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The original darker floor and wall textures are meant to be newer "patch" pieces installed by the robots for repairs. It might be a bit harder to spot via the screens, but they're still present as it were in my updates. I've gone with a different wall patch texture, as it also gets used on the floor in places -- the newer one makes more sense to me. But, it and the floor texture are actually less worn, darker and have more of a specular gloss to them compared to the other floor and wall textures -- which you can see from some of the shots (not all) depending on the lighting in the area.

Honestly though, there were just too many different styles of textures in use in particular for the floor. I know they were trying to go for a certain feel with it, in that the Ebon Hawk is supposed to of seen better days; but, it was just taken a step too far. If I could, I would still make use of the other floor texture with the holes, just in other ways. Actually, would love to switch / replace what textures are used and how for certain things. For example, I really don't like how the new patch floor texture is used at he wrong scale in places and on the wall in one area. I would really like to change the scale and replace that wall tex with something else more appropriate.

But I think this is how it is going to be for now.

Because whoever at Obsidian did the texture work should have realised less is more. And that's my nice answer .

Plus, I couldn't get the other texture with the holes to look good and match everything else.

Final of this set.

Ebon Hawk internal continued...

Well, thanks for all the positive comments folks.

I've been busy for a while with other things but thought I'd spend some time on the weekend to finish some things for the Ebon Hawk so as to make some before and after screens to show. The ones below are the Ebon Hawk on leaving Peragus -- I'll show the T3 tutorial wrecked version at a later date.

BTW: the after screens below have been brightened slightly as to make it more like how the textures appear in-game.

Harbinger external set...

I spent additional time on the Harbinger tex, redoing it as a 2048x2048 texture using some new techniques to add additional detail to it. The ship is so big that the 1024x1024 version was struggling to make do. I think the space backdrop is also 2048x2048 on account of the Ebon Hawk tutorial section where one of the space textures is used at the wrong scale; meant I had to increase the size of others to get it to work which also diminished the brightness of the smaller stars. This then affects the perceived brightness of the screenshots below but it isn't as dark in-game.

Anyway, I also redid the Ebon Hawk tex to the larger size to increase detail; the result is shown in the previous screenshots posted.

I also created this version of one of the screenshots to use as my notebook's 1366x768 desktop:

Peragus external...

@ VarsityPuppet:

No the graphics brightness setting is at its default.

How the screenshots are shown varies from program to program. For example if I view these screenshots within Windows Photo Viewer, then they are too bright, so much so that the blackness of the space backdrop becomes large discoloured pixels. If I view them via Paint.NET they look as they do as if I am viewing them here. All this via the same desktop yet each program has different color profiles it is using to base how to show the pic on screen. 

But as I said, it is brighter in game, even with the updated textures altering how the scene is rendered.

@ Zhaboka:

Things are brighter in game, the screenshots in particular when it comes to space, seems far more darker out of game. 

Anyway, I just got through updating the asteroid textures and I'm not keen on changing them as it means that I would have to work on them to fit the rest of the textures as Vasilii created his asteroid replacer to work with the vanilla textures. In that context they work well, in my updated textures they may not but rather stick out like a sore thumb.

If after a while I decide that the asteroid texture isn't good enough, then I'll try and update using Vasilii's texture instead .

Peragus hanger final...

Peragus Hanger continued...

Peragus hangar area...

Peragus continued... these are for the miner quarters areas.

I think I will release it as a proper download release once I've completed a few things:

• Do Harbinger textures,
• Complete the few missing textures for Peragus and Telos,
• Revise Telos texture specular,
• Probably rework very first textures that were for the Telos restoration zone,
• All droid enemy textures that appear in these areas,
• All the placeable object textures that appear in these areas,
• Maybe all the character textures for those that appear in these areas -- maybe just major characters,
• Probably rework the UI textures as well, especially some of those mouse cursors.

Though, I think I will also be updating various models first as I want to be more thorough with the update. Don't see the point in just updating textures for stuff like weapons where they are so low-poly and base texture so low in quality where I might as well start from scratch. But I'll only do this if I can get permission from people to use their models and textures.

Anyway, that would delay things a bit as it might take a while to track down some people I think. But, it should be a size-able portion of the game remastered by that point.

@ Sith Holocron:

I've pretty much done all the textures for Peragus and the Ebon Hawk. There are some bits that I need to get around to doing, one or two textures I need to find first before I can do that though.

Though I have not done the inside of the Harbinger yet, I have done the outside of the Peragus mining facility and that includes the Harbinger tex. But, you'll have to wait for me to post it up first .

@ Hassat Hunter:

Not to mention that the file sizes are huge! At least 1024x1024 for all textures; pretty sure one I checked out was using 2048x2048 as default. Think about how "big" those textures are when you factor in that the default for the vanilla game are 256x256. That means that one texture can fit 64 vanilla default textures if 2048x2048,16 if it is 1024x1024, and, 4 if 512x512. I don't think that when these modders (who are probably very inexperienced in their defense) have bothered to do the calculations, especially considering, that the texture files have to be in TGA format to be used in game. Hell, even if you could get them in game as DDS it would still be a large file in way of mbs.

And the real kicker of it is, that all that *extra* texture data that is supposed to provide greater "HD" detail in game is pretty much lost as the render can only render so much. If you look at modern games, their standard is usually something like 512x512 in way of dimensions -- if not still 256x256. They get greater *detail* from their textures in-game due to their game's render and newer techniques like normal / parallax mapping. Even without these you would still get better detail from a more modern renderer from the base diffuse texture in-game, especially from post-processing shaders that can sharpen images, provide HDR and bloom effects, along with smoothing jagged edges.

Anyway the point of my rant is that the other HD projects I've seen are failing to get the most out of what the renderer can do. My default texture size is 512x512 in that most of my textures are upsized by doubling their dimensions. Any more than that is a case of diminishing returns as you get less and less for more and more memory taken up by these textures. My current max is 1024x1024, but, that's for very large objects like ships where the extra size means more visible detail in game that would be lost on anything smaller.

Peragus continued...

Well, it's been a while, longer than I had intended. So, without further delay here are some screens of my latest work retexturing the Peragus mining facility...

If you mean the mod a teaser version is up already via Deadly Stream and it can be downloaded here.

If you mean when will I update this, well... Ah, maybe by the end of May -- this month.

Maybe.

Yes, it is a Hotmail account but only because I couldn't use my Gmail account. I've been trying to migrate away from Hotmail to Gmail for a while now. Basically, I rarely check Hotmail now.

If anyone knows why it won't take my Gmail account, would like to know as it didn't seem to think it was valid for some perplexing reason and I have a feeling that it's just some gmail emails not all of them that it doesn't like :/

Well I'll be going back to do Peragus, then the Harbinger. Then probably the Ebon Hawk if I actually don't do that first considering that you appear their first for the tutorial segment.

Anyway, the idea being that people can then play from the start all the way through to Telos -- which sill has a few odds and ends for me to finish off. Also, I've played those and have save games for them, which makes it easier for me to test as I don't have to play anything first.

BTW: is there any reason why I can't set my account to notify me via my Gmail account. It's the one I generally check for notifications about stuff, like forum posts, yet the site doesn't like it for some reason...

Personally, I don't see why they can't release the tools as in world building and editing tools. They don't have to release an SDK / code for the engine or anything. Anyway, I think people aren't signing your petition and the reason why it will fail are one and the same -- beyond what InSidious has pointed out.

You need to rewrite your petition. It reads juvenile. You need to rework the tone of the text to be especially more respectful of Bioware -- its clear you like Obsidian and very clear you don't like Bioware. And while your at it, try and be more professional in your writing and use some CAPITALS. Not just once in a while for when you start a sentence but for ALL of our sentences. And when you finish a paragraph, leave a line of white space before you start another. This aids readability along with making it look far more professional. Like you care about what you have written because you've taken the time to make it read well, so therefore, others reading it will take it more seriously and take the time to actually read it.

Didn't actually get to do any extra work on the TSL Remastered Telos teaser, but I did manage to squeeze in uploading it to the site here. 

I'm tired, got stuff to do and still need to get some sleep before heading off to catch a plane. Will have notebook with me so as long as I can find decent free WiFi, then I will check in from time to time if I'm not busy having fun .

I am and most likely will replace that horrible cantina music. Not sure about the other music as I'm not much of a composer, but, I figure that I can get a bunch of free open-source samples and put something together in Audacity that is 10x better than what is present. Honestly, I am really getting sick of having to listen to that crap they have in-game .

I do experience a lot of "crack" sounds when sound begins to play or ends play. Not sure if there is a better sound download patch that I missed or something, but if there isn't one then I at least wanted to have a look at it some as I think that it might have something to do with the game being first optimized for Xbox -- as I don't recall the problem at all for KOTOR.

The problem with music is finding stuff that will match everything else, otherwise you have to replace ALL the music -- which is probably not possible as some of it will be part of a movie file. I think I came across 2 or 3 music sound mods but apart from listening to a few tracks, I never actually installed them. They didn't seem to support the atmosphere of the game nor was it totally Star Wars in style -- orchestral.

As I said, I'm also not much of a composer myself. So beyond simply improving the files so they don't crack every so often, I'm not sure how much I can do on my own in this department.

I'll have to check, but there is at least 2 if not more versions of the Ebon Hawk -- damaged in space, and normal which may have a hyperspace variant and others for each time it is docked. So, some of these problems may not be applicable to all of them as some may have differing meshes.

I've noticed this one in particular on the version of the Ebon Hawk on route to Telos. A great big old plane of black as your screens capture as well. Not sure why it would be there either.

If I can find what texture is supposedly being used there and as long as it is not being used by anything else. Then it should be easily fixed by replacing it with a blank texture if any other solution as to how to fix it doesn't present itself. Though more than likely, it is simply an erroneous mesh that once had a purpose but now needs to be deleted.

Anyway, there are probably a number of factors beyond which "version" of the Ebon Hawk that has been loaded up for that part of the game. Like whether people had been alt-tabbing out of the game in order to do something, like check email, before tabbing back into the game. This will introduce graphical problems, as will updating too many graphic files of the game whilst out of the game whilst its still running. Another is what mods people have installed, especially those to do with the Ebon Hawk. These can create "false" reports of problems when there really isn't a problem, in that closing and starting the game and/or uninstalling a mod, will fix these.

nd then there is what graphics card and drivers people are using, which means that they and others may experience them but I and others, may not. I can't fix something like that as I have no way of testing it on my own. Not impossible to fix on your own, just very time consuming and somewhat frustrating -- I had a Fallout 3 script bug that has taken me a long while to discover what the problem with it was, as I and others with newer computers, simply never experienced it.

There are a lot of animated textures in use as well -- or more likely, there is one animated texture used all over the place. These in particular look bad and may also be the reason why certain panels have areas that look like they aren't there -- these are usually where the animated textures appear. So replacing these with better ones and a custom TXI file may do the trick -- especially if it turns out that a particular animated texture for that version of the Ebon Hawk is simply missing from the game.

However, this is a real pain as when you export animated textures from KOTOR Tool, they come out garbled. Basically, you have to rebuild them using elements of the original image before you can do any work on them. it also doesn't help that these "areas" are actually different meshes or parts of a mesh that have a completely different texture applied to them. It would have been better if these, especially animated screens, had multiple layers. A static background, an animated texture layer, and possibly, an effect layer -- like adding the look of an interlaced monitor over the top of these. There are probably problems with this to do with rendering, but, I think if they had used say "additive" for the animated layer and "decal" for the effect layer. Well, I think they wouldn't have any issues and the end result would have looked way better -- plus, if the animated layer wasn't rendered you'd still have the static background to fall back on.

The "cracks" that are especially visible in Hyper space, appear all over the place, especially around console panels. If it is a case of the texture having a great big old transparent area around the parts that aren't used. Then that is solved by filling them with black -- at its most basic. However, I doubt that is the case and this is more than likely the result of the mesh -- not actually the UV mapping at all. One mesh end that is butted up against the end of another. No matter what, there is a gap between the two that some engines will allow what is seen behind to bleed through -- especially if the mesh has no "depth" to its edges but is basically a plane. The best way to fix this is to edit the mesh so that one actually intersects the other, or, by adding an edge to these meshes so that they have something to but up against -- though, simply adding another simple mesh behind these with a black texture applied would probably also work. However, that means learning more 3D modelling that I have experience with currently, which is compounded by the fact that exporting and importing them into a game format is problematic as the tools are old and fairly basic.

A quicker short-term fix is to replace the hyperspace texture with something less bright and hideous along with a custom TXI file -- make it have an additive blend render so that the "black" of nothingness behind it will come through and mute it down some so that the bleed through isn't as bad. And that would be my first step as any mesh editing would have to wait until later .