Melee Weapon Replacement Mod?

[Guest cornel]

Hi everyone! I'm new here! (he said, in an innocent, utterly optimistic and completely ignorant of modding problems tone of voice...)

And I'm a complete noob at modding!

 

Thanks to all you modders, I've got my KOTOR game nearly perfect! Just one thing missing... and I can't find a mod for that. So here I am, ready to make my first (and hopefully simple) mod

 

I'll explain: I love Star Wars (yeah, duh!) and just "discovered" KOTOR. Never played an RPG in my life. More of an action kind of gamer. But I recently tried out TOR online, and I liked it so much, that I decided to stop and first try out the offline bioware prequel game KOTOR.

 

So, I started the game and ran into a couple of sith troopers. That's where my "turn-off" began: I hate the very "un-star wars-like", "medieval touch" of shiny, metal swords and body armour! So I googled a bit and noticed there are several other non-energy weapons in the game. The only mods I could find that helped a bit were the inverted lightsabers, sith troopers to assassins (only in a rather limited area), and sith assassins with light sabers mods.

 

http://imgur.com/a/nHV3T

 

I was able to change the shiny armours into black armoured suits, which are perfectly sith-like to me (see pics). But they were only those on the Endar Spire... In the next part of the game, they're silver again! After looking at another sith trooper mod, I changed the N_SithSoldier01.tga - N_SithSoldier04.tga files, but I don't know the names of the other sith troopers in the game... Is there perhaps a files list available somewhere? (I've seen this: http://deadlystream.com/forum/topic/3010-new-to-modding-i-have-a-few-questions, but it's too much info, too little "list", for me... I just wanna do this "simple" little exchange thing...)

 

Also, I am in need of replacing all sith and jedi weapons into lightsabers, and any other wooden or metal melee weapons wielded by non-jedi or non-sith characters into blasters... Does anyone know which files I need to (copy and) replace for this? I've gotten as far as opening the KOTOR tool and seeing the file tree of items.bif and the "w_..." files (w stands for "weapon", I gather) that it contains. Could it be as simple as replacing - for example - the "w_dblswrd_001.mdl" and "w_dblswrd_001.mdx" with "w_dblsbr_001.mdl" and "w_dblsbr_001.mdx", etc, etc?

 

I don't want to screw things up... Replacing stuff should not be so difficult, I imagine, but I would greatly appreciate any hints or pointers as to which files I should modify to achieve my goal. Once finished, I would be more than happy to publish my mod here, for others to enjoy.

[Guest cornel]

Put simply: can I just extract a mdl model file and rename it to an unwanted mdl model file and put it in the Override folder so that it replaces the unwanted model? Or is it a bit more complicated than that, and are there other files that also need to be modified?

 

Note: What I want to do is replace normal weapons for lightsaber versions (double swords for double lightsabers, swords for lightsabers, short swords for light sabers), and also: non-jedi/sith weapons for blasters, etc.

[Antonia 5]

 

Replacing the appearance of your enemies is fairly simple really. Figure out which lines (rows) in appearance.2da you really don't like, and map them to use something else instead.

 

For example, if you hate the sith soldiers, you can replace the data in their row (28) so that where it calls for the N_SithSoldier model (and skins) you point it to something else. Say N_SithComM, which is your run of the mill male Sith.

 

You'd have to play around with which value(s) you're not liking, and which replacement(s) you wanted, but this will have the same effect of extracting/renaming a bunch of character models except you can keep all the changes in this one, central file and not need to actually chase down and extract all those models.

 

As for weapons.. you could probably do the same thing here by altering the baseitems.2da file, but I'd be rather careful to make sure any time you go in and change something, it stays the same basic "style" of weapon. For example, you could probably safely change the entry for quarter_staff to point to double_bladed_lightsaber, and instances of these weapons would *likely* still work as intended. Changing something like a blaster to a lightsaber this way however would almost certainly have some odd results, I would think, but honestly I've never tried to make such a universal change before, so I'm not entirely sure what the effect might be.

 

You *could* of course do this by finding and extracting and renaming models of one kind to that of another, but I expect again you'd probably want to stay within comparable weapon classes, since the game data is still expecting a weapon that's defined outside its actual model data. Basically what I'm saying is, if the game encounters a uti file that tells it there should be a heavy blaster here, I'm not really sure what all the effects might be when it loads up the model for a lightsaber. Might work fine, but I suspect at the very least, it'd be a blaster that just looks like a lightsaber and probably has some very strange animations going on when someone tries to "shoot" it.

 

To *Properly* replace weapons you dislike, you'd actually want to edit each .utc file for every character/enemy that's using something you don't like, and point it to use a weapon you prefer.

 

There will probably be a few instances where the game creates someone's items "on the fly" with scripting, and they'd still be wrong, but this should catch the majority, and you could then look to trying to fix any individual oddities that may remain.

 

Sorry if this all sounds a bit disjointed. I know what I'm trying to explain, but I've never been that good at laying this sort of thing out in a nice tutorial fashion, which is why I don't make tutorials. xD

 

Anyways... see if that info helps at all, or if someone else may wander in and give some more helpful information and we'll see where things go from there.

 

-Kitt

[Kexikus 994]

Antonia already described pretty much everything, so there's not much I can add. But I really wouldn't start with alterting baseitems.2da, that file is very easy to screw up. There are better ways as Antonia described and I'll come to those in a second. I also wouldn't copy the lightsaber models and rename them, since vibro weapons don't have on/off states you'll end up with a lightsaber that's always on and has still the sounds of the vibroblade.

 

So, you could either go ahead and edit the inventory of all characters to give them your weapons of choice (edit their .utc file) or you could edit the .uti file of the weapons. I'd do the latter as that should be less work. What you'd have to do is open the .uti file for every weapon you don't like and change the baseitem type to something you want (I think you could also make a blaster from a melee weapon that way, but I'm not sure). Then you can even change the color of the lightsaber by editing the Model Variation (each number refers to one blade color in case of lightsabers). And when you go to the Description tab you could also change the name of the weapon to something more suitable.

Note: Copying and renaming a lightsaber .utc will probably not work since Template ResRef and Tag should be the same as the file name. But I don't know what happens when they aren't.

[Guest cornel]

Thank you both very much for your input! I had already gone ahead and copied, renamed and replaced the .uti files, and it seems to work, but then again, I haven't come so far in the game to see a vibro blade... What I did was rename (a lot of work, which took me all night) the lightsaber files to the unwanted vibroblades or swords files, and change the tab caption also. So the program thinks it's giving its designated weapon, but in reality it gives a lightsaber. There shouldn't be a problem with vibroblades being always on, since there are no vibroblades, only lightsabers.uti's are triggered, and these have on/off states. Unless there are other files that determine the characteristics of each weapon?

[Kexikus 994]

It's the base item type that determines the characteristics of a weapon and that type is set in the .uti file. So you should be fine

[Guest cornel]

Thanks! I'll play the game once, and correct any bugs found. Then I'll upload the modified files here.

[Guest cornel]

uploaded