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MAJOR (positive) update on The Prodigal Knight coming very soon...

///// 01. Background ///// A couple of years back I had an idea to create a new modding suite for both KotOR games. My original idea was something along the lines of Kotor Tool on steroids with a built in 3d module editor. As time went on I learned a lot about the game and it's systems getting me to a point where my editor could load an entire module complete with 3d models, sound, waypoints, triggers, walkmeshes, and more. I then realized my knowledge of the underlying engine wasn't up to snuff because I kept making bad design choices on how I linked everything together. Fast forward about a year later after I've poured through about all the Docs and Resources I could find on the original games and the NWN Engine they spawned from. The project has now expanded to include game engines for both games. Yeah I know what you are thinking "Well that escalated quickly" and I have to agree because I never thought I would ever attempt to recreate the original KotOR games let alone in JavaScript lol. ///// 02. The Big Question ///// And now to the big question i'm sure a few of you have asked at this point... Why write something like this in JS? Well because it's fun. I do a lot of work with JS when i'm working on websites and am constantly blown away by everything it can do. It's also cross platform and at it's core platform independent. The original scope was also just for a Modding Suite with some 3d sprinkled in so it made more sense then. ///// 03. The Other Big Question ///// Why not just write your stuff in C++ and contribute to the xoreos team. Well that's simple i'm not even close to being well versed enough in C++ to contribute in any meaningful way to that project. I mean for the most part I can look at C++ code and understand it and get the gist of what it's trying to do. I wouldn't have even had a shot at this if it wasn't for them I owe so much to what they have discovered so far . I do wish them well and hope that once I publish the code they can hopefully find some stuff they can port the their project. And yes I do plan on making this an opensource project so anyone can contribute. ///// 04. Credit ///// I want to be sure and give credit where credit is due. I am totally standing on the shoulders of everyone who came before me. I could not have gotten this far if not for all the people who have shared their knowledge on these and other forums. @bead-v @DrMcCoy to name a few were instrumental in helping me get this far as the MDL/MDX format was really the bane of my existence for a while. Also all of the tool makers who shared source code allowing us to follow in their footsteps. I can't begin to mention everyone by name but if you have put anything out there in regards to cracking a file format or how the internal game mechanics work there is a good chance I have read it and have been helped by it! ///// 05. End Game ///// I really don't have an endgame per se. I just really have a lot of fun doing this in my spare time. I would love to someday have the entire game playable with this engine and finish the modding suite. In the mean time I will post updates when I have stuff to show. ///// 06. Ok That's Enough Talk ///// Source Code: https://github.com/KobaltBlu/KotOR.js/ Public Alpha Build: https://github.com/KobaltBlu/KotOR.js/releases/tag/V0.0.2 Website: https://swkotor.net Online Demo: https://play.swkotor.net/ I'm sure by now you're ready for me to show something. So without further delay here is some footage from TSL enjoy! ///// Screenshots ///// I copied the post template from this thread https://deadlystream.com/topic/6088-wip-star-maps-revamp/

With the change in porting rules now firmly in effect and the interest in porting up to and including an entire game's worth of content obvious, I've started poking around to see how things can be done in the long term. As it is now, we have a smattering of individual mods that include ported content, which is all well and good, but this depends on individual modders with the required knowledge producing and releasing mods at their own leisure. As with a lot of things in the modding world, a lot of people are interested, but far fewer know how to do it. So I'm interested in automating the process in order to port content on a much larger scale - for example, making every module in K1 available in K2 - and release this content as mod resources that will be as easy to access as anything you can extract from KOTOR Tool currently, or perhaps even allow for the creation of an automated porting tool that the average end user can run. The latter case would apply even to stuff that was allowed under the old rules, like a lightsaber mod that was done for one game but not another. In general, I'm looking to make things easier and require less manual tinkering. Even before the rules change, I experimented for my own personal use. To make things easier for me, I started extracting files en masse rather than bothering to figure out what I needed for each specific job, given that this was for personal use and not release. Once the rules changed and I was free to distribute these, though, it became clear that this was not ideal. My modified texture packs that included all of K1 and K2's textures amounted to about 800 MB of data. It didn't seem reasonable to include all that in an official upload and put a strain on the servers. Plus, this is the sort of thing I've criticized the Apeiron team over, so I figured I should tread carefully and look for a better method. A more ideal situation would involve a tool that could extract assets from one game and send them to another. I started writing some scripts for this, though I've had mixed results and what I really want involves charting into some unexplored territory. Ideally, this new tool would generate a new BIF or ERF archive - portedmodels.bif or what have you - rather than requiring thousands of files to be placed in Override and all the potential file conflicts that come along with that. Ideally, these will be made as universal resources like the existing models and textures - that way people can still edit them and put their edited files in Override without having to overwrite any files. I've spoken with @VarsityPuppet about developing something like this in the long term, and I'm also interested in seeing whether certain porting processes can be automated with MDLOps or MDLEdit, so I imagine we'll be talking about those eventually. In the meantime, I'll also be posting my own, more hacky results. I've included two such attachments in this post. K1toK2 Texture Conflict Guides K2 has hundreds and hundreds of files that were reused from K1. It's not necessary, and generally not a good idea, to try to copy these over. Not just because they're unneeded, but because files with the same names might not actually be the same textures. There's a very good chance Obsidian altered them and kept the original names. So I've created these guides that list the names of textures that are included in both games. There are three lists: for textures.bif, swpc_tex_gui.erf, and swpc_tex_tpa.erf. (The last list also applies to to _tpb.erf and _tpc.erf.) There are two sets of lists: one that lists conflicts, and one that lists files that are only in K1. K1toK2 Texture Filters These are simple batch scripts that will delete all textures in a folder that are known to be in both games. That way you can extract a game's textures, run the batch files, and filter out the textures that are already in the other game. Extract the contents of textures.bif, swpc_tex_gui.erf, and swpc_tex_tpa.erf from K1 with your preferred method and place them in the same location as the included batch scripts, or you can put them each in their own folders if you prefer. You should have thousands of TPC files and a handful of TGA and TXI files. Run the three batch scripts. These will delete all the conflicting texture files, leaving only the ones that are unique to K1. The batch scripts will delete themselves when finished. Copy the remaining textures to K2. You can put them in Override (or a subfolder in Override) or you can repackage the ERF texture packs to include both the original K2 textures and the extracted K1 assets. Note that if you do want to put them in ERFs, you will have to do _gui and _tpa separately, and you will also have to repeat the process for _tpb and _tpc using the _tpa script if you want to include support for the lower quality texture options. For the first version, I've specifically filtered out every file that has a matching file in K2. Eventually, I want to confirm which (if any) textures Obsidian modified, so we can include both game versions by renaming one copy. If you use my filters and start porting K1 content to K2, you won't run into any missing textures, but they might not necessarily look as they did in K1, at least for now. K1toK2 Texture Conflict Guides v1.zip K1toK2 Texture Filters v1.zip

Interesting... the early kotor modding era. NPCs facing the wrong way, most of the NPCs were just reskined and items were changed. If I'm correct that was the first mod that tried to give Carth an ending if you were darkside. Would be a neat concept to implement the invasion of Manaan as Darth Revan, the extermination of the Jedi, the defeat of the Republic, and Revan's Sith Empire explored a bit from the eyes of his soldiers. I do certainly like the idea of Revan boarding a hammerhead (through the escape pod hatches of course) and wiping out some jedi and Republic troops. I look forward to seeing more of these older mods playthrough.

Here's the newest installment of Mod Analysis: Reign Of The Sith

View File TOR Ports: KOTOR Comic Republic Uniforms for K1 This mod adds Republic officer uniforms styled after Saul Karath’s appearance in the KOTOR comics, ported from TOR. Male and female officers get a generic uniform, while Admiral Dodonna gets an admiral outfit that matches the one used in the companion mod for TSL. Her hologram appearance also uses this outfit, with alterations to bring it in line with the appearance of holograms in the movies and TSL. Additionally, Master Vandar’s hologram gets a movie-style upgrade as well for the sake of visual consistency, as per the previously released Movie-Style Holograms for End Game Cutscenes mod. Compatibility: With the switch of both danii-chi's Dodonna’s Transmission mod and this mod to module injection, install order should no longer be an issue. Acknowledgements: Original models and textures ported from The Old Republic MMO Thanks to @bead-v for KOTORMax and MDLEdit Thanks to @ndix UR for TGA2TPC and normal map normalizer tool Thanks to zaramot on the Xentax forums for the TOR GR2 Max import script Submitter DarthParametric Submitted 08/25/2018 Category Mods K1R Compatible Yes  

Testing out the feasibility of some alien model replacements:

Wow! thanks for the praise. I've always looked up to the work you and your team are doing, so coming from you that means a lot. I agree the term "further along" is misleading because i'm building off of THREE.js as my base which comes with a scene graph, lighting, shaders, materials, and all that jazz. If i'm not mistaken you all are building all of that stuff from scratch. If I was having to do all of that myself for the past two years i'm sure I would have given up by now. Here is what I have so far on the Endar Spire. Things kinda go off the rails once Trask opens the door. I'm only firing a few scripts like onSpawn, onUse, OnDialogue, and a few module specific ones. Heartbeats loop endlessly for the most part so I haven't turned them back on until I can spend some more time looking into why. I know one of the culprits is GetNextObjectInArea, my current implementation just uses GetFirstObjectInArea instead which causes while loops to continuously loop. I believe GetNextObjectInArea is supposed to return invalid once it exhausts itself. I think if I can get a few more of these core functions working I may be able to get a little farther without using the console. And thanks for encouraging me to contribute to xoreos. I'll be sure to see if there is anyway I can think to be of help. My main drawback is fear of proper memory management because most of the languages I have spent the most time with manage memory for me... though that has gotten me into trouble a few times on this project already. I can also now see the benefits of having the power to capture and release memory at will. Thanks! I sure will 😀. Ok yeah that would be a nice addition. The editor has taken a major step back since I merged the code bases back together. I'll try to free up some time to clean it up so it can be messed with once I publish the code. Thanks for the feedback

JavaScript? You working with Tyvokka to run KOTOR in Netscape? This is all very interesting. A new module editor is the next big thing a lot of us want to see... we've even been talking about how it could be done with KOTORMax. But your screenshots look a lot like the Dragon Age Toolset and a live preview like what it has would be very handy.

Thanks to my bros @DarthParametric @bead-v and @JCarter426 for hammering on MDLEdit. Looks like y'all will be getting a ghostly Ajunta Pall after all (along with a bug fix or two) Screenshot has been brightened so the transparency can be seen more easily

I understand where you are coming from. I felt if I was going to throw my hat in the ring I needed to do something different and the xoreos team are definitely doing things the right way building it in C++. I also felt JS would be more accessible for collaboration and ease of testing. Thanks for the feedback! 😃 I would love to get some contributors on board! I've been working on cleaning up the code and trying to get it as presentable as possible. I also want to make sure the project structure and design principals are set before I open it up just yet that way people coming in know where to start and where things should go... I will keep you posted xoreos is an open source implementation of BioWare's Aurora engine and its derivatives, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 (or later). The goal is to have all games using this engines working in a portable manner, starting from Neverwinter Nights and ending with Dragon Age II. - This is the description from their GitHub project page. https://github.com/xoreos/xoreos | https://xoreos.org/

Holy hell this is amazing. Man, can I contribute? I'm a JS developer and this is a lot more impressive of a project than my little modding tool I was working on!

After the next mod analysis, I plan to up the editing, commentary, and judgement a little more, some are just showcases while other I do put some commentary and judgement in, like the genoharadan mod video also no, it was you because i found the link from a post you made on this post

Rey's a Mary Sue. That doesn't exclude doing absolutely nothing in the movie. The "SWJ!" theories think it's because they can't have a MAN training a WOMAN so instead they do f#ck all on the island instead. I'm not sure if I believe that, but there's no denying Rey inside the movie does; 1. Nothing at all with Luke. 2. Force Skype with Kylo which is interesting, but the climax is in Ruin Johnson style "nothing" and basically reboot to zero; i.e. nothing. 3. Saved Kylo Ren (a ten+ year trained Jedi/Sith) showing once again he's her bitch and the confrontation in IX is pointless. 4. 360noscope 3- TIE fighters in her very first use of the Millennium Falcon turret (can you say Mary Sue?), luring away ALL TIE-Fighters cause the First Order is the worst military system EVER. 5. Lifting rocks to complete her arch of "being bored of being powerful" (thank you Mauler). It would be something if she did everything else alongside with it too. Then again, we would have saved more of these dreadful movies, so there would have been that... " YET " Wow, yeah, they spend 0 (ZERO) effort on world-building in the first 2 movies. I'm suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure they will make up for all of it in the final movie. Yeah, that's sarcasm. If JJ wasn't capable of even mediocre world-building at the start of the trilogy, who has hope he will add to the last. You apparently. How foolish you are. " There's also the RJ SW trilogy to come out, " F#ck no I hope there isn't. And if Disney does it, I hope they like 200 million losses like Solo. There's no way this ain't cancelled unless Disney collectively goes brain dead. Also RJ goes into detail on the guy he went "f#ck this guy, just write him out.", are you serious? " Ep9 is supposed to bring everything together. So we'll have to see. Until then, do some theory crafting of your own. Don't wait for it to be spoon fed to you. Read, reason, and theorize. Until you are given the answer from the official source, make it make sense to you.  " Yeah, that's how trilogies work. But when the middle part gives the finger to part I and leaves zero setup for III, the very firm establishment of a trilogy is already thrown out the window, so who knows what happens. Who cares? I'm not going to do theory-crafting on this pile of poo. I'm not going to write Ruin Johnson's screwed up plot-holes explanations for him. It sucks so far, and there's little reason to believe IX sucks again with JJ in charge. I have no interest in this mess what-so-ever. The best Disney could do is trash this trilogy entirely and make better anthology movies like Rogue One, or make a PROPER trilogy, with planning and such.