KotOR II (PC) Freezing

[RC #38]

Hey, I Just Got TSL For Christmas, But It's Freezing At The Last 2 Items In A Droid Shop On Nar Shadaa. Any Help?

[vanir]

Troubleshooting is a process of trial and error, so the more details (particularly about things like system specs) help cut things down a bit.

 

Being new to the game I'll mention you need the official update v1.0b Patch you can download at Kotorfiles, which fixes some vanilla game bugs.

 

After that, if you're still having problems the simplest thing is whether your computer is up to it. We need system specs. And it's not just the hardware, if you've got a lot of utilities running (which a lot of people tend to install, great for browsing and home office systems but terrible for gaming systems), they can clog your computer with background processes and that will definitely cause memory/graphics intensive games like Kotor/TSL to freeze up all over the place, particularly when you start trying to up the graphics settings.

 

There are issues with multicore processors and Windows Vista, which can be addressed with the stickies in this forum.

 

Then there is system setup, are the basic settings set up to handle games or just browsing? This is in your bios and pagefile settings and things like that. These can also cause freezing/crashes at certain points.

 

Is the system well maintained or bugged from long term use without maintenance utilities being run?

 

Are there any mods installed?

 

Finally could the game installation be corrupt?

 

Off the top of my head I can't think of a specific bug for the droid merchant, or at least one that isn't fixed by the 1.0b patch but I've never run TSL without the update or even a vanilla version of the game since 2005.

[RC #38]

Well, I'm Running A RADEON 9200, But The Up-to-date CATALYST Isn't Installing Properly. No Background Programs Running, And It's Maintained Pretty Well. So, I'm Guessing It's The ATI CATALYST Then?

[Q]

Try the Dantooine lag fix:

• First, figure out where the .ini is installed. Default is "C:\Program Files\Lucasarts\swkotor(2)\swkotor(2).ini". If its not in that location, then your going to have to do some searching around on the hard drive a bit.
  
• When you find it, just double-click on the file to open it in Notepad.
  
• Scroll down the file until you find the Graphics Options
  
• Under the last line ("last line" as in the last line of the list of entries under "Graphics Options", NOT the last line of "swkotor(2).ini), add "Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1", without the quotes.
  
• Goto File, then Save.

[vanir]

Oh I remember the Radeon 9200, I had tons of problems sorting out the right Catalyst version for it that ran properly. Same with the x800 I updated it for.

This is a few years ago now, but I remember all the mucking about with drivers for those two video cards, IMHO this is why Radeons are so cheap. They're actually pretty good cards (there are some good gaming mod versions of them) but the ATI drivers are exceptionally fiddly and annoying, they lose out on driver software and it just got worse with HD/multioption setups modern drivers have to account for.

 

What I had to do was download older CAT CC installations/drivers, pre-HD or those which were around roughly near the time the card was originally released. See, when they're making new drivers they're assuming you've also updated to the latest hardware.

 

Oh and yes the newest CCC was bugged and didn't install properly. I had to install the older CCC and then install the newer one over it, so it wound up running the older CCC interface but updated the drivers in it. It took a fair bit of trial and error to get right. This is all just bad post-purchase customer support.

 

For the 9200 I wound up making a little collection of various older CATs saved to CDR, downloaded the ATI Tray Tools utility and used a lot of trial and error to get it working. And even with the Dantooine lag fix it still lagged and didn't let me up the settings much.

TSL is a real challenge for the Radeon 9200

 

For the x800 at the time the previous CAT worked nicely which I used with ATI Tray Tools and this was the first card I ever got reasonable graphics settings with all the frame buffer effects in TSL, since I always had ATI cards.

 

But I'll tell you, when I switched to a NVIDIA 7600GS it was like a whole new computer. And these are dirt cheap nowadays and available in AGP. Really, there's no comparison, the driver support is excellent and literally plug and play, it's very gamer orientated, more than enough power to run TSL on close to max settings (I use x8 AA and 4 sample Aniso on 1280x768).

 

The thing about multicore processors and HD everything these days is all the older single core top shelf stuff from a couple of years ago is all dirt cheap today, and it's about 4x more powerful than the older mid-range gear we all had on a budget a few years ago.

 

Trust me, Radeon is okay for the home office but if you game but have an old system and can't afford a complete upgrade, at least switch out ATI for NVIDIA and snap up some 1gig DDR2 to spec out the old system you do have (even see if you can't pick up an older high end gaming motherboard for it), it'll cost you just about nothing and turns your computer into a higher end game system from a few years ago, instead of what is now a very poor computer indeed by comparison.

 

At the very least switch out the ATI for NVIDIA, it'll cost you something like $30 and quintuple your current systems graphics, and cut all your troubles with drivers to zero. I managed to pick one up in a computer store, new, old stock AGP about a year ago so they're still around, forgotten about in display cases and the like.