[KotOR] Explosions can leave ugly marks

[Salk 381]

Hello!

I took a screenshot after using a few grenades in a fight and noticed how the explosion leaves a blast residual that is cut by what I think is piece of maps intersecting and doesn't play nice at all with non flat surfaces, giving a real bad impression.

I suppose nothing can be done about it?

Cheers!

[JCarter426 1,235]

This is a visual effect model, v_burnmark. But I think the issue there happens because it's clipping with the sand dune, and probably nothing can be done about it indeed, unfortunately. It's just down to where the visual effect occurs and the shape of the area.

[Salk 381]

Hello, JCarter426.

Eh I suspected there wasn't really much to do but it is indeed ugly. I wonder if it would be possibly preferable to disable it altogether rather than see something like that on specific places like the Tatooine desert where the burn marks in the sand don't make much sense anyway.

Cheers!

[JCarter426 1,235]

That should be easy enough. You can do it in visualeffects.2da by looking for the entry with the model name (v_burnmark) and blanking it out with ****.

Or if you prefer, swap the model out with an invisible one, like renaming a copy of plc_invis to v_burnmark.

[Salk 381]

If I go for the latter, can I disable that effect just in particular areas where I'd rather not have it at all then?

And thanks for the suggestion.

[DarthParametric 3,806]

Only if you injected the model into a MOD for the appropriate module.

[Salk 381]

Yes, that is exactly what I was thinking to do with Tatooine and any other area that has a non flat surface.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[Salk 381]

Well, it seems that the invisible v_burnmark.mdl/mdx model won't work unless it's dumped in the override.

My goal was to have only Tatooine and Lehon's beach affected and so I followed DP's advice and made the model part of my .mod files but it won't have any effect.

Am I doing something wrong or was it actually wrong information?

Thanks!

[JCarter426 1,235]

I haven't tested it, but I recall hearing mention that putting models into modules won't work except for the area models for that module.

If the burn mark model uses a texture, you could try inserting an invisible texture. Those generally do work as long as there are no bump maps. Again, I haven't tested this, but allegedly they also must be TGA/TXI and not TPC.

[Salk 381]

I understand, thanks.

I guess what you heard was correct since I could verify it.

The burn mark model doesn't use any texture so my asking you is just a curiosity: if it did use a texture, I could have used an invisible one with the same name in the .mod file and that might have worked or did you mean something else?

Unfortunately now I am left with an unpleasant choice: either I remove the burn marks altogether from the game because of how ugly they look in places like Tatooine and Lehon or I just keep things the way they originally were.

I have a third path which may be worth exploring if it was not that I cannot do any modelling and it's change the v_burnmark model itself. At the very least to make it much smaller thus reducing the aesthetics damage it makes.

Any suggestions?

[JCarter426 1,235]

6 hours ago, Salk said:

The burn mark model doesn't use any texture so my asking you is just a curiosity: if it did use a texture, I could have used an invisible one with the same name in the .mod file and that might have worked or did you mean something else?

That should work, yes.

Maybe you could edit the burn mark model to use a solid black texture globally, then localize the texture to be invisible where you don't want to see it. However, if it's not using a texture right now, and instead it's using particle color as I assume, then I'm not sure if it would be possible to give it the same look with a texture. Depends how it's set up.

[Salk 381]

Well, in the end I only reduced the size of the burn mark of 70% more or less. This does not really solve the problem but it mitigates the issue considerably.

I'll just have to live with that.

Thanks a lot for the the advice, JC!