Kexikus

I don't think so. The only animation I can do is a rotation like the one for Malachor and that only works for very cloudy skies as you'd otherwise get weird lighting on the clouds. And even then you usually have clouds moving in one direction and not rotating around a single point, i.e. an animation like that wouldn't work for the Telos Polar Plateau either even though that one is just as cloudy. And K1 doesn't even have something like that.

That's not the model, that's the render. The problem here is that each render is illuminated individually and sometimes, especially in scenes with thick clouds, that illumination will not match. But that's easily fixed by using a so called "global illumination cache" in TG. I'm just too lazy to do that for my test renders as that takes extra time. But in the final version these corners won't be visible at all (and the resolution will be higher and there will be less grain).

It's done. Malachor is now complete. I went with the color closer to vanilla as you all suggested and also desaturated the dark clouds a little bit. In addition to that I tweaked the terrain color a little and also improved the terrain itself so that you can no longer see where it begins. Here's what the result looks like: But since this is an animated skybox, pictures can't really do it justice and so here's a video for you all: And as always, there's also a render of just the skybox. Well, two actually. And I have them in two versions. One is the raw Terragen render and one was edited in a similarly to the skybox textures to get darker clouds at the top. Next up is the Unknown World, but that's mostly fixing the skybox model for all modules and rerendering the skybox itself with some tiny tweaks. I'll keep you updated.

I said I'd work on another skybox next (and I actually did for a very short time) but I just couldn't leave Malachor yet. So I've made some tweaks and I'm very close to calling it final but first I need some opinions. The thing I can't decide on is the sky color. I have two options. One is closer to the vanilla sky color and one is more green. Just let me know which one you prefer and maybe also why you prefer it. For comparison, you can find a screenshot of the vanilla sky here. Once that's decided on, I need to tweak the terrain color some more, apply the animation to all Malachor modules and the skybox will be done. The next one after that (which I worked on briefly before I returned to Malachor) will be the Unknown World. It won't have many changes compared to V1 though.

It would increase loading times, yes. There is already a noticeable increase with the non animated skyboxes I made although it's no big deal yet. Otherwise 500MB would be no problem for any modern GPU but consider that this is only for 16 frames. At a (low) animation framerate of 10fps that wouldn't even be 2 seconds which is just waaaay too short for a good sky animation. You'd probably want an animation that takes at least one minute. At 30fps that would be 1800 frames, at 10fps 300 frames and even with only one frame per second you'd have 60 frames. So even that would give you 2GB of skybox textures. That's something most modern GPUs could handle but not by a big margin. A typical higher end GPU has around 8 GB of VRAM today so that's only four times more than what you'd need for those skyboxes alone. KotOR won't take much more VRAM beside that but you can probably see the problem by now. So as I said, that's just not possible. But as Jorak Uln said, it would be possible to create different times of day at least from the skybox side. I don't know if it's possible to switch the lightmaps, light positions and all that stuff with scripts.

Thanks you very much! There was and I think it was based on Joraks ideas. But again, it's not feasible with texture animation. One could probably have a system where there are four or so times of day and then for certain quests or after a certain time and when you change module, the next skybox would be used. But a seamless day night cycle is just not possible. The compressed 2k tgas in my first skybox mod were between 10 and 15 MB per texture and I think that won't change much. I don't know how much I can lower the filesize by using tpc but not too much I would assume. And going from there, an animated skybox with let's say 16 frames would already be at 160MB per texture or 500MB for one skybox. And 16 frames isn't even close to being enough for a proper sky animation.

Are you maybe using TSLRCM from the workshop? Or is your TSL installation folder set to "read only"? And where did you extract the mod to? It can be anywhere except for the TSL folder.

This turned out better than I expected: The video shows a test for an animated Malachor skybox and surprisingly it actually looks good. What you see are basically three layers: A skybox that has only terrain. A second skybox that shows the closest clouds including the "ceiling" and rotates around its axis. And a cylinder that has the distant clouds and rotates slower than the close clouds. And the video also shows my new lightning animation. The skybox is still not done though. I want to have more cloud contrast (all attempts for that were unsuccessful so far) which should also help with distinguishing the two cloud layers, the terrain color is not quite right and it needs to be lowered a bit as well. And then there are the lightning strikes coming directly from mountains that I need to move somewhere else. Oh and there's a rendering error where part of the terrain is cut off for some reason. Also not quite sure about the animation speed. I might have to make that faster. I might work on another skybox first though just to get a fresh perspective on Malachor afterwards.

Glad to hear it did. Be careful with reusing an existing crystal however. If you do that and at some point take the crystal out of the saber you won't be able to get your saber back. That's because when you put the crystal back in, the game will check upcrystals.2da for the first row with this crystal and give you the corresponding saber which would be one of the standard sabers. If that's no issue for you and you don't want to release it as a mod you're fine of course. Otherwise I'd recommend creating a new crystal item and also short and double blade versions of your saber.

The skipping is actually a good thing. Modules being overwritten not so much. If a mod edites files in a module and is properly set up it will do the following: It checks whether the module already exists in the module folder. If it doesn't it takes an unmodified module file and copies it there. Otherwise it will skip this step. This is where those warning messages come from. In either case the installer will then proceed and modify the content of either the unmodified or the already existing and modified module. This feature of editing the already existing module files is what makes TSLPatcher so useful as that allows for much better compability. Unless the mod author decided to just straight up replace the module files in which case you want to install that mod as early as possible. And all of the above is also the case for files in the override folder.

I think you have to add the saber to upcrystals.2da for it to be upgradeable.

That's exactly what TSLPatcher is for. There are just some mods where the creator decided to not use TSLPatchers full features and instead of modifying a module file just drops it into the modules folder and that's what's creating the compability issues.

Yeah, that'd work just the same but it's just not feasible. An animation like that would probably need 20+ frames and considering that each frame is already 2048x2048 you can imagine how big of a file that would give. I have however thought about using a model animation to get a similar result. I might play around with that but I'm not sure if it'll be worth the effort considering that the Malachor skybox is rarely visible anyway.

It already did. I had at some point in the distant past even made some clouds for an updated version of Quanons reskin, but I'm not sure if he ever finished that update. In any case, I've been playing around with the Malachor clouds for some weeks now and never got a result that I was really happy with. It wasn't bad but it never looked like a proper storm. But that changed this morning. For this latest version I created a huge cloud vortex and also learned some new stuff that allowed me to have a more interesting cloud underside while having a fully covered sky. Here's what it looked like after a first ingame test: I have since recolored the clouds green and changed some of the twisting in the clouds as well. Now I just want to get a little more contrast, i.e. darker dark parts of the clouds and then the sky might actually be finished. Oh, and I also created a new lightning texture that I wanted to show here but it didn't end up on the screenshot... I'll try to do better next time.