DarthParametric

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Status Replies posted by DarthParametric

  1. This may turn into a forum post later, but has anyone tried Kotor I/II on Intels Arc GPUs? Looking at building a new system and 16GB of VRAM sounds pretty nice. I know drivers have been pesky but it looks like team blue is finding their footing.

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      The 4060 is kind of a bad deal. You may want to consider a 3060 Ti instead if you can find it around the same price. It's basically on par with the 4060 Ti. Have a look at this -

       

    2. (See 4 other replies to this status update)

  2. This may turn into a forum post later, but has anyone tried Kotor I/II on Intels Arc GPUs? Looking at building a new system and 16GB of VRAM sounds pretty nice. I know drivers have been pesky but it looks like team blue is finding their footing.

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      I really wouldn't suggest a current generation of Arc card. It's great that Intel have entered the discrete GPU market to help shake things up, and I suspect they are going to eat AMD's lunch in a few years time (kind of funny given the reverse happened in the CPU market), but they're not really suitable for anything but the ultra low end right now. And even then, only for modern games running on DX12/Vulkan.

      What's your budget? You'd be better off with an older 3xxx series nVidia card - even secondhand - than any of the Arc cards.

    2. (See 4 other replies to this status update)

  3. I apologize to anyone who has dealt with confusion or issues with the models for my recently-released 'Movie Mandalorians' mod that ported Deadman's Mandalorians to K1. I hadn't tested it enough and the model been imported incorrectly into Kotor Blender where I worked on it, which resulted in clipping issues between the arms and shoulder-plates. I didn't realize this until afterward and had to manually tweak and adjust the model in blender a few times before I could fix that in a way that gave satisfactory results. The issue seems to have been fixed, but please let me know if anyone who has downloaded it has run into any additional problems.

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      I don't think it has any adverse effects, but doesn't hurt to correct it.

    2. (See 3 other replies to this status update)

  4. I apologize to anyone who has dealt with confusion or issues with the models for my recently-released 'Movie Mandalorians' mod that ported Deadman's Mandalorians to K1. I hadn't tested it enough and the model been imported incorrectly into Kotor Blender where I worked on it, which resulted in clipping issues between the arms and shoulder-plates. I didn't realize this until afterward and had to manually tweak and adjust the model in blender a few times before I could fix that in a way that gave satisfactory results. The issue seems to have been fixed, but please let me know if anyone who has downloaded it has run into any additional problems.

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      Might want to set the model type to Character while you are at it. I noticed they were set to Placeable (also the original TSL versions). Possibly an artefact of ye olde MDLOps.

    2. (See 3 other replies to this status update)

  5. Finally watched the TRUE first Star Wars film: The Hidden Fortress by Akira Kurosawa. ;) 

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      Is this your first step into the Kurosawa rabbit hole? Lots of other great films to add to the list if so.

    2. (See 1 other reply to this status update)

  6. Mr Chandos was a man who spent more time with his gardener than his wife. They discussed plum trees - ad nauseam.

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      InSidious has been secretly replaced by an AI chatbot spouting IMDB quotes?

    2. (See 2 other replies to this status update)

  7. It's been a while, but I figured I'd drop a quick note about the NCS reverse compiler. I have, in fact, been working on it and documenting it. I needed a distraction from all that's happened over the last year and a half, which I won't get into as I don't want to spoil a day of celebration. I have some personal things that need to be done by July, so I won't have any time in May and June.

    The good news is I expect to finish soon after. I've solved the problems other people have been stuck on, like recursive functions and finding structures. I need to perform extensive testing, and each test requires documentation, a review of the documentation, and identifying potential tests to perform. Additionally, as I've discovered errors in NCS files (not sure if vanilla or from mods), I also need to write a reverse compiler that can handle those errors to determine if it can produce usable output.

    Long story short, I'm targeting a release date in September.

    May the 4th be with you, always.

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      Glad to hear you are still chipping away. In your absence, @JCarter426 and I have taken a more brute force approach to things. JC hacked DeNCS to allow it to batch process both games and bypass certain common problems. We then manually reconstructed those that couldn't be decompiled by looking at the bytecode. We have decompiled almost all of K1's scripts in this manner, with only about a dozen or so remaining now (I've attached them if you are interested). The results are up on Github:

      https://github.com/KOTORCommunityPatches/Vanilla_KOTOR_Script_Source

      Most are just the straight output from DeNCS, but it also includes those that were manually cleaned up in the course of working on the Community Patches and other mods.

      Things have stalled a little lately, so TSL is still somewhat incomplete. Although it didn't have quite as many issues as K1 did.

      There were some interesting stats to come out of the process. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit was that - for K1 at least - seemingly all the reports of a bytecode mismatch were due to Bioware apparently using an older version of ActionStartConversation with one less variable.

       

      K1 NCS Non-Decompilable.7z

  8. So I’ve been playing around with adding some actual geometry behind the permanently locked doors on Yavin Station: 

    Spoiler

    315448054_AddedGeometry.png.89ed86e2b83f5c8ecbef4d9b89560e1a.png

    Would there be interest in having that added to my Yavin Station Hangar mod?  Or does it change the look too radically?

    Vanilla backdrop for comparison:

    Spoiler

    Vanilla.png.ba65b2bbd8a951b67a3a752bc46f1104.png

     

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      Looks much better than the vanilla approach. I'd suggest adding it to the mod.

      As to room poly counts, the engine seems to struggle more with large numbers of low poly count meshes than it does with small numbers of large poly count meshes. This ties in with its trend of struggling with entity count in other situations. From my own experiments with room mesh consolidation, I got a detectable performance gain by merging as many meshes as possible in the DS ending stunt module. You can see some of my ramblings about it in this thread.

    2. (See 3 other replies to this status update)

  9. So I’ve been playing around with adding some actual geometry behind the permanently locked doors on Yavin Station: 

    Spoiler

    315448054_AddedGeometry.png.89ed86e2b83f5c8ecbef4d9b89560e1a.png

    Would there be interest in having that added to my Yavin Station Hangar mod?  Or does it change the look too radically?

    Vanilla backdrop for comparison:

    Spoiler

    Vanilla.png.ba65b2bbd8a951b67a3a752bc46f1104.png

     

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      How far back does it go? Just has another dummy door after 10m or so? Can't really see much from that angle.

      I recall that ebmar and I were musing about adding another hangar at one point, since obviously the Trandos have to be able to land independently of the Hawk. Might be something else worth considering.

    2. (See 3 other replies to this status update)

  10. If you use the brotherhood of Shadow mod, what happens if the keep Sera Degana with you all the way to meeting Bastilla on Lehon and add her to your party via the dark ending? Bastila and Sera use the same character select slot.

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      To answer the question in regard to party slots, you cannot add an NPC to a slot that is already filled. The script will simply fail. If it was supposed to perform additional functions after trying to add the NPC, then those will probably break. One would hope that some failsafes were built into the script to avoid that, but you'd have to look at the source.

    2. (See 1 other reply to this status update)

  11. It's been a while since I did a full light side playthrough on Kotor 2, but I was wondering how feasible it would be to make a mod where the cutscene showing Traya being thrown into the Trayus pit would play at the end of the light side ending? IIRC it's only shown on the dark ending

    I always thought it was fitting for both endings.

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      Should be a simple script edit, though you may also need some DLG editing to have it make sense. Although from memory even in the DS ending the tossing her into the pit thing kind of comes out of nowhere.

  12. Is there an easy and/or convenient way to view what each placeable looks like?

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      Yes. Holocron Toolset has a 3D preview for placeables and creatures:

      HT_Placeables.png

    2. (See 1 other reply to this status update)

  13. The Bad News:  My good old Blue Snowball microphone's drivers are not supported for Windows 10.  I was using a Win 7 computer and everything was dandy but once I upgraded due my old computer's woes, I didn't even think to check to see if the microphone was working because it was always a sturdy workhorse allowing to record my M4-78 EP lines, the lines for LDR's mod, and numerous other things over the years.

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      You probably could have saved yourself some money by rolling a Win 7 virtual machine and recording inside that. Oh well.

    2. (See 7 other replies to this status update)

  14. I thought all Kotor 1 player models were already included in Kotor 2, even if not used? Is that not the case?

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      A bunch of heads got remodelled/re-uv'd, others just got outright replaced, so it's a bit of a mixed bag as to what remains. The most well known example is mullet man being turned into one of the Hispanic male heads.

    2. (See 3 other replies to this status update)

  15. I thought all Kotor 1 player models were already included in Kotor 2, even if not used? Is that not the case?

  16. Hey, this is my first status update on this site!

    Anyway, I intended to post this on New Year but there were more complications than I anticipated.

    So recently I softmodded my +20 year old original Xbox and I wanted to try modding the Kotor games with the new tools to check how far you could go.

    I saw some threads about this here and here, which were really useful but I wanted to note some things:

    · From my experiments, textures need to be square with a size of 512x512 maximum, otherwise they will not show up correctly. They don't need to be in TXB format, you can just throw the TGA and TXI into override.

    · I tried converting custom modules (like the ones in Brotherhood of Shadow) to the Xbox version, but they didn't work for some reason.

    · Character models and other mods can easily crash the game. I have had countless crashes which made my console freeze and I couldn't turn it on until a few hours passed which is why this took me so long.

     So with all this I just made a video about it here:

    Excuse the video and audio quality, I don't have a game capture lol.

    I also experimented with the Xbox version of the Jedi Knight games and ironically, they are way more limited than the Kotor games despite having released all the tools and source code for the PC version. You can see a video about it here:

    On another note, my machinima is getting closer to completion and I will show it here once it's done.

    No mods to show this time, but I hope you find this useful if you ever intend to mod the Xbox version of this games. And don't hesitate to post any other info about this I may have missed if you have any!

    Happy New Year!!

  17. "Patience is bitter, but its fruits are sweet."

    - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (18th century philosopher)

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      Don't eat the leaves, got it.

  18. My Carth Onasi and Male PC Romance mod has been updated to version 1.0.4 to add KOTOR 1 Community Patch (K1CP) compatible installation options, in order to prevent major bugs caused by conflict between my mod and K1CP.

  19. Any chance that we could get the "Featured Downloads" section of the Downloads page updated once a month? For example, I'm not sure that Playable Lizard Characters needs to be a featured download for years on end.

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      That's secretly VP's favourite mod of all time.

    2. (See 1 other reply to this status update)

  20. High quality Rodian in-game test

     

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      Oh it is only the "hair" that uses danglymeshes on the vanilla? Been a while since I looked at it. I know some of the TSL aliens have a few more flappy bits using danglymeshes.

      As to the mouth, it' hard to say without seeing it firsthand in-game.

    2. (See 3 other replies to this status update)

  21. High quality Rodian in-game test

     

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      My 2c:

      The antenna cups look a little low poly. Seems like they need a few more segments to round them off a bit more. Are you going to make them danglymeshes like the vanilla ones?

      Is the eye envmap custom or vanilla? Either way I think it has too many light points. If you are going for the Greedo look you only want two light points. Personally I would blur it significantly since I think that would work better across multiple environments.

      I see you got the lips flapping. Seems like there might be some shading issues though? Hard to say.

    2. (See 3 other replies to this status update)

  22. The model 201TEL14 has an object with no geometry. Forget quality assurance, I have no idea how it even exported.  

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      I guess that's down to both Max and Blender dealing with a mesh object that has some ancillary trimesh data, so a mesh with no geometry can't exist. Whereas the model format presumably has a trimesh as a data type in and of itself that contains mesh data, which can be zero values.

    2. (See 8 other replies to this status update)

  23. The model 201TEL14 has an object with no geometry. Forget quality assurance, I have no idea how it even exported.  

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      Ah, interesting.

      node trimesh Object33
        parent 201TEL14
        position 5.75107 10.0839 12.91
        orientation 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
        diffuse 1.0 1.0 1.0
        ambient 1.0 1.0 1.0
        transparencyhint 0
        animateuv 0
        uvdirectionx 0.0
        uvdirectiony 0.0
        uvjitter 0.0
        uvjitterspeed 0.0
        lightmapped 0
        rotatetexture 0
        m_bIsBackgroundGeometry 0
        shadow 1
        beaming 0
        render 1
        dirt_enabled 0
        dirt_texture 1
        dirt_worldspace 1
        hologram_donotdraw 0
        tangentspace 0
        inv_count 0
        bitmap TEL_HJk
        verts 0
        faces 0
      endnode

      KMax refuses to export a trimesh with no faces, but interestingly MDLEdit will compile an ASCII with a trimesh with 0 verts/faces just fine.

    2. (See 8 other replies to this status update)

  24. The model 201TEL14 has an object with no geometry. Forget quality assurance, I have no idea how it even exported.  

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      I have no idea how it even exported

      A model doesn't need geometry. Meshes have geometry. A model can include meshes, but doesn't need to. For example, VFX models are just a bunch of emitters. The only thing a model absolutely requires is the OdysseyBase.

    2. (See 8 other replies to this status update)

  25. Working on a little something:

    Comp_Panel_WIP_03.jpg.1bfe6e6b3d60d44e514d6805aa047c94.jpg

    While doing so, the thought arises: what are those "wings" meant to be exactly? Giant Wi-Fi antenna?

    1. DarthParametric

      DarthParametric

      The first and the last. An all new placeable model (with an all new texture) that will also be used for a matching GUI. As well as adding various glowy bits, I still need to model the datapad and add in some space-USB ports for it to plug into.

    2. (See 16 other replies to this status update)