Is there a way to assign a different race to the Player Character?

[Jike 1]

So to expand on the title, I'm trying to make Revan from a human to a droid and so far I re-assigned his model, the portrait, sound set and class to the appropriate droid-related things however the inventory is an issue and is likely either hard to change or impossible to change. I'd like to know if I can change his inventory from a human inventory (so he can equip implants and human armour and such) to a droid inventory such as HK's or T3's (so he can equip droid armour and upgrades and the likes). Is this at all possible and if so, how would I got about doing it?

 

I've included some images of a "human inventory" and a "droid inventory" in case my wording was strange.

[JCarter426 1,214]

I don't believe there's any way to do it with traditional modding. A lot of the character creation seems to be hard-coded and I don't know of any editable file used as a template for the player character. The only thing I can think of that would have a chance of working would be to edit the PC's UTC file in your savegame and change the race from 6 (human) to 5 (droid).

[Jike 1]

I've looked around a bit in google and searched through "BIFs -> Templates -> Blueprint, Character" but I kind find anything about a UTC file for the PC. Perhaps I'm missing something. I was thinking that it'd be perhaps similar to if you added a custom party member but after doing some research I'm not so sure anymore.

[JCarter426 1,214]

Right, that's what I mean - there isn't a template there for the PC, or at least not one I've ever seen. The starting character stats may be hard-coded in the engine.

There should be a UTC for your player in every savegame file, however. Changing the race doesn't seem to be an option supported by KSE, but perhaps you could do it if you extracted the UTC from the SAV file, then repackaged it.

[Jike 1]

Ah right yeah, I see what you mean now my bad. I'll look into that and tell you how it goes.

[DeathScepter 46]

to JCarter, what are the limitations to the Character Creation?

[JCarter426 1,214]

That's a tricky question to answer because a lot of what can be changed doesn't affect just the player. So for some things you can't change them without changing them for other characters too, and it's not immediately clear what the side effects are.

Generally, though, here are some things that can't be changed at all (without savegame editing)..

• Attributes: Character creation only gives you a certain amount of points and forces you to use all the points you're given, whereas with NPCs you can give them whatever.
• Conversation: Kind of a non-issue, but the player can't have their own dialogue file.
• Faction: The player is always of the Player faction.
• Gender: The player can only be male or female.
• Level: Of course the player has to start at level 1.
• Movement Rate: It's always Default.
• Name: You can input this in character creation, of course, but in K1 this is bugged and your whole name gets set as your FirstName.
• Natural AC: This isn't used very often, but it's possible to give an NPC a bonus to Armor Class without equipping an armor item.
• Phenotype: The player has different appearances for small, medium, and large body sizes, depending on their starting class.
• Race: Human, of course.
• Scripts: The contents of these scripts can be changed, but the set that the PC uses is fixed.
• Soundset: The player is always given Player_Female_W or Player_Male_W soundset, based on their gender.
• Tag: The player has no tag.

There are also a few trivial matters that can't be changed in character creation, but can be done once the game starts...

• Alignment: The player always starts at 50.
• Credits: The player starts with no money.
• Equipment: The player always starts naked.
• Inventory: Nope.

The rest can be changed to some degree, but may change other aspects of the game, such as...

• Starting class
• Number of skill points
• Starting feats & number of bonus feats
• Number of Force powers

These are all implemented by changing the level up system, which may also affect party members. Party members never "level up" to level 1, so it's possible to change some things on a player starting class without affecting any party members in K1, at least. In K2, party members can multiclass to Jedi classes, which are the same as your starting classes, so it's a little more complicated.

[Jike 1]

I've searched for a while and looked through KOTOR Tool through my savegames but can only find RES files and not UTC files for the PC.

[JCarter426 1,214]

It might be in the SAVEGAME.sav file, which you can edit with ERFEdit.

[Jike 1]

So I opened up the SAV file for the savegame I wanted to edit and extracted both of the UTC files inside and despite the fact I'm on Taris now, one of them is Trask, the other being Carth. Neither of the UTC files belong to the PC it seems, how ever, the SAV file I opened had more SAV files in them, so perhaps I might find what I'm looking for in there?

 

On another note I recently had an idea. I could always use some of the 2da files to add a new appearance option when starting up and apply the c_drdprot.mdl + mdx files for its model and set its race to 5 making the game register it as a droid (if I, of course, set "forpc" to 1). Perhaps this might work?

[DeathScepter 46]

is there a way to do height adjustments to the Player Character is what i am curious about?

[Jike 1]

From what I've seen whilst editing the UTC files of characters you wouldn't be able to do it that way. I suppose if you modified the actual model of the PC you chose to begin with to make it taller or smaller, that might possibly work? It's then just a question of getting the model to work in-game in place of the original model.

[HK-47 84]

9 hours ago, JCarter426 said:

Changing the race doesn't seem to be an option supported by KSE...

Change the "Appearance" option. Made my character a Duros once. A couple of strange occurrences though like lightning/drain life coming from the ground and a headless opponent in the cave on Korriban. But otherwise full animations for everything, you just can't see the armors you equip because it's like wearing a disguise. That's the closest you can get with KSE.

[Jike 1]

Just now, HK-47 said:

Change the "Appearance" option. Made my character a Duros once.

I'm focusing on actually making the inventory of the main PC to be that of a droid as well as make them level up like one. I've already changed their model, their portrait and their soundset and class but just changing the class isn't enough.

[JCarter426 1,214]

The race is what determines what items you can equip, not appearance. Well, mostly. You can restrict inventory slots in appearance.2da, but that's just preventing you from equipping what your race normally can equip. It's the race that lets droids equip droid armor, droid utilities, droid interfaces, etc.

9 hours ago, DeathScepter said:

is there a way to do height adjustments to the Player Character is what i am curious about?

It's certainly possible to change the model files, or edit appearance.2da to point to different ones. But the game is hard-coded to give you a small/medium/large appearance line based on your starting class (scoundrel/scout/soldier in K1 and consular/sentinel/guardian in K2).

[Jike 1]

8 hours ago, JCarter426 said:

the game is hard-coded to give you a small/medium/large appearance line based on your starting class (scoundrel/scout/soldier in K1 and consular/sentinel/guardian in K2).

I'm assuming then based on the order you listed them, and this is likely obvious, but scoundrel is small and soldier is large, correct?

 

And also, if I did edit appearance.2da and managed to use that to assign a droid-based inventory to the PC that way, would that allow for me to adjust the way they level up so they can be given droid-based feats in the level up menu in place of some of the organic-based feats? I've already attempted to set the character's class as a combat droid and removed scout from them but when they levelled up all that happened was they didn't have the option for neither organic nor droid-based feats, just the generic sort of in-between ones that both droid and human can be assigned.

 

EDIT: I managed to make the character level up the way a droid does exactly how I wanted. I achieved this by simply editing classes.2da and replacing a starting class I never use (scoundrel), adjusting it to match the one I do use and having the game treat it as though it is the CombatDroid class instead. The only thing left is to somehow change the PC's inventory type to that of a droid if at all possible.

EDITEDIT: Okay, so I noticed that when editing my K1 SAV file to find pc.utc, there is nothing of the sort, however when editing a K2 sav file it has pc.utc right near the bottom. What I'm attempting may well only be possible for K2.

Edited June 2, 2019 by Jike
Managed to solve a part of my own question + A few other notes

[JCarter426 1,214]

1 hour ago, Jike said:

I'm assuming then based on the order you listed them, and this is likely obvious, but scoundrel is small and soldier is large, correct?

Yes.

1 hour ago, Jike said:

And also, if I did edit appearance.2da and managed to use that to assign a droid-based inventory to the PC that way, would that allow for me to adjust the way they level up so they can be given droid-based feats in the level up menu in place of some of the organic-based feats?

No, what feats you get are determined by what feats are allowed for your class in feat.2da & classes.2da. And the equipment slots are race-based; appearance.2da only lets you lock a specific slot so you can't equip anything there (e.g. Mandalore cannot change his armor). That might not even be a thing in K1, I forget.

2 hours ago, Jike said:

I managed to make the character level up the way a droid does exactly how I wanted. I achieved this by simply editing classes.2da and replacing a starting class I never use (scoundrel), adjusting it to match the one I do use and having the game treat it as though it is the CombatDroid class instead.

That'll work, but remember it will also affect every NPC with the scoundrel class, like Mission. You could make a copy of the original scoundrel class and have any NPC that uses it point to the new line, though it may be a bit of work tracking down all instances of it. Enemies usually use the minion class or one of the Jedi ones, but sometimes they don't.

[Jike 1]

6 minutes ago, JCarter426 said:

You could make a copy of the original scoundrel class and have any NPC that uses it point to the new line, though it may be a bit of work tracking down all instances of it.

I'm done making a copy of the original scoundrel class. For now I'll just change any of the party members and direct them toward Scoundrel instead of CombatDroid. I'm still trying to find a way to change the equipment screen despite how many things are pointing toward that being impossible for K1. My mindset is this: In mods like "Brotherhood of Shadow" that add new party members, they have to be assigned an equip screen right? And iirc there is a droid-based NPC in Brotherhood of Shadow and I know that editing the inventory type for an NPC is not the same as doing so for the PC, there has to be some clue there? Or maybe I'm just being too hopeful. Either way I'm going to dig around the files in that mod for a bit and see what I can find.

[JCarter426 1,214]

8 hours ago, Jike said:

My mindset is this: In mods like "Brotherhood of Shadow" that add new party members, they have to be assigned an equip screen right? And iirc there is a droid-based NPC in Brotherhood of Shadow and I know that editing the inventory type for an NPC is not the same as doing so for the PC, there has to be some clue there?

There isn't really a screen that's "assigned" to them. baseitems.2da determines which items may be equipped by droids or humans in the aptly-named droidorhuman column. 2 for droids, 1 for humans, and 0 for either. The entry in the equipableslots column then determines what slot it goes in. The two races have mostly the same equipment slots, but they have access to different items for them. And this should be determined by the Race field in the UTC.

I figure the easiest way to test this would be to start a new game after editing Trask's file and use him to check this.

[Jike 1]

That's a good idea. I also noticed that BoS created its own PC.utc file so I copied it and edited it to match my character but this didn't seem to do anything when I injected it into my save. I'll try modifying Trask and seeing what happens.