Small request - changing the colors of Quanon's lightsabers

[Drago-Morph 2]

Hey folks! I recently jumped back into a KOTOR playthrough for the first time in years. One of the mods I picked up was Quanon's Saberhilt Pack, which adds four non-upgradeable and wildly OP lightsabers into the game. None of them feature red blades, which is unfortunate for me since I'm doing a dark side run. I was hoping to use them as crazy endgame weapons, but they've gotta fit my bad guy aesthetic, you know? So I was hoping one of the talented and beautiful individuals here might be able to help me out, either changing the blades to red (if it's not too much trouble) or telling me how I could do it myself.

[Ebony Moon 187]

You'll need a hex editor to edit the .mdl files.

Someone posted some instructions at the bottom of the first posts page here: https://www.nexusmods.com/kotor/mods/14

 

[Drago-Morph 2]

47 minutes ago, Ebony Moon said:

You'll need a hex editor to edit the .mdl files.

Someone posted some instructions at the bottom of the first posts page here: https://www.nexusmods.com/kotor/mods/14

 

I had seen that, but the hex editor program I first used wasn't any good so I assumed the post was mistaken. Anyway, I opened up one of the sabers in a better hex editor and made the changes as instructed but trying to equip that saber made my game crash. I went back in and added a period after the color (since I was changing "w_lsabregren01" to "w_lsabrered01" and losing a character, and I had gotten a warning about changing the file size the first time) and that stopped my game from crashing, but resulted in a messed up asterisk-looking blade texture.

[Ebony Moon 187]

I didn't have the the time to test it, but I looked at the sabers in a hex editor. It seems they have 3 or 4 lines with the lightsaber color that needs to be changed. The hex value seems to be 77 if you use the search. Or search for w_lsabre. That's all I can think of.

[bead-v 251]

If you open the binary file in mdledit, you can edit the textures by using the Edit → Textures... feature. It will take care of problems like the new texture name being longer or shorter than the previous one...

[Drago-Morph 2]

Thanks for the help folks! I ended up figuring it out; when I was editing the text string to make the sabers red, I used a period as a 0-value at the end to keep the file the same size. But I finally noticed that a period in the text string isn't actually a 0-value in the hex string, so I just had to edit the hex string directly and voila, red sabers!

[Ebony Moon 187]

53 minutes ago, Drago-Morph said:

so I just had to edit the hex string directly and voila, red sabers!

How did you do this? I'm completely new to hex editing and want to learn.

[Drago-Morph 2]

1 hour ago, Ebony Moon said:

How did you do this? I'm completely new to hex editing and want to learn.

In the hex editor I used (HxD) there's an option to search and/or replace, and a further option to specify whether you want to search/replace text strings or hex strings. I also know exactly zero about hex editing, I just assumed that a 0-value would function as a placeholder so the file wouldn't crash my game. So I used this text-to-hex converter to translate "w_lsabregren01" into hex, then translated "w_lsabrered01" into hex and added "00" to the end. Then I just search and replaced the original hex string with the new one.

[Ebony Moon 187]

3 hours ago, Drago-Morph said:

In the hex editor I used (HxD) there's an option to search and/or replace, and a further option to specify whether you want to search/replace text strings or hex strings. I also know exactly zero about hex editing, I just assumed that a 0-value would function as a placeholder so the file wouldn't crash my game. So I used this text-to-hex converter to translate "w_lsabregren01" into hex, then translated "w_lsabrered01" into hex and added "00" to the end. Then I just search and replaced the original hex string with the new one.

Thank you!

It works!

[SovereignXII 25]

On 1/31/2020 at 10:38 PM, Drago-Morph said:

In the hex editor I used (HxD) there's an option to search and/or replace, and a further option to specify whether you want to search/replace text strings or hex strings. I also know exactly zero about hex editing, I just assumed that a 0-value would function as a placeholder so the file wouldn't crash my game. So I used this text-to-hex converter to translate "w_lsabregren01" into hex, then translated "w_lsabrered01" into hex and added "00" to the end. Then I just search and replaced the original hex string with the new one.

Edit: Solved most of my issues. Only thing I'm still stuck on is the length of the hilt. Trying to covert Count Dooku's hilt from OldFlash from a Malak Longsaber replacement into a regular Blue blade. I changed the colour but can't change the length...

Then with OldFlash's TLS hilt replacement pack. The hilt becomes textureless. I don't think it's a problem with the HEX, but simply renaming the saber fies 007 to 001 to replace blue. It's so confusing. 

 

[Drago-Morph 2]

On 2/3/2020 at 7:13 AM, SovereignXII said:

Edit: Solved most of my issues. Only thing I'm still stuck on is the length of the hilt. Trying to covert Count Dooku's hilt from OldFlash from a Malak Longsaber replacement into a regular Blue blade. I changed the colour but can't change the length...

Then with OldFlash's TLS hilt replacement pack. The hilt becomes textureless. I don't think it's a problem with the HEX, but simply renaming the saber fies 007 to 001 to replace blue. It's so confusing. 

 

I don't really know anything about modding saber hilts, unfortunately, but I would tenuously assume that it'd be easier to change the texture of the blue saber hilt to the Dooku hilt than to turn Malak's saber into a regular blue one. I would imagine that if you can find the hilt texture in Malak's saber file, you could just copy it into the blue saber file.