Kotor Performance Mod (Inquiry)

[trevuar25 15]

Hello DeadlyStream folks, 

It's been a long time since I've attempted to create a mod and I'm trying to create the ultimate performance mod for old hardware for KOTOR. For context, my one and only mod contribution to this site has been the TSL of the OLD PC. This is thanks to a combination of contributions by modders on here like BeadV+MDLedit , DarthParametric for allowing me to take his widescreen menu and remove the particles, and the kotor tool by Fred Tetra). Unfortunately, this didn't really address all of the issues of performance on low end systems for TSL.  Thankfully it was pretty effective for a lot of use cases and I had fun working on it. Since then, I've wanted to revisit the original KOTOR in attempt to make it push 60FPS on the most meager hardware possible in a way that I could learn to do the same for TSL. In my current mod output testing, is an old Dell laptop running windows XP with 2GB of DDR2, a less than 2GHZ dual core and the infamous Intel chipset graphics accelerator running at a resolution of 1024x768.

Successes:

The main menu runs at 60fps, placeable explosions, sparks, and other effects visibly render and don't appear to be a detriment to FPS. Unnecessary map animations, added aurora lights, door animations+particles, particles have been removed. The overall framerate and gameplay pacing is better than the vanilla install (in some cases better than original xbox). 

Failures:

At one point, I considered that the vertices, faces, and overall polygon count for map modules could be the ultimate destroyer of framerate on low end systems. So naturally, I looked up Blender tutorials to lower polygon and vertices count. I ended up using KotorBlender and followed that by using the decimate modifier on the nodes and had very limited gains (with some bad visual outcomes). Even when targeting unnecessary map objects that had a ton of vertices, this method didn't have enough FPS gains for what I was trying to achieve. While some map portions that were modified seemed to give an FPS boost, there seemed to be a deeper problem based on player viewpoint.

My current struggles (Endar Spire Command Module):

I've modified ALL Endar Spire command module maps, Global fx, characters, creatures, and global placeables using the following tools: MDLedit (BeadV), Holocron Toolset (Cortisol), and the kotorblender plugin for Blender (seedhartha). Even with these modifications, the framerate can't sustain over 30fps on the hardware that I'm testing.

So far, the framerate appears to be utterly destroyed by the draw/render distance dependent of the controllable in game camera. In the case of the Endar Spire Command Module, the framerate plummets when the main character's camera viewpoint is pointed towards the bridge of the Endar Spire. 

 

Does anyone here have any pointers or advice to give me? I would very much appreciate it! 🙂