Rukil's Apprentice - Recruitable Malya

[HelloWeasel 16]

Hello all,

This is an idea I had many years ago (I think I even made a thread here about it), but I never got very far. It crossed my mind recently so I decided to take another crack at it since it's a character's story I feel low-key passionate about.

When the player is down in the Undercity of Taris, they can run into Rukil, the old proclaimer of something called the Promised Land. He has you go search for his missing apprentice, a young woman named Malya. In the game, you find a generic (old man) corpse with Malya's journal, and you tell Rukil she died. The end.

Or not. The Promised Land concept is interesting enough, but the fact that Rukil has an apprentice (with a name), who seems to be an open-minded, hopeful, and brave young woman of all things seems like a huge missed opportunity to me. Maybe she's force sensitive. Maybe she has a unique perspective the other characters don't have, based on her unique upbringing. It's especially tragic for my player character, who doesn't really have the hots for Bastila and would be much more interested in someone who's not such a normie. So, Malya lives on, developing quietly in the back of my mind.

So I've started work on it again.

STORY:

The new story is, basically, that while searching for the Promised Land, Malya left her journal on an old corpse in the Undercity when had to run and hide from Rakghouls and then Gamorrean slave hunters. She got captured by Gamorreans, and sold to the exchange. Shortly before the player character arrives at Davik's estate, Malya attempted to escape but was caught and thrown in the torture chamber. She is then rescued by the player character, and the grateful Malya joins him after learning that the other Outcasts are long gone on their journey to the Promised Land.

The party then escapes Taris and goes to Dantooine, where Malya succumbs to her usual habits and explores every part of the Jedi enclave she can. While the player character is in training, Malya steals a Jedi holocron, and starts learning about the Jedi, Sith, and various Force philosophies.

Once the quest for the Star Forge begins, the player character learns of Malya's Force experiments and has the option to train her as his own apprentice. Instead of becoming a traditional Jedi, however, Malya forms her own philosophy combining the teachings of Rukil and what she has learned since. One of her protests to the usual events of the game's story is on Kashyyyk, where she denounces a violent Wookiee uprising against Czerka, instead advocating for a more moderate agenda.

As she harbors feelings for the player character, she dislikes Bastila, and by extension distrusts the Jedi. This is amplified after the Leviathan incident and subsequent revelation. Near the end, Malya declares her wish that the player character neither be subservient to the Jedi nor the Dark Side, and instead submit to nothing but Truth itself and become a fully realized individual, and says that this can be done by saving his old friend Malak from the Dark Side.

MOD GOAL:

Recruitment mod that adds Malya to the party, replacing Juhani. She serves as an alternative love interest to Bastila for male PCs. She can be trained as a Force user by the player character. She is to be fully voiced (I have directed voice actors before so I'm not worried about this - I'm more worried about lip synching because I have no idea how to do it). She is to chime in on the story like other party members do. Further down the road, if I get good enough at modding or have help, I'd like to have more story stuff like in the above summary.

WHAT I'VE DONE SO FAR:

-In Davik's estate, Malya can be found in the torture chamber (replacing Hudrow). When you rescue her, she gives you the Ebon Hawk security codes and joins your party after you escape Taris. This is implemented and works. However, there are a few problems I have to work out.

-Her appearance is subject to change, but right now I have a reskinned albino version of TSL's PFHA06. After she escapes Davik's estate and changes out of the dirty old Outcast clothes, she has a hooded outfit which was made by removing the face from the darkjedif model (I might publish that bit on this website separately as a modder's resource or small mod). I made a prototype skin for the clothing, and I'll make cooler variants in the future.

CURRENT PROBLEMS AS OF POSTING THIS:

-I don't have any voiced lines yet, so Malya has been speaking Twilek. Sometimes her mouth doesn't move and I don't know why. Edit: Now I know why.

-Although Malya has a unique entry in appearance.2da, I don't know how to access the new entry with the UTC editor. The dropdown menu only shows vanilla appearances to choose from, so that's why the Malya in Davik's estate looks like her old friend Shaleena the Outcast girl. Edit: Fixed! Thanks, Effix.

-I hardly know how to do anything! Lol.

 

 

So, if any of that sounds interesting, or if you have any comments or suggestions, or want to help in any way, or just want to say hi, I welcome your words.

It had been so long I had forgotten the details; I had a post about this back in 2016: 

 

However, it's super old so I guess ignore it.

 

Here are some images:

Edited January 8, 2023 by HelloWeasel
Removed references to issues that have since been fixed.

[Effix 532]

Hey, nice work so far!

- You can use K-GFF to update the appearance (a value named "Appearance_Type" at the top) to point to the non vanilla row.
You will want to let the TSL Patcher do that dynamically once you're ready to turn things into a downloadable mod, but that can wait.
- Lips not moving: that means you are referencing lip files that are not included in the module the character is in at that moment. You can extract them from another module that does include them, to the Override folder.
How to look for the ones you need: copy a mod file (one that contains _loc) or a bunch of them from the lips folder to the modules folder. In KotOR Tool you can now check which lip files it contains, the mod will appear under Kotor I -> ERFs -> Modules. Pretty easy to clean up afterwards because of the _loc in the filename.

That's all for now, good luck! 🙂

[HelloWeasel 16]

Wow, thanks Effix! This helps alot!

It looks so much more exciting now that she actually looks different from Shaleena:

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 8, 2023 by HelloWeasel
Removed redundant images that are now in the first post.

[HelloWeasel 16]

I have successfully added a silhouette for the Malya party member slot for before she is added to the party by replacing the Juhani entry. Her portrait also appears successfully when after she joins the party! (Ignore the level 20, she joins at level 1 I think)

Unfortunately, there is a big whiteness where the character should be standing, and I need to figure out why that is the case.

[Effix 532]

Try adding a file that ends with 3.
So maybe you have po_pmalya for the default portrait, po_pmalya2 for the silhouette and then po_pmalya3.

Btw the image's doesn't get shown at 100%, I don't remember the best fitting value (height 80%?). You can see the slight difference here:


 

[DarthParametric 3,785]

On 1/6/2023 at 2:12 PM, HelloWeasel said:

I'm more worried about lip synching because I have no idea how to do it

Lip sync is fairly trivial to generate once you know how to do it, it's just extremely laborious and clunky because of the archaic toolchain required. This tutorial should give you the gist of it. Although it's a bit outdated now. Grab this version of CSLU Toolkit from DS. There's also this alternative option, but I've never tried it myself.

[JCarter426 1,215]

To add to the above, my blogpost on lips contains some batch scripts that automate some of the process.

Although that is also outdated because a license for the CSLU Toolkit is available once again from the above link and I also wrote that blogpost before I wrote SithCodec.

[Zhaboka 91]

Wow, well she LOOKS awesome, and I love the story idea! Would totally play this when finished.

[EpicStoffer 31]

This looks amazing, I'm excited to see it come to fruition, and try it out ^^

In relation to your voice aspect, while I understand you have some experience working with VA's, an alternative solution could be to use one of the free voices from https://beta.elevenlabs.io/

The quality is quite high, and it's very user friendly to use (you'll have a 10k characters limit pr. month as a free user though).

 

Edit:

In relation to creating lip files, JCarter's put up a small video that shows how to do it, that's pinned over in the Kotor discord's "Mod Development" channel.

[HelloWeasel 16]

Hello all, thanks for the kind comments! It's been a while, I am hoping to get back to working on this momentarily (I've been distracted with modding Age of Empires 2 and of course real life).