Kexikus

You need to make copies of the dlg file, one for each alien species and then change the dialog file for each thug in their utc so that they use the correct one for their species.

Just wanted to say that I love the idea for this mod and will use it in my future playthroughs.

Thanks a lot!

Makes me also wonder if we could get some other better VOs from SWTOR. Could be worth investigating.

More progress:

I was originally going to do Nar Shaddaa next but my idea of getting the buildings from SWTOR proved more complicated than expected/hoped.

So instead I worked some more on Dxun. I remade big parts of its landscape, added bushes etc. There's still a lot to do but here's what I have:

Then I also started working on Malachor. That one turned out really well so far. The clouds are still very much a placeholder but the terrain is pretty close to being done.

The green glow on the ground comes from my attempts of having a low fog that's lit from below. That's partially working but the ground glowing green is an unintended sideeffect that's maybe impossible to get rid of. In that case I'll have to find another solution or just skip the green glow from below *insert spooky music here*

On 1/3/2019 at 11:45 PM, REVANSDAD said:

OPs the creator nvr sent or uploaded

Uhm, what?

On 1/3/2019 at 6:04 PM, rowan-the-wise said:

Any word on how the mod is going?

No progress, sorry. The last thing I did with the mod was to send it out to my testers. They tested it and provided very helpful feedback but I have not yet implemented any of it.

I haven't forgotten about the mod, it's just not on top of my priority list right now.

8 hours ago, Thor110 said:

Does anyone know of a way to automatically extract all the textures from these files?
Say if I was to extract the entire models.bif from kotor tool with the .mdl, .mdx, .dwk, .pwk and .wok files.
How would I then extract all of the textures contained within the .mdl files at once without having to do it individually to each file like I would in kotor tool. ( unless I have missed something )

Why don't you just extract the entire swpc_tex_tpa.erf? That should contain 99+% of all textures. And you can extract that with the "Extract Entire ERF" button in KotOR Tool. That should even give you the .tpc files and not convert them to .tga.

Btw, maybe I just misunderstood you but just to clarify: A model (i.e. .mdl file) does not contain textures. It only has references to textures and KotOR Tool can use them to extract those textures from the .erf archive while exporting the model to ease your workflow.

1 hour ago, Thor110 said:

Is there anything else you can suggest to keep an eye out for that can regularly make levels crash?

Not a lot as I never worked with creating new modules. I know that missing textures don't matter while missing models crash the game (maybe not always though).

1 hour ago, Thor110 said:

There doesn't seem to be all that many txi in the librarys that kotor tool offers me access to ( which from what I know is all of them ) most are in the lightmaps and scattered around, I extracted the entire BIFF archive each and every last file, is there any way to know if txi's get broken?

The game stores the .txi information inside its textures, that is, in the .tpc as ebmar mentioned. It's only when using the converted .tga files that you need the extra .txi file to keep this information.

I'm not 100% sure about how KotOR Tool handles txi information when doing batch extraction (as I assume you did that). I know that it shows the txi information when you use it to open (not extract!) a texture. And since the batch extraction gives you .tpcs IIRC, the information should also still be there. But depending on how you continued from there, the information might no longer be there.

The transparent textures are most likely due to missing .txi files.

8 hours ago, Spectrometer said:

A beautiful work so far! Just one observation though: I think the blank backdrop for Telos academy´s hangar is to show that snow has covered the forcefield (this is even seen in the take off cutscene), so I don´t think you have to change that. Otherwise very good work.

I know that this was Obsidians intention but I honestly think that it looks terrible, which is why I changed it. But if you don't like it, you'll be able to easily change it back by removing a few files from the Override.

On 12/26/2018 at 6:54 PM, ebmar said:

Awesome... how did you do that? 

There's nothing fancy about it. I just copied the mesh from another module (Upper City South), positioned it in my Davik's Estate scene in 3ds Max and linked it to the skybox odysseybase. And since I'm lazy, I took a building mesh that already has a proper lightmap so I didn't have to add that one either.

In other news: I now consider the skybox part of Taris final. I will probably go back and tweak the lightmaps some more in the future but that will be only tiny changes. And to celebrate this milestone there is the obligatory render:

I also went back to the very first skybox I made when restarting this project almost two years ago: The Telos Polar Plateau. There was always something bothering me about its snow in particular, but that's now fixed.

The trick was to get rid of the fancy snow shader (which had among other effects an actual displacement for piled up snow) and replace it with a very simple color shader instead. Then I lightened up the rock color to better match the ingame terrain and the skybox was done. Afterwards I just had to fix up the model and while doing that, I also added a skybox to the academy hangar similar to DarthParametrics standalone mod.

And even though it's not exactly spectacular, here's a standalone render of that skybox:

Added:

On 12/24/2018 at 6:16 AM, DarthParametric said:

Seems a bit too pinkish to me compared to the buildings in the foreground. Might need to be desaturated a bit, and/or shifted more towards the blue side of things. It is probably accurate for the time of day, so you can blame Bioware for the lighting in the rest of the level.

You are absolutely right about that. The colours were still a bit off and Bioware's lighting on Taris is terrible^^

So I continued iterating over the lightmap for my 2d buildings and also the lightmaps for the 3d buildings to get everything to blend together. Once I was happy with that, I enabled all the clouds in TG and rendered the skybox again. That changed the lighting of the skybox so there was a mismatch once again. That meant tweaking the skybox lighting to get it closer to where it was before, followed by tweaking the lightmaps again. And finally, I rerendered the 2d buildings with more contrast and a better cubemap. Here's the result of all that:

Much better if you ask me. What's left now is to rerender the cubemap (used both when rendering the backdrop buildings and ingame for reflections) at a higher resolution and then maybe do some additional tweaking. More importantly, I still need to do the same thing (changing all the lightmaps) for the Upper City South. But I'm getting there

I also noticed that I had forgotten about one skybox when going through all the models and fixing them: Davik's Estate.

That was changed and Davik has a nice view from his hangar now. I decided not to add additional backdrop buildings here since I figured that his estate was probably expensive and should thus stand a little more separated from the rest of the buildings.

Thank you very much for your help. I had it flipped in my head, just like you said. But I was now able to figure it out. Thanks

4 minutes ago, Sith Holocron said:

Missed posting the same by 20 seconds.

Yeay, first

May I ask how you tested this?

The reason why I'm wondering is that judging by Darth_Sapiens examples the order would be different:

Let's say that 3 is north or front, then 4 and 2 would be switched in your order (5 and 6 are flipped by 180° here).

I tried both versions ingame (these are for sky reflections on Taris buildings) but it's really hard to tell whether or not the reflections are accurate.

Maybe that's also due to a misunderstanding on my side about how cubemaps for reflections work.

The TSLRCM Tweak pack has an option to do that:

I'm currently trying to figure out cubemaps.

The conversion from a simple folded cube to KotORs format is okay.

But I'm now wondering how the cubemap is "oriented" in space. Up and down are obvious but which side is "facing" north?

Any help here would be very welcome

I'm still here. And after moving, handing in a thesis and working a lot I finally had some time to work on skyboxes again. Yeay

I also just realised today that I can use a simple cylindricalk UVW map for lightmaps and don't have to use a multi-unwrap script followed by somehow projecting a cylindrical map and rendering that to a texture. With that roadblock out of the way I was able to get a lot of work done for Taris. The backdrop buildings are now lightmapped to blend with the skybox:

For comparison. Here's the same without lightmaps:

In that case one would of course change the color for the texture but you can also see the change in "lighting" in the lightmapped image from left to right. That would have been impossible with a single backdrop building texture and no lightmaps.

Now I just need to figure out what those weird white rectangles floating around the upper city are and get rid of them. I might also tweak the lightmap some more, especially for the Upper City South. And I need to check if everything still looks good once I render the skybox with all clouds enabled.

Apart from the lightmaps I also did something else today. I'll show it in a screenshot and for some reason I'm feeling like making a guessing game out of it. Please don't ask me why. I'll post some hints in spoiler tags below and if you don't feel like guessing, you can just open the answer-spoiler^^

Answer:

That's it for now, so all that's left for this post is me wishing you all a MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I think you need a gff editor for that (I'd recommend k-gff). If you use that to open your already edited .uti you should find a "Male English" string for your item name. Change that to whatever language you're using.

I never did that by myself though, so I can't tell you how you go about changing it exactly.

Great idea! 

The only Suggestion that comes to mind right now is that all the Letters on the signs are mirrored and that should be fixed. It's not the entire word that's mirrored though, only the letters. 

2 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

Yes. At least if you want to make a public release.

Why is that? I've never seen any harm done by ARE files in the Override.

It's that time of the year again and I didn't release a single mod this year. That certainly needs to change in 2019^^

Anyway, on to the nominations:

Best Texture Enhancement

@VarsityPuppet's Spectral Ajunta Pall Canonical Appearance.

Best Content Restoration / Addition

Not sure if it counts for this category, but I'd like to nominate @JCarter426's Dense Aliens for K1. It's a small tweak but it goes a long way in improving the game.

Most Helpful Community Member

My nomination goes to @bead-v for providing the tools (I know they were released last year) that made many of this year's mods possible.

Mod of the Year

As an example of all the small but valuable fixes that  @DarthParametric has provided over the course of the year, I nominate the KOTOR Comic Republic Uniforms for K1.

Could you upload the .uti file for us to have a look?

The only thing that comes to my mind without looking at it is that you need to set the stringref for name and description to -1 or it will still look in dialog.tlk for them. But then you'd get the wrong ones and not blank entries, so that's probably not it.

25 minutes ago, jc2 said:

@kexikus Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless there is a .mod (which only modders make) then that won't work; therefore, he'd have to rely on k1r or another mod. Or he'd have to recreate the entire module file and make it into a .mod file increasing the likelyhood of incompatibility with other mods, perhaps k1r depending upon how k1r tslpatcher was set up.

Will do

Making a .mod file is really easy. Just extract the .rim and _s.rim into the same folder, grab ERFEdit and put all those files into a .mod. You can then set up TSLPatcher to copy that .mod into the Override unless the file already exists. In both cases TSLPatcher would then edit or put the .utp in the .mod depending on how it's set up.

This is exactly what TSLPatcher is for: Avoiding compability issues by patching files instead of replacing them.

As a final note: The .mod you provide for TSLPatcher should contain only vanilla files. TSLPatcher will add or edit the file afterwards.

34 minutes ago, Arctrooper209 said:

Ah, dang, didn't know about the backpack. I just checked to see if it worked in that instance, not other backpacks. I'll get rid of that.

As for the weapons, my mod overwrites the "Sith Sniper Rifle" and "Sith Assault Gun". I believe the only gun in this mod that the enemies use in the game is the Assault Gun but, because I didn't add to the base stats, only the ability to upgrade it, it won't change anything. Unless enemies suddenly learn how to use a workbench.

You don't have to get rid of it. You just need to put the .utp file into the corresponding module, i.e. .mod file instead of in the override.