JCarter426

Oh, I didn't know about that. I'd thought of a return to Dantooine mod before porting was ever allowed, and I'd be very interested in playing (not so much making) one and that should be easier with the K2 areas as a possibility.

This is an official on-the-record statement granting @A Future Pilot permission to use my Shader Fixes for K2. Or the Mandalorian ones in it for K1, since I'm not going to bother to make that its own mod. Also the other Minor Fixes we discussed - Atris, Mira, grass, and clothes.

View File JC's Shader Fixes for K2 When they made K2, Obsidian removed several shaders from characters that had them in K1. I suspect this was part of a systematic effort to improve performance on the Xbox. There's no such technical limitation on modern computers, however. But the perplexing thing about it is the shaders weren't just removed, but for some characters you can't even give them shaders in the conventional way that would always work in K1. There is another way, oen that other mods have used already, but I think it's a bit of a hack method. Even though I've used it myself for years, I never released my work as a mod because the installation process is less than ideal. Recent insights, however, have allowed me to finally understand why the heck this happens and come up with an alternative solution that doesn't require mucking around in appearance.2da. This mod alters the appearance of certain characters in the game, giving them shaders, making them nice and shiny. The affected characters are Mandalorians, T3-M4, and all the HK units (HK-47, the 50s, and the 51s). For the Mandalorians, I can safely say their shaders are just straight up missing. They're shiny in K1 and not in K2. In K1 they only ever appear in small numbers, but in K2 there's a whole camp of them on Dxun - I think that was the problem for the poor little Xbox. I've made them shiny again, though I didn't just copy the alpha channel from K1 as I didn't particularly care for it. It looked like there was too much contrast to me, with some parts having no shader and then parts right next to them were totally shiny. I tried to make mine subtler so all the metal pieces have a mild shine, with none on the body glove. I've also fixed some other issues present on the Mandalorian model. One of the finger bones was visible and there were some smoothing and weighting errors. The HK-51s aren't even in the original release of the game. But HK-47 is quite shiny in K1 and I think the later models ought to be as well. While the 51s don't appear and the 50s only appear in small numbers, there was supposed to be an entire factory of them late in the game, so - I think they had their shininess removed for the same reason as the Mandalorians. For the HK-51s, I've also fixed some texture issues around the photoreceptors. HK-47 himself is not shiny in K2 because he's worn down and rusted all over. I don't think a technical reason was responsible for the lack of shaders here; he probably looks as the designers intended. But I thought he could do with a little bit, a hint of his former glory. T3's situation was similar. For both of them, I tried to apply shiny to the parts that look like they're still working, with the amount on all the rust and banged up bits reduced to almost nothing. I've separated them into different folders in case you only want to use some of them. Submitter JCarter426 Submitted 06/18/2018 Category Mods TSLRCM Compatible Yes  

It's been 15 years, she's legal now.

Oh yeah, you're totally right. That was part of the impetus for including the MMO under the "same series" clause in the first place. In addition to the actors you mentioned, there's also the possibility of alien VO. I've thought about replacing the garbage Huttese the Rakatans speak, for example.

View File JC's Canderous Ported from K2 to K1 This mod alters Canderous' appearance, porting the unused texture from K2 to be used in K1. Submitter JCarter426 Submitted 06/18/2018 Category Skins K1R Compatible Yes  

Yes, but the credits have already been updated. The updates included more than just the music, though, and I did versions with both the new music and the original music, so now either can be used.

Notepad. Yeah. What DP said is the right process, but because 3ds Max is unreliable with KOTOR models that can cause some serious annoyances - one of the big problems is when you get a difference between what the game thinks is the pivot point and what your modeling program thinks is the pivot point, which skins are especially susceptible to. One particular failure of mine resulted in an eternally sad Malak. Rather than mess about with that, I find it easier to edit the ASCII file directly so you get a model that imports with most things working properly. That minimizes all the fussing around in the hierarchy too. Here is my procedure: Open your head from Game A ASCII in Notepad. Copy all the visible geometry from it (head and tongue skins, eye and teeth meshes, plus any extras like hair dangly meshes). Get a similar head from Game B. Remove all the visible geometry (same stuff as above). Export an ASCII file. Copy the geometry from step 2 to the ASCII from step 3 in Notepad. Use find and replace to make sure everything is parented to the right stuff (replacing the first model's name with the second's). Import into 3ds Max. Using the original head as a reference, make sure all the geometry is in the correct position. It seems that anything without a skin modifier won't necessarily go in place; for example, Malaks's eyes and teeth had to be moved. I usually look at the XYZ values and enter them, but if you want to mess around with the hierarchy you could delete them, import them from the original game ASCII, and put them back in place. Rename your model how you want it for the final time. Export. Convert to binary.

I think you're both misreading the situation. 🙁 @DarthParametric quoted an old rule post by @Darth_Sapiens but @Qui-Gon Glenn seems to be under the impression that it wasn't an old quote but a recent threat. I don't think he was accusing you of anything personally and even assuming he were, not only is it not something you did, it's something that didn't actually happen. I figured somebody with keen eyes must have noticed what we were doing. We were actually planning to try to get ahead of the controversy and say yeah we do it but we're only doing it for the films and not releasing anything. Funny how things turned out.

That wasn't a response to @DarthParametric - he was quoting an old post.

Yeah. While it's been seriously looked into, and other games in the Aurora family can do it, and KOTOR does keep track of the time of day, it would take some startling, groundbreaking new information for anything to come of this. Or a ridiculous amount of scripting that no sane person is going to do. It is, however, possible to make new weather systems via particle emitters. I don't know if they can be integrated in modules as they are in K2 - I'm guessing no - but we can easily mimic the effects by copying the emitter settings. And this isn't even really a porting issue, as both games are capable of the same feats in this regard. I think the only thing K1 is actually missing is textures for the rain and snow, which are a paltry few pixels anyway. What concerns me is stuff like the facial bones, eyes, mouth setup, and shape of the neck. Not concerned that anything will be fundamentally incompatible but concerned that things will be subtly different enough from KOTOR to make the re-jiggery a huge pain. Ah, I figured there was nothing truly arcane about it. I just remembered the different channels being used for different things and made a mental note that one would have to figure out which is which and the proper conversion process. But one seems to have figured that out already. That sounds simple enough. Could probably be done with a Photoshop macro if there isn't a plug-in for it already.

I’m glad to be able to talk about porting. It’s not the subject itself that I find as mysterious and alluring as some forumites seem to, but it’s been such a taboo topic for so long that I find it refreshing to be able to talk about everything I’ve been repressing. Porting content from one game to another within the same series (e.g. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords) is now allowed on Deadly Stream. Because I’m allegedly “staff”, I was told about the change of policy a couple days before the official announcement, and I was shocked. I’m still shocked. Honestly, it feels weird discussing the topic even now. Not in a bad way - like I said, it’s rather liberating - but in an I’m still having trouble believing this is a thing sort of way. This would’ve been my tenth anniversary on LucasForums, if it were still online, and I was on the FileFront forums for a bit before that. Porting was always banned and I don’t remember when it wasn’t. When Deadly Stream went online, it maintained the same rules, and now that’s changing. It’s a shift in policy older than this website, put in place before many users here even played the games. It’s a surprise, to be sure - and I expect a welcome one for many. Given the nature of this modding website, I expect anyone reading this likely knows well enough about porting, but not everyone is a modder or PC gamer and I have been asked before what porting is and why it’s a big deal. Porting is taking copyrighted content - models, textures, music, or what have you - from one game and putting it into a different game. It’s a kind of modding, but the distinction is that regular old modding works within the confines of whatever game is being modded, editing the existing assets and/or adding new content created by the modder, while porting involves something that wasn’t in the game and that the modder doesn’t have the rights to. Why is this a big deal? It isn’t in some communities. Different sites have different rules, and some do allow it. But it wasn’t allowed in the KOTOR community until now, though I feel I need to add a qualifier to that. It was kind of unclear. Porting was certainly against the rules on LucasForums, and with LucasForums went the KOTOR community. While I was a reviewer for KOTORFiles part of my job was to make sure the mods I reviewed didn’t have anything that wasn’t allowed. We were, for example, instructed to be on the lookout for TSLRP when the beta was leaked. If you were to ask me if porting were allowed I think I’d say no, but I don’t think that was an actual FileFront rule. JK3Files hosted mods that ported content from Jedi Outcast to Jedi Academy. There were also a few KOTOR mods I suspected of ported content - textures I recognized from Jedi Academy, for example - as well as mods that included other copyrighted material like music and sound effects. Fortunately, though, nothing ever came under my review that called for an examination of the laws of porting. To further complicate matters, the official release of MDLOps - still hosted on StarWarsKnights.com - contains a tutorial on how to port the Tenloss disruptor rifle from Jedi Outcast/Academy to KOTOR. Bit of a mixed message there. Regardless, on LucasForums porting was certainly verboten. But for a long time, this was a moot point. There was a lot in the modding realm we couldn’t do. Until a few years ago, we couldn’t work much with head models - the animations would break, or something worse would happen. And unless you used Taina's Replacer, which didn't allow change in vertices, the smoothing would break. Even if you could get a model from point A to point B, it wouldn’t look as nice as it did back at A. Different tools could only handle different things. KAurora couldn’t do animations. MDLOps couldn’t convert lights or lightmaps, emitters, or walkmeshes. I don't know if room animations didn't work or if nobody ever tried it. All these things and more would break even if you were keeping a model in the same game. Most of these issues were only resolved last year with the development of KOTORMax, MDLEdit, and the updated MDLOps. For this reason, perhaps, porting as a reality was a rare concern. Only two cases from those days stand out in my memory, both of which involved screenshots taken in K1 to make textures in K2, and both of which deemed ok by the administration. On Deadly Stream, there was that fiasco with the credits. More often than not, the matter was merely theoretical - someone would unknowingly request something that required porting and be shot down for it. It was forbidden as a theory even though it wasn’t much of a possibility and I don’t know why. It was a rule from before even my time and I’ve never heard the issue properly debated. Porting wasn’t allowed, and you weren’t allowed to talk about why it wasn’t allowed. I find that a bit unsatisfying, so I’ll try to see things from both sides of the issue and debate myself. Argument A: Porting is a copyright violation. It’s taking something that’s not yours and distributing it without the copyright owner’s permission. In more extreme cases, publishers have moved to shut down mod projects/websites for fear of losing sales, such as with conversion mods that would remake a game in another engine. Modding as a whole is already on shaky legal ground, so it’s not wise to attract that sort of bad attention. The line is drawn here. Argument B: Porting isn’t anything like pirating a game because it involves a fraction of the content and requires the framework of a game to access it. It’s unlikely that any mod would negatively affect a game’s sales. If anything, more mods for a game is a good thing and content ported from one game to another draws interest in both. There’s nothing illegal about porting for personal use. The only part in question is the distribution of game assets - but that applies equally to all mods. The only difference is from which game the assets originated. It doesn’t make sense to apply a different standard of rules, especially for games in the same series that already share a lot of assets, like KOTOR. Those are the essential arguments, as I see them. At the risk of earning Kreia’s wrath, I’m not going to take a side. This is a bit of a coward’s way out that I can take because I’m a modder and I can port stuff myself if I want to and not rely on downloading it from Deadly Stream - more on that in a bit - but that really is how I feel. I don’t see it as a matter of what’s right or wrong or what’s legal but rather what you think is a good idea and how much of a risk you want to take. Some communities take a risk and never have any trouble. Some - not many, but some - have taken the same risk and had their mods taken away. It’s a subjective matter, and maybe that’s why I’m a little bitter about the LucasForums days - because I see it more as a decision we should make as a community rather than an ultimatum that must never be questioned (even if most of us don’t know who made the decision or the rationale). But whether or not it was entirely by choice, that was what the community decided and I went along with it. That was then, this is now. It seems the community has gone in the other direction, and I’ll go along with it. The question has become not what is allowed but what is and isn’t possible. I imagine, in the coming days, as more people ask this question there will be some poking and prodding to explore the new horizons. So I thought I’d save anyone reading this a bit of time by admitting that I’ve known how to do a lot of naughty things for a while now. I’ve been porting for personal use - not to make mods, but for my film projects that demanded it. Characters from different games interacting with each other, locations we wanted to use in another context, or just things that were useful for cinematic purposes - K2 has a lot more animations than K1. I’ve already been poking and prodding for years now and I no longer feel the need to hide it. I’m not going to go into much technical detail yet - perhaps when the modding wiki is online, if it's permitted - but I can answer some general questions right now. For K1/K2: Can we port head models? Yes. There is some difference in the bone structure for each game, but there’s a specific process that works. It’s not even a huge difference, but it makes the lips of K1 heads clip in K2 and leaves K2 mouths gaping open in K1. My guess is Obsidian changed things during their development of the facial animation system that was never finished. The fix is essentially to copy the skin onto the appropriate game’s set of bones. Can we port body/full body models? Yes. Without any qualifiers. PCs? Party members? Aliens? Really? Yes. What about robes with capes? Yes. The supermodels would have to be edited to include the cape bones and their animations, but it could be done. I had one go at it but it’s a bit shoddy at the moment. Can we port other animations? Yes. With a few caveats. 1.) K1 has a limited number of animations that can be scripted, though new cutscene animations are an option. 2.) K2 has more combat animations than K1 and under different names. A couple bugs in K2 stem from failure to account for this, and unless they’re named properly for K1 the same sort of problem would occur. 3.) K2 has a ton of other new animations and they’re added all over the place, which complicates any sort of porting. Can we port models with their own special animations, like Darth Nihilus? Yes. The same animation concerns apply, but that’s it. Can we port textures - fancy ones, like bump maps and ones with animations? Yes. The TPC format doesn’t change, so even in the event that we’re unable to properly decompile to TGA/TXI, simply copying over the TPC is enough. I have a texture archive for K2 that includes all of K1’s textures (and any that happen to share the same file names are overridden by the K2 versions). Can we port areas? Probably. I’ve had one definitive success - m14aa, the Jedi enclave courtyard - and a few partial successes or failures. But it’s still early days and I suspect the problems may have been procedural. The courtyard has grass, running water, and room animations - all the things I’d expect to go wrong first - and zero problems. Lightmaps, which used to be destroyed during ASCII conversion, load fine thanks to the new tools. There is a difference in how each game is lit, so a ported module may end up too bright or too dark, but that can be fixed in the .are file. Good signs so far, but not enough for me to be confident in a hard yes yet. While we’re on the subject, since some of you seem to have been left out of the loop, we can also edit areas now. You might’ve seen area fixes in recent mods, but I’m talking full on editing like changing the lighting or texture mapping or adding a door to a new module. This would come in handy, for example, if one wanted to make new area mods that connect to the existing game, or integrate cut ones like the Czerka warehouse, or restore modules on Dantooine or Korriban that were left out of K2. Can we port feats/lightsaber forms/prestige classes/the upgrade system/the level cap/everything hard-coded? No. These were never porting issues. These game mechanics run directly through the game’s executable rather than an external file that we can mod. For the MMO: Can we port items? Yes. See MDLOps’ tutorial. Can we port vehicles? Yes. I ported the Mantis bounty hunter ship to K1 as part of an area model on Taris. I stripped it of its bump maps because I didn’t know how to work with those at the time, but I imagine if we could figure out how to convert the formats those could be included as well. Can we port character models? Probably. But you’d have to weight it to KOTOR’s set of bones, which isn’t easy or fun work. That’s kind of why there aren’t a lot of new character mods at all for KOTOR. I’m not at all familiar with how the MMO models are set up so I can’t comment further. Can we port areas? Maybe? I can import the models into 3ds Max. To get one in KOTOR would be a lot of work - making new lightmaps and walkmeshes, replacing any emitters like running water with KOTOR standards, almost as much work as making a new area from scratch - but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible. Of course, KOTOR has issues with vertical space - can’t have one walkmesh on top of another - so there may be issues with the designs, depending on the area. But I don’t think poly count or anything like that would be a problem. The MMO seems to average around KOTOR’s level, some things better, some worse. I really just haven’t had the time to try it yet. These are all just my general impressions so far and your individual success may vary. But overall I'd say there’s a lot we can do and not a lot we can’t do - just a lot we weren’t supposed to do until now. The point of this blog isn’t to encourage porting, exactly. It’s your choice whether to do it or not. Because of the rules (the old rules) I’ve always strived to use assets that are in both games wherever possible. It’s more challenging that way, but it almost always resulted in fewer complications. Even with porting allowed, I’ll probably still do that in the future. It's simpler. But now that, surprisingly, after all this time, that is a choice people can make, I want to put this information out there so those of you who are interested in stepping down this path may do as you choose. I’ll be available on Discord if anyone wants to see some more examples of my porting attempts or get a more thorough overview of the process. Personal opinions not endorsed by FileFront Deadly Stream.

I see it as an issue of supply and demand rather than a legal one. If porting is allowed at all people are going to ask for stuff from the MMO because it's the same series. @DarthParametric and others have made MMO-inspired mods. There's a demand for it. But it's a risk. I think we're probably safe, but it is a non-zero amount of risk. And we could limit the extent of that risk - it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Though I'm not suggesting any policy, I'm just postulating for the sake of argument.

Hey, I'm not voting against it or anything. I'm just surprised. It's a good idea, and I kind of suspected that was the reason. I'd suggest a further distinction be made between the regular KOTORs and the MMO to be safe, unless the "source of ported content" thing is going to cover that. Some sort of drop-down menu? To be honest, I've never known anyone to argue that the porting rule shouldn't be changed. I've only heard people say it's not allowed and that's the end of the debate. I've rarely heard anyone express their true feelings. Or at all, really. This was more of a LucasForums issue than Deadly Stream, but it never struck me as a topic that was allowed to be discussed.

We discussed this in the back room - incidentally, I didn't realize that was a staff-only topic before because I forgot I'm "staff" so I'll repeat most of what I said there - and I don't think it's that serious a concern. All the MMO assets are accessible without paying a cent, even the expansion ones. That's not a license to do whatever you want with it, but it does mean it would be really difficult for EA to control what happens to it once they release it onto the internet for free. There are sites that host extracted assets - legal or otherwise - and I've even seen some mods with ported MMO content on the Steam Workshop. It's a madhouse already and so far EA doesn't seem to be doing anything to stop it. Maybe because they're unaware, maybe because they couldn't stop it if they tried, maybe because they don't care? Though this is all my personal naive optimism and I wasn't involved in any decision-making. Yeah, that was my reaction as well. And now for the other stuff I thought was public before (this isn't about porting): I feel like this is a case of history not repeating itself. A few years ago, LucasForums was in a similar state. It didn't actually host mods, but It was the center of discussion for KOTOR modding, having survived a chain of file hosting site deaths - LucasFiles, PC Game Mods, and even FileFront. After they were all gone, there were still modders on LucasForums, posting new links in the Taris Upper City Emporium in whatever manner they could manage to host them. But the site was old and community activity was dwindling. Part of that was due to the loss of a hosting site. The death of FileFront was a huge blow that led to a general reduction of new content, and with fewer new things to talk about, there were fewer reasons to go to the forums. That created a feedback loop that made the problem keep getting worse. But another part of it was that elements of the site design didn't age well. The Network was divided by game series - there was more than just KOTOR, though that I've only been talking about KOTOR is a sign of the problem. In all my years I never posted outside of the KOTOR forums. I'd certainly played many of the other games, and I'd used mods for some of them. I was active on FileFront's Jedi Knight forums, but not the ones for it on LucasForums. The way LucasForums was divided created isolated communities. They each had their own modding forums, of course, but there was also a lot of overlap - they each had their own Star Wars discussion forums, their own off-topic forums, and so on. They might as well have been different websites. There was other stuff, but there's no point in criticizing the site design after it's gone. The point is that part of the problem had a clear technical solution. The site needed an overhaul to address these issues and certain members, notably Lynk Former, were working on it. But instead, LucasForums went down without notice. I don't know what transpired, but I think ultimately the right people weren't in the right place to make things happen. So I'm glad to see that's not happening with Deadly Stream. The site is getting the overhaul it needs and with that out of the way, perhaps we can focus on keeping the community alive after 15 years. The right people are in the right place this time.

You could I suppose. About the Telos lasers, though. @Snigaroo censored that part of the readme for his non-spoiler build, so you may want to consider the same.

I don't mind the one that looks like Uno, though the other one was nice too. My only concern is that for the plus or minus cards, it isn't obvious whether it's in the plus state or minus state at a quick glance. Maybe if the center oval were a solid color, with only the bottom corner in the opposite color? That's a fan design. I remember the website from a few years ago. I think it's gone now, and I don't remember the URL. But I do remember it included other card variants, like silver cards.

Turns out either I lost the model or I was mistaking it for something else. So I whipped out a replacement. It's a bit of a hack job but I think everything else could be handled on the texture. The source models were PFBAL for most of the body and N_CommF for the boots. I made a double-wide texture and I haven't changed the UVW mapping much, so anything mapped to fit PFBAL will work on the left side and anything mapped to fit N_CommF will work on the right side. The texture I've included was just made from the first texture variants of each. Twisted Rancor Trio v1.zip

Interesting idea. Not much impact, as you say, but why not? I do that silly puzzle every time I play the game, so it's an improvement I'd see every time I played the game. It looks to me like the closest match for the body would be PFBAL. The shirt with the midriff would just need a little retexture, but the legs would need a bit of a model edit to turn the shorts into pants. I was actually working on a similar model before, so if you want to use this I could look to see what progress I made. Not a problem, I think. It looks like there are two placeables, one for the Biths and one for the twins, and for the on animation there's an emitter that creates the hologram. I believe that, rather than simple on/off, the placeables could be scripted to use the 10 looping animation slots. That should be just enough to have 4 different Bith characters since they need 2 animations each at most (turning on, and on). Then it would be a matter of animating the alpha values for every single mesh or something easier like sending the characters down into the floor when they're off. I'd also suggest taking a look at G0-T0's holoprojector, v_holo_dur. A visual effect like that would help the hologram objects blend in more. You'd have to fiddle with the settings to reposition it and probably decrease the size, but it doesn't require any assets that aren't already in K1 already.

It's because the light is going to be animated while the holocron is on. I hadn't added it on the model I uploaded, but it seems to be behaving with linear keys now. You're right that most models only have a single key for the open and closed states, but there's no reason they have to be like that. There are some doors that are set up like this already.

Oh, yeah, I am. I was actually having other problems with it before and then came here and saw you and bead-v had sorted that part out already and realized I was out of date. But for this, I meant I did click that and recompile it didn't seem to help. But problem solved either way. Plus, so long as it behaves, I can control which keys are bezier and which are linear in the curve editor.

Damn. I'm only using this for a short video, not intended for release, so I wasn't concerned about that. It must be because I used 30- and 60-sided circles for the rings. Bah. I suppose the only way to confirm is to remodel it. KOTOR being garbage confirmed. Ah. Last time I worked with animations was before bezier controllers were a thing. No luck with MDLEdit, but I found them in the curve editor and that did the trick. Thanks.

I have a couple oddities to report. I'm not sure if MDLEdit is responsible or if it's just KOTOR being garbage, but I've tried everything I can think of on my end. The first issue is that the cube maps on my model seems to be applied inconsistently. From one angle it's ok, but from others it looks like different faces are getting different parts of the map, resulting in odd seams. I've checked the model to make sure the UVW mapping is ok and there's no Z-fighting or anything obvious, no extra vertices to weld. I was pretty careful about that when I made the object and I'm still not seeing any problem after double checking. The second issue is more of a problem, though. I'm working with animated transparency and the animation is bugging out. There are the standard four placeable animations: close2open, open, open2close, and close, and I also threw in default to be safe. The mesh is meant to be 0% visible in the closed state and 100% visible when open, with transitions for the others. But for the open state, rather than staying on the mesh flickers on and off. I've redone the animations from scratch twice now, first to make sure the initial key was set correctly, and the second time to add default and change the order to match one of the other placeables in the game, just to be safe. But same result. And both the binary and ASCII models look fine - the open animation is 3 seconds long and at each end the alpha value is 1.0. The only other thing I can think of is that it's playing open2close instead of open, but I can't imagine why it would be doing that. Both issues can be seen in the video below. Binary and ASCII also attached. Holocron Troubles.zip