"Power of the force" race

[cry_of_paine]

I had this idea for a way to make battles more interesting. Here's the premise:

 

We all know that the force is powered either through our emotions or our calm zen-like attitude (depending on which side of the force you're on). Right now, that's only reflected in your allignment points. What I was thinking was that for major force powers (basically anything on teir 3), you could boost those by playing a kind of mini game.

 

My first thought was something along the lines of Final Fantasy special attacks. For instance, there's a slider bar that goes back and forth within a time limit, and you have to press a button on your controller when the slider is within a certain space on the bar. Or there's a time limit and you have to see how many times you can spin the analog joystick around in a circle. Things like that. I very much doubt that you could add anything like that in here, but I got to thinking.

 

My idea is this: You would select a high power force ability, and when it was time to activate it, you would be transported to a "swoop" track. It would be rather TRON like, in that it represents your mind. Ideally, there would be two types of races. A standard race where your goal is to get through it as quickly as possible, and avoid the obsticles. This is for boosting your light force powers. Then there would be a second type, where you push the button as many times as you can while hitting obsticles and avoiding the booster pads. In short, run it the opposite of the way you normally would (guess what happens for that type ).

 

So here's my questions:

1) Can you make your own custom swoop track? Complete with different object textures, etc.

2) Can you stop a battle in the middle, and come back to it with everything exactly as it was when you left?

3) Can you script a swoop race to keep track of certain events (other than the time taken), like number of times an obsticle is hit, number of times the button was pushed, if a button was pushed when not over a boost pad or ready to shift gears?

 

I think especially in TSL, this could be interesting. You could even have another racer (your opposite self) that you're either trying to beat(ls), or trying to force to crash into things (ds - if that's possible, I haven't done much racing in TSL).

[Darth333]

 

So here's my questions:

1) Can you make your own custom swoop track? Complete with different object textures, etc.?)

You can change the swoop track layout by playing with the .are and .lyt files and you can remodel the obstacles and make new textures but swoop racing will always be swoop racing and don't expect to create a new minigame.

 

The swoop track areas in Kotor 1 were much easier to manipulate than those in tsl as you had a swoop track with boost pads and rock obstacles (they were not placeables (*.utp) but the models could easily be moved using the .are file and the .lyt files). There were no walls in the middle of the place like in TSL. You can check my easy swoop racing mods for TSL and K1 here if you want: http://www.geocities.com/d333mods/

 

2) Can you stop a battle in the middle, and come back to it with everything exactly as it was when you left?

yes and no. You can stop a battle in the middle anytime and you could have a force power that warps you to another area and you could also come back to the same spot. But depending on where you are in the game, there's no guarantee things would be as you left them and you could mess up your game if you exit an area and come back to it when you're not supposed to.

 

3) Can you script a swoop race to keep track of certain events (other than the time taken), like number of times an obsticle is hit, number of times the button was pushed, if a button was pushed when not over a boost pad or ready to shift gears

You can fire some events when you hit an obstacle but you can't keep track of the keys that are pressed. Things you could do would be the usual stuff: number of obstacles you hit, change alignment, give a force power, boost wisdom, charisma, even spawn a Bantha on the swoop track for each obstacle you hit

 

Kotor is not meant to have this kind of event and what you want to do is not possible. To use something like this at specific points in the storyline is ok but to make a force power out of it could seriously mess up the game and I believe the result would be very far from what you are looking for.