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The face of power...

 

 

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  On 3/20/2016 at 8:36 AM, Mutilator57 said:

Woah, nice!

 

Thanks.

 

  On 3/20/2016 at 12:13 PM, milestails said:

Agreed. That's really impressive sic. Welcome back!

 

Thanks again!

 

 

The Handmaiden...

 

 

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This sort of started from me playing the (Steam) version on my laptop and having to fix a Bastila holo-recording bug I created. Decided to implement a dark-side version for her:

 

 

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It was just a rough and ready attempt as you only see her rendered with that awful holo-recording shader.

 

BTW: does anyone know whether this is something that is listed in any of the 2DA tables? I know it is a flag set in the UTC character files, haven't found what it's pointing to yet -- though, haven't dug that deeply into it yet being a bit time poor at the moment.

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I don't know if it's in visualeffects.2da or not, but I will mention that the holographic overlay might be tied to turning on/off the Frame Buffer Effects option. I know that the freelook effects and some of the camera effects are disabled with that option turned off, so there's a chance...

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It is not tied to the Frame Buffer Effects option, at least not solely. I'd rather say it is a graphics card issue. I've had the holographic look for... well, holograms, even with Frame Buffer Effects turned off.

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  On 3/21/2016 at 7:27 AM, Fair Strides said:

I don't know if it's in visualeffects.2da or not

In the TSL version (nothing in K1) there's VFX_DUR_HOLO_PROJECT which references the model v_holo02_dur, which is an emitter with no reference to any textures. The emitter is 1.7m in the air and pointing forwards and slightly down, so I assume it is used by a droid of some kind. Maybe it is for the G0-T0 droids?

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  On 3/21/2016 at 7:27 AM, Fair Strides said:

I don't know if it's in visualeffects.2da or not, but I will mention that the holographic overlay might be tied to turning on/off the Frame Buffer Effects option. I know that the freelook effects and some of the camera effects are disabled with that option turned off, so there's a chance...

 

  On 3/21/2016 at 7:45 AM, LiliArch said:

It is not tied to the Frame Buffer Effects option, at least not solely. I'd rather say it is a graphics card issue. I've had the holographic look for... well, holograms, even with Frame Buffer Effects turned off.

 

Frame buffer effects get applied to the whole screen; they're also referred to as screen-space shaders, full-screen shaders, and, image effects -- if you use Unity, and they are applied to the scene camera. The last is the most obvious in describing how they work, in that what gets rendered to your screen is effectively a 2D image (frame buffer), and like an image in Photoshop, you can apply a filter effect (shader) to it. This is done post-process, whereas the character hologram effect is not. FYI: this is how ReShade works, it injects post-process by injecting some render steps inbetween what the engine puts into the frame buffer and what then gets drawn to the screen -- some of the effects also use the depth buffer, like with deth of field and SSAO.

 

So put simply, those screen visual effects shouldn't have anything at all to do with the hologram effect. From what I see, this is not something that can be tweaked via a 2DA table, but rather, it's part of the compiled shader code.

 

Easiest (and probably only) option is to play around with the "Holotex" that Darth Parametric pointed out. Should be able to minimise the seeing teeth and whole eyeballs issue some, but, this was just how engines of the time would do these hologram render effects -- badly.

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Yeah if you edit the alpha channel to dampen the level of transparency that might help with the visibility of sub-meshes a bit, but it's always going to be a problem with such a simple implementation. There's the scanline effect that makes it a bit variable, but it looks like it is hovering around the 50% transparency mark.

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  On 3/21/2016 at 8:40 AM, DarthParametric said:

Yeah if you edit the alpha channel to dampen the level of transparency that might help with the visibility of sub-meshes a bit, but it's always going to be a problem with such a simple implementation. There's the scanline effect that makes it a bit variable, but it looks like it is hovering around the 50% transparency mark.

 

Yeah, played around some with overall brightness, opacity level and some txi options -- last was useless.

 

 

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I also spent some time doing a quick placeholder tex job for the "holocron" in the room...

 

 

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  On 3/21/2016 at 9:13 AM, sELFiNDUCEDcOMA said:

txi options -- last was useless

If you changed the texture to include a larger number of frames, you might be able to introduce a bit more "noise" to emphasise that it is a hologram. If the sequence was long enough, you could have it briefly disappear altogether, although that might be a bit too epilepsy-inducing in a short sequence.

 

  On 3/21/2016 at 9:13 AM, sELFiNDUCEDcOMA said:

I also spent some time doing a quick placeholder tex job for the "holocron" in the room

I never really understood why they made it 5 feet tall. I always thought it looked ridiculous. There must be better ways of drawing attention to it.

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  On 3/21/2016 at 9:44 AM, DarthParametric said:

I never really understood why they made it 5 feet tall. I always thought it looked ridiculous. There must be better ways of drawing attention to it.

A regular sized Holocron on a table would work better than what Obsidian did there. Like what Darth InSidious did with his holocron mod. . .

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  On 3/21/2016 at 9:44 AM, DarthParametric said:

If you changed the texture to include a larger number of frames, you might be able to introduce a bit more "noise" to emphasise that it is a hologram. If the sequence was long enough, you could have it briefly disappear altogether, although that might be a bit too epilepsy-inducing in a short sequence.

 

I meant more along the lines of blending modes.

 

 
  On 3/21/2016 at 9:44 AM, DarthParametric said:

I never really understood why they made it 5 feet tall. I always thought it looked ridiculous. There must be better ways of drawing attention to it.

 

 

  On 3/21/2016 at 9:56 AM, Sith Holocron said:

A regular sized Holocron on a table would work better than what Obsidian did there. Like what Darth InSidious did with his holocron mod. . .

 

They may have thought that a holocron was simply a holo- recording and data device, and that thing, is just a reader / projector for it. Or it started that way and then ended up being written in as being an actual holocron. 

 

I've thought of editing the model so that the tip of the device is an actual Sith holocron, however, it may simply make more sense to rename the placeable file from "Sith Holocron" to "Sith Holo-projector" -- or similar. Especially as it being a holocron, you would want to be able to take it with you like the fake one on Dantooine.

 

EDIT: maybe replacing the model with Darth InSidious' Sith Holocron one might be a good option; still, as a player I would want to be able to take it with me, even only to look at it in awe via my inventory ;).

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It was just laziness - or expediency if you prefer, I guess. It's one of the Sith monument placeables, plinths and pillars and such.

 

It would be easy to replace it with a new model. Just point the UTP at a new custom entry (I gather the existing model is reused elsewhere, so I wouldn't override it). Put a regular size holocron on a table, maybe give it some animated glowing light textures or something to make it obvious.

 

Edit: Whipped a new model up for you if you want to use it. You like texturing, right?

 

TSL_Revans_Sith_Holocron_TH.jpg

 

If you wanted to take the holocron with you, I guess you could maybe use a script to swap between 2 different placeables? One a table with the holocron, one just an empty table? Or have the table and holocron as separate placeables and use a script to remove the holocron. Then just do the same as they do with the Nihilus mask for the inventory. Too bad you don't have proper quarters on the Ebon Hawk (where do you sleep, anyway?), otherwise you could display it there.

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  On 3/21/2016 at 7:45 AM, LiliArch said:

It is not tied to the Frame Buffer Effects option, at least not solely. I'd rather say it is a graphics card issue. I've had the holographic look for... well, holograms, even with Frame Buffer Effects turned off.

I actually just decided to test this out by turning Frame Buffer Effects, Anti Aliasing, and Anisotropic Filtering off and setting the texture quality to low, and no matter what I did the hologram effect remained. I'd have to agree that it's probably a graphics card issue, especially since I remember that before I got my current graphics card, the hologram effect wouldn't display.

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  On 3/21/2016 at 10:45 AM, DarthParametric said:

It was just laziness - or expediency if you prefer, I guess. It's one of the Sith monument placeables, plinths and pillars and such.

 

It would be easy to replace it with a new model. Just point the UTP at a new custom entry (I gather the existing model is reused elsewhere, so I wouldn't override it). Put a regular size holocron on a table, maybe give it some animated glowing light textures or something to make it obvious.

 

Edit: Whipped a new model up for you if you want to use it. You like texturing, right?

 

TSL_Revans_Sith_Holocron_TH.jpg

 

If you wanted to take the holocron with you, I guess you could maybe use a script to swap between 2 different placeables? One a table with the holocron, one just an empty table? Or have the table and holocron as separate placeables and use a script to remove the holocron. Then just do the same as they do with the Nihilus mask for the inventory. Too bad you don't have proper quarters on the Ebon Hawk (where do you sleep, anyway?), otherwise you could display it there.

 

It would be better if it the holocron were a separate model just on its own, scaled to the same size as the ones you see via Telos and the confrontation with Atris where she's surrounded by them. You should be able to do something similar as with some datapads you find in-game: click on it, it disappears and gets added to your inventory. Regardless, you can still position it in world via XYZ co-ordinates so that it sitting on top  of a table -- any table. You might also consider using the existing TEL_holo tex for UV mapping.

 

Not sure I'd use it, however, happy to add it as a resource that others can use along with example scripts -- I have a bunch of this already implemented with that in mind, just not with any new models and such. It's just simpler to rename the peaceable to something else like: "Sith Holo-Reader," and then add a Sith Holocron that's usable in far more interesting ways. Especially as the "thing" in the room is only used to playback a recorded holo-message for plot purposes.

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Ok, so a few placeable texture passes to make some eyesores less so...

 

 

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EDIT....

 

Fixed... for now.

 

 

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Has anyone else come across this double lightsaber bug... occurs on my laptop Steam version of the game but not my (aging) dev-rig retail version of the game.

 

 

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  On 3/22/2016 at 10:36 AM, DarthParametric said:

It's not two sabers, it's the texture disappearing/being rendered flat. It's a bug Aspyr introduced. Only known fix is to disable vertex buffer objects in the INI.

And even that doesn't work for us Mac users :(

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  On 3/22/2016 at 10:36 AM, DarthParametric said:

It's not two sabers, it's the texture disappearing/being rendered flat. It's a bug Aspyr introduced. Only known fix is to disable vertex buffer objects in the INI.

 

Well, in the swkotor2.ini files has the following:

DisableVertexBufferObjects=1

1 is ON so this has already been disabled. Changing it to 0 actually makes the problem even worse.

 

Still, it's interesting that this only seems to be a problem (for me) with the double-sabers. The single-blade sabers render just fine  :question: .

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  On 3/23/2016 at 4:02 AM, DarthParametric said:

You have to change it to

Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1
in order for it to work.

 

It happens with all saber types.

 

 

Thanks for the info; probably would have been weeks before I bothered to find out how to fix it. It's a pity that using this fix results in a pretty ugly bug:

 

 

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Since I found that bug on Korriban...

 

 

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Yeah it's pretty much a case of which issue is less egregious? I probably won't bother ever using custom sabers in TSL again, or releasing any more saber mods. I reported the issue to Aspyr, but it doesn't seem they are going to do anything about it (I'm not even sure if it got past the support monkey reading the ticket).

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