JCarter426

As long as I'm being gently coerced into reminiscing, I thought I should let you guys know that a buddy of mine is starting a KOTOR podcast series, and he's tasked me with bringing to him news from Deadly Stream. He's not as in touch with the modding community because he only played the games on Xbox back in the day. Jenko on the forums here is also editing the podcast with us. The first episode will be posted this weekend assuming we finish it on time - cue Sith Holocron's slogan - and one of the first news items is, of course, M4-78. Keep in mind that it's news FROM Deadly Stream so if you're already here well you probably know it already but stay tuned and we might have some more interesting bits for you.

Ah, don't worry about it. I get what you're saying. And I agree - it is disconnected from the rest of the game. But... well, what would you do instead? The way I see it, either you'd have to change stuff in other parts of the game, or rewrite M4-78 to have an entirely different origin from the one presented in what little was left in the game files. You could argue maybe one of those things should have been done instead, but in any case, both were beyond the scope of this mod in particular. Even though it was not a restoration in practice, because there wasn't much left to restore, it was meant to be a restoration in spirit - so that meant not directly contradicting anything that was left over, or messing about with other parts of the game (apart from Vash's death on Korriban, obviously). And for better or worse, what was left implied it was a relatively insignificant planet, disconnected from the rest of the galaxy. So that's what we got. But regarding your other point, about not having a big choice to make... well, we started reminiscing about some ideas we had that didn't make it in, and it led to this topic here.

Well, I wasn't allowed to talk, as previously established. But I thought you were still working through the original M4-78, before the Enhancement Project. (Also, I did half a walkthrough already! I'm going to finish it, I promise...)

Yeah, I love puzzles but Obsidian made them all optional so I voted to go with the flow. But since the rest of the main quest at that point was just talking to people, it does make sense to have gameplay there to mix things up... even if dozens of YouTubers in my inbox disagree.

Hah, I have no idea. That color looks good on him, though. I still have my documents too, actually came across them again pretty recently, but it sounds like most of the same stuff. I know my idea for the power puzzle was even more complicated than what ended up in the mod, so I'm sure people would've LOVED that.

I never did sign that non-disclosure agreement... Unfortunately I think all our discussions went down with LucasForums, so even if we did want to do a thing we'd be relying on everybody's memories.

Yeah, it's been a while since I scripted any action scenes but that is my recollection. There's some weirdness with the factions but NPCs can die left and right no problem. And while I think a dead speaker would break the conversation, I know a dying speaker does not:

Previously, on M4-78... Discussion here led me - and Zbyl and others... I saw you guys messing about with the thread titles! - to start reminiscing about some ideas for M4-78 that did not make it into the mod. One idea was the Sith survivor, as Zbyl mentioned, and another - am I allowed to discuss the others? Maybe we should do a post-mortem on M4-78. Well I'm going to discuss some of it now, anyway! Another one was about how the droids developed in isolation from their colonists for so long. In that undeveloped plot, the droids had divided into two factions - one that still followed their original programming to prepare the planet for the colonists, and another that didn't believe in the colonists anymore. There were a lot of ideas thrown around and would've had a more typical player choice for the planet, but like I said, it never developed into one cohesive story.

Well, there is one thing... the game does bring it up but never really addresses the connection. Talia, Vaklu, and the whole royal line are descendants of Freedon Nadd. And Freedon Nadd died centuries ago. If the usual laws of genetics are at play here then a significant portion of Onderon's population could trace their ancestry back to a Sith Lord. That would be enough to draw a hungry Nihilus' attention. But as for M4-78, I agree with Zbyl. It's isolated and I really don't think there's any helping it. Obsidian was pretty thorough in their cutting, this time. Nothing else in the game connects to it because they wanted it gone. So I don't think that's a very fair criticism of the mod. It's asking M4-78 to address things it could not possibly address, because all that content was removed or moved elsewhere. In its very conception, M4-78 had to be a new, standalone thing.

That was a bit of speculation/misremembering on my part. The exact quote was: "The original premise had the player drafted for help by the Handemaiden to free her world from matriarchs led by a figurehead reminiscent of Kreia. After playing K1, we ditched the storyline - and it sucked that we wasted 2 months on it considering how little time we had over the course of the project, but LucasArts couldn't legally give us copies of K1 to examine or play until the contract was signed, so no one's to blame, it was just circumstances." I guess I assumed the figurehead was Atris and the planet Telos, just by association with the Handmaiden. You can read the entire interview here.

Great stuff once again. You have me conflicted about the shuttle dialogue... but I think you do win. While it's nifty to have that back, I suspect that stuff was cut on purpose for being too repetitive and not cinematic enough, and might be better utilized for Malachor. I don't think the Atris Traya was a mix-up, though. I have two theories. First, from what Avellone has said of the original story plan, it seems like Atris was the main villain and most of the story was centered on Telos - so if they had already started recording VO back then, it may have just been left over from that. Atris as a party member might also have factored into that somehow. My other theory is that it might've been left over from when the Handmaiden and Visas were the light/dark party members and led to two completely divergent end games, one in which Atris becomes Darth Traya while Kreia does not. Anyway, I'm looking forward to episode 3!

Both the turbolaser and the blast damage are visual effects and can be applied anywhere. I wrote a script to generate random visual effects (as well as physical damage, copied from the the grenade script) some time ago, and included it in the beta of my K1 Toolbox, which can be found here. One would need to figure out the coordinates for the hangar and then decide frequency of the blasts and such, and then have the script continuously fire. It's not complicated, and I could probably do it in about ten minutes, but I can't run the game currently due to technical difficulties, but I could take a look when I get a new video card. If anyone else wants to take a crack at it in the meantime, feel free to use my script as a reference. The script is jc_exp_r_3016.

Wow, that looks nice. I've been using Excel to generate the data points I need but frankly my feeble attempts were not adequate. I'd love to try this but I can't run the game at the moment - but I know someone else who's interested so I've sent him your way.

When you apply the shader in the 2DA, it gets applied to the entire character. That's why some player lines in K2 have it while most lines don't; some of the heads have jewelry or some such, needs the shiny. Anyway the deal is like you said, either you can use a shader or you can have transparency, but not both. EXCEPT... the electromesh armor does use a different shader. It uses CM_Bright even if you put something else in the 2DA. And if you try to use a shader with any other texture with that model, it will always use CM_Bright instead. I think it does that because the first TXI (PFBC01 or PMBC01) uses that, so they all do. But for Bastila you want the 2DA to have a shader and then the texture to have none, not a different one... so I'm not how to get it to do what you want, but there might be a way to do it. I used to have this problem and it went away when I changed my video card... if I recall correctly, it was a driver issue, essentially certain newer drivers cause KOTOR to not like it, and I couldn't roll it back for whatever reason, so I just switched cards. I'm not sure if there's a fix otherwise. Incidentally, even switching cards hasn't made the issue go away completely for me. It still kind of blocks things out along the edge of things, although it's not as bad as before.

All of her underwear variants use the model P_BastilaBA. And all the clothing is P_BastilaBB. P_BastilaBB02 is her cutscene model (clothes); the only difference is that the flaps aren't flex meshes, but instead are weighted to additional bones. I don't believe the model is ever used in the game; rather, it's left over from when the Bink videos were animated.

No, it's not - but you do need to reload the module if you're currently in it.

Yeah, looking into the animations is going to be my next task. I think I could work with the few flying animations it has now, but it might be possible to grab some more from the shyrack models so I'm going to look into that. I've also been working on getting motion captured animations working with the game models too, through Autodesk MotionBuilder, so if I can find some winged ones I'll give that a try too.

Ah, I didn't realize anybody had done anything with this already. Truth is, I disregarded the model myself for a long time. When I first thought it I just thought "what am I going to do with a grey drexl?" Didn't think texturing it was worth the effort. It wasn't until yesterday that I thought of something to actually use it for, and of course by now all the old networks are in the dark. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, guys.

There's an unused flying drexl model in the game files, c_drexlf. It's fully animated, but not textured: I'm trying to restore this, but frankly I don't have the patience to texture the whole thing from scratch. I tried piecing it together with the other drexl model's texture but it's never going to look as good as what some of you out there could manage. So I'm looking for some help, a collaboration of sorts. I've already adjusted the UVW mapping a bit to be more convenient, and I'm willing to handle anything else in the modeling and scripting areas if necessary. I just need a texture artist better than myself who can fill in the missing pieces and smooth out the edges. There's no real urgency to this - it's just one of my many side projects - but I have some things in mind for it in the future, so I figured I'd put the word out now.

Ah, thanks for reposting these. I haven't had time yet to learn lightmapping yet, but these will definitely come in handy.

Thanks, guys. And if I have any luck with what I'm trying to do, I may be back to help out with the tutorial situation on that front.

Does anyone have a lightmap tutorial? Even through Archive.org I can't find any with the content intact.

When something like that happens, I convert the model back to ASCII through MDLOps and then work from there. This usually fixes the discrepancy between what you see in your modeling program and what you see in the game. If you still have problems, I can take a closer look at your hilts in a few days, and see about making that extended tutorial too. Just backed up with a bit of work at the moment.

This part is problematic. Local booleans behave a little weirdly, so to avoid issues I'd recommend calling them in the following ways: if( GetLocalBoolean(OBJECT_SELF, 53) ) { or if( !GetLocalBoolean(OBJECT_SELF, 53) ) { I forget what the issue is precisely, but it's something along the lines of they can never be set to false; they're either true or not true.

Ah, I'm familiar with some of your previous lightsaber hilts. Converting them for KOTOR isn't too difficult, but its modding tools are a bit finicky. Firstly, you need to export an existing lightsaber hilt of the same type. The models are w_lghtsbr_***, w_dblsbr_***, and w_shortsbr_***, in either models.bif or items.bif depending on the game. You need both the MDL and MDX files; put them in a folder somewhere, unedited. Next you need MDLOps to convert the binary models (MDL and MDX) to an ASCII format that NWMax can read. Load the saber MDL and select "read and write model". It'll automatically generate a new model (for example, w_lghtsbr_001-ascii.mdl). This is the file you want to import into your modeling program through NWMax (import geometry & animations, on the left under "MDL Loading"). Merge your own saber geometry (just the hilt) into the scene, then move and resize it so it more or less matches the original saber. After you're done with that, delete the old saber and then use ResetXForm in NWMax's Mesh Tools on your saber geometry. That's basically a safety to make it use the correct transformation data, because it can get confused and use the original settings sometimes. Link the saber blade geometry to your hilt, then link your hilt to the saber dummy (not the Aurora Base, the other one). Once you're done editing your model, select the Aurora Base and export it through the Modify panel. Make sure you export this in a new location so you don't mess up any models you've been working with (I usually send it straight to the desktop). Export geometry and animations, and you can ignore the sanity check as that thing is never helpful. This will generate a file with the same name as your Aurora Base, but it's still in ASCII format and has to be converted back to binary to be loaded in the game. Rename the file, adding the extension "-ascii_new" (e.g. w_lghtsbr_001-ascii_new.mdl) and put it in the folder with all your other models. You'll need MDLOps 0.5 for this next step; it doesn't work in version 0.6 and 0.7 doesn't currently support it. Select the Replacer tool and load the binary model (the one you extracted from the game files) and the ASCII model (your own edited one). When you hit "read models" a new window will come up, asking you to replace stuff. Select the original hilt (it will be named "lshandle" or some such) and replace it with your saber hilt geometry. Essentially, you're taking the hilt from your edited model and placing it in the original binary model with the correct blades. The blade color will depend on the model (001 is blue, 002 is red, 003 is green, 004 is yellow, 005 is violet, and the K2 colors aren't consistent so you'll have to look those up). You'll either have to run the replacer several times for each color, or duplicate the compiled models and hex edit the saber names and blade colors, whichever you prefer. You will have to use the replacer for the red saber anyway, because the blade texture has a different number of characters (w_lsabrered01 as opposed to, for example, w_lsabregren01 for green). Anyway, after you have all your models, move them to Override and rename them. Copy all your textures as well. If your textures use an alpha channel for shaders, you'll need to generate another file for that, but it's pretty simple. A simple metallic shader is a text file that says "envmaptexture cm_baremetal". Rename the file to match the hilt texture's name and change the file extension to TXI. One last thing: K1 and K2 models are in a slightly different format, and may cause the game to crash if one is placed in the other. So you'll need to repeat these steps separately with binary files extracted from each game. I think that's everything. I can go over it in more detail later (with pictures and such) if you want.