Mark Havel Posted March 13, 2005 Share Posted March 13, 2005 Don't worry, Mark Griskey knows about this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Meshugger Posted March 13, 2005 Share Posted March 13, 2005 Don't worry, Mark Griskey knows about this. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> What was his response? "Some men see things as they are and say why?""I dream things that never were and say why not?"- George Bernard Shaw"Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man."- Friedrich Nietzsche "The amount of energy necessary to refute bull**** is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." - Some guy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trebius Posted March 13, 2005 Share Posted March 13, 2005 I too was rather annoyed at the quality of the in game music, especially compared to the passable KotOR I music quality but i've just visited Mark Grieskey's site and after having listened to the samples there I feel really sad and angry about the music we actually got. It is such good composing; i would be very ecstatic if we were given downloadable versions at the 160kb/s like on Mark's site and I will do whatever necessary to make LA and Obsisdian aware of this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LifeStar Posted March 14, 2005 Share Posted March 14, 2005 Just out of curiosity, was the original KOTOR's music in stero and all? I don't remember people getting worked up over its quality, but at the same time since the TSL obviously has many flaws (including the plot), it's only natural for people to comb over every mistake. I would just like to know if anyone has compared the two games sound wise because if Obsidian simply received the core code from BIOware, it's possible that the sound quality would match b/c they went along with the BIOware model. IF Bioware did the same thing with their music (a la mono and low bit rate, etc). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Havel Posted March 14, 2005 Share Posted March 14, 2005 KotOR I's musics were encoded in 128 kbps 44100 Hz stereo. So it's closer to Griskey's samples... By the way he seemed concerned about this issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlanC9 Posted March 14, 2005 Share Posted March 14, 2005 Seems like they did the same thing to the music that they did to the cutscenes -- which were released at crappy XBox resolution instead of PC resolution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Havel Posted March 14, 2005 Share Posted March 14, 2005 There may be the reason the XBox can't handle ingame cut scenes (too laggy to be handled by the game engine). But there is absolutely NO DAMN REASON to butcher the musics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markussun Posted March 19, 2005 Author Share Posted March 19, 2005 Seems like they did the same thing to the music that they did to the cutscenes -- which were released at crappy XBox resolution instead of PC resolution. With the puzzling difference, that Mark Griskey's music in the cutscenes is in proper STEREO, whereas all his other game music is in MONO. This confused approach to quality in KotOR2 is all over the place... I have come to accept that the cutscenes are in 640x480 low-res (800x600 would be more appropriate for the PC, though, as in other PC games). What I cannot accept is that every time a cutscene is played, the idiotic player code minimizes the game and switches back to the Windows desktop for a second, before opening up the 640x480 video screen and waiting an extra 2 secs for my monitor to "sync". It's the most jarring cutscene playback i've ever experienced in 10 years of gaming, because seeing my windows icons every time and then waiting for several seconds pulls me out of the illusion/immersion. Other games these days even manage to blend (!) cutscenes with realtime 3D graphics (Homeworld2, LOTR:ROTK, etc.) without a hitch, and we have to put up with such stoneage playback code in KotOR2 which has to minimize and launch a separate player app to do so? It sucks. Granted, KotOR1 had the exact same issue, but I really expected this to be fixed for the sequel, since it was such an obvious flaw. Oh well... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dufflover Posted March 19, 2005 Share Posted March 19, 2005 Man what a long read - I quit halfway! I agree that not having music at 128k (or at least 96k) 44Khz Stereo is not good since there isn't an excuse to not do it like that. Here's what I think: Mono - it's *ok* (just) to have mono, since the whole game won't sound mono with all the sounds. 10kHz - this is the biggest problem and it's clearly obvious from the distortions (ie, muffling) during points in the music. 48k - (this is just the calculated size needed from the above factors) Pure Pazaak - The Stand-alone Multiplayer Pazaak Game (link to Obsidian board thread) Pure Pazaak website (big thank you to fingolfin) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WoT Posted March 19, 2005 Share Posted March 19, 2005 I don't know much about audio but as I was reading Diary V on the KoTOR website I noticed this - "Once the final assets were delivered we had about a month of bug fixing and mix tweaking before submitting to Microsoft." That's taken from Mark Griskey's comments in Diary V. Maybe it wasn't a LA stuff-up, but a MS mistake. I'm probably wrong but it struck me as strange that the music was submitted to MS not LA or OE. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Havel Posted March 19, 2005 Share Posted March 19, 2005 I don't know why MS would take care about these developper/publishers things. What they do with the game is to see if its complies their minimal standards to allow an XBox game to be released, not to finish the job of the developpers and the publisher. There is some interface rules and some things like this, but no music encoding or game engine tweakor any developper side work. At worse, they could say "Hey, you're totally blind or what : the game is totally sluggish and the framerate around 5-10 FPS, fix this or the game is not allowed to be published on our console !". IMO, the music butchering has been made by some incompetent from LucasArts or Obsidian. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markussun Posted March 26, 2005 Author Share Posted March 26, 2005 Yep, the music butchering is certainly not Microsoft's fault. Although it seems to be typical that games on the Xbox have their sound/music assets encoded in WMA instead of MP3 (which seems to be a MS tactic), the quality of the encoding (mono, stereo, bitrate etc.) is surely up to the developers. A good argument to support this is the fact that the music in the Xbox version is less mangled than in the PC version. It's still MONO, mind you, and as such unacceptable. However, the compression in WMA at such low bitrates is much less damaging to the music quality than with MP3. I verified that by analyzing the music in both versions. So the irony is, that on the PC -- with its much superior processing power and larger memory -- we get the worst possible encoding and music playback possible in both versions of KotOR2. It's sickening. I just hope they will rectify this unbelievable audio blunder in the forthcoming 1st patch. I really do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nur Ab Sal Posted March 26, 2005 Share Posted March 26, 2005 Hi Mark Griskey wrote in an email to me, that LA will take care of the music in their update and that certainly it will have better quality. I feel safer now! HERMOCRATES: Nur Ab Sal was one such king. He it was, say the wise men of Egypt, who first put men in the colossus, making many freaks of nature at times when the celestial spheres were well aligned. SOCRATES: This I doubt. We are hearing a child's tale. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vilad saar Posted June 5, 2005 Share Posted June 5, 2005 get the miles sound tools and open your "stremmusic" folder in the kotor directory and select some of the files eg my fav new_mus_jedi.wav then select play , it plays at 11khz then select 44khz on the menu, and you have to listen to hear the difference... yes its there but in the middle of the game its not that important what i want now is some of the soundtrack in 4-channel midi format so i can use it as ringtones on my mobile id transcribe it myself but im not sure what instrument is used... thinking about it right now, i could find the instrument with finale transcribe facility, i think its only 1 instrument... some kind of string instrument... la la la off i go to get finale 2k3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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