Yavin IV by jenkeee 1.0.0

Hi everyone,

Working on this mod has been a really exciting experience. I’ve said before — probably everywhere I’ve posted about it — that this project started simply as a result of my curiosity, and eventually I decided to share it with everyone.

I’d like to thank all the people who left the first comments and showed interest in the mod. Your reactions were the exact push I needed to want to bring this project into a more complete state.

Since then, the project has grown a lot, and the number of files involved has increased significantly. The mod is now in a working state and is still actively being developed, so I’ll be updating the description to reflect the project as it currently stands.

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Updated Overview of the Project Files

1. Original requirement

• You need the original Yavin 4 mod by MotOR Squad + Master Zionosis.

2. Yavin by jenkeee EN - installer.zip

• This is my fix package for the mod. It repairs several quests so the mod works properly on the modern Steam version of the game. I also changed the final fight with Trask and added Revan’s Mask as a loot drop.

3. Yavin Trask Head Universal Hotfix.zip

• During development, I encountered a bug where Trask could lose his head model. This installer is meant to overwrite Trask-related files in the Override folder and fix that issue.

4. kotor_stability01.zip

• This is a small legacy safe-mode launcher. Inside the package there is a text file where you need to specify the path to your kotor.exe.

5. Yavin Yav_93 Leviathan Terminal Hotfix.zip

• Thanks to the players who reported this bug. The terminal on level 93 uses two Leviathan terminal entries from the vanilla game. While restoring the terminal for the mod, my Override files unintentionally affected the Leviathan level as well. This hotfix corrects that problem.

6. veh1.1 - installer.zip

• This is the version of the mask with baked animations. The cloak is no longer static, and now moves slightly, as if it were fluttering in the wind.

 

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Savegame Reminder

• A quick reminder about how the KOTOR save system works: if an object with an error has already been written into your save, that error may remain stored in the save file itself. Because of that, when applying fixes, it is strongly recommended to load a save made before entering the location where the problem was found. Ideally, you should load a save from before your first visit to that location. That is the best way to ensure your installation remains valid.

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Why I Started Making These Posts

I started making these posts because I wanted to talk to the Jedi still out there. The saga is going through difficult times, and the disturbances in the Force are stronger than ever. More than anything, I’m interested in what players think: is there really a need for a remake like the one Gothic 1 is getting?

With KOTOR II, my opinion is absolutely clear — that game deserves a full remake. But KOTOR I is a different case. It is a complete and finished work, and in many ways it is still beautiful exactly as it is. KOTOR has always been a game for enthusiasts, and even today I still play it on the highest difficulty.

For those who have read this far, from this point on I want to describe the technical side of the project.

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Technical Side of the Project

BioWare removed the cloak and the mask from the release version of the game, leaving them only in cutscenes. Why? And more importantly — for what reason? Trying to answer that question is exactly why I began all these experiments with KOTOR resources, as a level-capped Jedi Consular digging into the game’s internals.

I did not try to add more polygons to the cloak model. My goal was to preserve its original state as much as possible. I still had to redefine a few vertices, but I tried to stay as close to the original as I could. You can see the result of this work either by downloading the mod or by watching the short video below.

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The Main Question

And that is really why I wrote this wall of text — to ask one question.

Jedi friends, and Sith class enemies alike: should I continue this mod?

DarthMouse and I have a lot of ideas. There is also a huge amount of work ahead, and this is not development in Unity or Unreal. I want to use my mod as an example and explain how I made the cloak move — and the reaction to this post will show whether this project deserves to live on.

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About the Technical Process

First, we have to understand what is actually possible in the KOTOR environment. KOTOR is a true legacy dinosaur, and any developer understands that movement can, in theory, be handled either on the CPU or on the GPU. I do not want to turn this into a lecture — I’m only giving a broad overview of the technical process.

In the end, the entire approach depends on that core decision: do we simulate cloak movement on the GPU, or on the CPU?

After studying the engine — Aurora, Odyssey, KOTOR — I decided to stay with the kind of technology that would have been available to the original developers at the time. That means rigging the mesh and creating animations for the beautiful and terrible state mixer that KOTOR uses.

To the modders who will keep experimenting with KOTOR after me: please study my work before you try to make cloth movement with bones and animation. I still hope that one day I will see a proper GPU-based solution, maybe even with a full ReShade-style injection.

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Why BioWare Probably Cut the Cloak

I’ll answer the original question briefly: for anyone who has actually tried animating this cloak, the reason BioWare cut it from the release becomes obvious.

First, without increasing the polygon count, it is extremely difficult to make the cloth look truly presentable.
Second, the state mixer makes debugging much harder.
Third, development time.

I spent more than 36 hours just on the walking animation alone. And where I spent 36 hours today, twenty years ago I would have spent at least 300.

That, more than anything else, is why the cloak and Revan’s mask were never fully completed for gameplay in the original release.

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Final Note

In many ways, this entire reconstruction was made for this look.

 

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Media

boss fight:

short with new mask:

 

Original walkthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcvhjSGpTnE&t=1s