Kexikus

You need to right-click somewhere in the DeNCS window and select "View decompiled code".

If anyone wants to use them for that you're very welcome.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't want to change the ingame lighting too much but I'll see if I can tweak it a little for a better look. You should know the answer to that type of question, right? Currently work is still underway for the Nar Shaddaa buildings. I aim to create five different buildings based on those seen in the cutscenes. The first one is done, the second is in progress as seen here:

I get the feeling that the enemy AI wouldn't like that at all and get super confused.

And another skybox is done (well, actually two). As I said before it's the Unknown World: That screenshot is actually a little older though. I've since tweaked the colors a little to reduce that horrible sun glare. Apart from that the skybox is almost exactly the same as in V1. The only difference is the moon texture which I replaced with a texture from here so that it's no longer our moon you see in this alien sky. And as always, there's also two renders and unlike my other renders, I moved the camera quite a bit for these to get a more interesting foreground. But since those islands are usually only seen in the very far distance they're of course not that great looking. Better than no foreground though But as I said in the beginning, there's another skybox and that's the sunset version of the Unknown World used in the revelation and DS ending cutscenes. That one uses the same terrain of course but I remade the sky from scratch to get closer to its vanilla look. For comparison here's the very unnatural looking V1 of that skybox. The new one is just waaaay better: It's still a little cheated and not entirely realistic but it helps setting the tone of those two scenes. I even had a version with a sky that was much more red just like the vanilla sky but that was just too unrealistic for my taste. Anyway, here's the corresponding render: Those two were close to the last vanilla skyboxes for K1. The only one left now is Kashyyyk and some tweaks to Tatooine and Manaan. And afterwards there are of course still the mod skyboxes to do. TSL is also coming along very nicely with only two vanilla planets remaining, namely Nar Shaddaa and Dxun. I started working on some building models for Nar Shaddaa and I have to say that this is probably the least fun thing I've done for these skyboxes yet... 😅 But we'll see how it goes. I'll keep you updated.

I use KotORMax with 3DS Max 2017 without any issues. Just try it.

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.