I honestly don't remember.

I also didn't have a problem with the hacking mini-game. I don't remember if I changed my mouse sensitivity or what. I think they got lazy with it and just made the mouse act like a controller's analog stick, so you had to "tilt" it in the right direction for a second and then you have to return it back to the center.

The game definitely lacked any kind of polish, and it didn't live up to its potential as an espionage RPG, but I still had some fun.

+1
Thanks for coming back and editing your post to put this in (at least I am assuming that is why you edited the post several hours after you posted). I haven't read the thread, for obvious reasons if this warning was important to me, but I am glad to be warned of any spoilers. I bought this game in the Steam summer sale, and it is very much on my 'games to play in the next few months' list.

Well, thanks to KneeTheCap I have a copy of Alpha Protocol to play around with :)

First impressions are: I have to fiddle with the graphics a bit, some janky jagged edges for me [it is likely a combination of my video card and "monitor" [a HDTV]]. I have also noticed that, sometimes, settings I choose will revert themselves for no apparent reason [Subtitles turned themselves off after I enabled them, Motion Blur turned itself back on when I turned it off]. Don't know how much of that is the game, and how much of that is me failing at computers today [tired, only on my first cup of coffee].

Second impression is.. I suck. Hacking is bloody difficult for me - I have bad eyesight to start with and those rapidly moving characters don't help me focus, time limit seems low :/ - not the worst hacking mini game I have done though. Bypassing electronics can similarly cause me annoyance [with high difficulty bypasses at least - I set off an alarm in the "tutorial" by not being fast enough at hacking, when I went to bypass the alarm there were 8 paths to cut and not nearly enough time for my butt to do so - got frustrated very quickly].

Lockpicking at least is fairly easy and within my ability.

Only put in about 40 minutes so far [much of that watching the intro and doing the character building stuff]. I will need more time, I am sure, to get a feel for what the game really offers.

Now off to see if there are any guides on optimizing the game, and see if I can find tips to make hacking/bypassing less of a headache for me.

[Disclaimer: The hacking and bypassing difficulties are on my part - I have problems with time based gameplay in just about any game, my reactions are not nearly as fast as they used to be - not the fault of the game devs or game design direction]

You'll want to put some points into Sabotage. I got my Sabotage up till level 2. Didn't have any problems with the minigames after that, well apart from the hacking one. If I'm not wrong, getting to level 2 Sabotage also means that you can right click to abort the minigame and the alarms won't go off.

Ah, will have to do that then I guess.

Having some issues w/ mouse sensitivity right now though, it is all over the danged place :/

Tried turning off mouse smoothing [via ini] but it didn't make much of a difference.

Hacking sure is a pain in the arse at the beginning, but when you get the ability to cancel the hack without alarm, it gets much easier :)

Yeah, tried lowering the sensitivity as low as I could but it is still inconsistent. In menus the mouse will, sometimes, move slowly at lower sensitivity - other times it will still be fast as heck [not to mention some sort of odd "desync" when choosing loadouts, sometimes the mod/gear selection buttons won't highlight properly when moused over :/]

Even worse, the hacking mini game becomes even more frustrating at the lowest mouse sensitivity - the sensitivity is so low in that screen that it takes forever to move the danged mouse attached code phrase. I guess I am going to just have to EMP every danged terminal I come across - though that gets expensive when EMP grenades are ~900$ apiece.

I like the story elements, I enjoy the level up system and how your skill choices can actually matter, I am starting to enjoy many of the little things... but the darned controls and the mini games are frustrating the heck out of me. I never get a hack on first attempt - my eyes are just in too bad of shape to recognize the stable phrase quickly, and I have Green/Red color deficiency [which, to put it plainly, means I am partially color blind] which makes it harder [since they insist on both the hacking and bypass mini games using a greenish tint to the letters/wires]

I will keep on pushing through and try to ignore the things that are frustrating me - it is clear to me, however, that PC controls were a secondary thought [not meant as a flame towards the game, just and observation].

Tweaking the ini's for this game can be an ass, some overwrite your changes from 'backups' in other locations, others don't overwrite.... blah blah blah, headache.

Once you work out which you can edit safely you can do most of the usual unreal engine tweaks to improve performance. Raising the memory cache, changing that oneframethreadlag thingy to improve mouse performance in mini games, and lowering the shadow filter quality right down.

I've never seen a mod/tweak to make the timer any more forgiving in the hacking mini games. Their difficulty is actually based on how many character points you HAVE versus how many you've spent in sabotage. What this means is even if you where to cheat yourself a bunch of character points and spend them in sabotage, as you play the game your total character points versus those spent in sabotage goes out of whack even MORE and the hacking games become completely impossible (speed).

Steadily investing in sabotage is great to keep the timers mostly ok, but late game there are still some absolute screen/keyboard breakers. Your best bet is to save your money throughout the game, occasionally buying EMPs and keeping them on hand. When you come across a hack that's just spitting in your eye, blow the @#$%er up with an EMP (or bypass it).

Its also worth reading up on your handlers before game, or at least PAY ATTENTION to the online shop. What you can buy is not just based on location contacts, its also effected by handlers that like you. Early on I was on good terms with Albatross and the top of the range stealth armor was for sale. I couldn't afford it. Later I had to start making inroads with SIE to trigger her sex scene and this put me at odds with Albatross. Suddenly I couldn't buy the best Stealth armor but the best Combat Armor was available. You can still nab it in this case, but you have to complete a lot of location missions to unlock the merchant with it.

It is possible to sleep with all the girls in one playthrough. Mina's reaction when she finds the after effects of sleeping with SIE on your person is quite good.

Spoiler about the Ladies:

Unfortunately, picking which girl you 'end up' with is quite merciless. If Mina's alive at the end its pretty much always her, unless you're heartlesss with her in the final mission in order to end up with the hot assassin. There is no way to end up with any other surviving gal :(. I honestly cringed at the idea of sleeping with SiE until I heard her voice actress. How do you turn down Motoko Kusanagi? It can't be done. Her 'sex scene' is also the best in the game (hilarious).

Some great endings to the title based on what you did, nothing major changes but just enough to make you realise "that's because I...."

I had the game on release day, and put it aside after the first mission. That airport is a shit house introduction. It wasn't until I had nearly finished the whole first chapter, had some skills down and was comfortable with the controls that I began to really appreciate the game. Once you work out how to play it, it becomes a real gem. Just like I had to learn to play The Saboteur properly. If you come at it with too strict a mindset of how its all going to play you'll be disappointed. You really have to familiarise yourself with the title and then make the best 'Mike' to enjoy what its got to offer.

You really can't go wrong with sabotage, pistols and assault rifles though. Some boss battles become a cake walk with a little stealth and that refresh power that resets power cooldowns.

Er... I have little to no experience messing with unreal engine INI files. What is this 'oneframethreading thingy'? Is there a comprehensive guide somewhere on what settings do what for the engine settings files?

"I can't believe you just did that in my med bay! I bet it smells like tuna and cat piss in there!"

I was being deliberately vague because I don't have the game installed right now and It doesn't look like I backed up my own ini edits.

I think its in APEngine.ini that you can change OneFrameThreadLag= to False (i think it defaults to true). This is a common unreal engine setting, its only really necessary on systems that struggle to maintain 30+ frames (like mine).

Setting it to false seems to unshackle the mouse latency from your achieved frame rate. I had to set this to false for Mass Effect 2, to speed up the bypass mini game in that as well.

Your best bet to learn about tweaking via ini edits is to read any unreal engine tweak guide like the very good one for Mass Effect (1) on tweakguides (a defunct website). Make a note of what's being changed then search through whatever game you want to edit's ini files, looking for the same or similar settings. I recommend using notepad++ to edit unreal engine ini files, it keeps everything neat and uses pretty colours.

Usually they're named the same they just end up in differently labelled ini files. Mass Effect 2 uses a coalesced ini file but Alpha Protocol still uses individual labelled ini. APEngine.ini for graphics/engine related tweaks, APGame.ini for gameplay tweaks and I think there's also an APInput.ini that might have mouse smoothing and acceleration settings.

You can turn off Mouse smoothing by

set bEnableMouseSmoothing=False

in \Alpha Protocol\APGame\Config\DefaultInput.ini

Then delete your auto generated APInput.ini in your My Documents/whatever/ and let it get remade from DefaultInput.ini with your new edit by restarting the game.

Other changes I remember changing where just cosmetic, to the APGame.ini.

InteractDistance=240
CoverWalkSpeed=75.f
CoverRunSpeed=125.f
PlayerRotationSpeed=80000.0f
MoveSpeedNormal=220
MoveSpeedScoped=60
SprintSpeed=320

I got these suggestions from here.

Half of the stuff in that thread is pissing in the wind though, some guys are telling you to turn on trilinear filtering as well as anisotropic filtering which is pointless.

Just keep in mind, editing the ini files located in the game's install, and NOT in my documents will require you to manually back them up first, if you screw them up you'll have to manually replace them (or reinstall). Those in your my documents folder you can just delete and the game will remake them on next launch (from the default ones in the install folder).

Actually that was lowyhong's idea, I can't take credit for that :)

And why can't I edit this thread's title? I would really like to add "includes spoilers" right in the title...

The thing that always puzzeled me about Alpha Protocol was the reviewers hammerd it for having these game breaking bugs that should never have made it into the game, but it was released around the same time as Red Dead Redemption.

Now let me be clear here I personaly have no problems with RDR in fact I enjoy playing the mulitplayer with my friends, however it serves as an example for this very well due to release dates only)

When RDR was released there were far more in both number and severity of bugs in the game (donkey lady, carts flinging you into the air to die and bad guys that would shoot you through soild stone while inside a mine) and yet it still managed to get a metacritic of 95 compared to AP that with (in my opinion) had fewer and less game breaking bugs only got 72 (and thats on the PC the console versions only got 63 and 64)

/Rant over