KOTOR QOL questions

[Chris Solomon]

i bought KOTOR I and II for the Nintendo Switch back in may when it was on sale. I also have had the steam versions for years, but i gave up on those long ago because i had serious video and framerate issues under Windows 7 Ultimate X64. the game ran fine on my Windows XP SP3 desktop, but then steam cut support for windows XP. I don't know if the situation has gotten any better under Windows 10/11. the main reason i am bothering to make this post. is that the Switch version seemed to have a number of QoL (Quality of Life) fixes and additions. Hardware Video support seems to have been fixed, as well as several mods that were seemiungly integrated intoi the game. i dont know what they would be called as mods, but it added a sort of debug menu where you could add expereience or spawn items. you could also add skils, feats, and powers. there was also an option to 'spawn Cheat Bot" which spawned 'cheat bot 9000' which allow the player to set planetary variables, add an NPC to the party, or check the status of a game variable.
I don't know if the same thing is availible in KOTOR II for the switch, I haven't gotten to it yet, but i would assume it has. has any of this been done to KOTOR or KOTOR II on steam? if not are therer any plans to? other improvements seem to be to the textures. models and lighting.

have the video and framerate issues been resolved for the steam version yet? i would l love to play the PC version since i never was able to get it to work properly under anything past Windows XP SP3.

(for switch users)
to access the debug/cheat menu just press click the left control stick three times)

[Ragnarök]

Cheats and all that stuff you mentioned in the "debug menu" part of your post have been part of KotOR on PC since launch. You just have to enable them in your swkotor.ini file and enter the right codes in-game and you can do all that stuff. There's also a dedicated 3rd party save game editor that I use sometimes.

Video issues are dependent on hardware, nothing to do with the OS. Windows 7 and 10 work as well as XP in this regard. The game never crashes for me. Some people seemingly have stability issues with modern AMD video cards though so beware of that. No idea about Intel chips, haven't seen many complaints, but I also haven't had one in 20 years. For reference all of my rigs have been AMD processor + Nvidia card. Never had an issue with that setup.

Other than that, The game doesn't like high monitor refresh rates (anything above 75hz). If you limit the refresh rate in your video card/monitor settings and turn on vsync it solves that issue. In total, it takes about 30 minutes of fiddling to get the game running at 1080p 60fps if you're new to it. 5 - 10 minutes if you already know what you're doing. All providing your hardware is acceptable of course.

I believe the game got some slight visual (lighting?) improvements on the Switch, however these are not worth the trade off of not having access to mods that improve gameplay, fix many bugs and even drastically improve other visuals if you desire.

[Chris Solomon]

the issues i was having WERE os related. my XP system is/.was an AthlonXP 2800+ wit 3Gb of RAM, and an ATI RadeonHd 4670 AGP 1Gb (probably the last model AGP card made by ATI). the windows 7 system was superior hardware wise. it was an intel (1st) gen i7 with 8Gb of ram and discrtete Nvidia GT-360. the game ran fine on my Xp system, but would only run in sosftware mode with out crashing. the games framerate wouold also dropbeloow 8 fps if you tried to run the game full screen. running it in compatibnility mode helped with the crashes, but not the FPS. i was able to play the game right upo until steam dropped support for XP.

[Chris Solomon]

the game on switch look really good. i wish they would bring over the lighting improvements. the game also doesnt look nearly as chunky as it did the last time i played it on PC. i love that the selkath in particular have this 'wet' shiny appearence now. they look alot better than before.

[Ragnarök]

Originally posted by Chris Solomon:

the issues i was having WERE os related. my XP system is/.was an AthlonXP 2800+ wit 3Gb of RAM, and an ATI RadeonHd 4670 AGP 1Gb (probably the last model AGP card made by ATI). the windows 7 system was superior hardware wise. it was an intel (1st) gen i7 with 8Gb of ram and discrtete Nvidia GT-360. the game ran fine on my Xp system, but would only run in sosftware mode with out crashing. the games framerate wouold also dropbeloow 8 fps if you tried to run the game full screen. running it in compatibnility mode helped with the crashes, but not the FPS. i was able to play the game right upo until steam dropped support for XP.

No, they weren't. If they were OS related everyone would have had the same problems getting the game to run properly on Windows 7. Since that's not the case, it was your hardware. I had never even heard of a GT-360 and had to look it up. It's a laptop card which explains your grief. Regardless of how much "better" a product claims to be that's no guarantee that it actually is in all cases, especially for older games. On paper the stated specs can be as high as you like, but in practice the game and card don't always cooperate. Or the game and processor for that matter.

That's the reality of PC gaming.

[Chris Solomon]

sorry, i mis-stated the card on the i7. it was in fact a GT-330 and it was NOT a mobile card, and was infact a car that was pl;ugged into the Motherboards PCIE X16 slot. anyways...

running the game in 'compatibility mode' set to 'windows 98/ME' solved some of the issues i had under Windows 7, but not all of them.

I am now trying to get the game working on a more modern system, an an 8th gen i7 with an nvidia 1060 6gb, but i am rujnning into some of the same issues. the current system is running Windows 11 24h2 (build 26100.1882).

[Chris Solomon]

after some tinkering, I got the game to work fullscreen, with out crashing and with the movies able to be played. YAY! finally, after all these years! it does seem to look quite a bit better on the switch. the textures seem to be better, and the models aren't quite as chunky as they are on PC.

[Mardoin69]

Yes, the GT 330 was a PCIe graphics card. It may have also had a mobile version of it but, didn't read up on it to know for sure. For reference...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units

However, it was a crappy card to use for gaming honestly. At the very least, you'd want the GT 340. But, even that (for the money) was not worth buying when you could spend just a 'little' more and get a much better (for gaming) gpu. At any rate, I could see why it would of been hit n miss to use that card with PC games. At least you have it up n running 'properly' now though. Congrats!

Edit: Also, for that I7 cpu, you'd see some benefit in games by disabling the 'hyper threading' feature. This will force the cpu to only use actual physical cores instead of the additional 'logical' cores / threads. In other words one thread per core... which works better for games. You might see a 'little' performance hit when it comes to apps that CAN make use of 'many' threads. But, games do not.

[Chris Solomon]

that system was built on a budget. as it was configured it was good for gaming for almost 11 years. it was in use so long i actually had to reapply the thermal paste to the CPU because several of the cores started getting hotter than the other cores. the only game i have that i had to worry about the logical and hyper-thread cores was Sim City 4, but that was solved by going into task manager and telling windows to run the game using only core 0, along with some game startup command line arguments.

Under Windows 11 Pro 24H2 (build 26100.1878) i got the game to work with out crashing at all and running fullscreen at higher resolution (i have it set to 1280x720 for now.. will try 1920x1080 later on, maybe.)

its possibly becuase of the OS, but for some reason the game is not allowing the changing of resolutions either in SWCONFIG or from with in the game. the list is blank. and if you are not careful (pressing ok after bringing up the list inside the game) you can cause the game to freeze. I found i had to set several compatibility settings in the properties for SWKOTOR.exe as well manually add the following lines to the SWKOTOR.ini :

Width=1280
Hight=720
RefreshRate=120
AllowWindowedMode=1

setting windows compatibility to Windows XP SP3 caused the game to open up in fullscreen, but the game still crashed until i activated the Run as admin option under compatibility, and also the '[register this program for restart' and the option 'use legacy display ICC color management'. I also used the compatibility settings High DPI settings button. on that menu, i activated both options, and selected the options 'I open the program' and 'Application'.

i also found i had to go in and manually increase the graphics details settings in SWKOTOR.ini becuase trying to do it with in the game would remove the lines i added, and set the game back to running at something like 640x480 (not desirable).

all said.... i still think the switch versikon of the game looks better. the textures seem to have higher resolutions and the models, especially for the NPC's don't appear to be as chunky as they do on PC. the models for people in the switch version have rounded faces, instead of the angular edges you see in the PC version.

[Chris Solomon]

i still have not figured out how to access the debug menu with access to 'cheat bot 9000' you said it was in the game all along. how do i access it?

[Chris Solomon]

okay.... just got confirmation..... Switch version DOES in fact have better textures.... 720p (switch) vs. 480 (PC) also widescreen support was implemented for the switch version. the clothes and skin appears too look a lot better than PC