JCarter426

View File JC's Dense Aliens for K1 There are so-called "lite" alien models that are of lesser quality than most other models in the game. These include the Quarren and Gran species. Both aliens feature more prominently in the sequel and their models were given an overhaul. This mod ports the K2 versions of the models back to K1, improving the quality of models and creating a more consistent aesthetic. Submitter JCarter426 Submitted 06/25/2018 Category Mods K1R Compatible No  

You don't actually want to convert the models with KOTOR Tool (its version of MDLOps is garbage). You just want to exploit its feature of extracting all the textures with the models when you do so, that way you can easily find the file names. When you double click an MDL file in KOTOR Tool, you should see the option.

If you convert the models with KOTOR Tool, it'll extract any textures that are on the model. Just turn off the "clean directory" thing before you do that or you won't be happy. They should all be on the heads for K1, but if they're not then you would have to check heads.2da. Also I'd suggest you still use the original TPC files and not whatever KOTOR Tool extracts.

I don't believe you can stop the game from giving you XP or get negative XP. Your best bet would be to copy the scripts from the tomb.

I saw people on Reddit suggesting that as well and I've thought about it and I don't really see the benefit in it. If it were actually done, yeah, there would be a few nifty things about it, but... well, it would be a lot of work for little payoff, and there are a lot of complications. So, first of all, you can't just copy all the files from one game to another. You can do that with some of them - all the items, characters, and placeables should be fine once the assets are ported and dialog.tlk adjusted. The module files can be copied over without much change, but the area models need to be converted and that's a bit of work. It may take some time, but that's something I could see happening and I'm planning to do some myself. Nothing ridiculous so far. Now, here's the problem. All of the audio is set up differently in K2. It's not a difference in format, but the file structure is different. In a worst case scenario, that means every single voice file has to be renamed and relocated in order to work in K2 and then every single dialogue file edited to account for the new VO file names. That's hundreds and hundreds of files. Additionally, K2's NWScript functions are changed from K1. K1 scripts might not necessarily execute properly in K2. Some of them will, to be sure, but I'd be surprised if there were no problems at all. You'd be looking at the same level of bug fixes that the restoration projects have faced - and we're still fixing bugs that even those didn't catch. Furthermore, we don't have access to all the source scripts, so some things that go wrong would have to be programmed from scratch unless a more reliable script decompiler were developed. When you add all those up, this would be the largest KOTOR mod ever attempted. Easily bigger than TSLRCM or any planet mod. About as much work as a total conversion mod and how many of those have you seen released? And as much as I'd like having access to K2's new script function and assets and all that good stuff for K1, I'm having trouble seeing the point of it all. I can think of some things that would be nice to have, but I don't know if they would really positively impact the gameplay. Some would be tricky to implement too. It depends on what specifically you want to apply to K1, though, and I'd be interested to hear what people are looking for. Take the prestige classes, for example. There's no way to utilize those in K1. The player can only have two character classes, so unless you change the game to start as a Jedi then that's not going to work. Maybe you could give them to the party members or maybe you could edit the feat gain so the regular classes get those things at high level. You also wouldn't have all six to work with anyway; I think half of them would have to be converted to Jedi classes. It's been a while since I looked at that, but I recall that the starting classes can't be changed and they're Jedi classes in K2 - so you'd have to un-Jedi those classes, but you can't add more Jedi classes, so there go half the prestige ones. And about the level - well, K2 doesn't have a level cap. You gotta work out what to do with that. Either by leaving it alone and just allowing some minor level gain after the Leviathan or Lehon or wherever you hit level 20, or adjusting the XP gain to allow for higher levels than normal. The enemies also scale by the player's level in K2, so you would have to work out how that would affect things and re-balance the difficulty of all the encounters. And you'd have to take into consideration the new Force powers and feats now available from K2, and the different upgrade system. A lot of playtesting would be required. The saber forms are another mechanic that would have to be tested a lot - and you'd have to figure out how to incorporate them into the game. Perhaps Vrook's lines from K2 could be reused and you could go see him after finding each Star Map? I've thought of adding an influence system to K1 - it could be done even without the port - but for it to have any impact on the game would require a lot of programming changes. There are a lot of potential improvements here, no doubt. There's a reason there have been a few lightsaber form and Force power mods and the like to mimic what was introduced in K2. But even if you managed to port the whole game to K1 and had access to the real thing, you'd still have a lot more work to do to make it count for something. The mechanics are done for you but that's not really the hard part - the hard part is the execution and you'd have to repeat what a number of mods have already done. Anyway, I'm not knocking the idea. I'd be very interested to see what one would do with it. But I'm not interested in that one being me. I'd rather spend all that effort on making new things.

What is the "model name", though? Just the file name? It's definitely the base that the game looks at in many cases. For example, let's say you take a head or weapon model and give it new textures, but don't hex edit it to change the base name. If you load up your new head or weapon or whatever it might end up with the wrong textures. If there's an instance of the model you copied present, the game will recognize your new one as an instance of that model because they share the same base name, so your model will have the original's textures. As far as I can tell this is some sort of efficiency thing - the game stores in its memory how it should render a model and it catalogues everything by the base name. You can see the same sort of thing happen if you drop new versions of your MDL/MDX files in Override. The new version of the model won't be rendered until every other instance of it in the game world is replaced, because it's rendering from its old memory. Basically it learns how it should render a specific model and then keeps doing it until told otherwise. And the evidence suggests this is based on the base name and not anything else that might be more logical like the file name.

It works! Thanks. Ah, I don't think it would've helped here either, but sounds useful. Filing this in my brain for future use. All the issues I reported are clear now. I was having some problems with bump maps seemingly not behaving with mesh transparency, but it was annoying me too much so I haven't properly investigated yet. Might not be an MDLEdit thing. You can't edit it currently? I see it as an editable value under Header, though I haven't tried editing it so maybe that would break it. I'd suggest either there or the root node right above it, which currently, which currently can only collapse or decollapse.

Yeah, I don't know... I don't recall what models I was working with but I'm fairly certain I've seen it work before. I can't say the smoothing has been perfect but for the most part it has been fairly logical with KOTORMax/MDLEdit, reflecting what I input for the smoothing groups. The only issues that have arisen are when faces are either too close to each other (like each side of a cape) or the angle is too extreme (like the edge of a cube) and both those are cases of getting bad smoothing, not no smoothing. I'll go through my files to see if I have an example of mesh to mesh smoothing, though I'll have to remember what I was working on because I didn't release most of them. Yeah, they were definitely messed up just on import alone. I set them to what I thought would make sense - 1 for the hands and other accessories, 2 for the torso, 3 for the main cape and 4 for the other side of it. Just going by the smoothing groups alone that should be right and the smoothing preview is showing it as it's meant to be. No, that's normal. I redid the mapping there and actually the hands are from another model now. It's no longer mapped to the original textures, but that whole part is working fine (you just don't have the texture). I went around with the snap toggle on and moved all the cape vertices to the same coordinates as the robe vertices. That has worked on other models and I thought I had sorted that on this one, though I suppose I can't account for MDLEdit's precision or 3ds rounding errors or whatever. You mean the pivot point? How would I do that without messing up the skin? The littlest thing always breaks it.

The thing is I've had very good smoothing results before and I thought some of them were on different meshes. Ah, well... the issues I've fixed are probably worse than the ones I've caused...

I got a little MDLEdit bug. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong again. I've done everything that should work but no matter what, the smoothing won't apply correctly on this model. Original model: Edited model compiled with MDLEdit: Model in 3ds Max with KOTORMax showing the correct smoothing: I've tried all manner of things. Redid the smoothing groups to ensure they're correct, messed around with the vertices and UVW maps to make sure the parts that are supposed to be connecting are, and I even merged the cape and torso meshes and welded vertices... that still didn't fix it, and it probably wouldn't be a realistic solution even if it had. I also tried the other smoothing options in MDLEdit but didn't notice any change. ASCII attached. PMBIM-kotormax_v14.mdl.ascii

I looked at some indoor/urban areas and it didn't seem too bad. They're separated into different rooms like KOTOR but it seemed logical for the most part and not as many rooms per area. The really important thing is that the meshes (at least what I looked at) will import mapped with their textures mapped properly - once you have that, there's no reason they couldn't be put into KOTOR. I hadn't looked at outdoor areas, but what you say makes sense and that's unfortunate. Generating terrain isn't the most difficult thing so it may be simpler to make new ones and only rely on the texture assets. Not long after the game came out, I extracted and converted all of the sound effects to see what was available. And it was all like .001.ogg, .002.ogg, for thousands and thousands of files. This was before there was a hash list available, you see, and with one it is a little better. They're divided into folders based on where/how they appear in the game (Location_FP_Ilum_Space_Station, Abilities_Republic_Ranged, Location_Act_3_Ships, and so on) but there are still hundreds of files in each folder. There are a thousand weapon files, for example, still only named weapons_001.ogg to weapons_1027.ogg. Maybe those are catalogued in an XML file too if we're lucky? I haven't had a proper go at them, only made a marginal effort to extract things when I had the tools. There has already been a concentrated effort to organize the music. Funny thing is we now have access to a handful of KOTOR tracks via the MMO that wasn't available in the original games. Art is really hit or miss, depending on what the hash list has covered. Worst case, you get a file like 0A34C219_57DDEB1C5B7F5536 but a lot of them are pretty specific about what they are.

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.