Crazy34

So here I have one more update for you. The kitbash crossguard saber from @Kaidon Jorn is now ported to Kotor. Black core crossguard looks pretty good in my opinion. What do you think? Stay healthy!

So final update for today. The port to Kotor is finished including the three new saber colors from TSL. So when ever I get the permission from @Sithspecter I am ready to push boh versions out there. And something you might be interested in: Kotor features now black core sabers.

Yes the current TSL version of the mod I already send to you by pm. It fully uses the TSLpatcher and includes Standard, black core and unstable sabers. If you can take some nice screenshots to show here I would highly appreciate it. And thank you very much for testing it!

Until the permission question is settled, I just go ahead and say that the K1 version of the mod is also on the way and working. Here I think the lightning works even better, I don't know what's wrong in TSL. @Jorak Uln So if you want to test your new Kotor or TSL textures with these sabers just let me know and I pm you them. The red saber is actually Malak's long blade saber which also works with the new environmental light and the new blade models. Stay safe!

@Kaidon Jorn I can wait for you to share with the others what you have been working on. I think this is in terms of lightsabers a new revolution for TSL and later also for KOTOR. I hope I can soon get the permission from @Sithspecter to release my mod as well.

The problem is the ambient light function. With the correct version of mdledits it should not be a problem to switch it. I have wrote you a pm describing it. I think it is totally doable however still requires alot of work. Cheers and stay safe

Haha DarthParametric was faster than me! As a note for me MDLEDIT 1.0.9 Beta throws some error sometimes. For my lightsaber mod I use 1.0.6 for compiling and 1.0.3 for decompiling.

Hi everyone. Sorry to the mods for the double posting and I hope the screenshots are not to much. So before we start a short update: Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational batch station. So yeah I learned batch a little which helped producing the progress. In order to give an overview: All saber hilts are updated by hilts from @Kaidon Jorn SLM 2.0 mod (I love it!) All credits for the hilt models and textures and icons go fully to him! Update for Kaidon Jorn's: Revan's Tor Saber 1.1 to use the new blades Ambient light for lightsabers 3d models for blade core and inner glow symmetric lightsaber blade planes with a modifed version of @Sithspecter crossguard saber UV layout. (in principle compatible with his unstable textures) black core sabers are possible homogeneous brightness of the blade (no more brighter blades when viewed from the front) all sabers are fully upgradeable (added black core crystal) (Cross guard are updateable but don't have a unique crystal yet.) Now to the to do: Need permission from Sithspecter to use th UVs. I only modified them but he created them so I need his permission. I hope you are all right man! Need Icons for the crossguard saber Test: Someone to test the .uti with the english version of the game (I am only owning the german version) Test the K1 version at some point in the future Hope that some talented texture artist is willing to update my blade textures with good ones Possible update with a full set of unstable saber blades if Sithspecter gives the permission to also use his beautiful animated textures. Known Bugs: The tip of the blade has a spike which comes from a deformation of the lightsaber planes. This is also present in the original model. I was not able to find a fix sorry. The lightsaber hilts will peak through the blades. (See some posts before. DarthParametric sad it is not possible to fix it.)

@JCarter426 Thank you very much. I have looked over them and also read a little bit more in the forum. For future projects, it will be very useful. @bead-v Does Mdledit has the feature that you can compile a folder full of ascii files to mdl with a batch or script? A general question. Does someone know how the game determine the render order of textures? @Jorak Uln Can I ask you to post the txi. file you used for the black core sabers here. I am struggling to get the effect right. Stay safe!

The planes are now fully symmetric (yeah!) but I am fighting a bug with the lightsaber planes. I made a picture of it. For a reason I could not identify yet their is an artefact of the lightsaber planes peaking out of the blade itself. @DarthParametric I would kindly ask you how you got the the wireframe mod ingame, so I can track this bug easier. And maybe by chance do you have an idee how to fix it. Thank you very much!

@Alvar007 I really like the new improvement. Great work. On the force storm. Well I guess it can be done, even if I don't know exactly how. On this site is a mod called force zeal. Its a great forcepower on its own, maybe a little op. But the lightning coming from above is the best part in my view. Their is an uncompiled nss shipping with the files but I don't understand the scripting language. So maybe and expert like you can see how the lightning is done. Just to clarify I am not asking for you to do this, just want to know what someone with the expertise thinks if its possible. By the way force zeal is feature in this video at around 6:10 Thank you and stay safe!

@Alvar007 Great work man!!! After seeing your new retribution force power, I ask myself if it is possible to create a new version of Force Storm similar to the version in Star Wars TOR. As a reference here a clip: I guess the animation of the player as well as the lightning itself is the hard part, but since I have not don't animation or scripting I have no clue on how to do it. What do you think? Keep up the great work!

@JCarter426 Thank you very much. With the documentation at hand it makes life so much easier. Also thank you for the explanation I will try these settings in the next version. I am currently trying to fix the brightness. I also need to full symmetrize the planes at some point.

@Jorak Uln The reason why in kotor the blades look brigther from the front, is that the trimesh planes of the saber are onesided facing in front. So from behind you don't get any effect from them. @DarthParametric Is it possible to set faces to be double-sided in the ascii? Or do I need to add two more planes to the model with different orientations? Also do you know by chance with lightpriority value would be the best to use? The only way I could imagine how to get the special effect for the black core TOR blade is to have a texture with a alpha mask which is white for the black part of the blade and has greyish something for the glow and black outside of the blade. With this alpha mask one could try to set the blending to normal (from additive as default) and see how this looks ingame. I tried and it looks promising but the bad texture creator I am I was not able to get satisfactory results. For the double blade bug: In order to have not visible planes I could add a third 3d Model, which edge would mark the end of the glow. But personally I think it looks worse then the current state I posted before. Jorak Uln our textures look really great. Your are right, then I am in the right state of mind I should set up a consitent texture system such that you can tweak overthing for each model seperately. Big THANKS to DarthParametric for you help aswell as to @bead-v. I hope my lack of knowledge is not to annoying.

@DarthParametric Thank you I was not aware of that. I don't see a easy approach to use the same in Kotor. Can I ask you a model question? In the model ascii for trimesh there is the property inv_count. What is it and what is it tell me? @Jorak Uln I attached pictures of the double blade with the new model. Would you consider it solved? I also encountered again my nemesis enemy bug with lightsaber blades. It is shown in the third dan fouth picture. The lightsaber hilt is visible even then it is behind the blade. I guess it is a .txi problem but I have no clue on how to solve it. The hilts texture has a alpha channel which is not 255 and the standard .txi with envmaptexture CM_Baremetal The blades alpha chanel is 255 and the txi is alpha blending 1.0 blending additive decal 1 In the model ascii both have alpha set to 1.0. Does anyone has an idea on how to fix that bug? Thank you very much for the help and stay safe!

Thanks for the video. This and other showed how they used the blur and I agree its over used. For the black core blades the blur seem to be white regardless. Which would make life easier for us. But I still very much islike the behavior of the blur planes. I have to think on how to replace them. Anyway In case you want to test the new 3d blades yourself I attached a new version. The textures are preliminary and at some point I need to come up with a naming convention for all the texture files. The blue lightsaber is the one with the "black" core and the red the one with the normal white core. Tell me what you think. Stay safe! Test Ambient Light Lightsaber v3.rar

This thread turns more or less into a WIP. Sorry to all moderators. I have an update for you. I think I am now more or less happy with the 3d blade core models. I made a quick lightsaber blade texture (keep in mind that I am a very bad texture creator.). I am really excited for a real artist to take on these lightsaber blades in the future. These sabers have now 3 different blade textures you can manipulate independently! So the first to picture show the current version using my test texture. The second one is a focused version of the tipp. If you look very carefully you should be able to see the 3d glow model and the 3d core model seperate. On the third picture you should see the difference. Dark core sabers are a thing now. Although I still didn't found the best .txi settings for it but I guess someone can help me with that? Thx to @Jorak Uln for convincing me that 3d is the way to go. Hope you enjoy. So I have a question to you all. In the fourth and fith picture you see the motion blur trails used by the vanila game. I didn't find a way to replicate the effect for the dark core blades, since the planes use the blades texture and blending mods. The question is shall I keep them? The movies have motion blur but carried out much better. If my research was not wrong, SWTOR does not have motion blur. Pls correct me if I am wrong. So what do you think of this? Stay safe.

After a short rewatch of Episode I-III and RO I realized that the colored blade core has a different shape from the inner white core. I correct that, as you can see in the picture below. Both 3d core are now animated. Unfortunately I cannot animate a vibration mod on the models since they would mostly contract and don't really change in thickness. @DarthParametric Or is there a way to rescale the axis separatly in the ascii? I only encoutered scale as a single argument.

You give me some task I have to say ; ). No but your right I should try to fix it. My solution is to use he 3d core plus a 3d most inner glow and then the planes around for the full glow. That should fix your problem (I hope and I have to test it, when doubleblade testing is on.) The pictures below show the 3d progress. First the not yet animated 3d glow. THe second shows the new 3d core and glow actived. For comparison I put the original blade and texture in the picture such that you can compare them directly. So on the to do list is left: - animate the 3d glow - Make up my mind about the size of the 3d core and glow - Improve the glow planes (not shown in the pictures below) - Texture the glow (here I really need help from you Guys. Help me DS community your are our only hope!) - Add flicker animation to 3d core and glow - find some good looking hilts with permission to use them to give you a reason to use the blades If ou wish for something specific this should fix etc. please tell me and I will see how we can achieve the goals with this. Stay safe!

Here are some test pictures. On the first you see the model without the standard plane glow. On the second with lightsaber activated. I also have it animated but when you don't see the blade core at all, since it is smaller than the standard blades core texture.

@ebmar Thank you for the comment and I am glade that you liked my tuning of the parameters. Thanks for the Auroralight values. This helps if I will make it compatible with @JCarter426 mod. But at the moment I would like to change the blade itself. The reason is simple. In order to add the light to the saber I need to change the model files. So if I have to do tha anyway I can also improve the blades even beyond great texture mods like JCs. I am experimenting with a 3d zylinder blade core (the white). But the changes are maginal compared with better blade planes uv layout. The orginial plane approch has the advantage that once they are out there, people can again do texture mods for them (I am a terrible texture painter (no artist really)). Also you can animate the core and the color glow of the blade. With a 3d Zylinder Core it would always stay the same size and you could not animate them. Also some people like to have thin blades like rebels or the OT and others prefer the PT style. With the 3d ones you would need to change the model itself with is much more work. Mhm I don't know what to do. What do you guys think about it? 3d or 2d? I have the 3d thing ready. Also is there another way then planes to get the color glow and animate it?

Thanks again, good to know that we can reproduce the artifacts with different textures. As I sad I have my own spot to test this behavior so in the next days I will play around with the seetings and update you when I know more or if it helped. So do you guess or know what the range of the settings are LightPriority: 1 -10 ? Ambient Only: 0 / 1 ? Dynamic Type: 1 / 0 ? Affect Dynamic: 0 /1 ? Shadow: 0 / 1 this I tested, one could use the lightsaber to cast the shadow but its buggy when you are not static so this will be 0. Flare: 0 /1 ? Fading Light: 0 /1 ? Thanks alot for the help!

Thanks for the reply and the screenshots. Mhm in v2 I gave the green blade 0.01 1.0 0.01 so red and blue should be present even very small. If you increase it to 0.1 it did not help I already tried after you suggest it (thanks for the tip I appreciate it.) Can I ask you to reproduce your screen shots and try to get close to the wall but at the same panel as the first screenshot. It might not be the distance to wall but the specific part of the wall texture that change the glow. For me when i walked over a monotonic ground texture on dan for example on some spots the glow was really intense and on over it was normal. But this was on the same texture with the same distance to the ground. Only thing I can think of is the lightmap of the module itself but I have no expertise in Lightmaps at all. Does anyone have a documentation what these options are suppost to controll?: LightPriority: 5 Ambient Only: 0 Dynamic Type: 1 Affect Dynamic: 0 Shadow: 0 Flare: 0 Fading Light: 0 I welcome all help I can get and thank you for your patience with me. Stay safe

@Jorak Uln I started this project to bridge time until you finish your movie texture pack which is awesome. I tested your findings myself and I get similar results. I don't know what the problem is. At some spot on Malachor for instance I don't get ambient light at all. My guess is that it has to do with the lightmap and that the lights only amplified and colors the original light in the lightmap? Atleast for the module area I have no clue how what works. The player models seem to be consistent. I wonder how many different lightsabers in the same scene work and one still gets all the different colors. I attached a v2 with the lightsabers blue red green yellow. I would appreciate if anyone could test it and give me feedback on how the light interacts if multiple lightsabers are involved. As Jorak Uln pointed out we should also test it with different texture packs. Any feedback would help me alot. Thank you very much and stay safe! Test Ambient Light Lightsaber v2.rar

Are you happy with the light brightness and the range? I had to balance the optic in daylight spots like dantooine and onderon against the harbinger and Malachor. I played around with the color for a bit and the color you have on the test saber is r 1.0 g 0.0 b 0.0 . More saturated colors tend to look better. I guess next step is to try to replace the damn blade itself.