JCarter426

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.

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.