The Witcher technical information

is built on Bioware's Aurora Engine, so it is inherently moddable. This article will contain information on these two technical aspects of the game.
==Game Engine==
The Witcher is powered by a new version of the BioWare Aurora Engine, modified for a single-player experience. A number of changes have been introduced to the original BioWare Aurora Engine, and some of them are described below.
===World Visualization===
In BioWare's Aurora Engine, the world is designed exactly as it was envisioned rather than utilizing a tile-based system. Because of this, the visuals are claimed to be unique and rich in detail. All the environments are created in 3D Studio Max and then exported into the game engine.
* Light maps
:The CD PROJEKT RED's version of the engine supports lightmaps, generated in 3D Studio Max. Shadows generated this way are claimed to look more realistic and are faster performance-wise.
* Texture paint
:This is a special tool that enables to paint the environment using custom textures, with the purpose of saving time and promising a more natural look than ordinary mapping.
* Skybox and water effects
:New realistic skybox and water effects were added to the engine.
===Rendering===
All the in game and tool set rendering is done using DirectX9, and the engine now supports many different shaders (water effect, bump mapping, environment mapping, etc.). Additionally the whole rendering system has been unified and a new light manager was added.
===Other Changes===
Other important changes include the following: motion-captured animation, physics effects, new mechanics and combat system. There are also many other modifications, such as introduction of portals, additional graphical effects (glows, advanced dynamic shadows, blurs).
== Modding ==
Shortly after the 1.3 patch was released, CD PROJEKT RED provided the community with the D'jinni Adventure Editor to modify the game with. This works in a similar fashion to the Aurora toolset, however the community has since levelled some criticism at the developers for not providing sufficient aid in its use as there have been a wealth of new functions and D'jinni is not as intuitive and helpful as Aurora which would mark errors and provide a list of commands.
=== Information on the Engine's File Formats ===
* File formats
== Patches ==
The latest version of the game is v1.5. The is not a cumulative patch, like earlier patches. It requires a v1.4 installation of the game.
* (with 5 new modules, requires 1.4)
* (Enhanced Edition, required for 1.5)
** (superseded)
** (superseded)
** (superseded)
** (superseded)
== Load and Save Times ==
The most frequent criticism about the game's performance is about the load times. Try these tips to help lower them.
* Defragment your hard drive(s)
In addition, the game autosaves each time something changes in the Journal (added, updated or completed quest). Given the time it takes to save, many have asked that a future patch include a setting to disable autosave.
The time required to display the save or load screens apparently increases dramatically as the number of saves increases. Hence, it is recommended that the number of savegames be kept under control to avoid this. The saves are stored in .
Many tweaks were made to reduce load times and change how autosave is handled in the . Most notably, when going from a large zone (Vizima Temple Quarter for example) to inside a building (a house for example) and back, the load time will be much shorter than when initially loading the large zone. The game simply keeps the large zone cached in memory because it is almost certain that the player will return to it. This has helped considerably in reducing load times when exploring Vizima, for instance.
== Cutscene Performance ==
It has been noted that even though most cutscenes use the game engine itself (rather than being pre-rendered), they often run very slowly.
* Turning off Depth of Field may help, since that feature seems to be used exclusively in cutscenes.
== Troubleshooting ==
=== TAGES Issues ===
The game uses the TAGES copy protection system, which has been found to conflict with disc image drive emulators and react similarly to presence of SCSI and SATA drivers in the system, leading to a number of occasions where the copy protection system has prevented users from running legitimately purchased copies of the game.
These problems can be usually avoided by uninstalling the TAGES driver with the official installation program and then starting the game (which will automatically install the appropriate driver version).
==== How to remove TAGES? (while using patch 1.5) ====
Given that removes the copy protection scheme known as TAGES from the game executable, here is how to remove TAGES from your system.
First of all you must establish if TAGES is needed by any other games that you have installed, unfortunately we can not do that for you, and no list of TAGES protected games was found by me (if you have such a list do share it so I can update this).
Presuming that you do not have any other game that needs TAGES, you can carry on, get the latest TAGES executable, for your Windows 32bit or Windows 64bit, from here, and run it.
You will get one of two possible dialogue windows:
* If you are asked if you want to install TAGES, it means that TAGES is not installed on your system, so you will just press NO and that is it (IIRC, the original game updated with patch 1.4 works even without the TAGES system files).
* If you are asked if you want to uninstall TAGES, it means you have TAGES installed on your system, so you will just press yes and that is it. You might check by yourself if the files were removed, by searching for atksgt.sys and lirsgt.sys files in the WINDOWS\system32\drivers or WINDOWS\sysWOW64\drivers folder, and you could even do a Windows reboot just to be sure the devices are unloaded from the running system.
If you have other games that use TAGES, and you did remove TAGES from your system, when those games are run you might get:
* The game asking for the DVD or just stop/crash, meaning that you need TAGES in your system, so you need to run the TAGES installer (again) and install TAGES in your system.
* The game automatically installs the needed TAGES files without user input so you end up with a working game, but with TAGES in your system too.
Remember that patch 1.5 removes the need for the TAGES code/files only from The Witcher.
=== Windows 7 ===
* When installing The Witcher on Windows 7 it will tell you that the TAGES client is incompatible with your operating system. This is fine as long as you upgrade the game to the latest, .
* If you run the game normally through the launcher, the game may crash after 20 minutes or a few hours of gameplay, most notably when entering/exiting areas or battles with many opponents. See next note to prevent this.
* You will need to run the game by right-clicking the file in the folder and select Run as Administrator.
* Editing the permissions for permanently and then running the game normally through the launcher does not seem to work.
* Saved games can be found in 
Category:The Witcher (computer game)
Category:The Witcher technical aspects
pl:Wydajność
it:Informazioni tecniche