Markus Ramikin

It's got instructions, and it works with JKE and the voodoo patch. Not that it really needs any instructions to work with those two... all depends on what other mods you have.

After a good deal more work, version 1.0 is up. I think I'm done, at least for a good while. Anyone tries it out, please let me know your thoughts. Maybe I'll make a MotS version some time. MotS I'm starting to think is actually the better game - but it still has some weak bosses (Kyle is never more threatening than a Vonskr or Noghri!) and some seriously useless spells... Deadly Sight only becomes available when there's no point to it any more, Push does I'm not sure what that's useful... Protection becomes available when everything and its dog deals physical damage that it doesn't block... yeah, there's room for thought there.

Despite there being a "Jedi Knight series" section in the Downloads section, there aren't upload options for those two games, only for Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. I'm working on a minor rebalancing mod for JK now, and I'd love to be able to share it with this community. Well, I can, but only like this. (And no, "use the Other Games section" is not a good solution, for reasons that I hope are obvious.) Dunno about the demand for such an subsection - not like the Outcast/Academy ones have a lot of content but I thought I'd throw it out there.

DOWNLOAD: here This mod rebalances Force Powers with the single player campaign in mind. Most importantly, Mana regen is increased. Aside from that, some abilities have cooldowns now, Pull and Protection are nerfed, Lightning, Destruction, Absorb are more viable, Persuasion still extremely useful but works much more briefly, Deadly Sight doubles as a lifedrain spell, Grip works on bosses but at much higher mana cost, etc., etc. Bosses are more aggressive with their Force powers too. Sariss, for example, is a bit more fun, since you need to periodically interrupt her Deadly Sight. Fortunately you have enough tools for that even without LoS tricks. And Jerec's Lightning use attempts are, shall we say, less pitiful here. I mostly wrote this for myself, but I'd be happy to know if anyone else is using this too. A Mysteries of the Sith version exists too, also in this forum. Version 2.0 readme:

While I feel as you do on most things you wrote about, I wouldn't go so far. I think it would doable - with a good writer with freedom to do his or her thing. But the impression TFA leaves on me was that the writers had marketing people breathing down their necks the whole time. Oh yes, please. And this is actually an example of what I just said - Zahn's trilogy often reads like I'm looking at scenes from the original Star Wars trilogy, starting with a Star Destroyer scene and culminating in a throne room confrontation with the EmperorC'baoth, and a simultaneous battle on the ground and in space, but it's done well and it doesn't mean characters have regressed. It's a plausible continuation that doesn't make me feel everyone's just been wasting their lives since RotJ.

https://twitter.com/HamillHimself/status/684917974445101056 Mark Hamill's reaction to the script.

Hah, he said the same thing about him being wasted in his role.

The article did remind me that I had been hoping for better music in the movie. BTW, anyone else think it was a bit of a waste to put Max von Sydov in the movie just to have his character immediately die without the audience having any real idea who the hell he even is?

Heh, nope. Earlier you said "Regardless of what you thought, a lot of people love it apparently, a lot of people I know are going to see it multiple times". That "you" makes it a response, not sure to whom but the posts above yours are discussing specific issues. No matter. You know, I'm almost tempted to take you up on your claim tnat you're looking for an intelligent discussion. But I am going to be 100% honest here when I say that when I first posted and you started trying to refute my points, I repeatedly failed to get the impression that you understood what I was saying before you went on to criticising it. I particularly regretted going out of my way to make it extra clear in which sense I used the words "important to the plot" - in order to clarify what one of my issues with the movie is - because you then scratched off two lines in which you brought up two ways in which Han was "important" that had nothing to do with what I had just been explaining. It's discouraging. And when you combine that with condescending or otherwise unnecessary crap like "Try again", "Maybe you should pay attention more to the movie", "But sure, let's make everything stroke your ego,", then I'm sorry but you don't come across as worth the effort. You can go on complaining that nobody talks fairly with you, even though you supposedly addressed every point made by me and HH and whoever, but until your posts start looking like you're actually willing to make the effort to understand what the other guy is saying, I expect this'll keep happening to you.

Quite - but even that isn't quite what I meant. If people are discussing specific issues in the movie, and someone brings up "well it was successful, people like it" as a response to that, then they don't realize they aren't even speaking on topic. It's a discussion at the level of monkey-politics: everything nice you can shout about the movie is a point scored against the guys on the other treetop who are the enemy team, criticising it. For example, that thing I said at the start, that TFA's writing has a lot of stupid in it? I could say the same thing about better movies than TFA, such as, say, the Dark Knight. The Joker just walking into a meeting of some 30 mob bosses without getting even frisked long before he saw the inside of the room was ridiculous. If the one tried to respond to that by saying "well it was a good movie, people liked it", I would shrug and say "so did I, your point?" (As to how reliable the box office is of as a measure of a film's goodness, three words: Glengarry Glen Ross.)

I really like how Dr Evil appears to think that by mentioning that the movie is successful and lots of people saw it he's scoring some kind of a point.

Haha, yeah. I might have expected it if I'd read what you went through earlier in the thread more carefully. Yeah, Han finding the Falcon is explained. But Han finding the Falcon and this being in the movie is conditional on the Falcon already being in the movie. My disappointment was with how that was accomplished. And by extension, with the overall shape in which the plot accomodated Han's involvement. Instead of making it a random accident, it could have been because Han was already involved with something plot-relevant that would cause him to cross the protagonists' paths, maybe part of the Republic's operations, maybe trying to find Kylo, maybe some other reason. Or maybe someone was looking for Han, because Han or one of his crewmembers had something plot-relevant that someone else in the movie needed (such as information about Luke) etc. There could have been an actual reason written for him being there, rather than the writers just dumping the Falcon in front of the Main Characters in a jaw-dropping display of laziness. _____________ In other news, I didn't like how Han and Luke went nowhere in the last 30 years. Han, after the character growth from the selfish smuggler with debtors after him to General Solo, the hero, is back to being an unimportant smuggler with debts. I get it, his son is at least part of the reason, but it's still character regression. It's not satisfying when the accomplishments of one movie are erased offscreen before the next one. Then there's Luke. At the end of ROTJ, Luke has come into his own, he overcame the darkness in his father's heart and became a Jedi himself. The Republic is triumphant, the possibilities are endless. Fast toward 30 years and Luke's life accomplishment after the second Death Star is a few dead apprentices and one Dark Jedi. Since then he's just been sitting on ass. Seriously? Every time you see someone killed by Kylo or the Stormtroopers, remember that, at that precise time, there's a Jedi Knight sitting on a rock somewhere, doing nothing to protect them. Is this what Yoda and Kenobi trained him for? It just makes me want to re-read Timothy Zahn's trilogy. Sure, the Expanded Universe has its problems, but Luke wasting his life is not one of them. (One might think of at least a superficial similarity to Obi Wan's exile on Tatooine. Different circumstances, though. He and Yoda had fought and they lost. Kenobi was hiding from the Jedi purges, in a Galaxy overrun by a dictatorial state, while waiting for Luke to grow up.) BTW, were we told why Leia wasn't trained in the ways of the Force? ROTJ made a big thing out of her having the potential too...

There's that. But more simply and commonsensically, melee weapons require serious training to use with any effectiveness against other competent practitioners. It's not just a question of grabbing a stick and beating on a target. Also, training is specific; for the most part competence with one weapon doesn't carry over to another, with a different grip, weight, balance and/or reach.

Oh, wow. At this point you don't just fail at reading comprehension, it's clear to me you're not trying to understand anything I'm saying, because if you put in that necessary cognitive work, you'd be unable to point out nonexistent problems with it. Just one example before I'm done with you. OBVIOUSLY the proximate reason Han is there is that he's looking for the Falcon. Duh. But the overall reason, the one that changes Han from a random smuggler uninvolved in the mission at the start of the movie to an important character later on, was Rey finding the Falcon. That's the unlikely coincidence, one which makes Han's involvement a contrivance. Do I need to explain every obvious little thing because you can't make the simplest mental connections when reading a post by someone you're disagreeing with? (*) It wasn't that the writers said to themselves "oh, now that Rey has the Falcon, it might make sense to involve Han" - they started with the need to include Han and put the Falcon on Rey's planet as a way to cause that. And my point is that that's lazy writing. It would have been easy to write the plot in a way that made Han's involvement necessary and not accidental, to give Han or some other character a motivation and the means to make it happen. In Kotor 2, why does the Exile have the Ebon Hawk, the same ship as the protagonist of the previous game? Contrivance? No. It was brought about by the motivations of the character T3-M4, who brought the Hawk back and was looking for Jedi to help Revan. Even though the real reason was probably "so that we can reuse the game asset and give players the ship they're familiar with", the Exile didn't just inexplicably find the Hawk parked on Peragus for no knowable reason. Do you understand what I mean? (*) (*Rhetorical questions, of course. I'm done with this conversation.)

Oh Cthulhu, where do I even begin. It's not garbage, that's my point. It's a fully functional ship which just seems to stand there abandoned. No lock on the doors, no lock on the navicomputer, nothing. Basic sanity check: imagine it's a modern setting and we're talking about a car. A car with a full gas tank and keys in the ignition, just standing there near a busy marketplace for the protagonists to grab, with a layer of dust on it suggesting it's been standing there for a long time without anyone just taking it. We'd think it ridiculously convenient and a weak point in a movie, wouldn't we? And that's even before it turns out the car just happens to be the very one used by the protagonists in a previous movie. A silly comparison. In A New Hope Han and Chewie are just random guys we just met. It's not a coincidence, it's anthropic principle; any pilot Obi-wan happened to hire would have been part of the plot and, in retrospect, have had a chance to be an important player in the following events. But that we run into Han and Chewie again for no real reason is contrived. Roll a 6-sided die 10 times and remember the combination of numbers that you got. Whichever combination you got, out of the 6^10 possibilities, there's nothing special about and it's not a coincidence. But if you repeat the experiment later and get the same combination, THAT is a coincidence of extremely low odds. Ugh. Please tell me you're trolling and you didn't actually fail to understand what I meant by important to the plot. For a character to be important to the plot, there have to be reasons - logical, causal reasons - for them to be involved in the goings on. A role for them to play. For example in Empire Strikes Back, Han is involved because Vader wanted to use him to draw Luke out. The plot is Vader's attempt to capture Luke, and Han is Vader's bait in the trap set for that purpose. If Vader went after Luke in some other way, Han's escape to Cloud City would have made him unimportant; it'd be good that he survived, but he'd no longer be important to the film's plot. On the other hand, there is no logical reason why Qui-Gonn takes Anakin with him to Naboo to take part in the war. "So that Anakin can destroy the control ship" is not a reason, not unless Qui-gon specifically states "I sense the boy is meant to play a role in the coming war" - but that's not what happens, he expects Anakin to sit the battle out in the safety of a fighter's cockpit. Which is why that movie makes less sense than it could have with better writing. Similarly, "so that Han can have a scene where he dies to Kylo Ren" is not a reason that makes Han important in TFA. He's part of the events through sheer accident. "because he was one of the reasons Ben fell to the dark side" makes him important to the background, not to current events. This is part of why ESB is a good movie and TFA is... less good. The audience is not left asking "why are all these important characters at the same time and place in Cloud City, isn't that contrived?", because there are reasons for this, emerging from the plans and desires of the characters. It's not just scriptwriter say-so, it makes sense: Boba Fett and Vader would have followed Han and Leia whereever they went, and then Luke would have gone there to save his friends. In TFA, lots of stuff has no reason except for authorial say-so, and that's not good writing. I'm looking for the barest respect for the audience's intelligence, and the barest effort to come up with something that isn't that ridiculous. It would have been so, so easy to do better than what they did, it's like they didn't try at all, just someone asked "how can we top the Death Star" and that was the first draft idea that someone threw up and they just went with it without caring if it makes the barest amount of sense. LOL. So does an axe. Doesn't mean it's handled the way a lightsaber is. Right back at you. That energy baton thing is similar to a tonfa. If you are suggesting training with a tonfa will let you perform well with sword... and lightsabers are supposed to be hard and dangerous to use. Granted, he did lose to the stormtrooper, so whatever. But his fight with Kylo shouldn't have lasted 10 seconds, and actually landing a hit on Kylo? No. "It will make sense in the next movie" is never a good justification; 9 out of 10 the real answer turns out to be "bad writing". The remaining 1 out of 10 is often accompanied by the work acknowledging the unexplained thing (e.g. one character asking another "How did you do that? That should have been impossible"), thus telling the audience "yes, this is something unusual, and you can reasonably expect it will have an equally unusual explanation". But this movie, standing on its own, is just asking us to accept that Rey is just that much of a prodigy. Yep, the Force can be a great explainer of such things. I am reminded of the "ta'veren" concept from the Wheel of Time, which is pretty much unabashedly explained as "main character powers" - and it works. But there is a limit to it. For example, to use the Anakin on Naboo example again: if the reason Qui-Gon took Anakin with him to a warzone was the Force, what did Qui-Gon think his reason was? If he was consciously following a hint from the Force, the audience is not told this. If the Force led him to think he has mundane, sensical reasons for it, what are those reasons? Even if destiny is subtly bringing things and people together, those people still must have their own motivations for doing what they do. Now Rey happening on the Falcon (and therefore later meeting Han) might have made sense as a Force-induced coincidence, even if an actual plot reason for their meeting would have been better. But the actions of whoever left the Falcon there unguarded do not make sense. Even when you are willing to use it as a crutch, you can only excuse so much with the Force.

It's not as horrid as the prequels, but the writing is full of stupid. So yeah. The Millenium Falcon discarded like garbage, just standing there, unguarded, with no security or even closed doors, and it just so happens to be fuelled and running, perfectly flight- and combat-ready. Realistically, it would have been stolen long before the movie gets there. Then they just so happen to get found by Han and Chewie. Then Han's contact just so happens to have Luke's lightsaber in her possession. All this stuff is in there not because the plot of this movie needs it in any way whatsoever - you could cut out Han and the Falcon and all you'd really need is some different way for Rey to get a lightsaber before her fight with Kylo. It's there because it was in the previous movie, it's familiar to the fans, and they needed to shoehorn it in somehow. But Han is not important. And the worst part? I can EASILY fix that so that they become integral plot elements and don't offend the viewer's intelligence. Make it so that actually Han is the only person who knows where Luke went. (Maybe Luke told him, or maybe Han was crafty and managed to figure it out, but Luke made him promise not to tell Leia and others). Or if not Han, then R2, similarly to Revan-T3, and R2 is with Han. And the device the little ball droid was carrying is actually a tracking code for the Millenium Falcon, so that the Resistance can find Han/R2 and ask them where Luke is. There you go, the Falcon and its crew are suddenly important and don't feel shoehorned. Then there's the notion of draining a star into a planet as fuel for a weapon... no. Just no. Does anyone writing this have any idea how much bigger a star is compared to a planet? As a minor point (which shouldn't be minor, but compared to the idiocy of the Starkiller weapon it's nothing), Kylo Ren is a trained and experienced Darkside user who's successfully defeated several Jedi apprentices. Finn is just a soldier, and fighting Kylo was his second or third time wielding a lightsaber. There is no way in the universe he should have landed a hit. It should have been Vader-vs-Luke-in-Cloud-City except squared; even wounded, Kylo would toy with him a little then injure him. Even Finn's successfully using the lightsaber against the stormtrooper with that funky weapon should have been explained somehow ("Let's hope my vibrosword training holds up with this"), other than "main character powers" that is. For that matter, Rey defeating Kylo is also unsatisfying, for the same reason why Luke defeating Vader in Cloud City would have been. It took Luke frikkin' Skywalker 3 movies to get good enough to take on Vader. If they needed Rey to win (which they didn't: they could have her lose, then before he kills her, Kylo loses consciousness from blood loss, or Finn shoots him in the back), then they should have played up Kylo's injury, show us his vision swimming, like he's barely clinging to consciousness. At this point, why is Kylo an impressive villain again? And does something like "Jedi training" and "combat experience" mean anything? You mean the middle finger?

Hm... Last I checked, when HK-47 was solo, his ability to overcome GO-TO was determined by his Repair skill. No idea about the HK-50 route though, because I never picked it.

My mistake. Just delete 203B4D4.dlg from override. I removed it from that post. (I forgot to delete it after submitting it for possible integration with a hypothetical next version of RCM, before sharing here in public. Problem is that dlg filename exists in two modules, so I'd have used TSLpatcher, except after my latest system reinstall it seems to have require extra wrestling from me to make it work for some reason. So since this is just a quick share, I included the mod file instead, a crude measure to be sure, meant to apply immediately after installing RCM 1.8.4, before any Patcher mods.)

Wrong. Like the poster above said, it was for NS. The reference to refugees alone makes it clear enough. {[Gameplay Programmer: On board the ship. This scene has all the party members' thoughts, and the player is listening to them, as he lies unconscious.]} Is the Exile unconscious? Nope. Is there a reason everyone is grieving and Atton is wishing he'd died before? It comes out of nowhere. Clearly this was meant to have something leading up to it. There's a reason a copy of this file was put in 650DAN, and not in 205TEL or 851NIH. There's a reason the filename is pcdead2.dlg. And there's a reason it contains lines that suggest, for example, that Nihilus is still alive. This is a piece of a different puzzle than you stuck it into, and just saying "it goes before Malachor like it was meant to" is missing the point. (Perhaps originally the Exile was supposed to indeed be seemingly dead/unconscious after Dantooine, and the crew would travel to Malachor on their own initiative. That's why they get separated from you, and get captured before you arrive and rescue them. Then they changed the post-Dantooine sequence of events and then didn't have time to finish straightening everything out. But this is by the way.) Err, nope. That's an obvious retcon, sure, but far, far from the only problem. I already explained in detail what's wrong with it, and you didn't understand it back then, but just for a quick recap: - Kreia couldn't be "the one" to ask that the Exile be exiled. She was presumed dead in the Mandalorian Wars at the time. Nobody had a clue she was back until the Dantooine confrontation. - Atris saying that she did as Kreia asked makes no sense since Atris was against the Exile leaving. - This is narratively superfluous: The Council's motivations are explained well enough without this addition. And Atris had very clear motives of her own to be angry with the Exile (one of the best parts of the game, IMO). - It's actually harmful to the themes of the game. Kreia's ideological opposition to the Jedi Council was partly about such actions as exiling the Exile instead of dealing with what he brought. Making it so it was Kreia's decision all along robs it of meaning, weakens this ideological conflict, weakens the responsibility of the Council and the strength of the condemnation she levels on them, and basically makes it all an inbred plot. So I rather suspect that this was cut to tighten up the writing, because it was a twist for the sake of itself, which the story was better without. Again, if there's a reason at all to think this was cut for time, you've yet to provide even a hint of it. Gonna leave it at that, since obviously this conversation is going to be as pointless as the last one.

Oh, where do I even begin. It's not like you and I haven't argued about this stuff before. Consider the crew members despairing as you go to Malachor. That was meant to happen after the Dantooine confrontation, while the Exile was seemingly dead. Y'know, it's why it's called pcdead2.dlg. It also seems Malachor was initially planned to be the next stop after Dantooine. TSLRCM just arbitrarily stuck that scene in after Telos, where it makes no goddamn sense anymore. The general sin here is thinking "I see an unused resource, it's calling to me, I MUST FIND A WAY TO USE IT SOMEWHERE". Often the resource will be unused on purpose, due to draft revisions, the final version no longer calls for it. There's a difference between an obviously unfinished part of a game, vs a scene that holds up fine but there are alternatives buried in the files. You can argue that you can't always tell for 100% which is which, that you have to guess. And I agree, but you have to make these decisions with a degree of caution and humility, to resist the desire to impact the game more rather than less. And in any case, reusing the resource elsewhere sure as hell isn't a restoration. Again, the Planescape Torment mods are the gold standard as far as I'm concerned. Wonderful, wonderful job. For more examples, the outcome of the Nar Shaddaa debacle. As Obsidian told it, Mira freed herself from the base and at the same time freed the Exile from the tunnels. RCM changed that to where Mira is recaptured offscreen (wtf) even if you clear the whole base with her and Visquis obligingly lets the Exile in because, well... why? because the game would end otherwise? That's a story change, and a dumb and unsatisfying one. Even if there was stuff in the files that indicated that this alternative was considered, well so was the version of events that actually made it into the game. So I have trouble seeing how this is a restoration. Maybe it was meant as a fix. Yeah, the vanilla sequence had some minor problems, but this isn't an improvement (where did Zez-Kai go? wasn't he going to rescue Mira?), especially not one that would justifiy changing the story to where the PC depends solely on the cooperaton of the antagonist. And of course there's the Atris-Kreia dialogue near the end. I haven't seen yet what you've done to it with 1.8.4., but in earlier versions TSLRCM pulled out a dialogue (or rather, an arbitrarily incomplete part of a dialogue) from a branch explicitely marked in the files as alternate version, not for scripting, and stuck it in. There is no reason in the Universe to conclude that this must have been left out for time and was meant to be there in the final cut. As opposed to. say, Obsidian simply considering different versions of the dialogue, and ending up with what they did in the actual released game. (Moreover, I already described the logical and thematic problems this introduces. Ugh.) Some of this stuff feels like you found a marble statue surrounded by pieces of the marble that were removed during the carving, and you're trying to glue these pieces back on for no sensical reason.

In a word: No. Reused audio is reused audio, and players arent' stupid. Besides. You could be a professional and it still won't be a restoration. And yes, it matters. With a project like this, there's always the temptation to go beyond the pure scope of bugfixing and restorations only of content which was obviously cut for time, and to start adding/changing/reusing stuff because one can. TSLRCM is already an offender, wouldn't want it to get worse in that respect. It's what I always admired about Qwinn's Planescape Torment mod pack. He very clearly understood this issue.

Ugh. Duplicated audio lines are jarring and obvious, and not what I'd call a restoration. (The Malachor stuff gets a pass for obvious reasons, but let's not get "clever" everywhere else).

That fits. I usually get them to get masteries, but I usually play a Jedi Master.

...if you have high strength/persuasion? The problem is removing the guards blocking Aida's escape. If you have high strength, you can't provoke a fight with a failed [intimidate], so you have to choose "you'll die anyway", which gives DS points. Similarly, you can't provoke a fight with Sasquetch (which would let you kill the guards, I think?) if you actually succeed at [intimidating] him to release Adana. Now of course a single DS hit isn't a big deal, but I am curious if some LS way to solve this problem exists that I am failing to notice. (crap, probably should have posted in Kotor general).