MOD:All Hands on Deck for the Leviathan Prison Break

[DarthParametric 3,790]

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All Hands on Deck for the Leviathan Prison Break

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This mod makes a number of adjustments to the entire Leviathan jail break sequence:

• Carth and the rest of the party have any equipped masks and weapons hidden for the pre-boarding conversation on the Ebon Hawk.
• The initial scene of the three Sith troopers discussing the chosen jail breaker changes the commander to red armour, as seen elsewhere in the game.
• The player's force cage in the torture room is now positioned next to Bastila's. Static cameras have been adjusted accordingly.
• Fixes a couple of missing static camera assignments for player responses during the torture sequence.
• The entire party (aside from the chosen jail breaker) now get put in the party cell.
• The party cell's door is changed to a forcefield.
• The jail breaker can elicit randomised responses from a few party members when clicking on the cell forcefield before freeing Bastila, Carth, and the player.
• HK-47's initial cutscene when chosen as the jail breaker has a new custom stunt animation (derived from TSL's disabled animation).
• The technician working on HK now starts the scene standing behind him rather than in front.
• Restored the second technician when HK is the jail breaker that Bioware cut (for some reason).
• Both of the HK technicians are switched from Sith trooper to Sith commoner appearances.
• The player starts the final escape scene inside their force cage like Bastila and Carth rather than standing at the doorway.
• The entire party is now present for the final escape sequence, not just Canderous.
• Canderous now remains in his equipped gear if he was the chosen jail breaker rather than switching to basic clothing.
• The party are now shown getting their gear and then leaving for the Hangar Bay.
• Canderous, Mission, and Jolee will equip basic clothing when they grab their gear if they were left naked as the chosen jail breaker.
• The player now has their pre-Leviathan gear automatically re-equipped at the end of the escape scene, as was Bioware's original intent.
• All of the party's pre-Leviathan inventory is now automatically returned, rather than needing to manually loot it from a locker.
• Fixes some minor geometry gaps and smoothing issues in the detention block main room.
• Fixes the force cage placeable's walkmesh, which was misaligned.

 

Installation:
Run INSTALL.exe.

By default, T3's response to the jail breaker clicking on the party cell will be gibberish for everyone except HK. If you want it to be in English/Basic regardless of the jail breaker choice, copy dp_lev40_con_pd1.ncs from the OPTIONAL folder and paste it into your Override folder.

Compatibility:
It is highly recommended that you use this mod in conjunction with the K1 Community Patch. If doing so, make sure to install K1CP first.

This mod is NOT compatible with Fair Strides's Party on the Leviathan mod. I did consider trying to integrate Juhani's cut Leviathan conversation into this mod, but it doesn't really work in its existing state. If you are a Juhani simp thirsting for more of her, use FS's mod instead.

Probably not compatible with K1R. Use at your own risk as no support will be offered.

Known Issues:

• Some of the other jail breaker start scenes, like Jolee's and Mission's, could use some tweaks to address minor annoyances. I'll look at those in a future update.
• The techs equipping blasters and attacking at the end of HK's initial cutscene are a bit wonky. That probably needs to be integrated into the cutscene itself.
• I didn't test with a female player. I think I got them all, but some of the specific fem PC/Carth camera angles might be off during the torture sequence. Please advise if that is the case.
• It's still possible to lose Canderous's pre-Leviathan equipped gear forever if he is the chosen jail breaker and you don't manually loot the patient gear container before leaving.
• You can still be affected by the stealthed/invisible jail breaker bug, since K1 lacks a de-stealth script function unlike TSL. K1CP addresses this.
• Bioware handled the transition from the Hawk to the Leviathan in a really odd way. It's possible that they encountered a sequence break that caused them to take the approach they did, which I have now changed. I didn't encounter any problems while testing, but it's potentially possible that the initial cutscene on the Leviathan could fail to fire. Let me know if anyone encounters that.

Credits/Acknowledgements:
Thanks to @bead-v for KOTORMax and MDLEdit.
Thanks to @Cortisol for Holocron Toolset.
Thanks to @JCarter426 for helping out with some script troubleshooting.

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• Submitter
  DarthParametric
• Submitted
  06/12/2022
• Category
  Mods
• K1R Compatible
  No

 

[Salk 375]

Thanks for this new modification of yours, DP.

Top notch stuff, as usual.

Looking forward to the future updates as well! 

[Salk 375]

Hi DP!

Just one question. Could you please clarify what the following means?

• Bioware handled the transition from the Hawk to the Leviathan in a really odd way. It's possible that they encountered a sequence break that caused them to take the approach they did, which I have now changed. 

What and how did you change in regards to the transition? I am using a customized version of K1R's restored cutscene of Sith Soldiers boarding the Ebon Hawk so I think there might be some incompatibilities.

Thanks!

[DarthParametric 3,790]

The vanilla game setup is as follows. The exit node of the pre-Leviathan cutscene on the Hawk starts the Prison Block module with a waypoint in the torture room as the custom destination. When loading that module, the player is inside a trigger, which has the escape setup script as its OnEnter. This script spawns a force cage on top of the player, then gives the player a safety jump back to the waypoint in case they got displaced by the cage it seems. The end of that script starts the cutscene of the three troopers discussing the chosen jail breaker. Later on, when the jail breaker opens the doors and control is switched back to the player character, the PC is spawned at the destination waypoint near the door, where they were supposed to run to from their cage (like Bastila and Carth do). During the development of the mod, I moved the PC's starting point back inside their force cage and quickly discovered a collision problem. It seems that placeables that are spawned via script do not rotate the PWK to match the rotation of the parent placeable. Which is a pretty big problem if the PWK is non-symmetrical. It appears that Bioware, rather than fixing the underlying issue, just didn't bother putting the player back in their cage. After a lot of messing about, I ended up adding the player's cage to the GIT, so the initial setup script was changed to remove the (now unnecessary) spawning of the cage. I didn't encounter any errors with the player not starting the module correctly, so I'm not exactly sure what the vanilla setup was in aid of. Maybe it was some issue on the Xbox that forced that approach, or maybe it was a legacy of the original boarding sequence scene that was cut. Although either way I still see no reason to have spawned the cage via script.

The vanilla script cannot be decompiled by DeNCS, but you can have a look at k_plev_escsetup_ATTEMPTED_RECONSTRUCTION.nss in the SOURCE folder for my interpretation of it based on the bytecode.

What I probably should have done is just nixed the trigger setup altogether and moved everything into the module OnEnter. But by the time I actually figured out what the hell was going on under the hood with the spawned placeable I had been working on the mod for 3 or 4 weeks and was kind of sick of the whole thing and just wanted to get it out the door. Plus more radical changes would potentially raise additional potential compatibility issues. At some nebulous point in the future I may add my own boarding sequence, at which point I would definitely rework the entire initial setup.

And yes, if you are using anything from K1R then it's likely got a whole bunch of incompatibilities.

[Salk 375]

Thanks for the very exhaustive explanation there, DP.

One more question, if you please: would you consider duplicating Canderous' equipment (in case he is the jail breaker) and add it back for the player to find under the condition that the container where his items are is not being checked? 

[DarthParametric 3,790]

It's not accounted for in the current version, but I have plans for an update that will add a starting cutscene for Canderous when he is the chosen jail breaker (since he's the only one that lacks one), and in that he will automatically re-equip his gear, just like now happens for the PC (and Bastila/Carth) at the end of the escape.

I'm still working on the stunt animation at the moment. I may have to add an additional sequence to the end because the collision around the beds is too excessive to allow regular scripted anims to work as intended (a character can't get close enough to the bed). Either that or I need to adjust the walkmesh. I'm taking a break from it for a while to work on some K1CP additions, but here's a couple of snapshots of the WIP:

    

[Salk 375]

DP,

one curiosity: are you now using Blender for your animating and modeling work? 

[DarthParametric 3,790]

God no.

[Salk 375]

Well, rather then wait for the new version I thought I'd provide some feedback that might be of some use after testing 1.0.

Due to the fact that I needed integrating this modification into my own installation I had to manually inject all the TSL Patcher changes so please keep this in mind (i.e. human error on my part is a possibility, despite my best efforts to avoid it by double checking what I was doing).

• Bastila is facing the Player when she should instead be facing Carth (lev40_bast400.dlg [E54]).
• The camera's field of view should be adjusted to allow for 4:3 resolution because the way it is now Carth is talking and half of his body is cut out (lev40_bast400.dlg [Camera IDs 100 & 103 - I locally changed their FoV to 75 and 80 respectively and that seems to be good enough).
• The party cell door is now a forcefield and needs the additional sound added to the .GIT and the addition of the sound off script in the "OnOpen" door field. But honestly I don't even hear the forcefield sound from any of the force fields in the area. Either I am deaf or something is wrong.
• (Original Issue)I chose Juhani as jail breaker and in her cutscene she attacks a SIth Soldier but the lightsaber is not showing. It activates after she's killed her enemy, making for a rather ludicrous scene.
• (Original Issue)All three models (Carth, Player, Bastila) inside the torture cages suffer of some weird light issues causing some part of their bodies (ex. Bastila corners of her eyes) to be too bright without any apparent reason. This applies to several body parts but I suspect it is an original issue.
• (Original Issue) After lifting the force fields via computer, a cutscene starts where Rodians and Sith Soldiers are about to face each other for battle. It is very clumsily done, with the actors scrambling to find their destination before any combat ensues. I suggest a relocation of the waypoints and other minor adjustments to make it smoother.
• (Original Issue) The recovered equipment will be showing as new items in the inventory but if I remember correctly this is a game engine limitations we can not do anything about.
• Suggestion: in the lev40_carth.dlg cutscene we never get a nice camera shot showing the whole group standing in the Ebon Hakw's center room. Adding one static camera to do this at a few dialogue junctions would be a good idea. Actually no need to add any, it is enough to use the module's camera 1 at E7.
• Suggestion: change lev40_torturer.utc's appearance (currently a Sith Soldier)
• Suggestion: change name for three Sith Soldier originally called "Technician". "Sith Guard" like others in the area would be more correct.

Everything went smoothly enough otherwise and I tested using a female protagonist.

EDIT: Additional generic observation. Why do the "Force Field" doors even display the Bash icon? It should not be there at all because they shouldn't be destroyable. Enabling the Plot flag might be a solution. And I don't even think that the name "Cell Door" is really appropriate. I locally changed their name to Force Field (string #408).