DarthParametric

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Blog Comments posted by DarthParametric


  1. Stunt modules:

    STUNT_00 - Stunt Ebon Hawk (Vision Sequences)
    STUNT_03a - Stunt Leviathan Bridge (Destroy Taris Cutscene)
    STUNT_06 - Stunt Leviathan Bridge (Resume the bombardment Cutscene)
    STUNT_07 - Stunt Ebon Hawk (Taris Escape Cutscene)
    STUNT_12 - Stunt Leviathan Bridge (Calo Nord Cutscene)
    STUNT_14 - Stunt Leviathan Bridge (Darth Bandon Cutscene)
    STUNT_16 - Stunt Ebon Hawk (Interdicted By Leviathan Cutscene)
    STUNT_18 - Stunt Rakatan Temple (Bastila Torture Cutscene)
    STUNT_19 - Stunt Star Forge (Jawless Malak Cutscene)
    STUNT_31b - Stunt Lehon Temple (Revelation Cutscene)
    STUNT_34 - Stunt Ebon Hawk (Star Forge Arrival)
    STUNT_35 - Stunt Ebon Hawk (Crash On Lehon Cutscene)
    STUNT_42 - Stunt Ebon Hawk (LS Dodonna Holocall Cutscene)
    STUNT_44 - Stunt Ebon Hawk (DS Dodonna Holocall Cutscene)
    STUNT_50a - Stunt Dodonna Flagship (Break In Formation Cutscene)
    STUNT_51a - Stunt Dodonna Flagship (Bastila Against Us Cutscene)
    STUNT_54a - Stunt Dodonna Flagship (Republic Forces Pull Back Cutscene)
    STUNT_55a - Stunt Lehon Temple (Dark Side Ending)
    STUNT_56a - Stunt Dodonna Flagship (Star Forge Destroyed Cutscene)
    STUNT_57 - Stunt Lehon Temple (Light Side Ending)

    Other Ebon Hawk modules:

    ebo_m12ab - Ebon Hawk (Turret Minigame)
    ebo_m40ad - Ebon Hawk (Post-Leviathan)
    ebo_m41aa - Ebon Hawk (Post-Lehon Crash)

    Swoop track modules:

    tar_m03mg - Taris Swoop Minigame
    tat_m17mg - Tatooine Swoop Minigame
    manm26mg - Manaan Swoop Minigame
    

     

    • Thanks 1

  2. lack of voice acting

    It's a complete non-starter without proper custom VO, especially for the party members and major NPCs like Uthar and Yuthura. But fortunately we are on the cusp of that being a realistic proposition (as in it actually sounding good/natural).

    As to the mechanics of the rest of it, the way I'd tackle it would be to create a branching point with a cutscene on the Hawk after landing. If you go the "guns blazing" route then you could just load a separate module. Otherwise you'd get the vanilla module. That would maintain compatibility with existing Korriban mods with minimal issues, although certain mods might need extensions to have their content appear in the other module.

    • Like 1

  3. You should definitely use the Unofficial Tweak Pack to remove the most questionable elements of TSLRCM. Some other suggestions from my usual suspects list:

    Backdrop Improvements
    HD Cockpit Skyboxes (despite violating my "HD" rule)
    Head Model Fixes
    High Quality Blasters
    Luxa Hair Fix (make sure to use the hotpants option!)
    Realistic Nar Shaddaa Skybox
    Realistic Visual Effects
    Telos Citadel Station Skybox

    Since I seem to recall you not always playing in widescreen, these are optional I guess:

    Improved Widescreen Experience (stretched UI fix)
    Main Menu Fix for Widescreen

    Now I will enjoy TSL as-TSLRCM-K2CP-is and mind about my nitpick later.

    Probably a good idea. Not least because, unlike K1, TSL is fundamentally broken in ways that are not easily fixed beyond the remedial work TSLRCM has already performed.

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  4. Well in truth, local strings - be they in DLGs or UTIs, etc. - are probably sufficient in 99% of cases. But if you want to follow best practice then adding strings would be the proper approach. Then if someone ever wanted to translate your strings, all they need to do is alter the append.tlk, not directly edit every file (which, I'm sure you'll agree, is a real pain in the ass in the case of DLGs).

    As to the how, it's not particularly difficult. Have a read of the PDF that comes with TSLPatcher and it should cover most of what you need to know.


  5. Cannot let my freeloading identity of jc2 go to waste

    You need to pick up your copycat game by changing your avatar to a picture of an Exile in a black t-shirt shrugging. It could still have the Mythosaur logo on it.

    The dlg editor eats all of your apostrophes if you copy and paste text into that

    Tsk, tsk. That's what you get for being a dirty local string user and not properly appending new strings to the TLK.

    • Haha 2

  6. There are Max import scripts that import the TOR skeleton, so that's not a drama - https://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=11317  (don't forget to grab the update on page 2).

    The problem is you can't get the KOTOR rig and animations out of Max, at least not in a form that Motionbuilder would work with. I think the only practical option currently would be to create a new KOTOR rig from scratch using actual bones.  Unless someone created a Max script that automates the geometry to bones process.

    Edit: Well, well, here is something quite interesting:

    K1_Male_Rig_Dance_01_TH.gifSpacer_50.pngK1_Male_Rig_Dance_02_TH.gif

    This is the K1 male rig in Cinema 4D. I discovered that you can use the Max Bone Tools to mark any object as a bone ("Bone On"), so when you export the KOTOR rig as an FBX you get proper bones in other apps. And you can also export the animations, as our fine dancing friend here demonstrates. Somewhat ironically it doesn't look like this when importing back into Max, as for some reason the FBX  importer screws up the bone sizes so they end up as tiny cubes.

    The only real problem I can see now is that the TOR import script imports the meshes/rig rotated 90 degrees. I wonder if we might be able to get someone like @bead-v to have a look at it and add in a snippet that would correctly orient it? It would still need to be scaled, but that can probably be done manually.

    Edit 2:  So setting the FBX import dialogue bone option to "Convert as Dummy" solves the problem of the bones being the correct size/shape in Max, albeit as dummy objects rather than true bones (it also causes some weird visibility issues unless in wireframe mode). Looking at a TOR import, it seems the root bone of the rig ends up with a Y rotation of 180°. Meshes have their rotation values at 0°, despite being in the same position. Based on that, the scripts ideally need adjusting to do a -180° Y rotation and a 90° X rotation to import TOR assets in the same orientation as KOTOR assets. Scaling still needs to be examined in depth, but from a cursory glance it looks like a BMN rig is going to need to be around 87% of the original TOR scale to match a medium K1 male rig. I haven't looked at a female yet.

    Edit 3: After some Googling I came across some Maxscript that will allow for a quick and dirty rotation of the current object selection:

    (
    group selection name:"MyGroup" select:true
    $MyGroup.pivot = [0,0,0]
    rotate $MyGroup (angleaxis -180 [0,1,0])
    rotate $MyGroup (angleaxis 90 [1,0,0])
    ungroup $MyGroup
    )

    You can also insert the line

    select $*

    at the top to automatically select everything in the scene. But this will add those rotations to every object, which is probably undesirable when dealing with bones/animation. I'd prefer to "offset" the world axis during the import so that the original rotations are retained.

    Edit 4: So I am guessing that the TOR team must use Maya. That would explain the models - they are in a Y up, Z forward facing (right-handed?). KOTOR needs a Z up, Y forwards facing (left-handed?). My meagre understanding of these sorts of things is that this can be solved with a matrix transform.


  7. I was looking at Juhani and wondering whether it might be worth porting a TOR Cathar head to replace her (and maybe add additional NPC and/or player heads). I noticed they actually have something like her hairstyle as a player Cathar option, which I would guess was an intentional nod. There's also a set of facial markings that are kind of in the same ballpark.

     

    I was also thinking how this is really a situation where being able to do something like what Motionbuilder does and map the animations to a different rig would be awesome. If you could transplant the K1/TSL animations to a TOR rig, you could just create some new supermodels and import the TOR models as-is, without needing to go through a whole bunch of editing and reskinning.


  8. TOR's files are all stored in archives with hashed filenames. You need a program to extract them and a hashlist to generate the proper filenames. Unfortunately publicly available hashlists tend to be somewhat out of date, so more recent content is probably not accessible. Once extracted, the files are all arranged in various sub-folders. Some things can be found by a simple filename search, but other stuff might require searching through XML files to discover the actual filename of the thing you are looking for (body parts for clothes/armour being a good example).

    Format-wise:

    • Models are in a customised GR2 (Granny) format. For dynamic (i.e. skinned) meshes, skeletons are stored in a separate model. You'll need a Max or Blender script to import.
    • As mentioned above, terrain meshes and level layouts are stored in some sort of (presumably custom) DAT format
    • Textures are standard DDS
    • Animations have been figured out privately, but there is no publicly accessible import script available
    • Audio is stored in Wwise formats. Dialogue is in ACB and BNK archives, music as straight WEMs. These probably need to be manually listened to in order to find specific lines.
    • UIs use Scaleform (a game-centric derivative of Flash)

    A current extraction of correctly named files in something in the order of ~50GB, ~600K files, ~14K folders. I'm not sure how much is missing, probably multiple gigs at least.


  9. Regarding TOR areas, as far as I know only static meshes like buildings and so forth are extractable as usable meshes. The terrain meshes and layouts are stored in a file format that there is no publicly available importer for (that I know of). So you could partially recreate environments, particularly indoor ones, but it would all have to be assembled by hand from the component pieces. For outdoor areas that rely heavily on a base terrain mesh, say something like Tatooine or Hoth, you'd be out of luck for big chunks of it unless you modelled it from scratch. Or unless you could find someone to reverse-engineer the file format and code some sort of import/conversion script/program.


  10. One thing you forgot to mention in your MMO content porting summary - sound. Music, FX, and (perhaps most interestingly) VO could all be ported to K1/TSL. Of particular note is that Grey DeLisle (Handmaiden), Catherine Taber (Mission), and Jennifer Hale (Bastila) all have major roles in TOR, and using the same voice accent/intonation as in K1/TSL, so have plenty of dialogue to utilise. Other notable mentions that play named NPCs in TOR are Kristoffer Tabori (HK-47), Tom Kane (Master Vandar/Uthar Wynn/others), Charles Dennis (Davik/Lt Grenn), Daran Norris (Goto), Greg Ellis (Disciple), Phil LaMarr (Gadon Thek/Cpt Riken). There are also a few others doing "misc" voices in both, but they might be hard to pin down (and the content is probably minimal).

    • Like 2

  11. If you want to minimise issues, you'd import the TSL head, save out the skin weights, delete the rig, then load in the K1 rig, load the skin weights back in. The eyes/eyelids/teeth are all effectively visible bones, so you'd need to add those back to their proper place in the hierarchy.