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This baby right here Sith Holocron made a video and shared some info about this mod on the r/kotor subreddit a few days back, so I decided to try it out. I did both a DS and LS playthrough and have quite a few thoughts on this and things I'd personally like to see changed Before that, though, I'll point out that Sikon has given permission for anyone to take this mod and further modify it, with a couple conditions. From the readme: As for my thoughts - this mod is great for players who want more Vash but don't really care for M4-78. It involves finding Kaah dead in the cage instead of her, with a datapad mentioning Vash was captured and taken into the cave for some ritual. Once in the secret tomb, you'll find her after completing the trials within and speak to her to either ask your questions or kill her. If you yourself don't kill her, Sion finds his way in and does the deed for you, so no conflicts with the enclave sequence later on. It's a great way to turn the tomb from an optional side quest into something woven into the main story, which I think it certainly deserves to be. It also clears a small gripe of mine - if you're running for your life from Sion out of the academy, going into the mysterious cave you were told houses a dark power hardly seems like the ideal thing to do. Now, you've got no choice if you wanna get to Vash Now, as for the things I think this mod needs if it's to find a permanent home in a player's mod list: Full TSLRCM compatibility. This won't cause the game to break or lock up at any point, but it will basically revert Korriban to vanilla. This mostly amounts to no HK-50 squad, the return of the infinite Hssiss bug, and losing some restored lines - most notably "Apathy is death" from the full party, but that's still an unfortunate loss. An installer would also be nice A G-wing was added to the valley right in front of the Hawk. I guess it's supposed to show that it was what Vash and Kaah arrived in, but I never questioned it beforehand, and it really just gets in the way As for Vash herself, she has a few oddities which may be related to lack of restorable content. The conversation with her is a bit awkward. For one, the questions you ask the other masters are mostly all the same, while what you ask Vash is worded differently. At least some uniformity in dialogue options would do well. She also for some reason knows Kreia's name without you ever mentioning it when discussing Force bonds. The weirdest thing, however, is if you decide to fight her - for whatever reason, she has a -100 modifier to all her saves, so no matter what effect you try to apply to her, it'll always hit. And again, this might also be related to lack of restorable content, but you will not learn a saber/Force form from her if you fight or let her go. Also, when you kill her, she just drops dead and you walk away, no Force draining. Even if lines for her saber/Force form can't be restored, it should be simple enough to add in a scene of draining her Force and having your own FP increased So anyways, bit of a long post. This is sort of half review, half suggestions for improving the mod, among whatever other changes might bring it up to the high standards we have now, but after trying this out, I find myself a pretty big fan!

There's a new episode of KOTORadio out and I'm mentioning it in particular because this was a special occasion. It features two Deadly Streamers, with a special guest appearance by Jennifer Hale. Last summer, @Jenko came to visit me and we hijacked the show to record a commentary of KOTOR Episode I: A Familiar Path, the special edition of the original movie by @KOTOR_Trilogy. We talk about how we ended up remaking a fan film from 10 years ago of a video game from 15 years ago and get into some technical details about how we did that. Mr Director calls it our ".kor commentary". I've edited our commentary together with footage of both the Special Edition and the original Episode I, so you can listen to it and watch both versions of the film side by side. We made the Episode I Special Edition after the rest of the trilogy was complete, so be warned that we do mention some spoilers for Epiodes II and III, and a couple for the @DarthYcey films. And of course for the games a well. If you haven't seen any of our films, the best place to start is here. And now here's the commentary: And yes, that really is Jennifer Hale.

But do you want to do it properly or do you want to do it for KOTOR?

I can take a sledgehammer and smash two metal objects together until they sort of fit. That doesn't mean I'd be advising other people to do the same. New users should be taught how to do things properly. One reason why that wiki sure would be handy....

One or two weeks ago, I decided to quickly finish Onderon, thinking that there were only some tweaks to the TG scene and the fixed skybox models left to do. Turns out that I had forgotten about the turret scene and the swoopracing. For the turret minigame I had to add the palace model and alter the visible terrain as the vanilla one didn't fit my skybox design at all. So that's done now except for some lightmap tweaks to make the palace blend better with the vanilla geometry. The swooprace is another thing entirely. I didn't even know there was swoopracing on Onderon and my Onderon landscape doesn't really work well with the swooptrack as that one seems to start outside of the city and then gradually enter it, so neither my normal Onderon skybox nor my skyramp skybox work well for that module. I tried creating a third one from a different point of view but that didn't look great either. I'm not quite out of ideas yet but we'll see how it goes. Anyway, I wanted to share what I have. So here are two renders and two screenshots:

The move went off without a hitch!

This blog post is actually for my own reference so I don't have to seek out which of the many posts I've mentioned it in. When folks mention their "big modding project" or their "huge overhaul" of either KotOR1 or KotOR2, here's what I used to quote... If you actually wish to see if a large scale project will make it to release, see if they follow this advice. If they don't, that project likely won't make it. You may use the above quote to remind folks when "the next big thing" rolls around.

The supermodels contain all the animations. You've obviously grabbed one of the walking/running animation mods. Delete them all from the Override if you want to return to the vanilla animations.

I noticed his arms are different from the in game model of the skin. I looked into this, and sure enough there was an anomaly on the spaceman model's arm that they were hiding with the alternate black mesh texture seen in-game. I applied the full armor arms: The arms are totally deformed arms. Just a tip for future skinners, the black mesh texture was used to cover up weird issues with the spaceman model. I have worked with this model a lot and never noticed until recently.

That's really something you should be directing to @ndix UR. It would be better to update the existing mod rather than make another one. Also, please don't needlessly quote the entirety of large posts like that. It just clutters the thread and makes it harder to read (and it's also a pain in the ass if I want to go back and edit things). If you want to bring something to the attention of a post author then quote a specific line or just use the @ symbol with their username to tag them.

I don't have a bug to report this time but more of a feature request. I just figured out the solution to a problem that has perplexed me for a while. I know how to fix it, but it's a little time consuming so it would be handy if the fix were built in. One of the hack ways I edit models is by copying text from one ASCII file to another in Notepad, so I can import meshes from different models weighted to the same set of bones. The most common situation, and what I was doing in this case, is to take hands from a player underwear model to replace the hands of an armor model either to get rid of the gloves or, in this case, to put female hands on a male armor. Editing 3D models in Notepad sounds dumb but I find it easier to edit when it's imported all together and weighted correctly. It works for the most part, though KOTORMax's import script will fail if there's a reference on a mesh node to an object that doesn't exist. A common occurrence is I copy arms from a K2 model onto a model that originally came from K1 and forget about the sleeve bones. KOTORMax understandably freaks out if it's told a skin has a bone that doesn't exist. But in the past, it would give the same error even when I knew everything should check out. And I just realized it's because the import script is case sensitive. So it doesn't know that lhand_g is the same thing as Lhand_g, and so on. The game doesn't seem to care; the cases are inconsistent from model and that doesn't matter. But apparently it does matter on import.