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After a day and a half worth of space travel, Flint was not particular looking forward to another embarkment. He walked off the entry ramp of the freighter he was cruising along. Soon the Admiral followed, and the crew members for shore leave. Flint flung his bag over his shoulder, and holding the case containing his equipment he would use for the mission. "They will be leaving soon, so you better hurry." The Admiral spoke after a long silence of walking through the spaceport terminal. "We are already running behind." Flint grunted in acknowledgement. "Docking Bay 209... This is where we must depart..." Flint turned to his old CO and saluted. "Its good to see you again, Sir..." "At ease, Commander..." The admiral smirked. "Just come back in one piece... if you need anything, you know my old comm channel..." "Just make sure... she is safe..." Flint requested. "I'll try... Good luck, and safe journey..." Flint nodded and continued on. Within a matter of minutes, he finally arrived at the Docking Bay. Crew members were already making final preparations before lift off. Redemption was the name of the ship. He stepped aboard and entered the ship. Nobody there to greet him, at least not that he was aware of. The Jedi were probably still on their way. Flint made his way to the crew quarters and went to his assigned locker to drop off his stuff. He thought he could hear someone crying in the background, but he did not want to disturb. He was there to do a job, nothing more...

This is the first time since joining the project I've seen someone ask how we're going to implement the installer. As the person who actually wrote the installer, I can answer this. When you download the game from our website, it'll prompt you to specify the install location of the original (the folder container the .exe), once you do this it will look for a folder called "data", then it will load the "sounds.bif" file--similar to the way the KOTOR tool loads the .bif files. Once the file has been loaded, Apeiron will install into the directory you choose. Once the game is installed, it will then copy all the .wav files from the sounds.bif file and paste them into the /Content/Audio/ folder. Then you can just double click on the Apeiron icon and it'll open the game, the first time you launch Apeiron you will see a loading bar with the words "parsing audio". This is because the files are directly copied as .wav files, however the game needs them as .uassets, so we have to import them at run time. This will only happen once. As far as "How will they make it so KOTOR legal copies activate this "not a mod" and prevent cracked versions from also doing so?". There is nothing we can do about this, I've never cracked the game so I have no clue if there is anyway to tell if the game is legit. We've thought about checking to see if there are folders prefixed with "steam" (because the steam version adds folders with "steam" in their name), but we decided against it as we want to be able to support GOG and Disk versions of the game. There is no way for us to stop someone from pirating KOTOR then installing our mod.

///// 00. Disclaimer ///// I haven't given up on Star Map Revamp 2.0, just messing around with a little side project. ///// 01. Background ///// This is about .01% of the game, but I thought the Twisted Rancor Trio puzzle in Taris could look better. This was also a good opportunity for me to branch out from skins to editing .utcs, .utps, .gits, etc. So here's the original: The models are pretty pixelated, and the animations are very choppy. These are holograms, thousands of years from now, surely they can be displayed better and in a 3d space. ///// 02. Planning ///// I started digging around in the files, bugged @A Future Pilot for who knows how long and got an idea of what I wanted to do. It turned out the holograms were an animated .tpc that consisted of 8 frames, hence the choppiness. There were already Bith musicians in the game, so that was an easy replacement and I could bring the Twilek dancers over as well, but Elinda and Ashana are not Twilek, so there's still some thought to go into that. ///// 03. Work Thus Far ///// Here's a basic proof-of-concept. Through some alpha channels and .txi entries, I maintained the hologram look. I think these look so much better now and much more "realistic" holograms. ///// 04. Next Steps ///// There's still a good bit to be done, mostly scripting. These new models show versus the old animations. They are placed above the hologram base versus behind it as they are now. (for proof-of-concept) Any interactivity with them is disabled. They are customized to their respective names, (editing .utcs and such) and then clothing. They all face the right direction. Find models to replace the Twileks. Apparently Elinda and Ashana were human (hard to tell from the hologram), so it'd be a matter of finding a female human model that I think would work. ///// 05. Future Plans ///// This is silly, but creating an item that would activate these holograms wherever. I'm on Dantoonie, I want to hear some music. Fire up the hologram and watch these guys perform (music included of course!). ///// 06. Final Remarks ///// Thanks for taking a look and by all means holler with any comments, questions, or suggestions.

What is there to "expose" exactlly? "Big bad people are making a star wars game because they think it's fun! Burn the heretics!!" We have no goals to gain anything from this project other than self-enjoyment. If Disney wants to shut us down, they have all the power to do so. We do not claim to be immune, our fanbase often times will say "Oh, this is a mod. Disney can't shut it down.". We all know this isn't true, if we get shut down, it'll be sad but there's nothing we can do about it. This isn't some conspiracy theory, it's a bunch of Star Wars nerds that are game devs by profession making a Star Wars game because they enjoy it. Whoopty fuckin doo, you exposed us. Good job.

We have a lot we've not shown, and this is intentional. We are trying not to draw too much attention to ourselves, and we also want somethings to still be a surprise when the game comes out.

Some general tips. When importing level models, in order to see what you are doing you'll typically want to change to default lighting: And hide walkmeshes: In this case things were pretty simple as there was already an existing mesh that could be duplicated for the water mesh. It was simply a case of selecting the mesh, going to Edit->Clone, choosing the Copy option (you must choose Copy in order to get an actual standalone duplicate), giving it an appropriate name, and then hitting OK. Then, with the new water plane object selected, go to the Editable Mesh modifier and enable the Vertex sub-level. Select all vertices and with the Move tool position them appropriately. You may also need to use the Scale tool in order to resize the mesh, if necessary. Now you can create a new water material and apply it to the mesh. Then edit the OdysseyTrimesh modifier options. Turn off Lightmapped, set Self Illum to pure white, enable Bumpmappable if it isn't already. Then you are pretty much done. Make sure your new mesh is a child of the base, then export and compile. In other cases you may need to create custom meshes, for example the rectangular trough from the initial central walkway model.

I will preface this by saying it is not a MDLEdit bug, but seemingly a GPU/driver issue. However, @ndix UR asked me to describe it here so that there is a record for future reference. Discord user Deltm reported an issue with my recent TOR Republic uniforms mod for TSL. They were having rendering issues with the hologram effect, like so: As with my previous hologram mods, these are both full body models, so the face meshes are part of the same model. It appears that the user's GPU, an nVidia GTX 970, is incapable of rendering the hologram effect on meshes using a normal map/tangentspace 1. The uniform meshes are ported from TOR and use a modified version of the source's diffuse texture and normal map (the rank bars on the captain receive the hologram effect because they use a different texture). This was fixed by setting the tangentspace flag to 0 and swapping the offending diffuse to one that didn't point to a normal map (i.e. TXI edit, or removal actually). I personally didn't experience the issue during testing on a 1080 Ti on Win 10. I haven't seen any other reports of this issue as yet, although the mod was only released recently and the download count is small.

You could add a water plane to the floaty art statues at each end of the walkway easily enough. Edit: Here you go - https://www.darthparametric.com/files/kotor/k1/[K1]_Taris_Upper_City_South_Fountains_M02ac_02b_02e.7z There was already a circular plane as the base, so I just duplicated that and repositioned/scaled it to make the water plane. The whole "pond" piece though is probably a tad high for water. It puts it at an awkward position to see it properly. Perhaps it needs to be moved downwards closer to the height of the central "trough".

okay, understood! thank you for getting back to me. since posting that, I came up with two other actual corrections: "far-sighted" should read "farsighted" "hate mongering" should read "hatemongering"

Hello, wearymad. Thanks for the offer but what you are suggesting are mostly stylistic choices which may or may not be to general liking. I have already actually made some changes in this sense but I am hesitant about introducing new ones, especially since these are quite minor tweaks. Locally I use a much more heavily customized dialog.tlk file that includes more stylistic changes (I also changed the "??" to "!?" and the "!!!"/"!!" to "!") but here on Deadlystream I'd rather have a cleaner version and I am thus making changes only if I encounter more typos.

There is one case of this actually being okay'd, albeit not by Disney/LucasArts/Bioware/Obsidian but by Bethesda. I doubt the former mentioned parties will see it the way that Bethesda does considering none of those companies have ever supported modding, but there's that. Either way, I think anyone with half a brain knew that they can send a C&D out at any moment so I'm not sure what the surprise that the developers of Apeiron acknowledge that. In the end, who cares? Really? At this point this is a dead horse getting beat. The developers obviously do not care what any of us think.