DarthParametric

Ah, yeah that works. I wonder what the issue there is? Must be some hidden value in the AuroraBase or something. Got a slight issue where the little knob thing is offset for some reason, so it is floating out in space. I can probably just merge it back into the blade mesh seeing as the only reason I split it off was for the little "locking" animation, but you are never going to see details that small in-game. Otherwise it seems to work pretty well: Now I just need to make some sounds for it. I'm just using the saber sounds at the moment to test it was working. It didn't export any scaling keys for the arc planes btw. Although that's what saber blade planes use, so it should be possible. Doesn't seem like it is visible inside the blaster body when sheathed though, so I guess it's not a big deal.

JO/JA game models are frankly a pain in the ass to work with because they are split into a zillion pieces for dismemberment. Anyway I went ahead and merged/cleaned up a model, positioned and scaled it properly to fit the KOTOR rig. All the UV islands were detached/split to prevent MDLOps issues with shared verts. Dealing with the fingers was far too finicky, so I just lopped off the hands and used the vanilla KOTOR hand meshes. I had to do a bit of adjustment of the collar to fit a KOTOR head/neck, as they are a lot bigger than in JO/JA it would seem. The shoulders could be problematic, they aren't as broad as the KOTOR model. No way around that without some heavy mesh adjustment, but it will likely mean deformation issues. Certainly a quick skin wrap didn't look so hot. Skinning is not my thing, so if anyone wants to take a crack at it send me a PM and I'll send you the scene file. Note this is not open season, randoms wanting free crap need not apply. This is only for experienced modders actually willing to skin it and release it publicly as a mod.

So I took a crack at it. The animations themselves are pretty straightforward. Here's a slowed down version of the power up and power down: The weird thing though is that it's not exporting any position/rotation/scale data. I noticed that other models also seem to have keys for the AuroraBase, so I added some and it exported key values for it fine, but nothing else. For example: I've never messed around with custom animation export. The animations are all set in the AuroraBase and look to be fine. I did try the Bake Animation function in NWMax, but it complained about a scene not being allowed more than one AuroraBase (which there isn't, so I don't what it is talking about) and created a key every frame that resulted in a 0 byte export. Any suggestions?

I think it has been tried and failed, but if you want to have a crack the easiest way is use Convert2DA to convert the 2DA to tab delimited TXT, open that in Excel or other spreadsheet app, edit as appropriate, save back out as tab delimited text, use Convert2DA to convert back to 2DA. http://www.starwarsknights.com/mtools/Convert2da.rar (SWKnights is back, hurrah!)

I might not be able to release it at all. I'm getting crashes when equipping it in both TSL and K1. The weird thing is in TSL it works fine in one old save, but in another new save it causes a crash when equipped. In K1 I can see it in the workbench, but equipping it causes a crash. I have no idea what the cause is at this point. Edit: OK, I think I solved it, looks like it was enabling shadows on the base trimesh that was causing it. I created a low poly shadow mesh and that seems to have fixed it based on a few quick tests. I gather it was not generating shadows in the workbench interface, hence no crash there, although I have no idea why it worked fine in one TSL save and not another.

I don't think the line is the issue. The lack of spaces just means it would be an invalid entry and thus ignored by the game, which would effectively be the same as setting the proper line to 0, i.e. enabling vertex buffer effects. You can enable vertex buffer effects on the CD version without the issue happening. That would point to a shader issue Aspyr have introduced. Possibly it is related to their added option to disable the effects for Force Speed.

Hrm, so it would appear. Thanks for the info. I don't recall that ever being required in the CD version. I wonder what they changed?

I know a professional female VA that has done some game work. I can get some quotes if people are serious about paying someone. Alternatively, a barter arrangement may be possible, if you have suitable skills.

Yes, there was never much done on the JE MDL format, unfortunately. Oooh, handy, thanks. Now do K1/K2. They sure are popular. But I guess his Closed Fist Romance mod is arguably the greatest JE mod of all time.

With attribution, it should be stated clearly.

Odd. I haven't seen that issue with other models I have tested in the Steam version of TSL, like blasters or HK. I wonder what it is that only saber hilts would be affected. If it was a shader issue you'd think it would affect pretty much all models. Cheers, but as I said I already had a high poly model to base it off, so all the hard work of matching references and so forth was done years ago. Texture-wise it's pretty basic, just shiny metal with a few black bits and some coloured knobs, with some bakes from high poly meshes to make AO, etc. maps for the ribbed sections.

This is on the Steam version, I wonder if that is significant. Might have to reinstall the CD version and see if it happens on that as well.

The best approach is to install TSLRCM from the Workshop, then install all other mods the traditional way (via TSLPatcher or otherwise) using TSLRCM's Workshop folder as the destination. Trying to install multiple mods from the Workshop is not worth the effort.

Yes, as mentioned in the first post. It just ends up grey with a weird static sort of effect on it. Tried a new save to see if that was related and discovered a new level of screwiness:

It has a texture applied to it. The source Max scene is the same for both, the ASCII model is just compiled separately for each game. And the texture shows up fine in the TSL workbench interface, just not in the game proper.

Made a new one for you, assuming I can work out the weird texture bug I ran into - http://deadlystream.com/forum/topic/4004-obi-wans-tpm-padawan-lightsaber/ As to things being posted on the Steam Workshop, that is purely at the discretion of the original author.

So per a request in the request thread, I decided to knock out Obi-Wan's lightsaber from The Phantom Menace. It was actually pretty straight forward. I already had a high poly one I had done years ago, so I just modelled a new low poly one over the top using the original as a guide. Modelled, mapped, and textured in just a few hours. Runs about 1,500 tris: Unfortunately I seem to have hit a snag testing it in the game. In TSL, it looks fine in the workshop interface, but in the game proper it doesn't want to show the texture. It either just shows the envmap, or a grey model if the alpha channel is removed. When grey, it also noticeably has some weird animated effect to it, almost like static or something. I don't recall encountering this before, so I'm scratching my head at the moment. If anyone has some suggestions on what the issue there is, I'd appreciate it. Edit: Curiouser and curiouser. It seems to work fine in K1:

There's this one in this pack by J3d1W4rr10R - http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?t=154661 - but I'm not sure any extant links remain. Someone might be able to send it to you.

I believe that is related to one of the issues I was having with custom droid models, namely that vert positions seem to end up offset from their original position even if left untouched. I've run into it a few times with heads as well, although it seems less pronounced in those cases. Mission's head in K1 springs to mind. I remember trying to change the UV map and ending up with a face clipping horror show. I've also encountered it with high poly versions of meshes. When I was playing around with the weighting for the Nautolan head, I tried a 5K vert/10K poly smoothed version of the mesh (vs 1.2K vert/2.5K poly unsmoothed original) and it ended up with all sorts of mouth clipping as well.

I did a quick play around with it. Made your 4 faced pyramid with 1m sides, split each face out to its own UV island, left the verts welded (5 total) and set a single smoothing group. Exported it as a DA model via Eshme's script to generate normal data and split the faces to match the number of UV verts, then reimported the model. Set it up as a KOTOR model and exported via NWMax. On import the normal data is stored in an Edit Normals modifier, so once I deleted that it reverted to hard edges at element breaks (as per MDLOps). Here is the generated data - The vert order and position match (leaving aside rounding), but interestingly texture vert position seems to have a few anomalies. Anyway, I thought the normal info may be of interest to you as an example of the sort of thing that can be extracted from Max.

Yeah, briefly poking through the scripts it seems to my uninformed mind that NWMax is actually calculating normals/tangent normals/binormals, it just doesn't export any of that info in the ASCII MDL. Interestingly, I was looking at Eshme's Dragon Age Origins export script to see what it does (as it does export normal info), and I noticed that the Eclipse Engine appears to still have the same underlying issue, namely the 1:1 of verts and texture verts. I suppose it's not completely surprising, given that Eclipse is just an evolution of the Aurora/Odyssey codebase.

You could try getting the normal info from Max via MaxScript. There are no doubt plenty of existing scripts that you could use/modify. At the very least they may be a useful reference.

Playing around how? By hex editing the compiled MDX?

The root cause of the problem was detailed by cchargin (original MDLOps author) back in 2005: http://www.lucasforums.com/showpost.php?p=1973627&postcount=11 Unfortunately it seems that he never got around to addressing it, nor did JdNoa in the subsequent revised version.

I need to make some colour adjustments and play around with the alpha for the envmap, but I think the texture is more or less done: The blade? As I said above I don't have any plans for that. Could you get it to only extend at the start of combat and retract at the end? You wouldn't want it constantly animating while firing. Same deal as a lightsaber I guess, but could you manage the same for a blaster?