JCarter426

The need at all for this blog post blog post brings warm feelings to my heart. We’ve always had a decently-sized community, but we were always kind of under the radar of the modding community. I’ve had people who have known me for years as a modder tell me they were surprised to find out I was involved with the movies as well. But it’s true - I’m one of the animators for the KOTOR Movie Saga. More than ten years ago, I was inspired by the original KOTOR Episode I to make my own projects. I initially made some comics, which I’ve posted about here, and I later started my own movie adaptation of KOTOR II (which I still haven’t finished). The director of Episode I @KOTOR_Trilogysaw the work I was doing there and asked for help with Episode II to do a few things he couldn’t do on the Xbox version. I also worked with him to update Episode II when we screened it at MAGFest, and then we were asked to come back within a year for Episode III. At the time, @DarthYcey was working on his own KOTOR II films and he came on board so we could actually get the film done in time. We now consider his Meetra films as a continuation of the Loganverse trilogy in one shared KOTOR Cinematic Universe, but that’s a whole mess of a story that I won’t get into right now. Anyway, @Jenko also joined us and more recently directed the special edition of Episode I, which just had its birthday last Thursday. So that’s the four of us. Mr Director and his three animators. We’re currently in preproduction on two new projects: Revan, a prequel trilogy set during the Mandalorian Wars, and Heroes of the Old Republic, an anthology webseries of little side stories that wouldn’t fit in the films. Until now, all these goings-on have occurred in the shadows. We never drew any attention on LucasForums. I think I posted Episode III when it came out and nobody replied. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d put it down to LucasForums not having a very active fan media section. There were forums for for it, but not a lot happening in them. People went to the site for mods. On the other hand, a lot of Loganverse fans (myself included) discovered the movies because they were specifically looking for Star Wars fan films or new KOTOR content, and weren’t necessarily interested in modding the game. So there isn’t as much overlap as one might think. Recently, though, I’ve noticed we’ve started to attract more notice - or in more cases, actually, I’ve learned that certain individuals were already aware of the films and just never mentioned it to me (maybe because they didn’t know I was aware of and involved with them). Whatever the case, we’re out in the open now and while it wasn’t a big secret before, I’m now trying to be more open about my involvement and exactly what that entails. And that segue brings us back to the matter at hand. Lately, I’ve seen requests for some material from our films to be released as mods. I want to talk about why that hasn’t happened so much and what you can do to maybe change that. First, I want to point out that not a lot of our stuff would work as mods. The scenes in the films were recorded solely for film purposes and utilize a lot of camera tricks and editing that can’t be done in the game. Most of the scenes aren’t complete in-game cutscenes. Even when I do program an entire scene, I don’t input each specific camera angle in the dialogue file that you’d need to do for a mod. Instead, I record the entire scene from every camera angle and turn the footage into a multi-cam sequence in Adobe Premiere. I do it that way because the game generally forces you to change angles at the start of a line of dialogue, but we don’t always want to do that when editing a film. Mr Director even asked me about this one time - he was wondering if, provided they had all the right files, someone could execute a scene and essentially see the whole movie in the game. And I could probably do that, but it would involve a lot more work than is necessary to make the movie and I’ve only ever done what’s needed for the movie. Unless we specifically plan for a scene to be released as a mod, it’s not a realistic prospect. What’s more eligible for release would be the assets we use to create these scenes - characters, outfits, locations, that sort of thing. And there hasn’t been much of that - yet. We’ve had to hold ourselves back a few times when we thought stuff would be filmed on the Xbox and therefore couldn’t utilize any modded assets. A few times this wasn’t necessary, and if I could redo things with that knowledge, Episode III would look a fair bit different. Canderous wouldn’t wear blue armor and a lot of the characters on Korriban wouldn’t wear officer uniforms. There were only a few cases where we knew we would record on PC and could do whatever we wanted. The earliest such case I recall is the Sith outpost scene early in the film (the one recorded in the Vulkar base). Since Logan had changed so much between films, Mr Director wanted his outfit to change too. We knew that I’d be recording that scene and that Logan would change clothes early in the film, so it wasn’t a problem to give Logan a custom outfit there. I dug through my files and we ended up using a texture I’d made years earlier. Another one that stands out is the Zabrak character Kondor Moderro. I remember making that the night I got back from the Episode II screening. We had a creative meeting in Mr Director's hotel room; he told us his plans for the character and asked if it was possible to add a new alien to K1 since we’d have to record all Moderro's scenes on PC anyway, given that he was a new character. Bastila’s outfit was another addition and in that case it was actually because there wasn’t a mod for it. Again, we knew her scenes would be another PC thing (you can’t use the Xbox freecam during those duels) so Mr Director thought of changing her outfit. He saw something he liked online but the mod was never released, so I came up with an approximation to use for the film. Things have changed since then - from now on, we’re recording everything on PC and the new projects involve new characters and locations that most definitely will involve new assets. But from our past works, only a few isolated bits come to mind. And for those, the most common scenario is that it simply hasn’t occurred to us to release it. As I mentioned before, Mr Director is an Xbox guy, and of the animator trio I’m the only one who has released mods at all. I’ve been on the modding scene as long as I’ve been working on these movies, but the other guys only got into this stuff for the films. So the real question is why JC hasn’t released anything. Again, the usual answer is I didn’t think of it. I’m really bad at releasing things. I have tons and tons of unreleased material - unfinished or abandoned project, things I changed my mind about, or some stuff I just haven’t used yet. Logan’s Episode III outfit was one such case. That was one of a bunch of textures I made back in 2009 and I still haven’t used the others for anything. I have a backlog of useless assets and a lot of it I don’t think is worth releasing. Not necessarily because it’s bad (and a lot of it is) but because of the futility of it. “A bunch of robe recolors I made in 2009” doesn’t sound appealing for a mod. Plus there’s all the work required to test the mod (I don’t get much time to play the games these days) and write up a proper installer so it will be compatible with other mods (I usually manually edit my 2DAs and other files and have a totally garbage build with years of such clutter that barely works for recording purposes) and taking screenshots (I hate taking screenshots) and so on. The mods I actually do release are only released thanks to a focused, concentrated effort to release them instead of letting them sit on one of my hard drives forever. There’s more in there I’ve forgotten than I remember. My incompetence aside, there are a few cases where we’re specifically reluctant to release our assets. It’s not the case for everything, and we likely could be persuaded to release some things, but it’s an ongoing concern for us that our films contain a lot of new content and don’t come across as footage of a 15-year-old video game. We want everything we make for the films to look and feel new, and to release that content, if you could see all the same stuff outside of our films, there’s a risk it could detract from that experience. I don’t feel that way about everything, but I do have mixed feelings. And because I’m not working on these films alone, even if the material in question is something I made on my own, if it’s I made it specifically for one of the films then I wouldn’t feel comfortable releasing it without getting the other guys’ approval first. And even though I think they’d probably say yes for some of it, I haven’t done so because there isn’t anything I’m particularly motivated to release. I made all this stuff for the films, not as mods. That goes for a lot of my own stuff as well. Some assets I have made with several uses in mind, such as my head resource, which end up being used in the films but weren’t made with that specific intent. When tha does come to mind, I do set it aside for release. But most of the time, I’m in one of two mindsets on this. Film, or mod. I don’t usually think of doing two things. If there’s anything from our films that you’d like to see released as a mod, the most proactive thing you can do is let us know. We can only say no on a case by case basis and we have to know what in particular people want released. It’s not like we’re hoarding all our files, but even though we know that generally there’s probably stuff from our films that people would want, we aren’t inclined to upload anything in particular without some nudging first. We gotta know what you want then and you gotta make us let it go. So if you make a mod request for it, then we can address the matter. I couldn’t end this post without a little promotion. If you want to talk about the movies to us directly, you can join our new discord. And if you’re reading this but you haven’t seen any of our KOTOR movies, the best place to start is with the Episode I: A Familiar Path Special Edition.

You weren't wrong - there's one called Star Vader too. I remember that was the first one I used long ago. Star Jedi is an update with a larger character set, although I've found it still isn't really that good at the connecting and some of the letter shapes are a little wonky. I type stuff in it as a template and then manually adjust the letters as needed. That's for fancy stuff, though. If I were being lazy like for screenshots I would just use the font as is.

Thanks. I'm not sure... I guess? But the thing was you cold see the front of the skirt was visible from the front, and the back of the skirt was visible from the back, but the faces were very obviously single-sided. So from the front you could see no back of the skirt, and no front from the back, and depending on the angle it could disappear. That bugged me almost as much as the waist thing.

That guy who's been making all the icons should get on that, whoever he is.... Yeah: The ridiculous waist thing was the primary motivation, but while I was in there I made some other adjustments to fit it to Bastila's proportions, using P_BastilaBB as reference. They might still be off compared to a human being, but I thought I got it fairly close to her body shape. Also, I forgot to mention in the readme that I duplicated the skirt so the cloth actually has a front and back. I forgot about that until I saw these images just now.

I believe it's CSS now. I didn't actually edit mine, but I went in there and I was able to see the source code (leftmost button above the description panel). It didn't look like anything was broken, but again I didn't actually save the edit.

View File JC's Slave Bastila for K1 Summary Early in the game, BioWare had Bastila appear in an outfit that's a homage to the infamous Slave Leia costume from Return of the Jedi. But it was just a retexture of her regular underwear. For the sequel, Obsidian made the same homage and included a more elaborate model that could be worn by most female members of the party once the item is acquired. This mod ports the K2 model to replace Bastila's outfit in K1. Note that this will not replace Bastila's easter egg appearance because that uses a different line in appearance.2da. That will have to remain a retexture of Bastila's underwear, unless one were to replace her underwear model with the dancer outfit entirely. Instead, this mod adds a dancer outfit item that Bastila can wear any time afterwards. It has the same properties as the item from K2 and can only be worn by Bastila. I've modified the dancer outfit model to more closely resemble Bastila's body shape. I've also changed the texture to match her skin tone and fixed a few minor errors I noticed. Finally, I've included an alternate texture that changes the outfit's color scheme from red to a sort of dark blue with gold flowers and a lavender trim. I was trying to match the color scheme of her original outfit. @Dark Hope has also made a new texture with that color scheme and it's a lot fancier. Note that if you want to use any other texture that isn't in a TPC file, you'll have to remove JC_SlaveBast01.tpc. Compatibility This mod is not compatible with other mods that affect Bastila's slave appearance. This mod uses my Supermodel Port for K1. This makes it super cripplingly incompatible with any other mods that alter the game's supermodels (the S_Female and S_Male files) unless the other mods utilize my Supermodel Port assets. These edits are necessary to give the player supermodels the bones required for the cloaks to animate. This mod's supermodels include my Supermodel Fixes for K1. So you don't have to worry about using that, or if these files are overwriting those. Use this mod's files. These supermodel edits somewhat alter some animations in the game. These adjustments were necessary to prevent the old stuff from clipping with the new stuff. It's essentially what Obsidian did when they added the new bones to the supermodel, but I've reversed the changes a bit to bring the animations closer to the original K1 style. Some models aren't so happy with the new rig. I've made some hotfixes for such cases where I can, but they won't be compatible with other mods that alter these models. I've instructed TSLPatcher not to overwrite these. P_JuhaniBB.mdl and P_JuhaniBB.mdx are two such files that will be skipped. If you use the Juhani Catlike Head Mod, I suggest that you use my version because I happened to fix the same thing that mod fixes anyway. You can copy those two files manually from tslpatchdata to Override. While this mod adds skirt bones to the player supermodels, at this time it does not add the bones or the necessary animations to the cutscene models. So the skirt flaps may appear stiff in scenes that use those. This mod edits the script k_ptar_bastpart.ncs in tar_m03af.mod. If install another mod that edits that script after this one, then you won't automatically get the dancer outfit item, but all the other changes will still take effect. You can cheat the item in if you want. The item name is jc_slavebast. I've instructed the patcher to skip the file ia_cloths_255.tpc if it finds another copy present. If this file isn't installed, it will look like something else in the inventory but everything else will be as it should be. Credits KOTOR Tool – Fred Tetra TSLPatcher – stoffe, with updates by Fair Strides ERFEdit – stoffe, with updates by Fair Strides NWMax – Joco KOTORMax & MDLEdit – bead-v This mod contains assets ported from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords by Obsidian Entertainment. Permisisons I hereby grant nobody except myself permission to upload some or all of this mod anywhere for any reason. For any reason. If you would like to include any part of this mod in anything, then please contact me for permission. Disclaimers "We Beks don't believe in intergalactic slavery" but I guess they're totally cool with regular old domestic slavery? INTERGALACTIC SLAVERY NOT BELIEVED BY BIOWARE, OBSIDIAN ENTERTAINMENT, OR LUCASARTS. I was also going to make a "Song of the South" reference but I think anything I could possibly quote about that would be too offensive to be taken as a joke. Donations If you enjoy my mods and would like to show your support in a monetary manner, you may do so via PayPal with this donation link. For various legal and ethical reasons, this is entirely optional and is not a requirement to downloading or using any of my mods. I also do not create specific mods for hire. I make mods as a hobby and will most likely do so regardless of any donations or lack thereof, but modding does take up a lot of my time and every bit helps. Submitter JCarter426 Submitted 07/05/2018 Category Mods K1R Compatible No  

Huh, I thought people had reported being unable to have stereo VO. And I know it must be mono to generate lips. But if it can be stereo then I guess that's one annoyance out of the way. However, it would still only be viable, as I described, for scenes with pre-determined camera angles and character positions. Stuff like the Leviathan cutscenes, the Ebon Hawk cutscenes in K2, that sort of thing.

Yeah, I agree. With almost half the texture black it's rather silly. But some modders insist on having 4096x4096 textures even when there isn't any real detail there. With that in mind, willfully scaling 256 down to 80 feels like sacrilege.

Ah, yeah, that does look decent. I see you still kept some of the subdivisions by snapping the vertices to edges. Should be fine so long as they're weighted the same and I think pretty much the whole head is weighted either to the neck or the head bones anyway. As for the textures, I can see why you'd scale them down but I don't think a 1024x1024 texture with tons of wasted space would make all that much difference to the loading time. Though the eyes probably don't need that much detail to begin with, considering plenty of KOTOR heads have the whole thing on a 256x256 texture.

Wow, I didn't expect an attempt so soon. I was looking at it an hour ago and thinking I do not want to be the first to try that. It looks like all of my concerns about the process have been realized, and then some. This was the main point I was thinking on earlier. The MMO necks are much rounder than KOTOR's because that's how necks work. But that means they don't match the KOTOR bodies. I expect this can be fixed by reducing the amount of vertices to match the KOTOR standard. It won't look as nice, but at least it will all connect. Well, we could just use big textures. If it's four or less per head and the extremities are only 256x256 it wouldn't get too ridiculous. What's the size of the face texture? Oh, of course.... Should be fine for NPCs though. If you wanted it for a player or party member you could copy the Handmaiden's setup maybe. I think her heartbeat has a script to change her appearance. Then you just don't use texture variations for the head, and that way you can keep the original different textures too. Might not be practical, but it depends on the context. I expect we'll have to deal with the same thing for armors. To be honest, the specular MMO heads look bad to me and I'd rather see a talented individual add actual texture detail instead. I didn't even think of this one. I didn't realize the eyes were that different. But wouldn't you have to scrap all the MMO bones anyway for the KOTOR animations to work right? It might be rough, but it looks a lot better than I'd expect for a first attempt. The difference in art style also doesn't stand out nearly as much as I'd expected, maybe because of the specular loss. I'm still thinking I do not want to try this yet, but the prospects look good.

Conceptually, you're not wrong. Dialogue usually comes from the center channel for surround sound or is left as mono for stereo sound, but it is mixed up sometimes for immersion as you say. One example is Yoda's introduction in Empire when he says "...feel like what?" and Luke turns around. The audio for Yoda's line comes from the right channel because he's off-screen to the right of Luke. But there are complications with it for KOTOR and video games in general. The main issue is that unlike with a film, with a video game you don't have a finished, edited video with the camera angles and the cutting locked in. A video game in 3D space can have all the characters' positions change based on how the scene is triggered, you can skip through parts of a cutscene if you're bored, different characters can be present, and so on. In a film, the video editing is completed and then only after that will the sound editor go in to adjust the balance and make the audio match the video. That doesn't happen with a video game, which is why developers will often include pre-rendered cinematics that do allow for that sort of editing, such as with the dream sequences in KOTOR. This all depends on the game, of course, and how the engine handles cutscenes, but at least with KOTOR the camera angles are generated dynamically. There's a stock set of camera angles (#1, #2, #3, and #5, with #0 being a random choice) from which the game picks and the composition of each shot changes based on which angle is picked and where the characters are in the game world. Whether they're too close to each other, or too close to a wall, or there's something in between them, whether the player initiates the conversation from the speaker's right or left, which character is configured as the listener for a dialogue node - all these things can change how the scene actually plays out. KOTOR in particular is very bad at choosing its camera angles and characters frequently cross the line (they face one direction in the start of the scene, and later face another direction, which can be disorientating). It wouldn't be practical to edit the VO in stereo because there's a good chance it would not actually match the scene. The engine could be set up to have the VO come from each speaker, where they are in 3D space, just like the sound effects, but I don't believe KOTOR does this. And if even if it could, it wouldn't be a good idea due to all the crossing the line issues. A character's audio would switch from the right channel to the left channel and back because of the shoddy camera angles and that would be distracting. So it's only practical to edit in stereo for cutscenes with specific camera angles and not rely on the usual haphazard dynamic system. You can do this in the game (angles #4 and #6) but it's more time consuming. Darth Malak's introduction is like this, for example, but Darth Bandon's introduction is not. I'm guessing they didn't have the time or budget to do it for all of them. The other complication for KOTOR, though, is the VO simply can't be in stereo as far as we can tell. It specifically has to be mono or else the line will be mute. You could get around this, but once again it wouldn't be very practical. You would have to leave the real VO line mute and add a script to play some form of audio that is allowed to be stereo (I think music is) and doing that for every single line of dialogue in a scene would be tedious. A more practical solution would be to do a cut of the whole scene and make it unskipable so the audio can play out uninterrupted - but this may be annoying for longer scenes - or pre-render the whole thing as a Bink video, which would have no limitations on the audio but it does come with other limitations due to its nature of being pre-rendered. This is another case of being in the 99% of things in KOTOR that could be done... but is more trouble than it's worth.

I suppose you're right. They're the ones that bother me the most - I don't care for them in officer uniforms because they're supposed to be Dark Jedi. But they do have their own versions of the officer uniforms... well, they're not specific to Uthar or Yuthura exactly but I don't believe they're used for anyone else, so you could see it as the Dark Jedi version of the uniform. If you don't want the mod to affect Uthar or Yuthura, you can simply delete all the .utc files associated with them, but I think I'll include an option in the next version that will keep their custom uniforms and also make their uniforms consistent in every area. The uniform thing would probably bother me less if Uthar wasn't wearing the same thing as Lashowe or Varko or random guy who gets saluted on the Leviathan. Or the Czerka officers on Korriban. Or basically everyone on Korriban, as previously established. Do note though that if the robes are reverted to uniforms, they'll also lose the +4 defense bonus. Of course, they don't have that bonus in the original game and it's only restoring things to the way they were, but I just want to point out that is a thing that will change. EDIT: Just want to point out that I was going by my (bad) memory before and the Jedi Robe item only adds a +1 bonus to defense. I'm not sure why I thought all robes had a minimum +4 because it's 0 in baseitems.2da for both games.... It seems in K1 the bonus is +1 / +2 / +3 for Jedi / Knight / Master robes. K2 has a similar but more complicated setup.

Just stopping by to testify that I've allowed permission for various fixes from my Korriban: Back in Black mod. I think the robe stuff should be kept as a separate mod, as it's an aesthetic change and not really a bug fix, but even though I was only intending to make aesthetic changes I ended up fixing lots of bugs in the process and it makes sense to allow those. The ones we specifically talked about are the appearance fixes for the guards and Bandon's entourage, incorrect and missing soundsets, missing weapons, gender swaps, Dak's inventory, and the reorientation stuff.

It's not a finished mod. The assets were released as a mod resource, but it was never finished as an actual mod and it's not tested. You probably won't be able to play with it unless somebody finishes it. I can tell you though that the bug you mentioned occurs because of the file g_bandon001.utc. BioWare did a naughty thing and reused this file name for several different instances of Bandon in the game and so editing one of them and putting it in Override breaks all the others. Any edits to Calo will cause the same problem.

With one exception, all the others wear Dark Jedi Robes. The reason for this is that in the original game nearly all of them were wearing either basic clothing or nothing, which adds nothing to their defense scores. Robe items add a minimum of +4 to defense, and my intent for the changes was aesthetic, not mechanical, so I minimized the change by giving them the weakest robes. The Jorak Uln is the exception because he was already wearing blue Dark Jedi Master Robes. I've changed them to black for the mod, but left them as master tier.

No problem. I thought about that, but decided to go with regular robes for the initial release. It didn't feel right for him to look exactly like Bandon or the generic armor-wearing Sith so I'll have to think about what he would wear.