sELFiNDUCEDcOMA

More of Peragus...

New Peragus screens continued...

As SH messaged about updates and I needed to take some screenshots anyway, I thought I'd post up what I had been working on up until late November last year:

This... is... AMAZING! I don't know what else to say. I am, however, glad that mant of the "plastic-like" textures were changed to more realistic ones.

 

There's just a few things though:

• Will this affect the TSLRCM areas such as the HK factory?

The HK factory uses the same textures as those found within the secret facility within the Telos restoration zone -- minus the new ones created and used by TSLRCM. Any other changes to things that are "global" like placeable textures and entities that have been changed by the mod that appear within this area will also be changed.

• Could the standard player character clothing model remain?

If my memory is correct, that is all done by the appearance file. In theory you can set it back to being the robe models as per the game; not sure I will however as it means creating and managing multiple appearance.2da files. Especially as it's a bit complex as I wanted to use the default clothing "slot" -- or model letter -- for another purpose. I'd have to think through what issues there might be with that that aren't immediately obvious.

• I'm not too fond of the "nippy" Luxa myself. Could it be changed?

Possibly, but, the time I spend on it is time I can't spend on anything else. Might see if I can do something quick though -- probably won't look that great.

For the last two, I'm not asking you to remove it entirely, as I'm sure plenty of people will love the changes. Instead, could you do like you did with the Ebon Hawk garage and add two alternatives? That way, everyone's happy.

Yeah, if I hex edit the Ebon hawk model files there may not be "alternatives" as each will be used for specific meshes  .

Darth Hayze is kind of right; you would of been better of phrasing it differently.

If you just wanted to do this for yourself, then there is no issue, but, you'll find that a lot of modders -- not just with to do with KoTOR -- aren't interested in helping people to port stuff from one game into another. Not because they necessarily look down on it, but, because various sites do not like it one bit. For example one of the best sites for Fallout 3 and New Vegas mods is Nexus. Any mods that aren't kosher will get deleted and the modder will be banned. They have a system in place where other modders are rewarded essentially for reporting on others. You release or even talk about your mod that uses assets from another game for a New Vegas mod on that site and you'll likely get banned for it.

Anyway, to get the model into New Vegas you would have to use NVmax plugin to get it into proper Max -- not Gmax, unless you can find another plugin that can save it out as a format that Blender might be able to use. Save it in a format that Blender can open, and then use the plugin tools for that to get it into New Vegas. I would actually suggest you look at the nif plugin for Max that is available instead. Especially if you can get a student copy of Max, though it may work for Gmax as well. And then do all your work in Max considering how much of an illogical pain in the arse it is to use Blender IMHO.

Though my real suggestion for you if you intend to make this mod publicly available is to use another robot model altogether. One where there is no issues in you using it within a New Vegas mod. Maybe have a look at the existing mods found via Nexus to see if you can find an already game ready robot model that you like and use that in your mod instead. Then spend some time learning how to modify textures so that you can customize it to your liking. The other option is a longer route in that it involves creating your own HK-47 model from scratch to use in your mod instead. There shouldn't be any issues with you using that in your mod as it is simply inspired by HK-47 and is not a port of another game (and company's) assets.

FYI: if you do use someone else's New Vegas robot assets, make sure you track down all the sources for that model as it may be a port of someone else's work. In which case you may need to get permission to use it from the original author. And don't just take the modder's word for it, as many of them try and pass of other people's work as their own; I know of one guy who has been banned from Nexus several times -- he keeps on creating new accounts but is found out every time. Nothing worse than doing a lot of work in good faith only to discover that you need to start from scratch because of some twerp -- another reason why a lot of modders won't help with porting, because they see it as not just being a waste of your time, but potentially a waste of others as well .

I ... have pretty much all of those, and no issues... :?

New games tend to have a visual stutter to them. I think all graphics cards do, but in particular, for ATI cards its much worse. That's one example I can think of that I can do without .

What the hell, two more: 1) AMD chips run hotter requiring more cooling which also means more noise; 2) my ASUS motherboard when I put my PC to sleep, sometimes, doesn't come back out of sleep requiring me to manually turn it off and then re-start of everything -- though it's a hassle as you then have to reload everything, it probably also helps move my system towards being corrupted and needing a clean re-install; possibly even permanent damage to hardware from a forced restart.

Well, it's been a problem for ATI cards for YEARS, so updating drivers wont help. And downgrading 3 years back? Yeah, bad idea.

 

So was hoping if you had a grass that was working proper I might add it to TSLRCM to fix it for all ATI users (without affecting Nvidia users with worse looking grass like JCarter's fix). If it infacts looks worse, don't have a nvidia anymore.

 

If you could send just the grass I could check it? Using jcarter's now for my own install (yeah, I know, keeping the game pure, but here's an exception . Also for various modding tools like wherami of course XD)...

Sent a couple of  versions of the grass to you to try out.

Yeah, I still use an ATI card for the (aging) dev rig; think it was perhaps a Catalyst driver update that did it. All I know is that it didn't work before but does know; I also always assumed it was due to ATI's OpenGL support specifically that was the issue, especially considering that KOTOR still has the problem for me.

About the only thing I know for certain is that I will never buy an ATI graphics card again nor an Asus motherboard and AMD CPU... Too many "issues" that I've had to fix or put up with.

 

@SelfInducedComa

 

Was your grass the same in your texture pack as of March 2013?

Yep, that's the one.

Does the grass also fixes the issue ATI users (like me) have with Grass?

 

Currently using Jcarter's fix for that, but wondering if yours would do similar...

Checking out the problem / fix, well, if that's the issue why grass in particular has issues appearing in-game then that is so easy to fix it's not funny -- you can do it with one or two effects filters if you can't be bothered using your eraser to clean it up.

Not the best thread for this, but, kinda wondering whether anyone had issues with my Telos grass textures, as it has a bit of the "not so invisible" pixels as part of that texture as well. Which is not surprising as it was like the first texture I created for TSL and was still learning how to use various tools. Wondering if so as I'd like to make sure that all the grass / plant textures show up nicely in-game and all.

FYI: A year or so ago I had to re-install everything when my SSD died, which meant updating all the drivers and such for my graphics card. Prior to this it didn't work for me, after, the grass showed up perfectly -- still doesn't for KOTOR though. Might be worth checking to see whether everything is up to date with your system. If you're like me, you'll do this once and then leave it be so as not to be hassled beyond generic Windows updates .

@SIC Wow. We really do think alike.

 

I tried to get the charric to look unique, but to keep it in line with the descriptions from Zahn's Visions of the Future.

I'm thinking of giving the bowcaster a unique sound effect which is more in line with say, jedi outcast and more of a ball of condensed energy instead of a blaster bolt. Do you think the energy ball design is too much of a diversion from the OT?

I guess the color isn't too much of an issue, since I can change that with a few seconds in PS.

 

BTW, the third screen is an ion weapon/electrical bolt; not that of the disruptor/charric.

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I've never read that particular SW novel; actually, haven't read that many beyond the Darth Bane trilogy by Drew Karpyshyn. I find most of them to be formulaic and rushed in order to meet the market needs of the publisher or circumstances. Like Drew's Revan novel which really should have been a trilogy of books rather than one condensed book created for SW:TOR -- Revan as a character and the corner stone as it were to the Old Republic era of the SW universe, really demanded more than one underwhelming book. As it is, it's a failure in my opinion.

So I really can't comment on the Charric effect. Bowcasters I think traditionally -- perhaps not in all SW sources but on average -- has a greenish effect. But, I think it should be whatever you like in the end; plus, "lore" changes quite a bit and is often based on things like art direction more than any logical reason -- that is beyond technical issues as to why Luke Skywalker has a green-bladed lightsabre in ROTJ. Though it's probably not a good idea to stray too far from canon, I do also think that some people take canon a little too seriously .

Very nice Malkior.

Those weapon FX screens reminds me that I still have to finish off my own .

Love it, love it, love it. Marble and red velvet for some reason always comes to mind when I think of Coruscant, now just if Sithspecter's Coruscant exterior was in working condition we'd have a worthy Coruscant planet!

 

The first thought that came to mind about the statue being in the way would be to have the masters on a higher plane (which imo would make more sense anyway, what with them arrogantly believing that they have the moral high ground, and it would give it more of a feeling of a trial, but I'm going to take a guess that it's probably impossible lol.

It's not "impossible" just a major pain as the current tools don't appear to be very good at it. Mdlops when it exports the models appears to dump anything it doesn't "understand" about the model; in particular those things to do with area modules which use different features to something like a weapon model. And even if it didn't, then NWMax sure does. So, you can edit the mesh to make such changes, however, it may not appear correctly in game if the game even wants to load it up. I haven't done that much in the way of creating new areas for the game, so there are likely steps that you need to take to get things to export and load correctly. But, these may not work with existing area models and such.

Anyway, you can't really use the council chambers as is as the obelisk and chairs don't have collision detection. Meaning you can pass right through them. The statue does so you can't, and the best fix I think for the chairs is to replace them with placeables which would also come with collision. Placing them in a half-circle would then help alleviate the "statue in the way" issue. You can still have additional chairs, you'd just use some other chair placeable to make it clear that these are for assembled visitors and not for the Jedi council themselves to sit in.

It looks very good! And yeah, the inversion looks better to me also, for some reason...

One reason for the inversion is stylistic, in that if you had it as default it would look rather odd with the surrounding marble/jedi symbol border and the statue within the centre. You tend to expect borders to be dark, not light.

I also prefer it inverted as it helps support themes to do with their own corruption (hypocrisy) as at it centre surrounding the statue is dark marble reflecting what is at their arrogant core past their puritan facade. 

My first impression was along Sith Holocron's lines, but it really looks fine, and if its the appropriate Je'daii symbol, then that's alright. Regardless, the look itself looks "ritzy-er" which fits into the old republic theme a bit more due to the exorbitant lifestyle that the jedi were going through. (Reminds me of 1920s New York) 

 

As for the statue, I think it does a better job of explaining why the jedi council members are so hostile to the exile later in the game, since he/she allegorically stabs the jedi themselves rather than some random pillar.

 

(Though it does beg the question of why the jedi masters saw fit to stare at a statue of themselves while discussing matters of the republic... )

I actually think that it being similar to the republic army symbol is more a reason to keep it as is.

Anyway, I think the obelisk (now statue) being in the center of the room is functionally a problem, but, I can see why they wanted to have the exile stab something. It would perhaps make more sense if the chairs weren't all the way around but actually just a half-circle. That way no one seated has to try and look around a statue right in the middle of their view if trying to see someone speaking directly opposite themselves. The statue would then be there for the "visitors" they have called to appear in front of the council -- not primarily for their own egotistical narcissistic needs.

But, that would require making a custom chair placeable and then tediously positioning them as replacements before "removing" the others. Still, might be worth going at a later date...

That Je'daii symbol seems to have colors inverted - if you're using the Wookieepedia page as gospel anyway.

 

 

 

I think my issue with this symbol is that it's too close to this symbol - which represents the Republic Military.

 

 

 

It just seems ironic that the Exile gets exiled partially because she joined Revan and the Republic Military to stop the Mandalorians in a room that pretty much has the Republic Military symbol on the floor.

 

It's not all grim news. I like the addition of the statue.

Well, I did say it was based on the symbol; it's inversion is on purpose.

It may be similar to the Republic Military symbol, but it is not the same nor does the wiki page state when that symbol started it's use. Plus, perhaps they had more than one reason for getting rid of it...

In short: I ain't changing it, no matter what you think of it or the reasons you give -- I like it the way it is and that's how it is staying  .

Well as I have finally gotten around to doing the last of the fixes and texture work for Coruscant, I thought I'd post up some screens for it.

Originally I wasn't going to do much beyond the skybox textures, not until I had a crack at Malacor as some of the textures are used here. But, it is a very small self-contained level that allows me to test some things out and still have it all completed within a short time-frame. And thought it is only seen briefly, it is still an important element to the game if undersold as it was.

Uh, is the exile going to impale the statue in the middle?

After much fiddling with scripts and waypoints... Yes:

Something I've been working on for a long while now...

Not exactly the game faults you're not using it's designated system.

It's somewhat the beauty of TSLRCM though, that since we change the .mod files ANYWAY, I can jam everything in there that I want changed with no regard to the override or other mods. Definitely makes things easy. .utc change? Stuff it in. .Git changes? Yup. .dlg? There you go.

 

Also in my custom mods I prefer to stuff stuff in the .mod files rather than override. Less chance for conflict. No extra work required to make them work in override (like the original Handmaiden mod had to had about 7 files just to rename so it was override friendly, all dropped). And yes, I do need to update them sometimes if TSLRCM gets patched, but I suppose a benefit of working on both is that I already know exactly what's changed and thus needs adapting.

 

As for keeping track, I just got all my modfiles nicely sorted in a seperate map. Most are pretty much the files you find in the patcher folder, few actually use the patcher to add to globalcat or dialog.tlk.

Of course, most are small anyway, just a few files, makes it easier too XD

 

EDIT:

Yes. That fix sounds good. Want to share how? Or top secret stuff? XD

Yeah, not sure I have that kind of advantage, yet. So far it's only the miner appearance that's been an option of being handled via a .MOD file; so it's still early days on that front and I may decide that trying to do things via the override just doesn't warrant all the extra hassle as I figure just about no one else will bother making sure that their mod is compatible with mine. Making a mess of all my hard work. Plus, there are certain files that are going to cause issues regardless, like the Appearance.2DA file that by necessity has to have changes made to pretty much every single row.

I should just stick with making sure it is just compatible with mods like TSLRCM, and leave it to that. Not that I ever wanted to support every mod under the sun, as that is just impractical, just less hassle using it with others. Why I'm looking to recreate certain smaller mods by doing the same or similar with this one when I get the chance. Probably the best way to reduce compatibility issues if people can be persuaded to not use a bunch of mods that actually only make one small change to a .2DA file. But in the end, there are always going to be issues as there will always be people that have more than a hundred mods installed at once... Bit pointless when people go out of their way to ensure that there are as many mod conflicts as possible -- but of course, since yours was the last one they installed, it has to be YOUR mod that is causing all the issues  .

Anyway, I'll re-post my last post as I think it may have ended up being overlooked:

I think I'll keep the fix to myself (for now), but once the mod is released, it should be easy enough to dig out the answer. All I'll say as a teaser, is that when the issue was originally raised on this thread, well... It turns out I was even more correct than I thought I was  .

I don't want to speak too soon, as I haven't fully tested it yet, but, I do believe I have completely solved the Ebon Hawk black mesh problem for good:

The game has memory leaks as it is, no point adding more to them for no good reason. For intermediary actions heartbeats aren't used anyway.

It's in-game. It's the HEARTBEAT in a .are file...

Though you really ought not to use it, since there are generally far better ways to handle whatever someone wants that doesn't put any additional strain on the game.

They're usually used for quest updates if you get a specific item.

Solution; change .utc's. Done. ?

I'm steering clear of actually making changes to anything that I can't just plop into the Override folder -- the UTC files would overwrite every case of it throughout the game. Can't recollect all my reasons, as I really need to find coffee, but I think the gist of it was that I figured there would be far less mod conflicts that way as this mod won't necessarily care what you've done to those files as it will then endeavor to overwrite these regardless without overwriting absolutely everything a mod did -- just what was necessary.

Probably a waste of effort trying to do it that way as it's all (probably) largely covered by TSL Patcher anyways, but, I can be stubborn that way; plus, it's easier for me to track what I have and haven't changed this way if I don't have to remember I made changes elsewhere.

EDIT: it easy to forget that TSL is actually a turn-based game at its heart... why the 6 sec / round makes sense, even if it really doesn't 

@ MrPhil:

The mining safety gear is equitable, the uniform no longer is.

@ Kainzorus:

Yes and no, as the result would be that every miner would be wearing it, including all the "admin / sec" officers.

@ Milestails:

Wow... It's always a bit of a shock how much of a difference there is between TSL and more modern games graphically. Usually it takes a while to adjust when I start up on the textures again as the difference is massive, especially as there are no normal maps present for the most part. Seeing that pic hits it home again. 

@ Malkior:

Yeah, it's how Fair Strides says, its an item that is set to "disguise" and allows you to then change a character's appearance once it is equipped to pretty much anything in the Appearance.2DA file. Even a Gizka:

It's how in KOTOR you can get the armor that changes your appearance to that of a Sith Soldier so that you can get to the lower levels of Taris.

You might be able to use it to solve other problems, perhaps even use it to change the Handmaiden sisters to their correct appearance, however, it is still reliant upon the respective row within the 2DA file being correct and all -- models as well. Though, it seems that not all the appearance can be selected, at least not via KOTOR Tool in that it has a 255 (8bit) limit on things like the number of variations you can select from; for example, I found that I could not set a plot use icon beyond 255.

Not sure if that is a KOTOR Tool limitation or whether it is an engine limitation, but, as the 2DA file I believe has more than 255 rows... Then I suspect it can be gotten around with something like KGFF.

@ Hassat Hunter:

Don't think memory is really an issue -- my notebook has 4gb which I doubled to 8gb -- if anything, it would be processing and that really depends upon what you were doing with it and how the engine handles scripts. If the game engine's scripting system was optimized to work for hardware from 8 years ago, and has various limits in place. Then it would be an issue, otherwise, it ain't as most people are now playing the game on more modern hardware.

I also think that it was more than likely an unnecessary limitation to have in place back then as well, and at the very least, should of been 1 second intervals not 6. That would make it far more useful as the delay experienced is far shorter.

As a further example of the usefulness of what Fair Strides and Insidious are describing, having a script that is independent of any game objects that is checked every frame would actually be simpler and cleaner. I had an issue for when I was modding Fallout 3 in regards to applying fullscreen shaders depending upon whether an item was equipped or not -- for example, making night vision goggles that "enhanced" the screen. To control the effect, it required a script attached that had code for the OnEquip and OnUnequip blocks. It appeared to work fine when equipping and then unequipping the item, however, when you force equipped another item over this one things got screwed up -- the shader FX was removed but could never be applied again, unless you knew the precise steps of how. There was no OnForceUnequip to use, this was just something that it was not designed to handle and everything I tried failed, and looking at how others did it was no help as they were doing it along my way. No one had bothered to test their mods thoroughly, otherwise, they would have found the bug as I did.

The solution was straightforward, create a new quest that was always active and had a script attached that ran every frame. This script was simple, at the start it removed the shader effect if it was active, then, it checked to see if the item was equipped or not. If not it did nothing, if it was, it applied the shader. It didn't need to know whether the item had been equipped or not as the script wasn't directly triggered that way. It works every time and there is no performance impact as it's not doing something stupid like sorting through the contents of an overflowing container -- like the player's inventory.

In this case, how I went about achieving altering the holo-miner appearances is messy, not simple. In particular the holo-miners are created as needed and destroyed when not. So you can't have a script check OnEnter to search for and change the miners that way, which is even more simple and less chance of it impacting performance. And though I achieved it, there is one clear bug where a miner's appearance will change mid sentence and they will not be animated or say anything until the next line is said. By having a script that is continuously checking and then changing the miner's appearance as needed, virtually the moment they are created. Then this should not happen as it would be seamless to the player instead of mildly jarring.

That is if it will work without issue checking just about every game frame.

@ MrPhil:

Yeah, that's the plan, to have them multiple version and for them to not look the same. Not sure how well it will turn out as the body textures tend to only have the texturing for one side which then gets mirrored for the other side of the model. Makes it hard to get things more varied as bullet holes and such will get mirrored exactly on the other side. But, I have some ideas I just now have to make the time in creating all the assets for it...

@ Malkior: 

I'm sure you appreciate the amount of work that goes into these textures. It might be lost on others, as they've only done the odd texture of things, but not when you've attempted to update the textures of an entire area. Even what appears to be from a static poor screenshot to be a texture that hasn't changed a hell of a lot could have taken a lot of work to make look good, especially within the context of all the other textures; some demanding of more attention than others.

It's a bit of a shame with the armored flightsuit, in that it is probably one of the better armors to attempt to retexture in that the male and female version of the textures are pretty much identical. So, you don't end up having to do twice the work

What makes things difficult is how painfully limited the scripting is; all have their idiosyncrasies that you need to overcome in order to get what you intend to work as best you can, but TSL makes it even more of a challenge. As far as I know, it is hard to do something as basic as having a script that is run throughout the mission. The best I could do was to spawn an invisible object that had an OnHeartbeat script attached, but, that will only get checked every 6 seconds and I'm unaware of anyway of increasing that rate.

Though, it didn't help that I had been sitting in front of the computer for several hours trying to get a solution that worked. Should have gotten some sleep instead as it then only took me half an hour to come up with something that did .

@ Fair Strides:

I dunno, I'm pretty good at getting myself sidetracked...

If I can come up with an existing armor that I think it would work with, and I didn't have to do too much extra texture work... Maybe.

Yeah that default minor uniform is an eye-sore.

 

Love your new take on it

Thanks, glad someone appreciates it. Wasn't sure anyone would care to be frank, as it is just the miner uniform -- and it is just simple "contrast" work apparently . But, I really do find it odd that this ugly jumpsuit is somehow classed as being armor...

@ Malkior: No, it's not a competition -- as much as some might like to think it is.

It's surprising how much work you can do and have so little to show for it; for example, I've been working on a lot of things of late but in particular to do with Peragus and the mining gear items you get in game, like the "uniform":