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As I said in my prior post, DDS is not a supported file format by the TSL game engine. Using DDS files with a .dds extension has no effect, nor does renaming the extension to .tga or . tpc -- actually, what happens is that the game appears to be missing this texture and that part of the world is see through. The TPC file format may be very similar to the DDS file format but that does not mean that DDS can be utilised in anyway unless you have a way of converting DDS to TPC format. Unless you have a process where an actual DDS file, compression and mip-maps and all can be read by the TSL game engine, then all you're doing by suggesting this is wasting my time as your comment is simply misleading. Misleading in it implies that using DDS files in some way is a possibility and that you know how. As far as I can tell, no one here does, nor does the modder Xarwarz referenced in that thread, as he clearly states that the DDS files must ALL be converted to TGA before they will be utilized in game. Therefore all benefit that DDS provides beyond a smaller download file, is actually lost.

The normal maps created by the Gimp plugin are actually very good. You can get a few plugins for Paint.NET but they range from crap, to basic to good as long as you want to do a lot of manual tweaking. Personally I am sticking with Paint.NET and Gimp. I don't see any need to switch over to any other programs and won't be . Anyway, the problem is not the program I suspect, but the file format that KOTOR reads them in. Like how it will read TPC or TGA files but won't read DDS files. It may actually read DDS files but, you may need to do something like rename them to TPC -- as an example of what I what to know. With normals I've tried to get it to load them in-game saved as TGA files, but I suspect, that they need to be in the TPC mip-mapped format. Declaring them via a TXI file is not enough but the file itself needs to have a proper header recognized by the game engine. Perhaps as you say, DDS files can actually be used, then maybe, this is the way of getting normal maps to work... Maybe.

A completion mod sounds great, as though I think restoration mods like TSLRCM are great and all, I do think they kind of miss the point. There is a reason why this content was cut from the game and there is little point of simply making it available if you do not intend to add what is missing from it in order to complete it. Unfortunately, adding that additional and make the right changes in way of content is harder than it looks, and not just from a technical point of view -- KOTOR / TSL modding is more hacking than modding in my opinion. Take items, most mod items are way over powered and therefore unbalanced. Not to mention that their description is clearly written by someone without a lot of experience with writing. Having done some script and fiction writing and such before, may I suggest that you lay off the fiction writing and just plan out the plot, places, events and characters. Do something more high-level and then worry about the finer details of things like dialogue, which is harder to write than most people think. In this way you have a solid framework that can give you an overview so that you can spot weaknesses in the plot, and more importantly, identify various mission / quest types you can add. And that last point is very important, as I've played some KOTOR mods in the past and most have a tendency to focus on writing self-indulgent monologues of dialogue in the form of interactive cut-scenes and flashbacks within flashbacks. What amounts to gameplay is usually the boss battles that never seem to end, that last for 20+ rounds and degenerate into running around in circles just out of range of attack, so as to build up your health and force points to attack back with. That is NOT a really brilliant idea . These mods were a nice novelty to experience once but not something I would want to experience again, to be frank. BTW: It would be good if you had links and such to things you've referenced. Like GenoHaradan which I had to look up to recall who and what they were, as well as, find a link to the mod(s) mentioned for it -- which in turn don't bother give much explanatory detail either.

DDS is the format of choice, but, I wasn't aware that TSL could actually read DDS format. Just TGA. Will test it out anyway, as it is the better choice to TGA. The program is Paint.NET. As long as you get one of the mega plugin and file format packs, it can do pretty much everything you need it to do. Though, GIMP is still better for normal maps. Speaking of which, does anyone know how to create normal (bump) maps that TSL will like?

I've seen some of the lower rez TSL textures for stuff like droids and wasn't aware that they differed to the KOTOR ones. My guess is that they were simply just making do with XBOX versions of the textures to cut time. It's easier to just optimize and get it working on the XBOX first and then let PC players suffer some with the lower resolution textures as at least the game is bound to work. Though they probably planned to have better textures for PC, but had to compromise due to time. So, some of the lower resolution ones remained. If I come across any that aren't for things like objects in the distance -- like shuttles flying in the background. I'll see what I can do to replace them with something better. But if all there is are the textures themselves, then depending upon how bad they are then there may not be much that can be done to improve them. Plus, I don't have KOTOR installed and there are probably some legal issues about porting and using KOTOR (Bioware) textures in TSL (Obsidian) as it was made by a different company. It seems weird that that may be the case, but that's how it is with using content between Fallout 3 (Bethesda) and Fallout New Vegas (Obsidian). Not everyone would care but some people are real anal about these things . No I haven't seen that particular mod Malkior; if I have time I'll check it out. And yes, I'll do some before and after shots in the future.

Some of the TSL textures can look rather bad up close as well. I have a suspicion that the KOTOR textures are a lot better compared to TSL in that TSL was a bit rushed development-wise. Looking at some of the texturing for the Telos station, you've got textures that have been used at the wrong scale, like x4 the size they should be. Mainly as filler for places and to cut back on texture creation. I think that maybe KOTOR has a lot less of this -- more like the Telos military base where things are more uniform in texture scaling. It isn't much of a problem if the textures are unedited, it is when they are, as the blurry stretch is more obvious when they're next to edited textures used at the correct scale. I may have to increase the size of some of the textures because of this as there is no way to get around this otherwise -- unless you start editing modules to "fix" how textures are used; and the more I read about this the more it seems like a real pain . Currently I'm sticking to upsizing textures from 256x256 to 512x512, as though that's just "double" the dimensions, it actually means you've increase the texture size (area) by 4. It I up some to 1024x1024, it's not three times the original dimension, but actually 9 times the original texture size in way of area. Why I don't want to do that for every texture as it means more memory used by the game. Plus, I'm sure there are people out there who are playing this game on very old notebooks and the like, so performance might be an issue. Especially as an older engine would have been optimised to work with smaller (mip-mapped) textures.

Thanks. When looking at what others had done when researching KOTOR texture formats, I generally saw that people had gone heavy-handed with their changes to the original textures rather than trying to keep to the original as much as possible. That or they replaced all the old textures with new ones; generally larger in size than actually required to increase the detail in game when other methods would have worked just as well or even better. I think that there is actually a lot of good elements in those original textures, its just that you have to bring them out and know how to do so. I think that's smarter as well, as marking a lot of textures from scratch as others have done, well, that has a lot of problems not withstanding the time it takes to make textures from scratch. Why they generally feel half-finished, lacking in "detail" that makes them look anything but uniform. Plus the original textures have already been made to work in all the places they are used, new ones would need a lot of playtesting to ensure that.

So, I decided to re-play Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords the other day and realized that I could now play the game with the grass enabled -- before I would get the common problem I think has to do with ATI (AMD) graphics cards and the game being OpenGL; FYI: I think the latest ATI drivers have finally gotten around to fixing this. I thought, cool, I can now play all those outdoor areas (like Telos) with grass enabled as without it they kind of sucked. Then I realised that they still kind of sucked because the grass textures are so crap -- well, the game is rather old to be fair. So, I re-textured them to something better. Then I had to re-texture the ground texture to match, which also meant re-texturing all the ground textures along with the cliff area walls as well. I was happy and played on, that is until I got to the old underground military base and I thought, I think I can do better with some effort. So, I redid those as well. Then I went back and started work on Telos station as well, as some of the textures are shared between the two -- actually, a lot of the textures are used all over the place which makes it a bit tricky. I still have much yet to do in order to complete the Telos set: I need to redo much of the signage along with recreate the animated textures. Work more on the skyboxes. Still need to do the Telos Polar area. The outside areas of the station you see through the windows I still have yet to do. Various textures aren't part of the Telos set but appear to be from elsewhere -- like the trees and grass on the station which I think are from Dantooine. So in order for them to be completed for Telos it means doing part of the outdoors for Dantooine. I think I can still improve the trees some via textures Anyway, I thought once I was done with Telos -- as much as you can be without editing models and such -- that I would upload it as a teaser of a much larger project to retexture (remaster really) all the environment textures for the game followed by everything else. As in props, droids, creatures, character faces, weapons, armor and robes, equip objects, effects, and anything else I've forgotten. It's a lot of work but the upside is that I am not recreating all the textures from scratch. 90% are reworked textures that have been enlarged and then a special-sauce in way of a combo of filters and layers utilised in order to enhance them. It's only around 10% of the textures that end up having to be tweaked in some way -- like floor tiles -- or made from scratch -- some of the signage will definitely be. So, it shouldn't end up taking me years of my time to complete. Anyhow, here are some teaser screens...