DarkeWolf

yeah, thats how much ram I have in mine too. Full time student, so cash is pretty tight for me right now, can't really afford to blow it on more ram. Mine sometimes takes around 3 minutes. at which point, I just go out for a smoke. a lot of it also depends on the area that it has to load. larger areas with more construction, mobiles, and files associated with that particular area are going to take longer to load. keep in mind that your system is also caching all the scripts that the npc's have associated with them, and whatnot. defragmenting the harddrive(s) that the game files, and the my documents folders are on, can help some. If you have a large hdd that will take a considerable amount of time tho. I recommend a free prog called Defraggler. It has an option for "quick defrag" which, while not a full-blown defrag, DOES help a lot. AND it's a LOT faster than the MS defrag. shut down as many running processes as you can. Antivirus, especially. THose take up a LOT of processing cycles, since most AV prog are constantly running in the background. However, if you do shut down your AV, I strongly recommend disconnecting from the internet while the AV is shut off. Even if you have a firewall. (Which I'd also recommend shutting off, since those hog a lot of cpu usage too). if possible, install the game on a seperate harddrive (if you have more than one in the machine) from your operating system. tho if it's an external drive, don't, you'll be slowing yourself down more. maybe run at a lower resolution/smaller game window when changing areas.

hrm. maybe I didnt read far enough thru all the comments. The part I did read tho, said that he was gonna edit the banters.

ok, downloaded, installed, and tried FRAPS out. So far, so good, other than it took me a while to realize that it was controlled via hotkey, lol. Much appreciated for the recommedation, folks, thanks much! Ok, now.... these AVI vids that is saves are HUGE. Anybody recommend a vid converter program so I can save them as a smaller file size format?

anybody know of a good, easy video capture program to use with dragon age?

interesting. I just did some playing with Shale earlier tonight. She's VERY astute! One of her party banters started going on on Morrigan. Asking her if "the swamp witch" (LOL) had planned on killing her mother from the very beginning. A question that I myself had also been thinking about. Odd tho, that it came after flemmeth was already slain, but..... very interesting about Al. Didnt know that you could convert him over to the dark side. Thats really interesting!

TG- you make some very good points there, about the dwarves. Things that I hadnt really considered till you mentioned them. Even tho, I'd considered what was going on with the elves. (Which is a reversal for me. I haven't liked elves since playing ShadowRun, and enjoyed playing dwarves in D&D). Yes, the zone loads were killing me. They took forever, and were sucking my RAM dry. So aggrivation at having my game crashing was probably a factor in why I wasn't paying attention like that. Other than the crap with the kingship, and having to tell that mother that her son was dead (and lying to her about that!) I felt pretty good about what happened in Ozimmar. I took out the Broodmother fairly well, (tho playing 17-18 level characters....) destroyed the anvil, and only took a -1 loyalty hit from Morrigan. Which is actually the first time I've taken a hit from her in quite a while! Made that one chick really happy about getting her family title back, killed off rooms of spiders with only minimal troubles (aside from game crashing) and only got mauled by them twice (overpower). gads I HATE that attack, tho I will say that it does look pretty realistic, what I can see of it. and figured out that anvil trap all on my own without having to go look it up somewhere. Take one for the team. Yeah, that outta be the Warden Motto. Subtitled- Bend over and take it like a man. No, no! It's a lesson is personal sacrifice! afffff Was it just me being foul mood from my computer, or did one those female ring fighters really get under your skin? The one that was the femme half of the twins? She's the one that I really really wanted to kill, and couldnt. not really, not completely. I did however, blow her butt up! Damn but I love those messy explosions from Walking Bomb. Moreso when it's a toon I dont like :D So aside from Leliana, who has the blatanly obvious character change (Oh, I'll put my past behind me and be good from now on....) did you guys notice any other character changes that your playstyle influenced? I've noticed that morrigan and sten both rag me a lot less, unless it's something to do with mages, or the Circle. Tho I'll admit, Claudia Black did a great job of catching the moment, when I threatened morrigan to put her inside a golem when she was going on about me wanting to destroy the anvil. I almost wish that I'd had shale there for that. Speaking of morrigan, there's a lesson right there for the younger generations... GEE... YOU WONDER WHY SHE ASKS YOU TO KILL HER MOTHER AND THEN YOU DO IT, AND then SHE BREAKS UP WITH YOU??? Cuz you gave her what she was boning you for? Cry about it that she closed her legs, or cry about it that you were dumb enough to fall for that crap! Ya know, I've read so many, many, many different interpretations of morrigan's character that I have to absolutely take my hat off to the writers. For that reason alone, she is one of my favorite characters in this game, because there is just SO MUCH conjecture over her. So many people reading into different nuances about her (tho some of it is just believing what they WANT to believe). They did a PHENOMINAL job, in that aspect. Not to mention that her script is pretty good. I think my favorite liines of hers are "I hate you all" and "I'm going to pretend I never heard that". basic lines, but in the context they were given was just awesome. edit- Actually, ya know.... you mentioned morrigan being practical. I'd been watching the Farscape episodes on netflix before I got the game. And there's a pretty good character familiarity between the Earlier episode Erin Sun, and Morrigan. Both played by Claudia Black. Hmmmmmmm.....

So. Did you? Did you... yourself, come up with a moral to this story, or pick up on anything that the story may, or may not, have been trying to impart? Discuss it here. For myself, I say that it was really heavy on something that I believe very strongly in. Choices and consequences. Not just in what the player does, but also in some of the things that the NPC's do also. I was really glad to see that you can't do just anything you want, and end up not paying for it, somehow. I also saw a lot of influence of "the second chance". The option of trying to make up for the bad things that they have done, if they are given the chance to. A LOT of that. And I also see them portray people undergo change. For the better, for the worse. Based off of choices and influences. I'm not trying to come off as a "dad" here. For real. No way! (I hardly qualify as the parent type!). But I was actually sitting here THINKING about what choices I was gonna make. How's it gonna turn out if I do this? How's it gonna affect it if I say "this" instead of "that"? And that's a GOOD thing. To me, somthing that people should do a LOT more of. And I also noticed that in some of the characters that I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY wanted to KILL, I couldnt. Maybe something along the lines of just because you Want to kill somebody, doesnt mean you can, or you should. LOL I also noticed the "devil on the left, angel on the right" story too. Wynn and Leliana as the concience, with Morrigan and sometimes Zevrahn as the dark side. With Alistair bouncing around between the two of them trying to balance "Right" with "practicality". Yes, it's VERY wrong to kill a little boy...but....he has a demon inside of him thats killing an entire castle and village! Alistair also shows to me, the side of learned bigotry. And overcoming it. He's always been taught such and such about mages, but actually hanging out with a couple of them, maybe they ain't so bad. Oh, and I gotta say.... I got really Sick and Tired of being manipulated by a bunch of freakin half-pint Dwarves who were making a WARDEN jump thru hoops to get what they wanted! "We're so happy and honored to have you here, Warden!" "Now do what I want, or I won't help you out, and lie to your face about why I won't do it!" :verymad:

You mentioned the polyamorus mod, so I had to go check it out. Sounds like it would be a really great work. Tho, the change in te party banter kills it for me. Thats half the entertainment, right there!

well, what I meant by letting us keep our characters- like when you choose to let a certain somebody live, a certain somebody leaves. (trying not to give away spoilers, since this is in the general section). I mean, what's so wrong about lettting us have them both? Or like with the famous morrigan sex ritual. Yeah, I REALLY need to optimize my dual core, and a couple extra gigs of ram wouldnt hurt either. I think most of it tho is my AntiVirus hogging down too much resources. I completely agree tho, that they need to streamline the engine. I dunno if it's because of the filetypes that this game uses, or if it's because they have files ALL over the place in bad directory structures, or what, but yeah....it could be a LOT more efficient. Both on the system, and for modding.

dangit, I REALLY hate it when I'm trying to think of something, and it's right there on the tip of my brain, and it just will NOT come to me!!! Sorry, getting really, really tired, and can't think straight. Anyway, there's a tactic where you cast a type of forcefield on a character, and it makes the character not be able to move. They can't be hurt, but they can't attack, either. Its a good one to use on a summoned critter, so that the aggro'd mobs waste their time on it, while others pile on damage. My way of dealing with spiders is to pull them in with my main using a longbow. After luring, I have morrigan kick off a tempest in the area I lure them to, then hit them with virulent bomb and start up the cone attacks with she and wynn. Also- never, ever type-cast your mages. Don't set one of them up purely as a healer and another straight up damager. Give both of them healing and offense. Heh, you'd be amazed at how fast wynn and morrigan can clear a large group of mobs when they both light a fireball right into the middle of the group at long range!

Also- if you have Dog search up those "dirty pantaloons" inside the castle of Hyever (SP?) and give them as a FIRST gift, you can usually get a +4 to +5 rating, pretty much regardless of who you give them to. Really dumb that a soiled pair of panties gets a reaction like that. I got a HUGE laugh when I gave them to as a gift to Morrigan after dog had gone and left a dead rabbit in her "unmentionables". Now she had two pairs of stinky undies, both of them from Dog! Edit- I've also read two accounts that in the xbox360 version that the golden mirror will restart a broken romance with Morrigan. I however, cannot get this to work on the PC version. Even after waiting for more dialog from her, to give it as a gift. I've tried many, many combinations. Has anybody else tried it and succeeded?

Ratting Morrigan out to the templars doesn't work. She makes one of her smart-assed comments, the head templar TOTALLY misinterprets it, and considers her to be a wise woman. As for wynn, no clue. Pure "kill bloodmages on sight" philosphy from me. Too much ShadowRun in my past, I guess. :whistling:

afraid that with leliana I cant really help, as far as which choices to make on her dialog. To be honest, I havent gotten her relationship to work. Tho I am trying her romance very late in the game. That and I think that polygamey might be in conflict with another mod, and not working. I guess part of it also depends on how much you can afford to spend. Once you get to Olzammar and a bit in Denerim, there's shopkeepers that have gifts for sale. That however, is just going to keep her loyalty rating up. Once you break up with them, unless you restart the romance, any of the "extra feelings" that are associated with the higher levels, are gone. As far as the OP, as to which characters are romancable, its Alistaire, Morrigan, Leliana, and Zevrahn. (sorry for any mis-spellings, I've been playing DA for 5 hours now, lol). Wynn, and Sten are no-go. I think, not sure, but Sten may have a wife back home, and Wynn thinks herself too old to get involved. Dog and Shale are obvious no-goes as they aren't humanoid. Not sure about Oghren, havent had him long enough, and not enough interest. I BELIEVE that Leliana and Zev are romancable by either gender, in vanilla, IE- both are Bi. Gotta watch Zev tho. If you mess him up too bad while his loyalty is still in the midrange, he'll try to turn around and stab you in the heart. Quite literally. Or..... as literal as a game gets, lol.

while a new engine would be an improvement, I dont see a $40.00 price tag covering the costs of redoing the engine. Especially not inside of a 5 month timespan. (november to march). besides.... you gotta remember who's shelling out the distribution on this- - - EAgames. Improvement? Ea? yeah....... IF they could just let US decide which of our NPC's to KEEP this time around, I'd be at least satisfied. Sorry if I seem a bit out of sorts. Nothing personal. Been playing for the last 5 hours, and my game keeps crashing in Olzammar. :aggrivation:

It kinda depends on if you want to stick to vanilla, or if you want to use mods. If you want to use mods go to dragonagenexus.com and click search. search for "polygamy". the polygamy mod will allow you to have active romances with more than one npc. that way you can have morrigan and leliana. "Easy love" will also allow you to have romances with characters of the same gender. Yes, be careful with the main gifts. Giving them at the wrong time can cheat you out of some quests, reduce the amount of points the gift gives you, and in one particular case... can have a BIG adverse affect on the relationship that you are having with that particular character. With the main gifts, wait for the character to mention the particular item. For instance (if it's possible, dunno... just using this as an example) dont give the antivan boots to zevran until he mentions the boots in dialog.

this actually gets asked quite a bit. I had downloaded a tutorial on how to do face changes using a saved game and the toolset to edit the saved game. I'll post what was in the tutorial. I do not know the original author, or else would give them full credit for it. I havent tried it myself, but reading over it, it looks like it would work. Keep in mind that different operating systems store the saved game info in different locations. So if you have any trouble findiing where they are stored, post...and we'll try to help you out. Also.... as always, I recommend making a backup copy of your saved game before trying to make any mods to it. Good luck :) 1. create a new character in game - with a new better face;) & save the game. 2. run DragonAgeToolset.exe and find .das file of your new saved game. C:\Documents and Settings\user\My Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\Characters\Daylen (Daylen it is my character's name) 3.in .das file find: SAVEGAME_PLAYERCHAR \ SAVEGAME_PLAYERCHAR_CHAR \ SAVEGAME_PLAYER_MORPH and copy value numbers 4. open .das file of your old character & find the same line: SAVEGAME_PLAYERCHAR \ SAVEGAME_PLAYERCHAR_CHAR \ SAVEGAME_PLAYER_MORPH now u can paste value and save changes in DragonAgeToolset 5. at the end i cut new Daylen.jpg Daylen_portrait.png & paste this in my old character's folder. enjoy a new appearance of your old character;) Luce

If you choose to start a new character for the game, you get to play the gray warden from Orlais. which gives you a different way that people relate to the character, as he/she starts out as a Commander rank, in the Wardens.

in somee of the older games that I used to mod out, the scripts for a particular creature, listed what body it used. Just out of my head for example, a troll used a body value of 128, whereas an orc used a body value of say.... 43. Each of those values being a different set of meshes and skins. IF DA uses a similar metod of assigning bodies to the creatures, then yes.... this could most definitely be done. Import new body meshes and skins in thru mods, and make whatever edits to the particular script to use the new body. Now however, you can run into issues. In a lot of cases, the issue being armors not showing up on the new models. Because in the core, the armors arent programmed to run on that particular body. And in many cases of that, you can't get around it, because it's programmed into the core. You can also run into clipping issues. where parts of the body poke thru the armor. Eh, thank you....no. I don't want an old crone running around on my screen. Seeing Flemmeth was bad enough, I dont think I'd want that on an all-time basis, as far as Wynn is concerned. I am fairly happy just adding the younger face mod to Wynn and ignoring all the in-game commentary about how old she is.

I've messed around with the toolset on a few occassions, and I gotta say that so far, I have YET to even be able to figure the damned thing out. I mean, I can't even get a scene to load, just the tree view. TESC was great! It did have a few limitations, but I really liked playing around with it. This datoolset.... Argh! So much that I would like to be able to do, but with a program that you cant figure out, combined with a really wierd set of filename extensions, and not knowing which kind of files do what..... I have yet to even figure out what extension the scripts use! I know that .cut is what the cutscenes use, and beyond that, I'm clueless. Yeah, IMO, they made this game a royal shedog to mod out.

I was actually thinking about this one too. I wish I knew what script controls the zoom, I would think that it would be very, very simple to change. It should just be a figure like 1-10

Morrigan is a bad example tho. Because one of her plot gifts has the exact opposite affect, as far as how it affects the relationship. Not that I am trying to say anything bad about you trying to help out. Thats always a good thing. Just pointing out that with that particular character, gifts can turn out to be a trojan horse, lol.

TGBlank- very informative, thanks very much! :) I appreciate the information, it's good to know. About EAgames- I too am very much NOT a fan of EAg. I can remember all the changes that started happening once EA got hold of Ultima Online. Eventually the game crapped out for the playing experience. Bunches of changes to the rules, increased monthly charges, changes to the game mechanics, supposed improvements that never came, or when they did, really were horrible. Can we say UO3d? Talk about pathetic 3d graphics! It's not just formatting. If you change something about your system, that counts against the number of times that you can install the software that has that DRM that you were talking about. For instance....the mandatory video card upgrade that I had to perform in order to be able to play DA counts as one mark against me. The biggest thing that EA had going on recently over the years wasnt their DRM, it was a grayware that they installed that BLOCKED the usage of OTHER applications! They took it upon themselves to decide what software would, and wouldnt work on the machines that their games were installed in. WITHOUT consent from the buyer. Crysis had such software installed, and even tho you would uninstall Crysis, that software remained. And as what was mentioned, you pretty much had to format your computer to get rid of it. Thats just one example, they've had several games out that did that. Needless to say, from now on whenever I install anything from them, I'll do so in a virtual drive. If they install that crap, I can just delete the drive! Anyway, back on topic. Didnt they say that you could use an old character, even if that character sacrificed themself to destroy the blight?

no problem at all, hope you get it working and get a face you really like :)

cool, I found the interview again! http://pc.ign.com/articles/105/1058656p1.html thanks for the link to the trailer, I'd forgotten about that! LOL I love that scene where the inferno golem punches that guy into a pancake! re-reading the article, I goofed. A new character starts at about level 17-20, not what I'd posted about 20-25. sorry about that. It also says "several months after the end of the blight" not "about 8 months" like what I'd posted. Sorry about that also. yeah, the fact that Alistair shows up so much in the trailer makes me concerned. I really liked some of the comedy aspect that he brought to the game, and he was fun to pick on sometimes. But overall, he was most definitely not one of my favorite characters. I do find it interesting tho that at the end of DAO, Morrigan was seen somewhere around the frostback mountains. Which, if I remember correctly (and definitely correct me if I'm wrong!) isnt that where the shadowspawn come from, thru Orzammar? And in the interview it says that the blight didnt retreat underground this time, like they had in the past. That something was blocking them. So I'm wondering, IF Morrigan IS in that area, does she have something to do with them not being able to retreat? I mean, a lone individual could definitely make it back to Orzammar faster than a hoarde army could. Especially an individual which can turn into animals that can handle terrain better than humanoids can. A spider or bug swarm would have NO troubles crossing mountains, and a wolf can travel long distances on much less amounts of food. Tho for all I know it could be something a Lot more powerful than a witch of the wilds that is keeping them from crossing back to the fade.

It was actually probably ready to go as soon as DAO was. Maybe just throw in a few things, clean up some stuff or whatever, then wait for everybody to get hooked on, and then through with; DAO before putting out the next piece of candy.