A New Chapter for the Kotor Community!

[superSzym 155]

Well, does the new rule mean TSLRCM and M4-78EP do not need to have their credits updated not to include music ported from K1?

[JCarter426 1,214]

Yes, but the credits have already been updated. The updates included more than just the music, though, and I did versions with both the new music and the original music, so now either can be used.

[UnusualCharacters 105]

I think that this is really cool! Would be fun to visit old planets as the Exile to see how they changed since Revan's departure. Looking forward to seeing what you guys do with the freedom.

[RLG 6]

3 hours ago, UnusualCharacters said:

I think that this is really cool! Would be fun to visit old planets as the Exile to see how they changed since Revan's departure. Looking forward to seeing what you guys do with the freedom.

To be honest, the first thing I thought of would be for K1: The Ruins of Dantooine.  I was looking in the dialog.tlk file and saw a few strings that indicated you could go back as survey the aftermath ( it was an identifier for Cratis Yurkal's corpse indicating the Sith had thrown him off a cliff).   

[JCarter426 1,214]

Oh, I didn't know about that. I'd thought of a return to Dantooine mod before porting was ever allowed, and I'd be very interested in playing (not so much making) one and that should be easier with the K2 areas as a possibility.

[ChrisC26 12]

So porting is finally good to go?

In my honest opinion, this is long overdue. 

I can't wait to see what awesome content the community can storm up. Maybe eventually we'll even be able to get most of the story from KotOR onto the TSL engine.
 

[JCarter426 1,214]

2 hours ago, ChrisC26 said:

Maybe eventually we'll even be able to get most of the story from KotOR onto the TSL engine.

I saw people on Reddit suggesting that as well and I've thought about it and I don't really see the benefit in it. If it were actually done, yeah, there would be a few nifty things about it, but... well, it would be a lot of work for little payoff, and there are a lot of complications.

So, first of all, you can't just copy all the files from one game to another. You can do that with some of them - all the items, characters, and placeables should be fine once the assets are ported and dialog.tlk adjusted. The module files can be copied over without much change, but the area models need to be converted and that's a bit of work. It may take some time, but that's something I could see happening and I'm planning to do some myself. Nothing ridiculous so far.

Now, here's the problem. All of the audio is set up differently in K2. It's not a difference in format, but the file structure is different. In a worst case scenario, that means every single voice file has to be renamed and relocated in order to work in K2 and then every single dialogue file edited to account for the new VO file names. That's hundreds and hundreds of files.

Additionally, K2's NWScript functions are changed from K1. K1 scripts might not necessarily execute properly in K2. Some of them will, to be sure, but I'd be surprised if there were no problems at all. You'd be looking at the same level of bug fixes that the restoration projects have faced - and we're still fixing bugs that even those didn't catch. Furthermore, we don't have access to all the source scripts, so some things that go wrong would have to be programmed from scratch unless a more reliable script decompiler were developed.

When you add all those up, this would be the largest KOTOR mod ever attempted. Easily bigger than TSLRCM or any planet mod. About as much work as a total conversion mod and how many of those have you seen released?

And as much as I'd like having access to K2's new script function and assets and all that good stuff for K1, I'm having trouble seeing the point of it all. I can think of some things that would be nice to have, but I don't know if they would really positively impact the gameplay. Some would be tricky to implement too. It depends on what specifically you want to apply to K1, though, and I'd be interested to hear what people are looking for.

Take the prestige classes, for example. There's no way to utilize those in K1. The player can only have two character classes, so unless you change the game to start as a Jedi then that's not going to work. Maybe you could give them to the party members or maybe you could edit the feat gain so the regular classes get those things at high level. You also wouldn't have all six to work with anyway; I think half of them would have to be converted to Jedi classes. It's been a while since I looked at that, but I recall that the starting classes can't be changed and they're Jedi classes in K2 - so you'd have to un-Jedi those classes, but you can't add more Jedi classes, so there go half the prestige ones.

And about the level - well, K2 doesn't have a level cap. You gotta work out what to do with that. Either by leaving it alone and just allowing some minor level gain after the Leviathan or Lehon or wherever you hit level 20, or adjusting the XP gain to allow for higher levels than normal.

The enemies also scale by the player's level in K2, so you would have to work out how that would affect things and re-balance the difficulty of all the encounters. And you'd have to take into consideration the new Force powers and feats now available from K2, and the different upgrade system. A lot of playtesting would be required.

The saber forms are another mechanic that would have to be tested a lot - and you'd have to figure out how to incorporate them into the game. Perhaps Vrook's lines from K2 could be reused and you could go see him after finding each Star Map?

I've thought of adding an influence system to K1 - it could be done even without the port - but for it to have any impact on the game would require a lot of programming changes.

There are a lot of potential improvements here, no doubt. There's a reason there have been a few lightsaber form and Force power mods and the like to mimic what was introduced in K2. But even if you managed to port the whole game to K1 and had access to the real thing, you'd still have a lot more work to do to make it count for something. The mechanics are done for you but that's not really the hard part - the hard part is the execution and you'd have to repeat what a number of mods have already done.

Anyway, I'm not knocking the idea. I'd be very interested to see what one would do with it. But I'm not interested in that one being me. I'd rather spend all that effort on making new things.

[ChrisC26 12]

Very interesting!

Personally, I think the only things from the TSL engine/game that I'd like to see mechanic wise for use while playing KotOR is the higher level cap and the more in depth weapon customization/item crafting and I figured these two things wouldn't be possible to move over to K1 but IDK.

I'm sure others could think of some other things.

I guess it would be cool to have Force Enlightenment and have it work the way it works in K2 while playing K1. I'm sure people will grab the Force Crush animations and sounds and make a number of cool Force Power mods with it for K1. 

I'd really like to see people bring over the, IMO, much better Jedi robe designs that can be found in K2 and all the new armors and items in general which I'm guessing will be fairly easy at least in regards to the models and textures.

Mainly I'm just throwing ideas out there. I'm so busy these days I probably won't get to enjoy or help with some of the awesome things the community is going to do.

[JCarter426 1,214]

1 hour ago, ChrisC26 said:

Personally, I think the only things from the TSL engine/game that I'd like to see mechanic wise for use while playing KotOR is the higher level cap and the more in depth weapon customization/item crafting and I figured these two things wouldn't be possible to move over to K1 but IDK.

But if you ported just about everything else from K1 to K2, then those would be available....

1 hour ago, ChrisC26 said:

I guess it would be cool to have Force Enlightenment and have it work the way it works in K2 while playing K1. I'm sure people will grab the Force Crush animations and sounds and make a number of cool Force Power mods with it for K1.

All these things are possible and apart from the animation and sounds not even technically "porting". There have been a few mods that copied K2 Force powers before, though I don't recall any that did the specific ones you mentioned. There are some compatibility concerns with Force power mods, particularly older ones, primarily because all the Force powers in the game are executed through the same script and partly because TSLPatcher's functionality with dialog.tlk used to be more limited.

1 hour ago, ChrisC26 said:

I'd really like to see people bring over the, IMO, much better Jedi robe designs that can be found in K2 and all the new armors and items in general which I'm guessing will be fairly easy at least in regards to the models and textures.

The robes aren't quite so easy because they require new or edited supermodels for the cape and skirts to animate. I'm working on it, though.

[bead-v 251]

3 hours ago, JCarter426 said:

I'm working on it, though.

❤️

[DarthParametric 3,782]

Wow, so first porting is cool, and now the site is hosting cracks. There really is a glitch in the Matrix. I particularly enjoyed how the threads were locked to prevent discussion. Nice touch.

[Tyvokka 198]

1 hour ago, DarthParametric said:

Wow, so first porting is cool, and now the site is hosting cracks. There really is a glitch in the Matrix. I particularly enjoyed how the threads were locked to prevent discussion. Nice touch.

*eye roll*

[DarthParametric 3,782]

Heh. Who'd be a forum owner/admin, huh?

[Tyvokka 198]

And who needs to be a snarky forum member?

[DarthParametric 3,782]

Well I can't make your life too easy. Especially when you serve up such easy pickings.

[Snigaroo 119]

We didn't handle the situation as well as we should have and we definitely had an unacceptable delay in communicating our reasoning, and we'll own up to that. But the threads weren't locked to prevent discussion, and we're not hosting cracks just for the fun of it.

The Steam version of the game still experiences what I call the fullscreen bug, which forces an auto-minimization whenever two cutscenes are played back-to-back. Usually this bug results in the window being unrecoverable, which means that the game can't even be properly booted into--intro cutscenes are, after all, still cutscenes. This is a major problem and the #1 piece of tech support which /r/kotor deals with on a daily basis, and widescreen guides (such as Xuul's) are an integral part not only of our tech support on the matter, but also of the mod builds' recommended procedures, precisely to prevent this bug from ever happening.

If you guessed that widescreen patching requires an unencrypted executable on Steam, you would be right, and that's why we're here. Even Xuul links to these executables directly in his videos. They aren't optional stuff for people on Steam who want to be able to play the game normally; even I have to utilize these .exes every single time I mod the game. We're not hosting these lightly, and that's precisely why we're not calling them cracks: they're named "editable" so people directed here to download them might not think about it too hard, and the threads in question are locked to prevent users from pointing out that they're cracked, just in the hopes that there's even less chance people who would use them for malicious purposes would notice. Realistically there are much easier ways to pirate KOTOR and KOTOR 2, especially since the GoG executables are fully unencrypted as-is, but we still took precautions just in case. As I said before, this wasn't a matter taken lightly.

But the main concern is that the sites on which these .exes are currently hosted are positively infested with viruses, malware and pervasive ads, as you would expect. It isn't safe for users to get them from there, and yet in order to play these games properly many users positively require these executables. The staff have discussed the matter now at some length, and we've agreed that it's not justifiable to continue asking users whose only crime is owning the Steam version of the game to go to unsafe sites in order to download necessary materials just in the name of principles. We don't advocate piracy, but collectively the staff has (thus far) unanimously agreed that these are beneficial as tools, and that their potential uses for piracy (which their usage for, so far as we can police it, is still fully banned) are outweighed by their benefits.

[Sith Holocron 2,477]

@Snigaroo : It still seems like that the upload is a violation Rule 1.  You might have to rewrite the rule.

[Tyvokka 198]

I have updated the rule to clarify intent of DS on this subject. Thanks SH. 

 

[DarthParametric 3,782]

There are a few other stickies you could put a broom through while you are at it. The general modding sub-forum still has stickies for the 2016 mod of the year voting, and for NWMax which is now well and truly deprecated with the advent of KOTORMax.

[Snigaroo 119]

I've unpinned the 2016 Mod of the Year voting thread, but since I don't want to touch the NWMax thread since there may need to be discussion of whether the KOTORMax thread (I presume there is one?) may need to be stickied in turn, I'll leave that to a staff member more familiar with that area than myself.

[DarthParametric 3,782]

No, there is no specific KOTORMax thread (aside from the release and support threads). It was awaiting the creation of the promised Tools subforum.

Edit: This thread is still pinned by the way - https://deadlystream.com/topic/4905-mod-of-the-year-voting-2016-kotor/

 

[Snigaroo 119]

On 7/29/2018 at 11:39 AM, DarthParametric said:

This thread is still pinned by the way - https://deadlystream.com/topic/4905-mod-of-the-year-voting-2016-kotor/

I've got it now, I hope.