Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 Tweak Guide
[Page 8] Neat Stuff & Conclusion
This section concludes this Star Wars KOTOR 2 Tweak Guide with some handy tips and useful links.
Speed Up Starting Time
Knights of the Old Republic 2 has several introductory movies which you must sit through when launching the game - although you can manually skip them by clicking your mouse when each one starts. However to automatically prevent these movies from loading up and hence go straight to the game's main menu each time you launch the game, follow these steps:
1. Go to the icon from which you launch KOTOR 2, right click on it and select Properties.
2. In the Target box, change the path so that at the very end it points to swkotor2.exe instead of launcher.exe. For example, it should now look like this:
"C:\Program Files\LucasArts\SWKotOR2\swkotor2.exe"
You will now bypass the game's Launcher menu whenever you start KOTOR 2. Note that this may only work if you are using a No-CD patch. If it doesn't work for you, or you want to keep the launcher menu, ignore these steps and go to the next step below.
3. Go to your \Program Files\LucasArts\SWKotOR2\Movies\ directory and find the leclogo.bik, ObsidianEnt.bik and Legal.bik files and rename them to something else (for backup purposes - e.g. ObsidianEnt.Real_bik).
4. Download this file (Skipintro_K2.zip, 1KB) and extract these .bik files into your \Program Files\LucasArts\SWKotOR2\Movies\ directory. Note that you cannot just create new blank .txt files and rename them to the relevant movie filenames, because for example if ObsidianEnt.bik is not a real .bik file, KOTOR 2 can freeze during loading.
You can now start KOTOR 2 much faster than before.
Taking Screenshots & Measuring Framerate
There are several ways you can take a screenshot in KOTOR 2. The following are the main methods to do this:
To measure your framerate in KOTOR 2, there is no in-game console and hence no console command you can enter to do this. Fortunately you can use Fraps to measure your framerate instead. It provides a small yellow Frames Per Second readout in the corner of the screen, and since FRAPS has no discernable impact on performance, the FPS that it shows is very accurate.
Conclusion
That brings to a close this relatively brief Knights of the Old Republic 2 Tweak Guide. I wish I could have provided many, many more tweaks and tips, but to be honest the KOTOR 2 game engine simply isn't as "tweakable" as some others are, and furthermore many of the performance problems/bugs in the game require changes to the game's code - something which is beyond the scope of a tweak guide. The best I've been able to do is gather all the working tips and tweaks in one place. If you have any additional tweaks or general feedback on this guide please Email Me. Remember that I will keep this guide up to date, both with any new working tweaks from readers and also as more patches are released for KOTOR 2, so check back on the guide often.
Links and Credits
The following are a list of places I used to research this guide, and would also provide good reading material for fans of this game:
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 Official Site
LucasArts Official Support Site
Lucasarts KOTOR 2 Official Forums
Well that pretty much wraps things up for the moment, so all that's left for me to say is:
Until next time, take care!
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