Taris Dueling Arena Adjustment 1.4

This mod makes some alterations to the arena in the Taris Upper City cantina. The primary change is the removal of the original low quality crowd sprites. In the vanilla game these are VFX nodes. It appears that Bioware's original intention was for these to be animated, but that was likely disabled due to performance issues on the Xbox. Subsequently, most of the sprites are lacking arms. Another issue is the scaling. The sprites are completely out of scale with the rest of the game world, appearing to be about half the height of an average human. This was possibly an attempt to skew the perspective, an attempt to make the arena look bigger than it actually is. The original sprites have been completely removed in favour of better quality crowd sprites ported from The Old Republic. Additionally, the bays housing the crowd have been resized in order to fit proper human-sized figures. To comply with recent local ordinance changes, transparisteel safety screens have been fitted for the crowd’s protection. Other minor changes include some texture swaps on the roof section and a dummy door model to hide some unsightly fog on the original.

Additionally, players participating in duels should now correctly face their opponent, and give an alignment-specific emote when they are announced. Opponents will now politely wait until their name is announced before giving their little fist pump. After some complaints by their union about a lack of proper medical services, defeated opponents are now healed back to full health post-match rather than being left to limp around. The view screens in the cantina have been upgraded to have a dynamic display of the current arena rankings. These will change as the player progresses up the ranks. The placeable computer screens have all had their positions adjusted so that they properly contact the walls they are supposed to be mounted to, and to align them with one another. Ajuur the Hutt’s dialogue has also had some minor surgery performed on it, to better deal with player and party positioning. Carth should now properly face Ajuur and the player during his relevant interjections, and won't be replying from across the room.

N.B. - Because alterations are made to the module's GIT file, the mod requires a save before entering the Upper City cantina for the first time. It is thus best suited for a new game. If you load a save after having entered, none of the screens will line up properly with the computer placeables.

Known Issues:

• If you initiate a conversation with Ajuur while the party is standing in the corner with the medpac bin, you will likely see them jump out of frame as they are moved to their now scripted fixed positions directly in front of the Hutt. That's an unfortunate consequence of the way it was handled, but the camera angle should mask the transition from pretty much anywhere else.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to @bead-v for MDLEdit
• Thanks to @ndix UR for TGA2TPC
• Special thanks to @JCarter426 for helping with some scripting, particularly extended troubleshooting of the Ajuur party positioning script
• Thanks to @Salk for alerting me to the TSLPatcher problem with v1.0
• Thanks to @A Future Pilot for pointing me to the fixed version of TSLPatcher
• Thanks to @Publicola for informing me about the ability to click through announcement animations
• Some screenshots feature @Sithspecter's High Quality Blasters
• The video features @ndix UR's KOTOR High Resolution Menus
• Crowd and glass textures ported from The Old Republic MMO