JCarter426

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

Hmm, that's interesting. I think I'm starting to connect some dots... Logic would tell me that if a texture can have shader info (either on a TXI or in a TPC) then the game should read that when it reads the texture but we've always known that's not the case. You can't use whatever cube map you want on a texture for PMBFM, for example - it always ends up as CM_Bright. And that's down to the shader info on PMBF01 being "envmaptexture CM_Bright". Even if you were editing PMBF02 or 03 or whatever, it wouldn't care. So we've known for a while now that the rule was you can't have different things on different texture variations. It would always default to whatever the first texture said. For HK-47, I can guess the reason his model is lacking textures in K2 - they left them out because they knew they'd be using multiple textures on different HKs for the same model. It's the same case with the Mandalorian variants and other models that rely on race textures. They're missing shaders in K2 and editing the TXIs doesn't do anything. While I was working in K2 I was just used to that being the way things are, and then when I got back into modding K1 I was surprised when I didn't run into that problem. I figured that was down to the games being different, since there are numerous things that are broken in one and not the other. But if your theory is correct then it's nothing to do with the game, and it's not the first texture's shader info either - it's the shader info of the texture that's on the model (by coincidence, this is usually the first texture variation). Even if that texture is never being drawn. Now, I've looked at the Mandalorian models. There's a texture in K1 and there's no texture in K2. I don't know why. But this is starting to make a lot of sense. I feel like it can't be that simple but I don't think my memory is reliable. For so long I've been defaulting to editing appearance.2da because I knew that worked. So I can't say I had to do it every time I did it. Further testing is still needed. Yeah, that's been my policy as well.

I've gone back and edited the descriptions of some of my mods - Sound Effects for K1, Blaster Visual Effects for K1, and Blaster Visual Effects for K2 - because I've started a new thing. It's a video series I'm calling my Mod Showcase. I felt that the previous setup wasn't doing a very good job of showing what the mods were all about. With the sound effects, the screenshot was... obviously not helpful in the slightest because that's not how sound works. The Blaster Visual Effects mods do have a more visual thing going on, but I have firsthand experience of being unable to judge these mods by still images alone. When the games' paused it's kind of just a big blur. It really isn't the same thing as seeing it in motion. I needed to watch the blasters fired from multiple angles when I was working on the mod to decide how I felt about my changes, and I kept going back and forth on the issue. For a while I wasn't sure if I was making things better or worse. I can't tell you how many kath hounds I killed during testing. So, in both cases, I thought having video would help to give people more of an idea of what the heck the mod does does and maybe more of an incentive to download it. The videos serve as a more in depth preview, for those of you who only take a cursory glance and judge the mod by its screenshots (I'm certainly guilty of this myself). I do a bit of before and after also go into a little technical detail about how I've done things from time to time. I've only done two so far, but I might continue this format with my other mods. These were the only ones that stood out to me as needing a more involved explanation, but I already know what my mods do, so a second opinion would help. Let me know if you have any specific requests. Also, to my surprise, with the site upgrades Deadly Stream automatically embedded my YouTube videos when I pasted the links. I didn't have to fuss around with it at all and was able to put them in the descriptions with no difficulty. I'd actually had this idea for a while and made the first video without considering how to get it onto the site. We could embed YouTube before, but I wasn't sure if it would work in a mod description, and then I wasn't sure how to do it in the upgrade. And then it went and did it on its own, so it definitely gets a pass on ease of implementation. It's too early to say whether my showcase is a good idea, but I do think some other mods could benefit from a video preview (particularly other sound effect mods) and if you were worried about having to fuss around then you don't have to worry about that. Many kath hounds died to bring you this information.

Here's a quick and dirty list in the meantime: On your model, for each bit of geometry that you want to use a normal map, make sure the object has the OdysseyTrimesh modifier and select it to be "bumpmappable" and export. On the ASCII, this flag is "tangentspace 1". Export and convert to binary as usual. Your model's diffuse texture will have to point to the bump map in its TXI data. "bumpmaptexture" and then the name of the bump map texture. Make the bump map texture. You can do this in your modeling program if you have skills like DP, or you can do it the lazy way and make a greyscale height map, with white being the raised bits and black being the lowered bits. You can convert a height map into an RGB normal map with a tool such as Nvidia's plug-in for Photoshop. Save the normal map as a TGA in indexed color mode. For the TXI data, at minimum you need the bump map's to say "isbumpmap 1". Convert your bump map TGA and TXI to TPC if you don't want to crash the game. The diffuse texture is fine as is. I've attached example TXIs. Mine have a bit of extra properties too. Hmm, is this problem specific to K2? I've only just started fiddling around with maps on character models but I haven't had any issues applying them yet. But if remember correctly, the TXI issue is only a problem in K2. K1 does load it properly from the TXI when the 2DA is set to default. So if it's the same deal as that, maybe the bump maps are ok in K1 too. Bump Map Example TXIs.zip

Oh, that makes more sense. It's probably that the game is can only read what it wants to read (i.e. if it's looking for one channel it doesn't know what to do with two, and the reverse) and there's nothing we can do about that. And really what it wants to read makes sense. You want SFX and VO and such to be mono and music to be stereo. The cutscene sound mixes are in the music folder and maybe they're there for a reason.

Huh, that would be interesting. It wouldn't have a lot of practical benefit, since in general with video games you want the sounds to be mono because the engine is taking care of putting everything in real 3D space. However, it would be better to have the option than not, of course, and I definitely could imagine some uses, such as with music. Now that I think about it, of course the files must be stereo. The sound mixes for some of the game cutscenes are there, and they definitely aren't mono. If anything, it's strange that WAVs we add have had to be mono up to this point.

You really shouldn't have to do anything fussy with the audio files to get them to work. I've been putting them in the game for many, many years and I can tell you that back in 2009 I did not know anything about a fake WAV header and couldn't have been adding one. I've always used standard, raw, uncompressed WAV files. They do have to be mono and that's what I've seen trip people up a lot. Sampling rates of both 48.0 KHz and 44.1 seem to work. I only know that because I've forgotten to pay attention to that before and surprisingly didn't have problems with either. I don't know if putting them in Override will actually override what's in streamwaves but there are a couple options if it doesn't. You could include the original in your install under a different file name (like whatever_bak.wav). Then add both to the installer and let it overwrite the original ones. Alternatively, you could set up another patch as an uninstaller. Have both versions overwrite, one with your mod's files and one with copies of the originals. That's probably what I'd do. I've actually thought about making uninstallers with TSLPatcher before, but I always thought it was too much a pain, and I don't think it can delete certain things anyway. But this is one case where it seems doable.

I do for the male ones, actually. I'm not sure if the female lines are different or not. These are from K1: In K2 the player doesn't have a soundset, however. It's possible to add one, but only by editing a save file after you've started the game.

I have a request. I just uploaded a new mod for the first time since the overhaul (much nicer, by the way) and I noticed there's an option to follow the file. Selecting this, however, does not make me follow the corresponding support topic for the mod. So it would be nice if it did both. I'd also prefer this to be on by default, but that's a lesser issue.

View File JC's Blaster Visual Effects for K2 This mod changes the visual effects for all the laser blasts in the game. Energy blasters, ion blasters, disruptors, bowcasters - I've replaced them all. Except sonic, because really, sonic? In general, I've added more detail and made them match what's depicted on film as best as I could, when there was a visual reference. I took screenshots of the movies and got out my eyedropper tool and everything. The cores of the lasers are brighter so they look more like lasers, instead of having the whole thing as one flat color. I also messed around with light objects so each laser will illuminate surrounding objects in the appropriate color. For disruptors, I've included three color options: white, green, and yellow. The default install is white, like the original, and the other two are included as optional things. Submitter JCarter426 Submitted 06/04/2018 Category Mods TSLRCM Compatible Yes  

View File JC's Blaster Visual Effects for K1 This mod changes the visual effects for all the laser blasts in the game. Energy blasters, ion blasters, disruptors, bowcasters - I've replaced them all. Except sonic, because really, sonic? In general, I've added more detail and made them match what's depicted on film as best as I could, when there was a visual reference. I took screenshots of the movies and got out my eyedropper tool and everything. The cores of the lasers are brighter so they look more like lasers, instead of having the whole thing as one flat color. I also messed around with light objects so each laser will illuminate surrounding objects in the appropriate color. For disruptors, I've included three color options: white, green, and yellow. The default install is white, like the original, and the other two are included as optional things. Submitter JCarter426 Submitted 06/04/2018 Category Mods K1R Compatible No  

What makes the ASCII look easier to me is that everything is listed together on one line - timecode, red value, green value, blue value. In this case it doesn't really matter much because there aren't a lot of animation frames but for a more complicated one that makes it easier to tell what's going on. Also, you can do a find/replace to change the "1.0 0.0 0.0" to whatever color you want. I do this all the time with ASCIIs when I forget to set the ambient and diffuse colors properly. But I was able to figure out how MDLEdit's thing works just by looking at it, so it could be a lot worse!

Ah. Yeah, I suspected that. I think MDLEdit can edit them, based on what I'm seeing here: timekey_0 0.0 timekey_1 0.0333333 timekey_2 0.166667 timekey_3 0.333333 timekey_4 0.466667 timekey_5 0.5 color_0_r 1.0 color_0_g 0.0 color_0_b 0.0 color_1_r 1.0 color_1_g 0.0 color_1_b 0.0 color_2_r 1.0 color_2_g 0.0 color_2_b 0.0 color_3_r 0.0 color_3_g 0.0 color_3_b 0.0 color_4_r 0.0 color_4_g 0.0 color_4_b 0.0 color_5_r 0.0 color_5_g 0.0 color_5_b 0.0 I'm guessing the color_# things are the keyframes and the numbers correspond to the list of timecodes at the top. In this case, it's clear that the frames with 100% red are the ones that need to be edited and the all zeros are the off keys. Though this is a bit messy so it may be easier to edit the ASCII as you say.

Oh, it's all fine now. I was just reminiscing about the dark ages.