Music is degraded to *MONO* 10kHz @ 48 kbit/s?!

[Evenstar]

From my knowledge there are peeps at Obsidian who would be very interested in fixing KotOR 2 in whole.  Its Lucas Arts that are holding things back.

 

I have a strong suspicion that you are exactly right. And if I were to guess, I don't think that OE is allowed to talk about the issues with the product (well, other than saying various forms of "soon.") Personally, I imagine that they are under an NDA or some equivalent to not talk about specifics with works in progress. A patch would fall under that category. Or if that theory doesn't float, the other idea is that they are trying to avoid the problem of issuing a statement about patch fixes only to have everyone and his brother crying "why aren't you fixing this other problem, too?!?"

 

I haven't purchased this game yet, and from the looks of it (primarily from the original post for this thread) I won't be purchasing it for a long time ... if ever, and I'm ok with that (I had the same opinion with Ultima IX).

 

I find it very hard to believe that in an industry such as the gaming industry, the powers that be would allow the release of a product that has mono music sampled at ~10Khz. That is totally uncalled for. I mean, my Star Wars LP that I got way back in 1978, scratchy as it is, would sound better.

 

Basically, I don't really care about the missing content; but music is one of my great loves. Thank you markussum for pointing this major problem with this product. Unless it is fixed, I guess I'll just have to be thankful for the first KoTOR (but even it got old after a while.) Perhaps this will give me more time to read up on OpenSSL.

[Afterimage]

Well, I registered here after googling for "Knights of the old republic II" disappearing game crashing. I just crashed to the desktop after killing the Exchange boss on Nar Shaddaa. Now I've got to do that all over again (and this isn't the first time).

 

I hadn't noticed the audio issues quite so much until this thread mentioned it. Now it sticks out like a sore thumb! My confidence in large corporations to address our needs "post-sale" is infinitesimal, but I did send the following letter to some of the aforementioned people at OE/LA:

 

...and I love it. Or, I would love it, if the game would quit crashing on me. Or, as many others have pointed out (see this thread -- http://forums.obsidianent.com/index.php?showtopic=30375 -- on the forums at Obsidian Entertainment), the audio was encoded properly; I can't imagine recording the audio for this game at MONO wasn't a mistake of some kind.

 

I'm torn between using honey and vinegar to make a point here. I'm sure you're all civil people like I am. I am a 28 year-old computer consultant with 4 kids. We all have to make money to earn a living. Game fans, predictably, take gaming seriously, and we hate to see support for games fall by the wayside. The fans -- your customers -- would like to see issues with crashing and the poor audio quality resolved.

 

Every business owner knows there's a goldmine in repeat business. If games coming from Obsidian/LucasArts continue to be released, what we perceive to be as half-finished, it will certainly discourage us from buying future titles, or worse yet, discourage us from gaming altogether.

 

I appreciate your non-form-letter response to this message.

 

Who knows, if we make enough of a stir, perhaps they'll respond. I'd really like to see a greater official presence in these forums. Good god, if they paid someone $8.00/hour to hang out in these forums and relay the more important messages to management, what a world of good that would do their PR! Guess they can't afford it.

[DarkPaladin]

Just out of interest, but has anyone played the XBOX version of the game? (I've not) How much different is it to the PC version? Was wondering if some of the bugs are in the console version too?

 

As for the comments made about Lucasarts "not caring" about the PC version of the game, I think you'll find that they do. If they truely didn't care, they wouldn't even bother in the first place. Consoles are all well and good, but I'd never buy one, the specs are always WAY behind that of PC's, they always will be! XBOX 2 will be behind the times when it's released... do you think it'll have a 6800 Ultra 256 graphics card with a 6600 SLI'd to it, along with 2 Gig+ of DDR2 533 speed memory? Uummm.. no, I doubt it somehow considering they cost around

[Master Dahvernas]

Just out of interest, but has anyone played the XBOX version of the game? (I've not) How much different is it to the PC version?  Was wondering if some of the bugs are in the console version too?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I have both the PC and XBox version and I am sad to say... The Xbox version is actually more "complete" in terms of gameplay than the PC version. The XBox version has a few bugs... But they are more glitches than actual show-stopping bugs like crashes and disappearing savegames and things of that nature.

 

BTW... Consoles are here to stay, so get used to it. The XBox 2 and PS3 are going to be comparable to current, high-end gaming PCs, but with a few less bells and whistles if the propsed specs are right.

 

Also...

 

The music is STILL encoded in mono, except in WMA (Windows Media Audio) format since the XBox is basically an MS-type 1999 era PC.

[iamthelorax]

Well, if the xbox's music files are wma and the PC's mp3, both at the same bitrate, it would be worth it to transfer the XBOX music to PC, since an x kbps wma is roughly equivalent to a 2x kbps mp3. I personally only record at 192 wma, but the transfer would still very worthwhile.

 

It also means that LA actually downgraded the PC music even from the XBOX version. Daaaamn. (Ha Ha, catch that, censor-matic).

[Mark Havel]

Well, if the xbox's music files are wma and the PC's mp3, both at the same bitrate, it would be worth it to transfer the XBOX music to PC, since an x kbps wma is roughly equivalent to a 2x kbps mp3.  I personally only record at 192 wma, but the transfer would still very worthwhile.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I have some great doubts about this assertion... Remember, it is classical music. It does not like lossy compression. Ars Technica said one time that under 128 kbps ANY codec begin to be quite crappy. The best way would be reencoding at proper bitrates from the original master.

 

And I think the developpers are quite present in these forums, I see a lot of icons saying "developper post here".

[swaaye]

Well, if the xbox's music files are wma and the PC's mp3, both at the same bitrate, it would be worth it to transfer the XBOX music to PC, since an x kbps wma is roughly equivalent to a 2x kbps mp3.  I personally only record at 192 wma, but the transfer would still very worthwhile.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I have some great doubts about this assertion... Remember, it is classical music. It does not like lossy compression. Ars Technica said one time that under 128 kbps ANY codec begin to be quite crappy. The best way would be reencoding at proper bitrates from the original master.

 

And I think the developpers are quite present in these forums, I see a lot of icons saying "developper post here".

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I wouldn't encode it with anything other than LAME 3.90 (not higher) with --alt-preset standard. That would give you 180-200kbps. --alt-preset extreme would give you 220-280kbps. This would also be joint stereo variable bitrate which is always better than constant bitrate, stereo. LAME was used to encode what's in the game now but they used some really bad settings, like shown in the first post.

 

I don't think a lossless encoder is realistic. Size isn't a non-concern, but what they did was way too extreme.

 

I do not recommend anyone use WMA. OGG or LAME, or lossless. Only open source stuff. I do not like how MS controls WMA. It creates problems with 3rd party software decoding it. Like Winamp has problems with outputting it to DSP plugins.

[Dragonforce]

great post

 

i'm sure the devlopers are on top of it..............caugh...... "

[iamthelorax]

I'd much rather use .ogg as well, but .wma is much more supported. My portable CD player will play .wma and .mp3, but not .ogg. Besides, WMP10 has a good interface and gets CD info well, which I have come to appreciate while building a ~350 CD (and growing) collection. If someone built a WM emulator, especially if it showed numbers next to each category (i.e. # of artists) like Kazaa did, I'd dl it immediately just for the sake of not supporting MS. I hate them just as much as y'all, I promise; I just haven't done anything about it. The worst part is, I'm forced, basically, to buy Windows and Office and who knows what else, cuz they're included, secretly, in my student fees. And to think that I was so excited when I learned that I could get XP Pro at the campus computer store for $5. I just figured, at the time, that MS was just trying to cement its monopoly. How na

[Lcaus Scuks]

I got an answer a long time ago, something like "appropriate department is looking into this", whatever that means.

Both PS3 and Xbox 2 games will be hard to program due to their awful but powerful architecture; these consoles will be so promoted that many people will buy them for the fact that they're the next generation and sadly the devs will be forced to develop games for them because most of the times the PC sales aren't enough (I'm not talking about HL2 and The Sims 2 here).