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So the new site skin seems very phone-centric. All the headings and text are big and chunky, presumably for touch navigation. There doesn't appear to be any provision to change scales or widths in user settings. Switching to the default theme does make a minor improvement (including putting downloads on the navigation bar instead of burying it in a drop-down), but Jesus, the blinding whiteness of it. Are there any plans for more desktop-friendly themes/layouts in the future? Edit: Btw, I find the "someone reacted to your post" message unintentionally hilarious. The first time I saw it I imagined the reaction was Tyvokka's eye twitching.

I'm waiting for this policy change to turn out to be some elaborate scheme to round up all the porters and ban them.

///// 01. Two-Point-Oh ///// First off, thanks to everyone who’s downloaded and offered support through this process. I appreciate all of your comments, critiques and suggestions. Through the creative process, the gears started turning for future plans. Here’s loosely what I’m planning thus far: ///// 02. Planned Improvements ///// Remap the UVs. A lot of the patterns repeat, e.g. details on arms are also on feet, or also on base, etc. I know I wanted to remedy those first and foremost. I wanted the arms to have their own textures, the feet their own, etc. etc. etc. Progressive: Create a UV for each arm and leg, which would increase the work significantly because then we go from 2 pieces to 6. Overkill? Planet rotations. When the map opens and you see the location of each planet, they slowly (and very choppily(?) rotate. I’d really like to smooth that out a bit, as it’s just a hacked together animation. I think it has 9 frames right now? At a minimum, I’d go up to… 18 frames? Progressive: Each planet has its own custom shape and visual identifier. Right now, it’s random Aurebesh numbers (which technically didn’t exist as it does now, same with planet names), but we’ll see. Does it even need those I guess? Maybe it’s actually the type of planet referenced by the terminal, i.e. barren, arboreal, etc. More “Builder-esque”. Until ebmar pointed this out (and it should have seemed so obvious), this is a Rakata structure. I got the Aurebesh (see comment above) in there, but what else can I do to make this more “Builder”? I started looking around at a lot of source photos and ran around the Unknown World location a bit. I think I can change the rock? metal? country? to be a bit more… just “of that world”. Perhaps I made it too sleek in 1.0. While I have the texture itself pretty roughed it, it’d also make sense that some parts got chipped/rotted off here and there. Progressive: ebmar and I have been chatting about having a new sound for the opening of the maps. Dodecahedron. I really hate that thing. I want to make it a sphere or I dunno, just something different. I was so difficult to figure out how to reskin it before. There would be so much more I could do with a different shape. At the very least it’s been given a new UV map. Progressive: Play around with some transparency ideas. ///// 03. Planet Customizations ///// Let’s just go ahead and mark this whole section as “Progressive”. The idea would be to create a star map for every location, customized to that planet. The thing with that is there would need to be at least 4 more placeables created or they’d have to be built into the room itself. Hard to say what the route would be at this point, I mean, there are a limited number of placeables in the game. Anyway, the custom ideas: Dantooine This would just be the base model. Similar to what it is now, though with a violet glow. Tatooine Yellow glow. Sand-blown, sand in crevices and piled around base. Maybe throw some krayt scales in there? Like the dude was using it as a scratching post. Kashyyyk Green glow. This thing has been in a jungle for what, 10k years? Let’s thrown some moss, vines, etc. on there. It’d only make sense that the jungle would start taking it back. Moisture stains. Rust? I’m iffy on that one. Manaan Blue glow. Heavy algae growth. Coral, barnacles growing on it? Korriban Red glow. (durrr) I’m a little stuck on this one because it’s unexposed to the elements basically. I was thinking along the lines of blood splatters and saber burns. Thinking maybe someone fought in that room at some point. ///// 04. Recent Dev ///// The model has a completely new UV map. Every part has its own map to avoid pattern repetition. While I don’t know if I’ll recreate all 3 arms and all 3 legs still remains to be seen. Lots of reading about creating placeables and modding rooms. ///// 05. Future Dev ///// I really don’t care for the end animation of when you open the final star map. It seems so lackluster and very anticlimactic to me. I envision once the final map opens and the coordinates triangulate, you now have a large hud of the starforge. As of now there are just blue streaks and dinky animations (no offense Bioware). All of this really gets into some hardcore modeling and animation and that’s way, way, WAY over my head. I’m using Blender too, and well, it doesn’t like KotOR animations that much. ///// 06. Final ///// So that’s what’s going on at this point. Thanks again to everyone who’s download the mod, given their opinions and suggestions and more. This has been a fun project and I’m hoping it will continue to be so! If there’s anything you’d like to add to the above list or have anything else you’d like to share, by all means. Feel free to follow this post for updated now and then. Cheers, -CO

I'll just throw a concept out there, Canderis. The program is called RevanEditor . . . so what if half of the mask was a wire-frame of the mask?

Greetings, meatbags. Last time I posted in this blog was quite a while ago, so I thought I'd share what my recording space currently looks like in Texas. The rundown: It's a big ol' closet with moving blankets strung up on the walls and draped above me like a circus tent. The equipment: I've been slowly adding more and more to my space throughout my various moves. First off, the second most important instrument you have (after your voice). I've had three mics throughout my 6 or so years recording VO. I started off with the respectable Blue Yeti USB mic, moved on to the AT2020 and now have landed at the E-100S Condenser Microphone. This thing is good for me to help bring out the natural bass in my voice, but is not markedly better than the AT imo. If you're looking for a good starter mic of your own, I'd recommend the far more affordable AT. Next is the Audio Interface, which is necessary if you're using a non-USB microphone like I am. I use the Focusrite Scarlett Solo, which is a plug and play type setup and has never steered me wrong. The next most important part, is your recording software. Audacity is free and it's what I've always used. Extras: Music Stand to hold your copy (or script), mic stand, stool to place laptop on, LED clamp light to see copy, dog trainer clicker to mark mistakes with loud pops in recorded track. That's all there is to it. Til next time. - UC

Everyone should be able to view reactions also I bumped the reaction limits.

I'm working on Jolee now, but I love Revan and his voice was the best part of vanilla TOR for me, so I tried to channel some Jeff Bennett for you. EDIT: Added my quick take on the rest of the guys you posted as well. Revan.wav AndTheRest.wav

I’m glad to be able to talk about porting. It’s not the subject itself that I find as mysterious and alluring as some forumites seem to, but it’s been such a taboo topic for so long that I find it refreshing to be able to talk about everything I’ve been repressing. Porting content from one game to another within the same series (e.g. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords) is now allowed on Deadly Stream. Because I’m allegedly “staff”, I was told about the change of policy a couple days before the official announcement, and I was shocked. I’m still shocked. Honestly, it feels weird discussing the topic even now. Not in a bad way - like I said, it’s rather liberating - but in an I’m still having trouble believing this is a thing sort of way. This would’ve been my tenth anniversary on LucasForums, if it were still online, and I was on the FileFront forums for a bit before that. Porting was always banned and I don’t remember when it wasn’t. When Deadly Stream went online, it maintained the same rules, and now that’s changing. It’s a shift in policy older than this website, put in place before many users here even played the games. It’s a surprise, to be sure - and I expect a welcome one for many. Given the nature of this modding website, I expect anyone reading this likely knows well enough about porting, but not everyone is a modder or PC gamer and I have been asked before what porting is and why it’s a big deal. Porting is taking copyrighted content - models, textures, music, or what have you - from one game and putting it into a different game. It’s a kind of modding, but the distinction is that regular old modding works within the confines of whatever game is being modded, editing the existing assets and/or adding new content created by the modder, while porting involves something that wasn’t in the game and that the modder doesn’t have the rights to. Why is this a big deal? It isn’t in some communities. Different sites have different rules, and some do allow it. But it wasn’t allowed in the KOTOR community until now, though I feel I need to add a qualifier to that. It was kind of unclear. Porting was certainly against the rules on LucasForums, and with LucasForums went the KOTOR community. While I was a reviewer for KOTORFiles part of my job was to make sure the mods I reviewed didn’t have anything that wasn’t allowed. We were, for example, instructed to be on the lookout for TSLRP when the beta was leaked. If you were to ask me if porting were allowed I think I’d say no, but I don’t think that was an actual FileFront rule. JK3Files hosted mods that ported content from Jedi Outcast to Jedi Academy. There were also a few KOTOR mods I suspected of ported content - textures I recognized from Jedi Academy, for example - as well as mods that included other copyrighted material like music and sound effects. Fortunately, though, nothing ever came under my review that called for an examination of the laws of porting. To further complicate matters, the official release of MDLOps - still hosted on StarWarsKnights.com - contains a tutorial on how to port the Tenloss disruptor rifle from Jedi Outcast/Academy to KOTOR. Bit of a mixed message there. Regardless, on LucasForums porting was certainly verboten. But for a long time, this was a moot point. There was a lot in the modding realm we couldn’t do. Until a few years ago, we couldn’t work much with head models - the animations would break, or something worse would happen. And unless you used Taina's Replacer, which didn't allow change in vertices, the smoothing would break. Even if you could get a model from point A to point B, it wouldn’t look as nice as it did back at A. Different tools could only handle different things. KAurora couldn’t do animations. MDLOps couldn’t convert lights or lightmaps, emitters, or walkmeshes. I don't know if room animations didn't work or if nobody ever tried it. All these things and more would break even if you were keeping a model in the same game. Most of these issues were only resolved last year with the development of KOTORMax, MDLEdit, and the updated MDLOps. For this reason, perhaps, porting as a reality was a rare concern. Only two cases from those days stand out in my memory, both of which involved screenshots taken in K1 to make textures in K2, and both of which deemed ok by the administration. On Deadly Stream, there was that fiasco with the credits. More often than not, the matter was merely theoretical - someone would unknowingly request something that required porting and be shot down for it. It was forbidden as a theory even though it wasn’t much of a possibility and I don’t know why. It was a rule from before even my time and I’ve never heard the issue properly debated. Porting wasn’t allowed, and you weren’t allowed to talk about why it wasn’t allowed. I find that a bit unsatisfying, so I’ll try to see things from both sides of the issue and debate myself. Argument A: Porting is a copyright violation. It’s taking something that’s not yours and distributing it without the copyright owner’s permission. In more extreme cases, publishers have moved to shut down mod projects/websites for fear of losing sales, such as with conversion mods that would remake a game in another engine. Modding as a whole is already on shaky legal ground, so it’s not wise to attract that sort of bad attention. The line is drawn here. Argument B: Porting isn’t anything like pirating a game because it involves a fraction of the content and requires the framework of a game to access it. It’s unlikely that any mod would negatively affect a game’s sales. If anything, more mods for a game is a good thing and content ported from one game to another draws interest in both. There’s nothing illegal about porting for personal use. The only part in question is the distribution of game assets - but that applies equally to all mods. The only difference is from which game the assets originated. It doesn’t make sense to apply a different standard of rules, especially for games in the same series that already share a lot of assets, like KOTOR. Those are the essential arguments, as I see them. At the risk of earning Kreia’s wrath, I’m not going to take a side. This is a bit of a coward’s way out that I can take because I’m a modder and I can port stuff myself if I want to and not rely on downloading it from Deadly Stream - more on that in a bit - but that really is how I feel. I don’t see it as a matter of what’s right or wrong or what’s legal but rather what you think is a good idea and how much of a risk you want to take. Some communities take a risk and never have any trouble. Some - not many, but some - have taken the same risk and had their mods taken away. It’s a subjective matter, and maybe that’s why I’m a little bitter about the LucasForums days - because I see it more as a decision we should make as a community rather than an ultimatum that must never be questioned (even if most of us don’t know who made the decision or the rationale). But whether or not it was entirely by choice, that was what the community decided and I went along with it. That was then, this is now. It seems the community has gone in the other direction, and I’ll go along with it. The question has become not what is allowed but what is and isn’t possible. I imagine, in the coming days, as more people ask this question there will be some poking and prodding to explore the new horizons. So I thought I’d save anyone reading this a bit of time by admitting that I’ve known how to do a lot of naughty things for a while now. I’ve been porting for personal use - not to make mods, but for my film projects that demanded it. Characters from different games interacting with each other, locations we wanted to use in another context, or just things that were useful for cinematic purposes - K2 has a lot more animations than K1. I’ve already been poking and prodding for years now and I no longer feel the need to hide it. I’m not going to go into much technical detail yet - perhaps when the modding wiki is online, if it's permitted - but I can answer some general questions right now. For K1/K2: Can we port head models? Yes. There is some difference in the bone structure for each game, but there’s a specific process that works. It’s not even a huge difference, but it makes the lips of K1 heads clip in K2 and leaves K2 mouths gaping open in K1. My guess is Obsidian changed things during their development of the facial animation system that was never finished. The fix is essentially to copy the skin onto the appropriate game’s set of bones. Can we port body/full body models? Yes. Without any qualifiers. PCs? Party members? Aliens? Really? Yes. What about robes with capes? Yes. The supermodels would have to be edited to include the cape bones and their animations, but it could be done. I had one go at it but it’s a bit shoddy at the moment. Can we port other animations? Yes. With a few caveats. 1.) K1 has a limited number of animations that can be scripted, though new cutscene animations are an option. 2.) K2 has more combat animations than K1 and under different names. A couple bugs in K2 stem from failure to account for this, and unless they’re named properly for K1 the same sort of problem would occur. 3.) K2 has a ton of other new animations and they’re added all over the place, which complicates any sort of porting. Can we port models with their own special animations, like Darth Nihilus? Yes. The same animation concerns apply, but that’s it. Can we port textures - fancy ones, like bump maps and ones with animations? Yes. The TPC format doesn’t change, so even in the event that we’re unable to properly decompile to TGA/TXI, simply copying over the TPC is enough. I have a texture archive for K2 that includes all of K1’s textures (and any that happen to share the same file names are overridden by the K2 versions). Can we port areas? Probably. I’ve had one definitive success - m14aa, the Jedi enclave courtyard - and a few partial successes or failures. But it’s still early days and I suspect the problems may have been procedural. The courtyard has grass, running water, and room animations - all the things I’d expect to go wrong first - and zero problems. Lightmaps, which used to be destroyed during ASCII conversion, load fine thanks to the new tools. There is a difference in how each game is lit, so a ported module may end up too bright or too dark, but that can be fixed in the .are file. Good signs so far, but not enough for me to be confident in a hard yes yet. While we’re on the subject, since some of you seem to have been left out of the loop, we can also edit areas now. You might’ve seen area fixes in recent mods, but I’m talking full on editing like changing the lighting or texture mapping or adding a door to a new module. This would come in handy, for example, if one wanted to make new area mods that connect to the existing game, or integrate cut ones like the Czerka warehouse, or restore modules on Dantooine or Korriban that were left out of K2. Can we port feats/lightsaber forms/prestige classes/the upgrade system/the level cap/everything hard-coded? No. These were never porting issues. These game mechanics run directly through the game’s executable rather than an external file that we can mod. For the MMO: Can we port items? Yes. See MDLOps’ tutorial. Can we port vehicles? Yes. I ported the Mantis bounty hunter ship to K1 as part of an area model on Taris. I stripped it of its bump maps because I didn’t know how to work with those at the time, but I imagine if we could figure out how to convert the formats those could be included as well. Can we port character models? Probably. But you’d have to weight it to KOTOR’s set of bones, which isn’t easy or fun work. That’s kind of why there aren’t a lot of new character mods at all for KOTOR. I’m not at all familiar with how the MMO models are set up so I can’t comment further. Can we port areas? Maybe? I can import the models into 3ds Max. To get one in KOTOR would be a lot of work - making new lightmaps and walkmeshes, replacing any emitters like running water with KOTOR standards, almost as much work as making a new area from scratch - but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible. Of course, KOTOR has issues with vertical space - can’t have one walkmesh on top of another - so there may be issues with the designs, depending on the area. But I don’t think poly count or anything like that would be a problem. The MMO seems to average around KOTOR’s level, some things better, some worse. I really just haven’t had the time to try it yet. These are all just my general impressions so far and your individual success may vary. But overall I'd say there’s a lot we can do and not a lot we can’t do - just a lot we weren’t supposed to do until now. The point of this blog isn’t to encourage porting, exactly. It’s your choice whether to do it or not. Because of the rules (the old rules) I’ve always strived to use assets that are in both games wherever possible. It’s more challenging that way, but it almost always resulted in fewer complications. Even with porting allowed, I’ll probably still do that in the future. It's simpler. But now that, surprisingly, after all this time, that is a choice people can make, I want to put this information out there so those of you who are interested in stepping down this path may do as you choose. I’ll be available on Discord if anyone wants to see some more examples of my porting attempts or get a more thorough overview of the process. Personal opinions not endorsed by FileFront Deadly Stream.

Twelve years ago in Boston, I went to a release event for Drew Karpyshyn's first Darth Bane novel, Path of Destruction. I was so excited to meet the man who wrote my favorite video game of all time. When I got there, I was one of about 6 people there, two of which were my parents who graciously drove me, and it felt a little awkward to be honest. Drew read a passage from his book and opened it up to a Q&A afterwards. I asked him about the possible KOTOR connections that might be in his book (the passage he read has included the mention of Selkath), my Mom politely asked him about his other works in fiction, and then it was done. The 501st showed up in some Stormtrooper armor, which was cool, I got my book signed and off we went. It was a nice little event. Over the years as each book came out and then the Revan novel, and then TOR, I would email DrewK who would actually engage in back and forths with me about characterizations of Revan, the Exile, and lastly the apparent non-twist ending of Dynasty of Evil (I still don't understand this one). Overall, don't really know where I'm going with this other than to say that Drew was a nice fella, and I'm appreciative for the experience and whatever slight connection I made with him. So, that's that. Also, if I said that I was working on voice lines for you, I still am. Trying to get paid work now that I'm in the proper state, so that's been my absolute focus - but I will get back to the fan stuff soon. Best, UC

Seems very professional to me! I bet she could do exactly what you're looking for. Very clear, bright voice in her preview - I'm interested in seeing how she'll darken up her tone for the role.

She's cute... Oh- I mean I heard her voice already! and I think that role would suit her very well.

Are we supposed to be able to know who is reacting to our posts? Or is it a fun little mystery?

I forwarded to Newbiemodder who I think should be in the parts from the submissions so far. After he responds, I’ll send him the rest of the files.

Hey guys, saw Solo last night. I really enjoyed it! I also caught what I believe might be a KOTOR reference. I detailed what I heard in this video below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMYTZQVsD0s Trying to keep the spoilers out of text format! As for the movie itself, probably my favorite of the new Disney ones. So refreshing after TLJ.

They're on kashyyyk, duh

A preview of an as-close-as-it-could-gets attempt to filter Malak voice to sounds like Darth Malak in KotOR. Keep in mind that this is not my voice 😂 I got the file from SH while ago & have a get go with this attempt. Sounds like the voice of Darth Malak in KotOR has multiple layer on his track; I decided to go with two layers and do some edits to them with this result. The program I am using is Fruity Loops. Any constructive feedbacks and/or questions are very much appreciated!

Think I can finally understand/appreciate the stress filmmakers/game developers go through when wrapping up a series in a way that pleases everyone. Without giving anything away... I don't expect everyone will be satisfied with the ending to TPK, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't proud of it (and the film as whole). Seriously can't wait for everyone to finally see it, I've really tried to give it a bit of a twist I don't think you'll see coming. Here's hoping... /end worry.

The Mandalorian Banner Fix is included in a different form in JC's Minor Fixes, so it can be excluded. I also think the Aleema Keto RDC and Kinrath bash mods are matters of personal preference and should probably be excluded, but I think the prestige class saving throw error is clearly a bug, and barring correction from HH I feel it likely that power cost correction is also a logical fix. I'd recommend their inclusion, but not the other three.

Me, I'm not going... I'll eventually watch it for free probably. No money from me going to LucasFilm after how they treat the fans and literally insulted us (what company DOES that?) It's sad if it harms a good movie (though from the sound of things, I really doubt it is) but a stance needs to be made. We can't just be insulted, ridiculed and belittled by a company that things we'll watch their next movie regardless. That'll play them right in their cards. So I laugh and am filled with "hope" (yes, there we go with SW-hamfisted terms) about all the news coming out of it being the most expensive SW-movie and projecting to bomb and actually make them a loss, not even JUST being the worst grossing SW-movie ever. Doesn't seem people will swallow anything LF dishes out and Stockholm Syndrome straight into cinema's still.

That was a lot of fun! Considerably more enjoyable than I'd gone in expecting. Bit of a slow start, and I wasn't fond of the colour palette, but overall, I really liked it. Got used to Alden as Han about a half hour in, and by the end, I actually thought he was pretty good 7.5/10 from me