ROR Dev Diary 1 - Main Menu & Character Creation

[N-DReW25 1,374]

Hello, and welcome to the first Dev Diary of the Revenge of Revan mod.

For those of us who have been living under a rock for the past decade, Revenge of Revan (or ROR for short) is a total conversion mod for Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords (Kotor II) that adds a standalone original story that continues from where Kotor II left off. With the Star Wars The Old Republic MMO (often shortened as just TOR) being released not long after the original ROR Demo, and with the new and innovative modding tools released over the years since, the ROR mod has gone through some drastic changes and has never looked better! In this Dev Diary I hope to show you some of these exciting changes, but first… I need to address the following.

 

Whilst the ROR mod is a spiritual successor to Kotor II, emphasis on “spiritual”, it is NOT Kotor III! Kotor III was a video game that was cancelled by LucasArts in the late 2000s, the ROR mod is entirely fan fiction. Whilst we do strive to make the characters, locations, and elements of the mod faithful to the canonical Legends material, the story you shall experience in the ROR mod is entirely NON-CANON and should be treated as such. The ROR mod is intended to act as a bridge between Kotor II and TOR MMO, you can play a strictly canonical playthrough that would hypothetically lead to the events of TOR or play a non-canonical playthrough that sees you defeat the Sith menace once and for all. We shall get into further detail about this in the next Dev Diary.

 

For those who may be wondering, the ROR Dev Diaries serves a few purposes.

 

1) It allows for you, the player, to get a taste of the mod without having to download it first.

2) Assuming someone makes a YouTube video about the mod once it's released, thus making purpose 1 redundant, it serves to give you developer commentary on some of the choices made in the development of the ROR mod. Giving you a unique insight into the mod and may serve to answer any questions you may have had when playing, or you can ask your own questions in the comment section of this dev diary relating to the content I've showcased in-case I didn't answer your question.

3) It serves as a space for the ROR Developers to pitch feature proposals to the player base before we commit our time and effort into developing them. We wouldn't want to waste an entire year developing something the players aren't going to like. With the feedback and your opinions which you'll hopefully leave in the comments we may get an idea of what the player base actually wants which will hopefully influence our decision on said feature.

 

In this first Dev Diary, I shall focus on everything you see just before starting a new game – the Main Menu & Player Creation.

And be warned, this entire Dev Diary is just the Main Menu & Player Creation. We actually start playing the mod in the second Dev Diary so stick around for when that comes out.

(Please let me know if any of the links and/or images are broken)

 

Starting off the mod, you arrive at the main menu screen.

The character you see to the left is described as a Sith Witch though canonically she is a Sith Sorcerer, do know that she is not the main antagonist of the mod. Similar to Kotor II, there shall be a group of Sith who you will encounter throughout your journey, including the Sith Twins you encountered all the way back in the Demo, this Torguta character on the main screen, and more Sith who are yet to be announced.

 

Many of the characters introduced in the ROR mod have unique and innovative designs, this character is based on a heavily modified variant of Kreia’s model. You can see the Darth Traya-style Sith Robes she’s wearing though her head has been heavily modified to resemble a Torguta. Here is a side by side comparison that shows you what I'm describing.

This character will rely on Force attacks when you battle her in-game as she is a Sorceress, whereas the Sith Twins from the Demo will focus on melee combat as they're both Sith Assassins.

 

As you can see in the screenshot, her head Montrals and Lekku head tails are short, similar to . They’re probably like this because the game would have trouble rendering/animating Shaak Ti sized Montrals and Lekkus (or at least they would back in 2011 when this character was made). And just for anyone who's curious, someone actually did try to make a Shaak Ti head for Kotor and this and this was the result... I'm sure you can see why we're sticking with our current appearance. Since we can't add a proper Shaak Ti sized head for this character, she'll probably be young, around the player character’s age, in-game when you encounter her to explain her appearance. And for any of you who still aren't sold on her appearance... just know that Disney's done worse by having Ahsoka's character design go from this to .

 

This character is similar to Darth Sion in that she's on the menu for the start of the game but will be replaced by another, much stronger, character as the game progresses. I believe @Logan23 showcased the next Sith Lord who appears on the main menu on Moddb back in the day, which I shall once again showcase here.

 This character is based off Atris' cut Darth Traya model. She is another Sith Sorceress and is paired together with the Sith Torguta, I imagine this character would be the Torguta’s Master and would be a lot stronger than the Torguta. This later character also isn’t the big main bad guy of the mod, there’s more characters who’ll replace her on the main menu screen. Now I know it’s possible to set the menus manually via the config in the main game folder, though do know that these later characters have not yet been implemented into the menu as of right now – though there is a bug where if you try messing with the config. This is probably a remnant of Thor110’s Expanded Galaxy mod… speaking of which!

 

The ROR mod will now utilize ported assets from the first game as porting has been allowed in our modding community since 2018. Thor110’s ported K1 modules from the Expanded Galaxy mod will be used to make new areas for the ROR mod whether it be reskinning K1 areas to make new areas for new planets or possibly even allowing you to revisit areas from the first game (emphasis on “possibly”).

 

Thor110 has also improved the menus for the ROR mod. Kotor I’s menus are blue, Kotor II’s menus are green, the menus in The Jedi Master’s and Edge of Darkness mods are both red, and ROR’s menus are orange... or at least they're supposed to be. To demonstrate the extent of Thor110's improvements to ROR's menus, here is a screenshot showing the skill menu during the player creation menu. On the top is how the skill menu used to look like back in the old Demo, and below is how the skill menu looks today.

 Thor110 has also released other menu colour mods for Kotor II which you can see in the links embedded in the text. If you would like see ROR’s orange menus released as a standalone mod for Kotor II, let us know in the comment section of this Dev Diary and we might consider releasing the ROR menu to the public should the mod team agree to it.

 

Unlike in the Demo, this mod has proper loading screens for all the modules you shall be visiting. The legal load screen and the default load screen are still untouched from the Demo and will need modern redesigns, though other than those two you'll have new load screens based off JC's Loadscreen Template for K2 meaning these load screens will be accurate to the ones you see in Kotor II. We shall see more of them in upcoming dev diaries, this heavily outdated load screen from the 2020 build should give you a taste of what's to come.

 

Moving on to the player character selection screen:

The player options are virtually unchanged from the Demo, you'll still have over 50 player heads to choose from, including a plethora of alien heads, and the default clothing is still the K1 Jedi Robes. Though this could change in the future.

 

We won’t be adding any more alien player variants, though we may add new alien NPC variants that you can encounter throughout the game. That means, for example, we won’t add Kel Dor players though we may add Kel Dor NPCs if the models and textures become available to us. The only exception to the “no new alien player variant” rule would be to add female Devaronians. We already the male Devaronian heads, and I hope one day that we can add a female equivalent for this species at some point.

 

With the male Twi'lek player heads, something I never noticed was that they have a revamped head model. I thought this was added between 2011 and 2020 but it turns out these heads were in the Demo from the beginning.

Incase you can't see it, the Twi'lek player's neck isn't fat like they are in the vanilla Kotor II - they normally look like this. What's really strange about the improved Twi'lek heads of the ROR mod is that, as of right now, only the Twi'lek players get these updated models - Twi'lek NPCs still have the default fat necked heads.

 

I have previously shared the concept of ROR Submods called "Addons", these mods would be released separately to the main ROR mod but wouldn't work without the ROR mod. If you're still confused about how that would look, I previously shared a screenshot of the Yoda character "Ulon" with an updated model and texture from the High Quality Aliens: Master Vandar mod which is for Kotor I. If we get permission from Ashton Scorpius, a version of his mod, Better Male Twi'lek Heads, may be released as a ROR Addon to give your male Twi'lek player character and Twi'lek NPCs improved heads with 3D ears.

 

I would also like to point out that there are also these Twi'lek head variants with head coverings. These Twi'leks are unique in that, similar to your underwear in the Kotor games, their head coverings actually changes color when you fall to the Dark Side. Here is a side by side of the Dark Side and Light Side Twi'lek with head coverings.

Many of the player heads in ROR unfortunately do not have Dark Side transitions... yet. We hope to add these to the ROR mod through updates.

Even though it isn't integrated into the ROR mod right now, most, if not all, of the human ROR players now have Dark Side transitions and they're available to the public right now through RedRob41's RoR Playable Humans for TSL mod. But if the lack of Dark Side transitions frightens you then do not worry - for you won't be able to completely fall to the Dark Side in the first ROR release without cheating.

 

Another possible change we are considering for the player character would be the player clothing. The K1 Robe clothing was a unique element of the ROR Demo back in the day as porting between Kotor I and Kotor II wasn’t allowed back then, the ROR mod got past the no porting rule due to the fact that the K1 Robe models and the brown K1 Robe texture were actually hidden with Kotor II’s game files and thus could be used without porting. And just like the robes, quite a few K1 heads were also hidden within the Kotor II game files.

 

In this blog post by Sith Holocron, you can see in the K2 heads section that there are a few K1 heads like PFHC03 - you obviously can't play as PFHC03 in Kotor II but both the head model and texture was buried in the game files meaning it isn't considered porting if you were to mod it into your game. You can also notice a few white heads in Sith Holocron's list, these are heads who's models are in the game files but their textures are not. That means you can use the head PMHB04 without porting but if you were to grab his texture from Kotor II then it would be porting.

So if that's the case, you might be wondering how we used PMHB04 back in 2011 without porting the K1 texture.

From what I understand of the process, RedRob41 was able to use this head model without the K1 texture by mapping out the model's UV layout in a separate mudding program. Once he had the UV layout, he was able to take samples from the textures of Kotor II player heads and he was able to literally stitch together a brand new texture using only the Kotor II head textures - this method is called "Photo Sourcing" I believe.

 

But alas, porting is no longer an issue in our modding community and such measures are no longer necessary going forward. So you might be wondering how this relates to our K1 Robe Clothing? Well, now that porting is allowed I’m sure many of the new and younger players of the ROR mod won’t find the K1 Robe Clothing as impressive as it was back when porting was a cultural taboo. Whilst he may not share this view in particular, Logan23 has expressed a desire to get rid of these K1 Robe Clothing and his reasoning is simple - he wants to use player heads as NPCs just like how Obsidian used player heads for various NPCs across Kotor II… but he can’t do that because the default clothing for the ROR players as NPCs will always be the K1 Jedi Robes.

So to prevent you from walking into a Cantina full of people wearing Jedi Robes, Logan gave these NPCs different armors. Below is an example of two NPCs with the player appearances as NPCs, if they were given clothing they'd both be wearing the K1 Robe Clothing as seen above.

And if you follow this link, you'll see what a Cantina full of these NPCs would look like - you simply can't tell who's a bounty hunter, who's a commoner, or if anyone in this room has a special sidequest as literally everyone in this screenshot sticks out like a sore thumb.

 

I would like to make this clear, we have not touched the player clothing just yet - though we also haven't used player appearances for NPCs either due to the above mentioned problem. Just as there are now alien player head options, most of these aliens will be available as generic heads meaning there will be aliens on Corellia who'll not only wear proper clothes, but they won't reuse a player head option.

 

So right now, we are torn between three different options in regards to the player's clothing moving forward:

 

Option 1) Remove the K1 Jedi Robes and restore the vanilla default clothing, meaning your clothes will look like this again - what Logan23 wants.

Option 2) Keep the K1 Jedi Robes and simply don't use ROR players as NPCs - what RedRob41 wants.

Option 3) My own personal compromise between these two positions.

 

In the spoiler below will be my very own proposal for a radical rework of how Jedi Robes work as an item in the ROR mod. If you don't care about this then feel free to skip the spoiler and continue on with the Dev Diary, though it would be greatly appreciated if you would hear me out and leave your opinions on the proposal in the comment section.

 

Spoiler

 

My idea for a Jedi Robe rework goes like this: we remove the K1 Jedi Robes as default clothing, restoring the default commoner clothing just like Logan23 wants, and reimplement the K1 Jedi Robes as an actual robe item so that they aren't cut.

 

In vanilla Kotor II, there are two Jedi Robe types in the baseitems.2DA and in the appearance.2DA - the Jedi Padawan Robe and the Jedi Master Robe.

 

In my proposed robe rework, the Jedi Padawan Robe would be replaced with the K1 Jedi Robe, the Jedi Master Robe would be replaced with the Jedi Padawan Robe, and the Jal Shay Armor would be replaced with the Jedi Master Robe.

 

The Jedi Padawan Robe item that looks like this will be replaced with a K1 Jedi Robe model and will look like this. The Jedi Knight Robe item which looks like this will be replaced with a Jedi Padawan Robe model and will look like this (The Jedi Robe item in the vanilla game). The Jedi Master Robes shall be pretty much unchanged from their vanilla appearance though they shall now occupy the 2DA slot the Jal Shay armor currently does as their 2DA slot will be replaced by the new Knight Robe type.

 

The textures RedRob41 made for the player clothing shall be recycled as proper Jedi Robe items you can find throughout the game, and with the modder's resources that are available to us I predict we can add up to 15 K1 Jedi Robe items.

 

You might be wondering, if the Jal Shay robes are removed does that mean ROR won't have any armor robes? Nope. Logan23 got permission from Darth Darkus to use his Armored Robes, the character Kyle from the Demo wears one of these Armored Robes. Since these Robes are based on the Jedi Padawan model, this proposed rework of the Jedi Robes won't affect Armor Robes as they Jal Shay Armors will simply be replaced with Darth Darkus style armors.

 

A second, more controversial, component of this proposal is a "nerf" for these robes.

 

The Jedi Padawan Robe type using the K1 Jedi Robe model will have no nerfs, but their stats will typically be low. That means these robes will have low defense even if the item in question is rare and has high attribute stats like Wisdom.

 

The Jedi Knight Robe type using K2's Jedi Padawan Robe model will have an added dexterity restriction of 5. They'll be similar to a Combat Suit meaning if you go above dexterity 20 you won't get the additional dexterity bonuses beyond 20, though unlike a Combat Suit you can still use Force Powers. They'll have slightly stronger defense than Jedi Padawan Robes.

 

The Jedi Master Robe type will have an added dexterity restriction of 3. They'll be similar to a Military Suit meaning if you go above dexterity 16 you won't get the additional dexterity bonuses beyond 16, though unlike a Military Suit you can still use Force Powers. They'll have a reasonably strong defense comparable to light armor to make up for the dexterity restriction.

 

The Armored Robe type using K2's Jedi Padawan Robe model will have an added dexterity restriction of 1. They'll be similar to Battle Armor meaning if you go above dexterity 12 you won't get the additional dexterity bonuses beyond 12, though unlike Battle Armor you can still use Force Powers. Their defense will be stronger than what is expected of a robe item with defense bonuses comparable to medium armor to make up for the dexterity restriction.

 

This robe rework is intended to shape how a player chooses to build their player and party members. The K1 Jedi Robes will have no dexterity restriction, will typically give good attribute bonuses for rare variants of this type but will have low defense. The Jedi Knight and Jedi Master Robes will have higher defense but will have higher dexterity restrictions and less bonus attributes, do you use K1 Jedi Robes to max out your dexterity and other attributes or do you limit your dexterity so you can use Knight and Master Robes for higher defense and moderate attributes? And if you're someone who doesn't really need bonuses to attributes are you willing to sacrifice your dexterity for an Armored Robe with insane defense?

 

And for those of you wondering - why a dexterity restriction? Well, the idea is that your cloak is weighing you down - the Master Robe cloak is heavier than the Knight Robe and the Armored Robe also has heavy armor plates in addition to a cloak.

 

For those of you who like my proposal, I may consider making this proposal a separate Kotor II mod as a means of testing how this proposal would actually work in-game. Even if you don't think this should be added to ROR, there might still be a really good mod idea to come from all of this.

 

In terms of attributes and skills, there haven’t been any changes that I know of, though if you think there’s good reason to change something like attributes and class skills etc, we’d love to hear your case.

 

Much like in Kotor II, the attributes and skills you pick can appear in your dialogue response options if said attribute or skill is high enough. So whilst we haven’t yet added droids to repair or terminals to slice into, the Computer Use and Repair skill can both be helpful in certain dialogues and can even help you in influencing droid or computer-expert companions in dialogue, so there’s a good reason to invest in your skills in this mod.

Here is an example of the Awareness skill appearing in dialogue:

Feats and Force Powers will undergo some changes in the ROR mod. For starters, I believe Logan23 has gone through and changed many of the Feat and/or Force Power requirements so that you need to be a higher level than you would in Kotor I or Kotor II. This is to prevent your young, inexperienced Padawan character from getting Force Storm on the fourth planet as well as to prevent you from getting Wound and Force Shock in front of Drayen during the first mission to Corellia.

 

Below is a second one of my "totally not controversial" proposals, feel free to skip over it if you don't want to hear it but we would appreciate it if you gave us your feedback on this idea.

 

Spoiler

Assuming the player can complete the game (as in the entire mod from start to finish) at Level 19 for example, we “may” consider implementing a Level Cap (Yes, we can do this). For example, we could Cap the player’s Level at possibly Level 20, Level 25, Level 30 etc. If we can implement a Level Cap like this, I’d also consider “removing” all of the added Kotor II Feats and Force Powers so that the Feat and Force Power options are similar to how it was in Kotor I.

 

Now you might be wondering “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!”, to which I say this: the player character isn’t the war veteran Exile, they are a young and inexperienced Padawan, similar to how Revan was an inexperienced Padawan due to his/her memory reprogramming. Instead of the ROR player being able to train their Force sensitive companions and teaching them your Feats and Force Powers like the Exile can... in ROR, it’s going to be the opposite.

 

Feats like Close Combat, Stealth Run, Regen Force Points, and Class Skill feats won’t be available through the Level Up screen, they have to be taught to the player via NPCs or Companions. Force Powers are the same; Sonic Scream, Battle Meditation, Beast Trick, Hold Breath will all need to be taught by an NPC or Companion.

 

We can also do the same with modded Force Powers, we could potentially add powers like Force Pull and Force Flame to the mod that can only be obtained by the player via training with NPCs, companions, and/or Holocrons you find throughout the game.

 

So, assuming you only have the K1 feats and are restricted to Level 20, you’ll have to gain influence with your companions in order to convince them to train you more abilities, here are some examples of what this may look like:

 

1) A party member can teach you a “Class Skill” based on their own class, for example a party member with the Soldier class like Uldir can teach you the Demolitions Class Skill if you’re a Jedi Consular who doesn’t have that Class Skill assuming you have high influence over him.

2) Similar to how Kotor II companions react to your alignment, ROR party members can not only react to your alignment but offer to teach you new abilities if your alignment matches there’s. So if the party member Nindu likes you and you’re both Dark Side he may teach you the Dual Strike feats.

3) Your own character build may also influence your party member's decision to train you. A Jedi party member like Drayen may be unimpressed if you have Wisdom 8 and may refuse to teach you a new feat and/or force power, though said Jedi party member may teach you the new feat and/or force power if you have a high set amount of Wisdom. This would apply to most attributes, so it’ll be nearly impossible to get all the feats and abilities through every companions without cheating.

 

4) A party member may even be able to give you an exclusive feat that you , the player, aren’t supposed to have (assuming the game isn’t hardcoded to prevent it from working). This means you, a Jedi, could have the opportunity to obtain Scoundrel’s Luck, Force Jump, Evasion, Uncanny Dodge, Sneak Attack, Echani Strike, Implant Switching, Point Guard, Weapon Proficiency: Wrist Mounted Rockets and more.

 

The above is just a proposal, if the player base approves of these concepts we may one day add them, if they strongly oppose them we don’t, and if people give their own ideas on how to improve/rework these proposals these could also be taken into consideration.

 

But what does the ROR mod add in terms of feats right now? Well…

 

Players will receive a feat based on their species, we will talk more about these feats in the next Dev Diary though do know that these feats will be used by NPCs to determine the player’s species, allowing these NPCs to react your species via dialogue. Here is a screenshot of an NPC reacting to a Miraluka player, the same species that Visas Marr is in Kotor II:

Let's say if Gorton Colu was in the mod, he’d be able to recognize if you’re a human or not… your species is no longer a cosmetic choice, you can be rewarded or punished for the species you have chosen at random points in the mod. Obviously a racist like Gorton Colu isn’t going to like a Twi’lek player, though a Twi’lek character might be equally discriminative towards a human player than they would to a fellow Twi’lek.

 

Oh, and don't forget how I previously mentioned how almost every alien you can play as will also have alien NPC commoner variants, so expect dialogue and NPC encounters to get... spicy throughout your playthrough. This feature will be discussed at greater length in the next Dev Diary.

 

There is currently a bug where the player will still receives the War Veterans feat, even though the player isn’t a War Veteran we'll most likely keep the Feat by renaming it to imply something else so you can get those sweet 30 Vitality Points at the start of the game that this feat gives you.

 

And with that, the Dev Diary comes to a close. Please let us know in the comments of this thread what you think, and feel free to stick around for more updates and Dev Diaries for the ROR mod – a mod we hope will be yours to play soon.

[Nm6k 0]

For the companion feats idea (Which I do like the idea of. I really enjoyed all the bonuses you get in 2 from interacting with your companions) if you have very high influence (or whatever ends up being used) with a companion, I don't see the point of an alignment check unless it's for a force power or something similar that relays on one's state of being 

[Spectrometer 16]

I'm glad this mod is close to release after following it for more than a decade.

I like the idea for the Jedi robes, I always felt like the Jedi padawan robes model was more appropiate and the Master model was a little too big. I would like if you could mantain the Jal Shey models for some other armor item, though, they are nice models. I always use this mod in K2 for them:

 

And I am also glad you are now able to use ported assets from the first game. It adds so much variety and possibilities for level design!

 

[Lewok2007 54]

I love how the UI is unique and stands out from the original versions of the games and other mods while still looking good. It looks more like a pomegranate colour than orange, but I think that works well. I think it would be nice if a version of the UI was released standalone. Personally I think it's easier on my eyes and looks better than the TSL green ui.

 

Quote

Option 3) My own personal compromise between these two positions.

I think your idea works the best. I'm assuming the way the pc characters as npcs would work is like the guy who claims ownership of the ebon hawk on NS in TSL, where he has 1 default head but if the player has the same head he uses another. I think removing the pc characters as npcs would be a bummer and not be as immersive. I don't think the vanilla clothing would necessarily fit for RoR. The potato robes the player wears for clothing always seemed to be something inconspicuous the exile wears to blend in with crowds and something cheap/basic.

 

RoR is looking good though. Looking forward to reading the next Dev Diary.