Snigaroo

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Snigaroo last won the day on February 26

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About Snigaroo

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  1. I, as other have said, understand your viewpoint as regards restored content and how you would like to have as much of it as possible. There's no issue with that, or with recommending such content to other users. However, with that being said, saying something specifically like this does not do your viewpoint any favors, because realistically what you're suggesting is almost certainly false. To my knowledge--and I have had many, many years to look--no KOTOR developer has ever come forth and stated that any content cut from the basegame was removed due to time constraints. There is reasonable indication that SOME of the content was cut due to technical limitations (be they engine or enduser hardware) or persistent bugs/unintended consequences with attempts to implement them (such as the Iriaz), but the amount of content to which that does--or even could--apply is miniscule as compared to the volume of restorations that K1R makes. As @N-DReW25 pointed out, fundamentally there are several parts of K1R which simply cannot be "intended" because there was not enough in the game files to even restore and most of the content as implemented is fanmade. But for the sake of making a good-faith argument I'll ignore those cases and focus solely on fully developer-produced content that K1R restores. Unlike in the case of KOTOR 2's development, KOTOR was not rushed. Indeed, far beyond not being rushed, BioWare actually deliberately took an additional six months of development time before the game's release to iron out bugs, polish content and ensure that the game released in a completed state. And I am not talking about the six-month delay after the Xbox release of the game before it was ported to PC, I am referring to a very well-documented six-month delay prior to the game's initial release, which BioWare employees specifically said was undertaken in order to deliver a fully polished and well-made product, even though the game was already A-Z playable at the time of the original intended release date. With this in mind, why would all this cut content exist? Sure, perhaps there would be some here or there that BioWare couldn't have gotten around to in the six months of extra time they had, but not the amount left lying around that K1R has available to restore, and as Drew notes K1R doesn't even restore everything there is! Why might this be? The most probable answer is quite simply that most of that content was cut entirely purposefully. This happens in game development literally all the time--if a sequence doesn't flow well (such as dragging on, or having an impact on the game's balance due to its existence); if a particular item is nonsensical or overbalanced; if a character is seen as superfluous or distracting. Game developers are not gods. Often they design things that they believe will be impactful and well-received at the point they design it only to discover in live testing that the implementation is simply poor, or functioning unintentionally. And game developers (especially game developers in the early 2000s, driven by a razor-thin profit margin) do not operate under the same philosophy of "any content is good content" that some modern players do. They have the entire scope of the playerbase to bear in mind, many of whom would prefer a trimmer, leaner and more coherent experience than one with more content but less direction. So what do they do in those cases? They cut anything they can which they believe doesn't work and would leave behind an ultimately more balanced, coherent and enjoyable experience. Given that no BioWare dev I have ever seen has discussed any content cut from the game due to time constraints; the simple fact that the game lacked any meaningful time constraints at all, and even had an additional half-year of development time; and the reality that many of the things which K1R restores are sequences which one can easily see a dev viewing as disruptive (the third level of the Vulkar base would drag on to a casual player; the pillar reward on Lehon was overpowered; Major Hurka allows the player to bypass most of the Leviathan, which trivializes the game's design in that area, just to name a few), it is overwhelmingly likely that at least 50% of K1R's restorations, and likely much more than that, were cut fully deliberately. This is not to say that that content is bad, that you are wrong for wanting to use it, or that others should not use it if they have a mind. Users should always play with what they want to. However, it is unreasonable to cite developer intent when wanting to use K1R where parts of K1R are entirely fanmade and at least half of it was quite probably restored in spite of the developer's intent, not in line with it. I say again: there is NOTHING wrong with wanting to use that content. The developers are not infallible, and the game they designed was, at the end of the day, the game they believed would be best-received by the widest audience. For those who view any amount of new content as a blessing, K1R is wonderful. But saying that it's all as the developers wanted is simply an unreasonable claim, unless you can dig up an example of a BioWare dev actually arguing that there were significant cuts made to the game that they didn't intend for.
  2. Snigaroo

    Thematic Sith Lords

    What powers were you trying to use against him? Low WIS does not mean all Force powers instantly work, you need to use ones which actually have WIS saves. The Sion fight is absolutely trivial if you can stunlock him, which most builds not even designed for Force abilities can manage thanks to his critically low saves.
  3. Certainly I think this would be a better implementation.
  4. I'm far more worried about the differentiation between companions than I am balance implications, though balance isn't an entirely irrelevant factor. My main concern is making sure that some companions do have access to talents which are unique, and keeping Crush & Enlightenment wholly locked to the Exile is critical for me. I would be okay with being able to train Atton with Precognition, as his Echani training does make him predisposed to already having some basic understanding of it, as well as the Disciple actually (since Kreia praises him so much for his insight), but nobody else.
  5. I'd really like to know why I don't get notifications of responses sometimes... This I have no problems with. Here I have some issues though. Like you get annoyed when the game gives level-up powers for free, I get annoyed when the game gives you something pointless for free--Affect Mind and Dominate Mind are insulting to me simply because it's a waste of time for them to be given when they do nothing. I'm not so wedded to getting rid of them that I'd rage if they were kept in, but I would certainly prefer removing them. Force Sight, Breath Control and Beast Trick are fine. Battle Precognition, Crush and Enlightenment are a no-go for me, though--there need to be things that keep the companions (and the player) feeling unique. Force Sight is shown to be relatively easy to teach, but Battle Precognition is something that the Echani train their entire lives on and is simply not easy to pick up in a short period, which is precisely why the Handmaiden is so incredulous when she realizes the Exile is doing it subconsciously. As for Crush and Enlightenment, they are far too overpowered, them being unique to the Exile aside; giving them out to companions would just make the balance even worse for, IMO, no benefit in terms of flavor.
  6. Good deal, thanks Drew, I'll edit the OP accordingly.
  7. One new request has been put up in the Patches & Submods section (JC's Czerka: Business Attire & Dark Hope's HD Ithorians). EDIT: Fulfilled by SH & integrated (easy to do without waiting for a revision, since it's a single texture).
  8. It's also possible an older Windows version compat mode would work for you, there have been cases where different compat modes were needed for different users.
  9. If you're using 4x world textures, it's possible that the textures are large enough that they're causing spot save corruption in the module. That's really uncommon, I should stress that, but it's not impossible--there's a reason the builds refrain from using any of the very large texture sizes, because the engine can't really profitably render them in the first place due to most models' poly counts, but you also run the very serious risk of your game just breaking as a result of trying. With that said, however, I sort of suspect that isn't the actual problem here. Swoop races in particular are very buggy on modern game versions as compared to older hardware setups. Can you see if the issue still persists with the game's executable set to compatibility for XP SP 3?
  10. Not at all. I am still not super fond of the idea of a lockout in general, but this would at least solve most of the problems with it. Because I don't personally want to restrict access to Visas as part of the means of dealing with this issue, though, I would likely not consider any implementation of this kind for build inclusion. I am extremely leery of preventing the player having access to a companion, even when many of the surface problems related to that are solved as you've handled them here. At base, you're still locking the player out of having access to a party member which they're meant to have at the time, and that's a big deviation from vanilla progression. Eventually in the far future I do intend to make another set of builds which don't have the same current commitment to maintaining the vanilla progression (as would be needed for some of the big mods I've requested here, for instance, like reworking Malachor). But at present that list doesn't exist, and so the builds still try to stick as close as possible to vanilla where they're able. Since there are definitely more vanilla-friendly ways to handle this than a temporary companion lockout, I can't say I'd use the former latter unless it proved absolutely impossible to do a reasonable implementation of the former. Sure. I don't mind how it's done on the backend, as long as the cat is skinned from the perspective of what the player sees.
  11. You are, however I don't personally like the idea for several reasons. First, many players won't actually get Visas until they're level 15 already, which will generally prevent the problem being solved or even mitigated at all. Second (and feeding into the first issue), Visas is trivially easy to get influence with, so easy that it would be incredibly simple even at level 15 and two sparring sessions to get more influence with Visas than the Handmaiden--this also assumes that new players will actually go back and spar with the Handmaiden right at level 15, which is not super likely. And third and most importantly, I think locking the player out of access to Visas for a (to the player) arbitrary amount of time would seem extremely confusing and unfun; at best they might just be confused and annoyed that they have a new companion but can't use them, where at worst they may think they need to do something to resuscitate her and run around wasting a large amount of time trying to resolve her being unconscious. I am definitely open to alternate suggestions to resolve the underlying problem of the lockout, but I think this suggestion would create more confusion as well as not actually resolving the problem reliably.
  12. I have added a new request (Handmaiden/Visas Lockout Warning) which I forgot to add after completing the last test. This is actually very high-priority for me since I see this as a significant blind spot in the basegame and users (especially new players) frequently run afoul of this, so I am hoping that someone will take a stab at this one in time for the next revision.
  13. So you tried opening it with Trask and it still did nothing then?
  14. It would likely be faster for you to get support on the Discord, but I can try to help you here. The behavior with the door being locked implies that Trask isn't present, which is very very old behavior--Trask Without Tutorials, the new KOTOR tutorial mod I use, keeps Trask in the party and uses him for the door unlock, matching vanilla behavior. If you don't have him or he can't open the door, something is already quite wrong. Is he present for you? Regarding crashing on save/load, you may simply need to use the 4GB patch. Patching widescreen in and using it for stability might be totally unavoidable for your setup.