"I am broken..."

[The Doctor]

I am not having this problem with either game currently, but I was wondering what causes the game to replace your character's portaits in the party select screen with black boxes, and change their names to "I am broken, so very very broken"?

What causes this problem, and how could I or others experiencing this problem fix it in future?

[Master Alex]

That happened to me tons of time in Kotor 1. There are alot of glitches in both games. You can't fix that without patches.

[StaffSaberist]

This is my guess at it:

 

The game processes a ton of info during a save. The character info is the largest (what combo of stuff is equipped, their alignment, their feats, skills, goes on for a while...) and has the highest chance of pieces of it not being processed. This lack of processing is due to the fact that your computer is assuredly not a NASA computer, and doesn't have 4.0 GhZ CPU, which handles processing for the entire computer. Naturally, when something isn't processed, the game experiences a Runtime Error. Programmers hate those errors, since that causes the game to crash without warning but those errors are not found during the compilation of the program. (Imagine the frustration of programmers - they spend a half hour compiling the beta and find a Runtime Error, crashing their work. Damn.)

 

Thusly, the programmers came up with a coding solution known as a catch. A catch is triggered If and only If a specific Runtime Error occurs. The one you know and hate is when - you guessed it - a massive amount of player info fails to process. The catch, however, is as buggy as the runtime error. It has no code that allows the game to continue even as a wounded game - so the program goes berserk and enters denial that the problem ever existed. In order to validate the denial, the program causing the problem is terminated.

 

This isn't how Windows, BioWare, or anyone else designed their software. This is how programming acts. Unless you have a million Catches, which Windows and KotOR does, the code is in no way intelligent enough to use it's own logic. It's only as smart as the programmer.

 

All this is my guess. Hope it is at least near the mark. This guess is educated by my limited vB knowledge.

[SITHSLAYER133]

did u use kse? cause i broke my characters like that

[StaffSaberist]

You don't have to use kse (whatever that is). If you saw my "After upgrading, I can't play KotOR 1" Thread, you'd see that I actually did this sometime on the Endar Spire without using kse, or any hex editors, etc. I was so frustrated, because I was trying to reach Dantooine real quick, so I reinstalled the game! I noticed the I am Broken thing when I tried to leave the apartments.

[SITHSLAYER133]

srry dude

[90SK]

I had the same glitch: On the Endar Spire, the door would open, but no Trask...

 

I checked the party selection screen. "I am broken, so very broken". Then it all crashed. What a mess. I think I reinstalled and it worked, though I can't be sure, as it was a while ago.

[StaffSaberist]

srry dude

 

Me too. Shoulda put a : ) or a : ( at the end of it, or something. All I was trying to say was you don't need a hex editor. But no worries. All's well.

[Jamps]

Its good to make backup saves when your done playing and put it in my documents. Really good to have.