Kexikus

Sorry for the late reply and thanks for the comment. I can see your point but I actually think that Thrawn's skybox is just way too bright. The buildings in my skybox have pretty much the exact same color as the module buildings themselves. Making them any brighter would just create unnatural lighting. But I'll let the skybox rest for a while and look at it again later. That should give me a new perspective and might convince me to make some changes.

The On Enter script of a trigger is working just as it should. It triggers every time some creature enters the trigger area which may result in something that seems like random behaviour but isn't. So if you want a trigger that only works with the PC, then you need the additional check you mentioned but that is the intended behaviour.

Nar Shaddaa is getting close to the finish line. I fixed the skybox in all modules and added the foreground buildings. On top of that I followed a suggestion by Jorak Uln to add some color variation to the windows of all buildings. The effect is intentionally pretty subtle but visible in this screenshot: Now I just need to get rid of the bright outline around the foreground buildings and maybe tweak the distribution of the background buildings some more to get more variety in the buildings closest to the player.

Glad to hear that. Enjoy your playthrough!

Thanks! As to seeing more of the horizon. While I would like to see more of that myself, it just makes no sense here. This is the landing pad of the refugee quarter after all so it definitely won't be the highest building around. In fact I think that it would be even better if the surrounding buildings were higher than in my skybox but I decided to stay consistent with the prerendered cutscenes. And yes, those buildings might look a bit outdated by today's standards but that's partially intentional (and partially my inability to create something better). But I really want to keep the style of the vanilla game and not make it into something it isn't. I'll leave the modernizing to you.

Nar Shaddaa is coming together really well and much easier than I expected: A few things to note here: The 2D building backdrops in front of the skybox are still missing. And the windows are all way too yellow. I might also tweak the building distribution a little as it's pretty obviously all the same building on the right. But I'll add the other buildings first as that might already hide this issue.

Could you post a screenshot of what you're seeing?

While I agree that TSLs Nar Shaddaa is way too clean, this is not something that I'll be able to fix with just a new skybox. That would also require extensive edits to at least the lighting of all areas and ideally also changes and additions to textures and props. But if someone were to do such an overhaul for Nar Shaddaa, I'd gladly provide a matching skybox. I might add some additional neon advertisement to my skybox if that doesn't feel too out of place compared to the actual areas but that remains to be seen. For now I try to stick to the vanilla look.

Four months later and I finally finished the Nar Shaddaa buildings: Next up is getting them into Terragen to create the cityscape. I might add some floating building like the casino from SWTOR further down the line but for now these five should suffice for my skybox needs.

I think I'll start rendering the vanilla skyboxes once they're all done and while that's in progress I will work on the third party skyboxes (which are not that many so it shouldn't take too long I hope). Then I'll see how far I got with those once the vanilla renders are all done. Actually it's been only about 2.5 years since I started with V2. Terragens v4 came out a few months earlier and while it has seen some improvements since that major release, there are no big new features or anything like that. At least none that I know of. Also, while I'm here: I'm not dead and work on those Nar Shaddaa buildings is continuing very slowly. My focus in the last months simply was on other personal projects and my masters thesis. That might/should change in a few weeks however.

Somehow the first one feels more in line with the vanilla loading screens.

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.