 kbit/s in MONO is sufficient for speech (I can accept that), but no sane person would encode music in that same quality. Maybe in the rush to release the game, they accidentally batch-encoded all the files in the same format they configured for speech. Another fact substantiating this is the inclusion of a music track player (!) within the game, as a menu option feature (similar to the cutscenes player). This is pure irony: Who in their right mind would include a music track player so that you can listen to the great music in pure form (without sound effects) if the whole soundtrack is reduced to this sad telephone-quality state? This shows me that the music was always planned to be of CD-quality. If not, why code a CD-Player-like feature then? Also, the splash screen (game launcher) on the Windows desktop features the music in CD-quality STEREO. This is the only time you'll ever hear the epic soundtrack (a short segment) in the proper way -- in the launcher window! How ironic. Once you hit the game's main menu, it's all muffled & narrow mono. If they offered us the proper 44kHz STEREO music in a patch, it would only be a 60 MB download for the music, according to my estimates. That's not too big, considering that many game-patches these days have similar (and even bigger) sizes: Rome Total War - 60MB, Armies of Exigo - 50MB, Star Wars Battlefront - 173MB. In the meantime, I urge the fan community to come up with our own solution to this. Maybe someone can somehow gain access to the higher quality stereo music files and then we could create a MOD to fix this mess ourselves. At least we would make enough noise about it to get noticed. I think if enough of us push in the right direction and let them know what we think about this blunder, they will eventually do something about it. This is unacceptable. Nobody who bought the game should accept this. If you go to a multiplex theater and pay 13 bucks to watch a new movie, would you just accept watching it in analog MONO? Would you allow them to rob you of the full experience (Digital Surround) if you know better? Go email LucasArts! CLICK HERE to request the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2. Telling LucasArts how you feel about the degraded music is the single-most effective way you can make this happen. If they receive continuing feedback on this issue, the chances are good they will do something about it. If you just sit here idly, nothing will come of it. We need to make noise about this -- and act NOW, before the first patches are coming out, because now is the time when Obsidian is still funded by LucasArts to implement any such changes. Later it will be in vain. Also, it might help to add your comment to this thread and thereby let Obsidian know what you think about this blunder. It'll ensure that this thread stays a hot topic. But don't forget: It's LucasArts who needs to get the feedback from you... *they* need to be convinced in order to make the decision to fix this. The music playback in KOTOR2 is below standards -- more than 10 years backwards. We consumers need to speak up about this to let game companies know that we don't accept sub-standard audio! Otherwise they will increasingly treat us like gullible pushovers, who shell out the money and won't know the difference. If we stay passive and don't demand quality, more and more developers will adopt the habit of only doing as much as they can get away with in order to ensure sales. Their marketing team will do the rest. Quality and artistic vision will then begin to erode. Do you want this to happen? It's in your hands. Vote with your gaming dollar and make your voice heard. Small steps can make a difference. And yes, there are always more important things to worry about in life. I can imagine some readers thinking "geez, this guy is extreme, is that all he worries about? I can't even run the game properly!" etc. etc... It's all a matter of perspective. There are many other things in life I worry about, too. But that doesn't mean we have to ridicule things we deem less of a priority. We all have our own convictions and priorities. Right now, I have set my focus on this issue, and it's important to me. And that's really all there is to say. I wrote this big post to inform and to make a difference. Help to make this effort not be in vain. Also, check out Kiwegapa's useful KOTOR 2 Game Issues Guide. It is a comprehensive guide to the game's Issues & Bugs, and a central collection of Feature Requests & Performance Tips.