I’m really looking forward to KotOR. I think it stands a chance of being my favorite Bioware game, mostly because I’m a sci-fi geek and a moderate Star Wars fan. I’m a bit worried about performance, though.
Every Infinity Engine game I’ve played has had slowdown problems. Especially in combat. Neverwinter Nights seems to do a good job of carrying on this legacy (on a P4 2.4 Ghz Ti 4600 w/ 512 MB RAM, no less). I don’t know what causes these problems; I’ve never fixed them. Messing with sound settings worked for Planescape (and NWN a bit), but not for Baldur’s Gate 2. I’ve tried everything. Even e-mailed tech support when I first got BG2. They ran out of ideas. So, with no evidence for support, and many others complaining of the same slowdowns, I decided that these games are slowing down because they use the D&D rules. Stupid, I know. But I can’t think of anything else.
So, I’m curious, to what extent does KotOR implement D&D rules? Because I’m afraid that a strict implementation will cause major slowdowns for me. And I don’t want that. Just a nice, smooth game experience for once.
I’d imagine most of the slowdown (though I don’t know where you experiences this in NWN–it always ran smoothly on my P3 1.4–at 1280x960 with 2x anti-aliasing and 64Mb textures, no less) results from all the AI scripts running when you get into a battle… KotOR’s framerate is pretty solid, though.
Well pathing just sucks in these games. I’m sorry, they’re good games, but the pathing implementation is very weak. Not one of these games has ever had good pathing, regardless of whether it was Bioware or Black Isle who was responsible for game content, and regardless of whether they tweaked path lookahead options or added some kind of simulated annealing or even let the characters jostle each other out of the way. I wouldn’t be surprised if the extra code they kept adding to deal with pathing messes up performance, not to mention paging and disk thrashing from the vast amount of stack space consumed by the algorithm…
For some strange reason, special spell effects also hose performance in these games, as do some environment animations. Remember in Baldur’s Gate 1 in the party-vs-party combats when both sides would open up with their fireballs and explosive potions and stuff at once? You could sit there waiting for the glittery stuff to go away for an embarrassing amount of time, even with a good machine. You’d think these little 2D overlay effects wouldn’t cause such problems… but no…
Anyhow I really really doubt that the game system rules have much to do with performance. They may be awkward to use in a tabletop game, but D&D logic looks to me like it should be quite compact in code. Of course the AI to make use of the logic can be as clumsy and slow as a bad coder can make it, but I doubt that AI is a big issue, except of course for pathing which is independent of game system rules choices.
It doesn’t implement D&D rules at all. Its rules system is a somewhat streamlined version of the Star Wars D20 system though, if that’s what you mean.
Given that it’s tailored to run well on an Xbox, I figure that as long as your video card can handle DX8-class shaders fairly well (your Ti4600 should do fine), then you’ll be in good shape. It’s meant to fit within 64MB of unified system/video RAM and not overtax a 733MHz CPU. The PC version will obviously have its differences, but one would expect that with your rig it will run just dandy.
Yeah pathing and effects sucked ass in Infinity Engine games, at least for me. Setting AI nodes to max never helped. To get anywhere reliably you had to send people there in the single file follow formation, and even that didnt work sometimes.
The effects were graphically ok, but they were not very efficient at all. All the machines I ever played an IE game on blew the required specs out of the water, and on all of them, AE spell effects could occasionally drop the frame rates to what felt like single digits.
It doesn’t implement D&D rules at all. Its rules system is a somewhat streamlined version of the Star Wars D20 system though, if that’s what you mean.
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I thought that was based on D&D rules. Guess I’m misinformed.
Given that it’s tailored to run well on an Xbox, I figure that as long as your video card can handle DX8-class shaders fairly well (your Ti4600 should do fine), then you’ll be in good shape. It’s meant to fit within 64MB of unified system/video RAM and not overtax a 733MHz CPU. The PC version will obviously have its differences, but one would expect that with your rig it will run just dandy.
Mmm, yeah, but the Xbox architecture is much different than a normal PC. So a 733 mhz CPU on the Xbox is much more powerful than a 733 mhz CPU on a PC.
You sure about that? I’m playing the built in campaign that Bioware made. I’d think they’d be more efficient at coding a problem that seems so identifiable.
Most of my slowdown occurs in the Temple and the Docks region in Chapter 1. Surprisingly, spell effects that I’ve encountered so far haven’t been a big problem. That was always a huge slowdown point for me in the Infinity Engine games. I also experienced slowdown when I was in front of the Seedy Tavern and 4 red costume guys teleported in. I guess slowdown in these areas makes sense, but it just doesn’t seem right to have to put up with this on a machine as fast as mine.
Honestly, pathfinding sucks in all computer games. The best that has been done so far is getting it to an acceptable level of suck. The more people in your party and the more enemies the worse it gets.
It doesn’t implement D&D rules at all. Its rules system is a somewhat streamlined version of the Star Wars D20 system though, if that’s what you mean.
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I thought that was based on D&D rules. Guess I’m misinformed.
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Well, Star Wars D20 is essentially Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition rules rewritten for the Star Wars universe. All the game mechanisms are the same, so you’re not altogether off.
Well, 3rd Edition D&D is a “D20 system” game, so it’s very similar. Think of it like this: If it were GURPS, then D&D would be “GURPS fantasy” and KotOR would be “GURPS Star Wars.” So a lot of the system will be similar and familiar, and you’ll have many of the same stats like, and things like feats and skills, but they won’t be the same feats and skills and all the rules won’t be identical. If you understand 3rd edition D&D you’ll feel right at home.
Mmm, yeah, but the Xbox architecture is much different than a normal PC. So a 733 mhz CPU on the Xbox is much more powerful than a 733 mhz CPU on a PC.
I wouldn’t say “much” more powerful. There are certain effeciencies at play with regards to memory access and OS overhead, but it’s not like the Xbox’s 733 is the equivalent of a 2GHz P4 or something.
I would suspect KotOR on the PC to be very much graphics card limited, and that you should be able to run at 1024x768 with full details on (though maybe not anti-aliasing) with your Ti4600 just fine.
Just get the XBox version :). That’s my plan. Also, isn’t KOTOR more of a console style RPG than an infinity engine game? I thought I read that somewhere. It has mini-games and everything. I thought I evern read that it is closer to Final Fantasy than Baldur’s Gate in a lot of ways.
The processor alone wouldn’t be much more powerful, but I think the Xbox as a whole is about the equivalent of a nicely outfitted PC, maybe one in the 2 GHz range. Just look at the quality of the graphics in many Xbox games. Or better yet, wait for Halo or KotOR PC to come out and base your judgement on the stats of a PC that is able to run one of those games at a quality comparable to the Xbox version.
I would suspect KotOR on the PC to be very much graphics card limited, and that you should be able to run at 1024x768 with full details on (though maybe not anti-aliasing) with your Ti4600 just fine.
KotOR strikes me as a CPU limited game, what with all the numbers being crunched to determine the outcome of combat. But I’m not a programmer, so I wouldn’t know.
I would, but I don’t have one :) Besides, the PC version is supposed to include new content. I believe it’s a whole new planet.
