The Brad Hole

I ran the new version, but I didn't experience any change at all. Still as slow as always on my iBook (1.2 GHz, 32MB Radeon 9200 Mobility - RV280M9+).

To be honest, in some areas we're talking about a doubling from 2-3 fps to 6-7 fps.

The framerate itself may not seem significantly better on borderline systems, but in low-framerate areas, you should be able to control your movements much easier. If you had trouble with moving across the screen unexpectedly before, it should be much less of an issue now.

What version of Stuffit Expander did you compress the KotOR beta with? My 7.0.3 keeps failing near the end of unstuffing. I've tried downloading three copies with Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari. Same results. I downloaded Stuffit Expander 8.0.2 and that fails near the end as well. I tried the newly released 9.0.1 and that seemed to work but no icon for the app.

I reinstalled 9.0.1 after uninstalling other Stuffit products completely and that seems to be working fine for now.

Thanks Brad I can now tour greater Manaan with ease! : )

YES! Thank you so much--if this helps jerky areas like it sounds like I does, I will be amazingly happy. But I won't believe you anymore when you say things like "This particular issue won't be solved by a patch - it'll only resolve itself if you get a faster video card or CPU. " :)

Also, yes, I would love to read about what you did.

Hopefully it will be playable on my 1.25 Ghz 9200 emac.

Still, if not, it's nice that somebody is thinking of us. Time to upgrade? I suppose so.

Merry Christmas Brad!!!

Just got this game for Chirstmas. Man does it rock! I was truly amazed at the performance though. 1600x1200 with 4xaa and 8x af with almost no slowdown whatsoever. This was on a dual 1.5 MDD with a 9800XT. Truly remarkable job Brad!

In case you didn't know... the CodeWarrior xSYM file is included in this archive. At 9.6 MB of extra space, not sure if you really intended that or not.

Brad,

I just purchased KOTOR and have tried both the 1.03b and 1.03c apps. The 1.03b appears to be faster on my system, which is a G5 SP 1.8 GHz 10.3.7 with 2.5Gb RAM, M-Audio 7.1 Audio card, and Nvidia 6800 Ultra card.

I also see that the 1.03c weights in much more than the last update. Please keep up the good work.

The larger size of the 1.03c update is almost surely due to the inclusion of the xSYM file which is only used for debugging.

But, since I'm a bit clueless: how can I tell what my framerates are? So far the game has performed flawlessly for me (though it doesn't support 1920x1200 for my 23" display :)

"But, since I'm a bit clueless: how can I tell what my framerates are?"

The game doesn't have a built-in mechanism to determine the framerate, unfortunately. If you're proficient with the OpenGL profiler, you can use that to get a rough estimate.

Low-end systems with the Radeon 8500/9000/9200 should be able to perceive a difference on the really slow levels by being able to control your player much easier now.

I still haven't put the nVidia card back in my Mac in place of the 8500, so I'd like to hear more from nVidia users about performance with this patch. Are there areas where the performance is noticeably worse with this new patch than before?

Well, I'll say the patch certainly sped things up on my radeon 9000 to at least playable levels. :) on the other hand, I've noticed that in some cases the game will not accept keyboard input until I've logged out and back in again. Has anybody else run into this?

Brad--for me it definitely speeds up the render but it does so by causing strange errors--in Manaan (the ocean world, right?) west? (the end with the judges), there are a ton of rendering errors--sunlight makes my character invisible instead of casting shadows, and several places, including the exit and the area where the judges are, are not drawn correctly unless I get very, very close to them. The old version renders properly, but I cannot control my character. I'd rather have render errors and a controllable character, but I don't think that was your intention, was it? I tried to take screenshots but they all came out as static.

Oh, yes, in the next few months I will be getting a g5 tower with a real video card, finally following your advice. Thanks for all your help!

"Brad--for me it definitely speeds up the render but it does so by causing strange errors"

I've looked at those places on Manaan with my 8500, and I'm not seeing any errors. This is with a Radeon 8500 and 10.3.7. What card and OS are you using?

Hi Brad,
Great job on the patch. On my 9000 Pro card in my G4 Quicksilver, Manaan is at last playable. Controlling the PC is very smooth. However, I have also noticed rendering problems in Manaan, especially in the courtroom sequences. Characters disappear entirely sometimes.

But otherwise the patch is terrific- thanks for the support!

"I've looked at those places on Manaan with my 8500, and I'm not seeing any errors."

A minor bit of good news - I've found a way to reproduce this bug, and I'm looking into a fix.

Hey Brad
I just tried this out on my G4 Dual 1G with a Radeon 9200 but still having the same problem right off the elevators in the Undercity section. I'm stuck in run-mode and zip across the map. It seemed to make things a little smoother in enclosed areas, though.
Thanks for the support, though!

"I've noticed that in some cases the game will not accept keyboard input"

If anybody was actually wondering about this, I discovered that it was my Terminal.app with sloppy window focus on that likes to eat KotOR's keystrokes. Oops. :-)

Haven't tried the beta patch yet, although can say that like Gil noticed in post about Jedi Academy patch, KOTOR behaves much better with NVidia drivers through OpenGL profiler than with native Radeon drivers.

I don't know why, but the issue when character was freezing and zooming across the map while running completely dissapears when I use OpenGL profiler. Is that because poor shader implementation somehow interferes with controls or whatnot? Really strange.

"Is that because poor shader implementation somehow interferes with controls or whatnot?"

First, let me say that you're a prime candidate for the patch - you should try it now.

Second, you are partly correct. When you force the OpenGL profiler to use the nVidia driver, it essentially puts the game on the non-shader path. On the r200 cards, this ends up being a win, because the vertex shaders are far too big to run in hardware. The new KOTOR patch addresses this properly by just disabling those shaders that don't fit in the 8500-class cards while keeping the others in hardware. That's only part of the optimizations though - I'll save the rest of the details for when I'm back home next week and have time to write about them.

Brad,

I have a 2.5 DP G5 and the nvidia 6800 -- the game has performaned flawlessly for me so far (I'm going after the fourth star map -- and just got "captured" while traveling to the last planet).

I haven't noticed poor performance anywhere at all and I'm running at 1600x1200 with everything maxed out.

Some of the details are amazing, like the reflections in griff's "hair tails" (or whatever they're called). It's so realistic: they really look wet and slimy!

Bryan

Yes, tell us of your adventures with ATI_array_rev_comps_in_4_bytes!

"Yes, tell us of your adventures with ATI_array_rev_comps_in_4_bytes!"

Here's a sneak preview - 16-bit index buffers stored in VBO (and thus in need of byte-swapping for rev_comps) aren't actually stored in AGP mapped memory if the total index buffer object is less than 64-bytes in size. End-result - they shouldn't be byte-swapped for rev_comps support.

Brad,

Just a couple more things I’ve noticed..
-I’m not sure if this only affects the patched version or not, but the forest floor on Kashyyyk (the foggy area) was full of rendering errors for me. I have a Radeon 9000 (1GHz PowerBook); oddly enough, the errors disappeared when I ran KotOR through OpenGL profiler and forced it to use the Radeon 9700 drivers.
-I’ve noticed some areas in both KotOR and JO/JA have a tendency to display corrupt textures on my machine. The Taris upper city is particularly bad—it starts with errors in the skybox and spreads to the rest of the map, with patches of garbled textures showing up everywhere (I’ve got screenshots if that didn’t make any sense). Am I correct in assuming this is specific to my video card? I haven’t seen anything like it on a G4 tower with a GeForce 2MX.