sEcOnDbOuToFiNsAnItY

After a whole bunch of tinkering with my own build in private, I'm finally foraying into something public. Some of you might be familiar with, or dimly remember, a great mod from the old filefront days - Robes of the Old Republic: Back Into TSL, which returns the robes in TSL to a KOTOR 1 style. I've always been a big fan of this one since the K2 robes were always so 4k years in the future for my tastes, but the downside to this mod is that the lovely cloaks disappear. Thankfully, @VarsityPuppet and @90SK had thought of this and made a newer mod that added a cloak to the K1 robe model for K2, with their own textures and recolours for the various outfits. But I always had a liking for the old ROTOR textures, for the most part, so what I used to do on my end was splice textures together to get what I want. So now I figured I may as well make a new mod using elements of both, with my own twists here and there. VP and 90SK were kind enough to give permission to use their assets, and Gavroche very helpfully gives permissiom in ROTOR's readme to use assets. I'm still playing around with various elements, but I figured feedback would be well worth getting before I go any further. I'm going to preface this by saying that I am not a very good digital artist, and the vast majority of my skills are limited to chop-and-change recolours on that end of things, so don't expect anything godlike if you don't already like the K1 robe textures. Most of these were also edited years ago now since they're the product of my tinkering over the years, and it's only recenlty I've gotten around to updating and reinstalling KOTOR 2 again. But, I have to start somewhere. I'm not 100% sold on the master and padawan having different textures, at least for the robe under the cloak, but atm the Jedi ones are all either game textures or courtesy of one or both prior mods. The dark robes are something of an options list, but I'm strongly leaning towards using the K1 dark robes texture instead. I've currently got those on a different robe later though, so some poking around might be needed. This is where things got more creative on my end - I wanted the cloaks to match the rotor textures, so I did a lot of trial and improvement on the recolouring. I've also got the K1 orange robes here on the sage slot, but I might move them too. I matched the cloak to the trousers of those robes, but the more I look at it the more I think maybe I should adjust it to be closer to the main robe. The Norris robe is currently home to the old K1 dark jedi robe texture, but I suspect I'll move it over to the dark jedi main in the future. I'm not super satisfied witht hecloak - there's a sort of turquoise tint to the wear lines of the K1 robe that I want to try and recreate in the cloak so it matches, but it's been proving tricky so far. The Ossus Keeper uses the K1 blue robes, and I do like the cloak recolour job I've done, but I am wondering if I should make the cloak blue instead - there's a lot of grey in the robe options already. The Natth Cowling loak I'm irrationally proud of, since I thought matching the pink trousers from ROTOR's tecture would be very striking, but I wasn't sure I'd be able to get it looking right. With the named character robes, I've been experimenting with matching the palette more closely to what the characters wore back in TOTJ, so Arcas and Nima swap base robes, and I did a lot of vsual reference looking to tint the cloaks. Thon obviously doesn't wear much of anything, so I just tried adjusting the colour of his cloak to be as close to his vanilla master-style cloak's colour as possible. The lack of a master-style cloak model does start to hurt how good these can look though, IMO. It was a bit of a surprise that Crado and Sylvar's robes from ROTOR matched their under robes from TOTJ pretty well, so I left them as-is, but I did make their cloaks a matching purple in from their comic cloaks. Aleema needed the most change, and she might yet see more change. In theory I could've given her several different colour combos thanks to her serial wardrobe changes, but I think I've found a nice compromise. And lastly, for Arren Kae's robe, I've got the VP/90SK textures instead of ROTOR for now, but I do plan to make some tweaks, though not major ones - probably try and get the cape more white, eliminate the grey trim, etc. I have no model editing experience, so I did put out a request for a K1 robe combined with the master-style K2 cloak, but sadly nobody's picked up, so I'll have to shelve that hope for the time being. If anyone's up to help, I'd be very thankful. I'm entertaining other ideas for the mod, like an uncloaked version or maybe clothes for each class using the NPC robes, K1 ending robes, and uncloaked K1 robes, but I'm not wholly committed to that as of yet. So that's where things are as of now - watch this space, hopefully.

Pretty much everything I've ever modded has been for my own build and never released, so pretty much everything I make, I use, until I don't want/need to any more. That might be changing soon though... at least the never released part.

For the last time, that is not what I was saying and I'm baffled how you think it was. Whether or not it's canon isn't the issue. I have said that multiple times now. I said that nothing in KOTOR 1 actively links to SWTOR in the way that SWTOR actively links to K1. It can't, because it didn't exist yet when they made K1; time is linear. That's not a canon matter, that's a reality matter. There was no SWTOR in 2003 for KOTOR 1 to actively connect to, much like there was no KOTOR 2 - it's later stuff that connects back to older things if it chooses to. KOTOR 2, the KOTOR comic, SWTOR, they all pick up things from KOTOR to do their own thing with and link back to it... but they can't warp through time and have always been there, and that affects the experience, the vibe, the functional content of each work. It can only ever act retroactively. The KOTOR remake, coming after all of the above, is consequentially going to be influenced by all of those in a way that the original couldn't have ever been. Not really - Revan being corrupted by his war and choosing to do bad things is pretty much K1's byline. Kreia's postulated theory is that he was somehow doing a grand scheme greater good and wasn't really evil. These are not the same thing. The common theme either way was that Revan, be it because he genuinely went bad or as part of Kreia's theorised gambit, chose to do bad things. Of course, there was always an air of mystery, because it was never made concrete within K1 or 2. SWTOR ended that mystery, and as a result a remake of K1 is almost certainly going to take that into account. And much the same goes for the myriad other things SWTOR introduces that don't appeal to me - be it Vitiate, what the True Sith turn out to be, changes made to the background setting, or even simply the aesthetic. I didn't say it wasn't okay. I just said it doesn't appeal to me and I don't need it. Because I don't - SWTOR is material I primarily find severely offputting on multiple levels, so I personally don't find a remake appealing since that material I dislike is most likely going to be woven into the creative intent. That's how it always goes, and whether that's appealing or not always depends on if the person it does/n't appeal to likes what's being mixed in. If I felt differently about SWTOR material, the reverse might be true, but as it stands, for me personally, I have no need of this if it really is a remake as opposed to a remaster. If it was just KOTOR 2 and the KOTOR comic that were going to likely get deliberate hooks in a K1 remake, I'd be far happier, but SWTOR can't be put back in the jar, precisely because it's EU canon, and is in fact the only remaining ongoing EU work. So if you like SWTOR's direction, that's great news. But if you don't, then what does this have for you? Nothing, or at least, nothing that feels worth that change. Because that's the only reason to do a remake instead of a remaster - to change the original. They can't make everyone happy, so I think it's perfectly mature to recognise that this probably isn't going to be for me. Worst case scenario is I'm pleasantly surprised.

You seem to be just fundamentally not getting that SWTOR being EU canon is precisely why a remake doesn't appeal to me. The unplanned nature of K1 and K2 means that you can play them, and experience them without SWTOR mattering. Not so for a remake, which will inevitably be influenced by the existence of what has been decided and created since. In the cases of KOTOR 2 and the JJMiller KOTOR comic, that's a good thing in my opinion so I'm fine with deliberate hooks for those being placed in a new KOTOR 1 remake. But SWTOR? I would really rather not. SWTOR does far more than simply go with official designated canon genders - it gives set in stone appearances, voices, life directions and so on. Heck SWTOR material even completely recontextualises Revan and erases him actively choosing to go dark through being corrupted by his war, to replace it with the Vitiate material. None of that was decided when KOTOR was made, and a remake would almost certainly act as if it had always been there. Which would be fine for me if it wasn't fundamentally offputting material for me. SWTOR's direction isn't going to be undone, and as a result it continuing to be EU canon is going to affect what goes into a KOTOR remake. It's easy to disregard things that were later established as canon in KOTOR because they never existed when KOTOR came out. That's not going to be true for a remake, because a remake will assume those thing as having always been the case and it will affect the experience unless it actually turns out to be a badly-named remaster. So yes, me not liking SWTOR doesn't make it not canon. That's my point. And that's the problem. If it is just a remaster that changes nothing about the story then it's not an issue - but they're calling it a remake, so I'm going to assume that means we'll have much more deliberate SWTOR hooks and not various things that SWTOR came along to decide what they meant.

That's kind of my point though. SWTOR took existing elements of KOTOR 1 and 2 to create its replacement to KOTOR 3, and I found that direction profoundly unsatisfying. The SWTOR original elements aren't in KOTOR because SWTOR didn't exist yet. Revan's agency being turned into him being brainjacked by discount palpatine didn't exist yet, what the mysterious 'true sith' Kreia mentions in 2 are didn't have a set answer yet, and within KOTOR 1 and 2 themselves, Revan and the Exile had no locked identity or endings, those being up to you. A KOTOR remake is either going to exist in disneyverse, or if it's not, it's almost certainly going to have more intentional tying in of the SWTOR elements that hadn't been created yet in the original. Everything you mention is things that are introduced by a distant sequel that didn't appeal to me in the slightest and have no interest in seeing referenced. I can easily play KOTOR 1 and 2 and not be reminded of those things because everything SWTOR picked up on was just loose undecided strands or nuggets that had no answer. I most likely will not be able to do the same with this remake if it's not disneyverse because SWTOR shows no signs of being thrown out and the devs will build the game with SWTOR in mind. I'm fully aware that SWTOR isn't Disneyverse - that's why this feels like a bit of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. It'll either connect to Disneyverse or SWTOR (in a way that the originals didn't) and I see both as reasons to be very disinterested in a remake. That's how linear time works. It's why if the Thrawn Trilogy had been rewritten in the late 00s its writing would be inherently affected by the existence of the prequels, the Hand of Thrawn Duology, Survivor Quest, and Outbound Flight in a way the original wasn't.

Disney isn't likely to not want new games and works to be part of their 'verse. Which is valid, it just doesn't interest me. And, to a degree that's true with SWTOR, if you play SWTOR or read SWTOR books. But within KOTOR and KOTOR 2 themselves there's no tangible link to SWTOR because it didn't exist yet. If by some miracle the remake is not tied to Disneyverse, it'll most likely have explicit connections to SWTOR within it, which also is disinteresting to me.

I guess the era exposure is cool but I... don't really need this. KOTOR 1 works fine for me and I've custom modded it to my tastes. the only appeal it would have for me is if I cared about the vague rough KOTOR era being connected to the Disney universe, or to SWTOr. And I simply don't, on either count. Maybe if it turns out to be a remaster or somesuch it'll have something for me.

Sounds interesting - though I suppose it raises the question of what to do when the option of reworking Visas's encounter isn't installed. Also, I left a comment on the mod page itself, but you might 've missed it. You might be aware that there's a compatibility patch for Partyswap with Extended Enclave, that includes an option for if this patch is installed. Unfortunately going by the last update and what I can see from the comments, a specific encounter with this patch is broken to the point that it simply removes the encounter - Disciple and Brianna's involvement in the mind-reading part. The modder doesn't know how to change the scripts to spawn the right characters, by the looks of it. Do you reckon you might be able to help out? No pressure or anything, just you seem to have a lot of scripting knowledge, so I figured it couldn't hurt to ask.

Lol, everyone hates Kaah it seems. Probably best not to lose the Visas scene though, but I'm sure you'll figure something out.

Since you mention Vash and M4-78, it might be cool to include a way for her to survive and turn up in the Dantooine council a la the old DStoney mod in future updates. Ditto Kaah, though I suppose he could have a Kaevee pulled on him. While I get the logistic necessity of them both dying on M4-78 anyway in LS paths, it always felt a tad lacklustre narratively. Obviously it'd require an M4-78 install version, but it's an idea.

So, many of you might be familiar with, or aware of 90SK and VarsityPuppet's Cloaked KotOR Tunics for TSL, a mod that takes the original K1 robes, puts the K2 padawan-style robes cloak on them, and reskins them for the entire K2 robeset. The mod is lovely and on my personal build I've tweaked it quite extensively over the years. However, there currently isn't a version that uses the master-style cloak - and I am both a massive pedant as well as interested in releasing a mod taking the cloaked K1 robes concept further if I get the permissions sorted out from prior modders. The issue is, I've made several attempts over the years to get to grips with model editing for KOTOR and have profoundly failed every time - so I was wondering if anyone here with the skills would be willing to help me out. I can take care of the recolouring/reskinning end if I have access to a functioning mdl/mdx, and if I do get around to releasing anything I'll happily credit the model editor. But even if it only ever exists on my personal build never to see the outside light of day again, I'd still be very thankful!

Yeah that. Dead Doc Officer in dormitories.

I actually first mentioned it in the mod thread, so since VP never came asking for it, I assumed they were not interested in updating. If VP does want it, I'll happily send it over. [Edit]: As a followup, I just noticed I can now attatch files to posts, so have this. Stick this in the 105 folder of the peragus tweak folder, then run the TSLPatcher as normal. 105per.git

A video or gif of it would be helpful, if you're willing. I'm not really in the habit of downloading stuff I can't see beforehand.

On a minor divergence, to save the bother of starting a whole new thread, anyone know what the song in M4-78's launch trailer is? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8t4SFCWcfo