Posted June 17, 2009
high rated
I just wanted to bring some ideas to the attention of the GOG staff. It's not a complaint so much as a suggestion for easy improvements that will mean a better experience for everyone for Under a Killing Moon (and Pandora Directive, when it comes time for that).
First of all, there's a good bit of redundant data in Under a Killing Moon, which was done to reduce the amount of disc swapping. GOG's version seems to mount full images of all four discs on four different emulated drives. This is wasteful. The redundancy can be eliminated as can the need for images (though the game does require some kind of drive emulation), which will reduce the game's total size by about 400 megs (and Pandora's by more than that). The process to do this is somewhat complicated, but there's a utility here:
http://www.adamhearn.co.uk/games/texmurphy/Under_A_Killing_Moon_-_Installer_v1.3.zip
A Pandora Directive version is available here:
http://www.adamhearn.co.uk/games/texmurphy/The_Pandora_Directive_-_Installer_v1.1.zip
This will save you guys a little bandwidth and save us all some download time and HD space.
Also, the game defaults to Adlib/SB music, which is very poor. The MPU-401 option will map the music right to Windows' MIDI synth and it sounds great. Super easy tweak. In fairness I guess this is really easy to change in these games on the user end, but no sense in making it default to crap.
Anyway, thanks for the hard work, hope this helps. I look forward to snagging the rest of them when they come out.
First of all, there's a good bit of redundant data in Under a Killing Moon, which was done to reduce the amount of disc swapping. GOG's version seems to mount full images of all four discs on four different emulated drives. This is wasteful. The redundancy can be eliminated as can the need for images (though the game does require some kind of drive emulation), which will reduce the game's total size by about 400 megs (and Pandora's by more than that). The process to do this is somewhat complicated, but there's a utility here:
http://www.adamhearn.co.uk/games/texmurphy/Under_A_Killing_Moon_-_Installer_v1.3.zip
A Pandora Directive version is available here:
http://www.adamhearn.co.uk/games/texmurphy/The_Pandora_Directive_-_Installer_v1.1.zip
This will save you guys a little bandwidth and save us all some download time and HD space.
Also, the game defaults to Adlib/SB music, which is very poor. The MPU-401 option will map the music right to Windows' MIDI synth and it sounds great. Super easy tweak. In fairness I guess this is really easy to change in these games on the user end, but no sense in making it default to crap.
Anyway, thanks for the hard work, hope this helps. I look forward to snagging the rest of them when they come out.
