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View File Harbinger's Arrival Performance Enhancement for TSLRCM Full Description: The mysterious arrival of the Republic hammerhead warship is one of the most ambitious and engaging cutscenes in TSL. Unfortunately, ambitious cutscenes can be a harbinger for more than just a man with severe psoriasis -- players may experience issues ranging from cutscenes stuttering and looping, loading screens before and after loading a new module mid-cutscene, breaking animations, to game windows minimizing and skipping the cutscene entirely, permanent black screen, and even game crashes. Thus this mod's mission was twofold: 1) Provide a range of general improvements and fixes that everyone will benefit from regardless of cutscene performance, as well as 2) Create a more stable version of the cutscene that generally performs well on any device. I am happy to report that results have been exciting: 1) General improvements - Atton now always faces the correct direction when speaking to you - Kreia actually shows up meditating in the morgue when you hear her speak, rather than standing right behind Atton - Kreia no longer visibly stands behind Atton in certain earlier shots of him speaking - The Peragus mining facility asteroid is no longer right outside the Harbinger window before it actually enters the asteroid field 2) Performance improvements All in-game portions of the cutscene are now rendered in the same module -- your game will no longer be trying to load an entirely new module twice over, all while trying to play pre-rendered cutscenes. This means that your game's mid-cutscene workload has been drastically reduced, and so issues known to occur specifically with the Harbinger Arrival cutscene are much less frequent. I have also scripted in "guardrails" for many minor glitches that can occur mid-cutscene. Note that this is not a 100% guarantee players who were having issues before never will again; TSL is nearly old enough to be legally considered an adult in the US, and its pre-rendered scenes are just not optimized for many modern machines. However, this mod was tested on a non-gaming laptop now a few years old, with the game running from an external hard disk drive, on a modern operating system, in full-screen mode, with several different visual mods installed. This meant that attempting to run the original Harbinger cutscene 10 times translated to the cutscene failing to play without major issue 10 times. After switching to the new version, any types of issues, major or minor, were encountered less than 1 out of 10 times. Hopefully, even a potato from your local grocery store can now successfully play the Harbinger Arrival cutscene, so long as it can generally play most TSL cutscenes successfully. Harbinger Enhancement_compressed.mp4 For reference when it comes to performance, this footage was recorded on an old laptop, with the game running on a modern operating system from a hard disk drive, with multiple other programs running in the background, and the following mods installed that can be seen in the video: - Ultimate Peragus Models Repair 1.2 (responsible for restoring proper lighting to the Harbinger, showing the administration level proper behind Atton, and other model fixes) - Harbinger Bridge Repairs (responsible for fixing several geometry errors, two visible during cutscene) - KotOR 2 Remastered (AI Upscaled) Cutscenes 1.0.0 by Naelavok (responsible for the upscaled pre-rendered scenes) - TSL Backdrop Improvements by Kexikus (responsible for the much-improved skybox seen from both the catwalk and the Harbinger bridge) - Improved Peragus Asteroid Fields 1.2 by Vasilii Zaytsev (responsible for the static 3d asteroids surrounding Peragus II) - Peragus Large Monitor Adjustment by Sith Holocron (responsible for that excellent HD computer monitor before Atton) - Kotor 2 Unlimited Worlds Texture Mod (responsible for the nicer-looking textures throughout the level, from the catwalk to the asteroids) - Ultimate Character Overhaul REDUX (responsible for the HD character textures) TLDR: This mod 1) stabilizes the Harbinger cutscene so that your game is much less likely to experience issues 2) places Kreia in her usual meditation spot in the morgue for her dialogue, and 3) fixes a number of minor issues with the cutscene. Installation: Download and run the installer, or else follow manual installation instructions. For Steam installations of TSLRCM, direct the installer to "Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\208580\485537937", and not the main game folder with the executable. 7z files can be extracted with Archive Utility on macOS, or with programs like PeaZip for windows and Linux. The installer is a .exe file, which can be run natively on Windows, or with programs like Wine for macOS and Linux. For an existing game, use a save file before going to the asteroid exterior. Save files made any later will not be affected. Uninstallation: Take 104per.mod out of the provided backup folder and place it in your modules folder at the location you installed to, and select replace when prompted. Take a_con_atton_end.ncs out of the provided backup folder and place it in your override folder at the location you installed to, and select replace when prompted. You can safely delete 104per.lyt and 104per.vis from your override folder. The files 104pera.mdl/.mdx/.wok come from Ultimate Peragus Models Repair, you can keep or delete these at your discretion. Additional Tips For Improving Game Performance: If you are having trouble running pre-rendered scenes in general, you can try the following: -- Go into your graphics settings, and under advanced options, disable frame buffering. If that does not work, try lowering or disabling all options. If the pre-rendered cutscene plays afterwards, you can up your graphics settings afterwards for normal gameplay. -- Try running the game in windowed mode, rather than fullscreen. Close your game and open "swkotor2.ini", found in the same folder as your main game executable (for a Steam game, that's "Steam\steamapps\common\Knights of the Old Republic II"). Under both "Display Options" and "Graphics Options", change "FullScreen=1" to "FullScreen=0". Restart your game. -- Uninstall/disable any non-essential mods that may relate to the cutscene or the area it takes place in. Peragus in particular also suffers from memory overflow if you play the game too long in one sitting. This can cause dialogue to start skipping, or for issues with game cutscenes. This can usually be avoided by: -- Quitting and restarting the game once in a while: doing it once before heading out to the asteroid surface, and again right before attempting to leave the Harbinger engine deck (the third and final level with the spooky lights) is usually enough to avoid problems. -- Avoiding skipping dialogue yourself, which can sometimes lead to memory overflow. If you do skip a lot of dialogue, quitting and restarting the game will fix the issue. Compatibility: Users should expect full compatibility with any other mods, so long as they make no modifications to the scripting or dialogue of the Harbinger's Arrival cutscene. For instance, if you are installing N-DReW's Mini Mod Collection for TSL, be sure not to add the included 104atton.dlg or 104kreia.dlg to your override, or remove it if you already have, as that would create a major incompatibility. This mod is for players using TSLRCM version 1.8.3 or higher. You may view this mod's changes.ini inside the "tslpatchdata" folder for a complete list of every altered module element. Feel free to check out "KotOR 2 Remastered (AI Upscaled) Cutscenes" by Naelavok for higher-resolution cutscenes, if you have not already. There are some other great mods out there that improve the visual quality of the cutscene. "Peragus Large Monitor Adjustment" by Sith Holocron, "KotOR 2 Unlimited World Texture Mod" by facemeltingsolo, "TSL Backdrop Improvements by Kexikus", and "Ultimate Peragus Models Repair" by yours truly are all compatible with this mod. "A Darker Peragus REDUX" by Malkior and "... A Darker Peragus" by Canderis are also compatible. Acknowledgments: Big thanks to Cortisol for the Holocron Toolset and Fred Tetra for KotOR Tool for making file extraction, module editing, and .mod file building easy, Fair Strides for the DLG Editor, JdNoa and Dashus for simple script decompiling with DeNCS, Blue for the KotOR Scripting Tool, Symmetric, Purifier, Ndix UR, and seedhartha for making importing to Blender simple using KotORBlender, and to Stoffe and Fair Strides for easy .mod extraction with ERFEdit, and for making inter-mod compatibility infinitely more feasible with TSLPatcher. Have a bug to report? Please click on "Get Support" and give a detailed description of the issue you are experiencing. This modification is not supported by Obsidian Entertainment, Lucasarts, Disney or any licensers/sponsors thereof. Use of this modification is at your own risk and neither the aforementioned companies nor the author may be held responsible for any damages caused to your computer via this modification's usage. Submitter PapaZinos Submitted 03/17/2022 Category Mods TSLRCM Compatible Yes  

So I grabbed KOTOR 1 for Android, and noticed that it seemed a little sluggish. According to the built in Android debug overlay, the game is locked at 40fps no matter the scene, graphics settings, or native refresh rate (60 or 120). The default INI file doesn't have the "RefreshRate=X" line, and adding it seems to have no effect, no matter what "X" is. VSync and Fullscreen dont have any effect either, even though both lines already exist. Is there any other way to increase the cap, or even remove it? I posted this in the modding section because I'm willing to mess with the game files if necessary, and I want to mod it anyway. Also... hello! First post from a lurker.

Overview DDS is a file format which contains a texture already in a format that a graphics card can accept (typically compressed and containing prerendered mipmaps). Many but not all games use these files as they effectively reduce both loading (as the files are smaller) and processing (as the files are already in a format acceptable to the graphics card) times. KOTOR2 is one of these games. Unfortunately it's dds support is non-standard, and not complete. Non-pot (power-of-two) texture dimensions are not possible like they are for modern dds files, and the format which obsidian uses for it's dds files is non-standard. Therefore you may only use the bioware dds convertor and not more modern, better alternatives, and also NO dds file viewer will be able to view the files generated by this convertor. With that out of the way... why bother? Motivation I did the Quake Epsilon Build many moons ago, and knew from that that converting textures to dds sped up loading times by 400%. While I enjoyed the newer, better texture packs the community had brought to KOTOR2, I got fed up with the loading times and set about finding out which textures could be converted and which couldn't - starting with all of them, and whittling the number down from there. The resultant conversion made the game loading times acceptable. I've now played through the whole game and corrected all DDS files which would not work as DDS and had to be TGA. What texture packs did I test/convert? To save time I haven't put the full names of each of these packages, but anyone familiar with them will know what they are: As a general rule, what kinds of textures will convert? Almost anything, except for: * Textures which are used as animations * Some textures which contain transparency (some work, some don't) * Some textures which are texture atlases, like the ebon hawk texture atlases (some others, like the swoop bikes, are converted fine) * Some textures which are stretched in-game (some grass/rock textures) don't work properly when converted All character models can be DDS. Overall it's hit-and-miss. I had to go by trial-and-error to find out which worked and which didn't, and the above rules don't always work. One mandalorian blaster texture wouldn't work, for no apparent reason, when all others did! And while I've taken my time, I haven't stopped to inspect every single blaster in the inventory, so there is a small possibility I may've missed one or two. What is needed to convert textures? Firstly all textures must have width and height which are powers-of-two eg 512, 1024 etc. I don't think anything in-game should be 4096, that's killing it, asides from some skyboxes, but up to 2048 is fine. Mostly I rounded up to the nearest power of two when the texture wasn't a power of two, resized then used photoshop's 'sharpen edges' filter to remove the resultant edge-blur. This worked very well. Total image sharpening is not recommended. However if you have a resizer that does Lanczos filter resizing, any additional sharpening should not be necessary. Only for images where the original size was very much closer to a lower power of two (eg. 560, would resize down to 512), did I resize down - and then, no sharpening is needed. Then simply convert the files using Bioware's dds convertor. Finally, move the specific TGA files out of your override folder, and put the replacement DDS files in there, instead. How would I know if a given file doesn't work as DDS? Either it will be invisible, look like rainbow-coloured static, or be completely white or completely black, in-game. I had to play through the entire game to correct all of these - as some dantoine textures, for example, are used in telos's citadel, and will work as dds on dantoine, but not in the way they're used on the citadel!!! Okay, so which files can be converted? The following textures (in tga format) can be converted to dds without issue - for some you may have to resize them to power-of-two dimensions: Please note, load_101PER (from Peragus Large Monitor Adjustment) must be resized down to 1024x1024 (like the other loading screens) in order to work as a dds file in-game. And which files cannot be converted to DDS (must stay as TGA)? Can I make DDS packs of the above textures and supply them, save you some time? No, that'd be up to the authors. If they give their permission, I can, otherwise, I can't really. I'd actually quite like to compile an all-in-one KOTOR2 HD texture pack, for beginners, but I doubt so many authors would give their permission. Anything else you should know? KOTOR2 will read files in both override and any of override's subfolders - so you can create a subfolder called DDS with all your .dds files if you like. Just don't include both TGA and .dds version of the same file - KOTOR2 will load them both (and your loading times will stink). Otherwise this should at least halve your loading times. Also, although the telos signs in the overhaul pack cannot be converted (since they're animations) I found that resizing some of them to lower powers-of-two resulted in them a. loading faster, b. playing faster/more fluidly as well as c. being displayed in a slightly jumpy way, like signs that are slightly crappy/glitchy - it looks better - try it. Of course, you can also alter the speed of animation in the .lxi file - but this is more fun! Closing arguments It was the first time I'd played through with the TSLCRM, and I'm glad I did - the game felt way more complete than it did the first time, ten years ago- but the ending still sucks. Oh well. Thanks to the whole community for coming up with all the great mods, textures and the sound packs. Great, well-rounded game. Now.