Annoyances, Candy, and Powers

[Zagadka]

Heya,

 

1) I was thinking earlier about how the worst part of the gaming experience is running back and forth across cities doing errands... I usually end up taking the Force Speed line, which is annoying (not to mention, blurry). I figure that changing movement speed would be simple (since such functions already exist), though I don't know how to go about it.

 

2) Looking at the "KotOR Cleanup Mod" that hides weapons in cutscenes etc, I was wondering if you could hide them completely when not in use (AKA, holster them), then do a weapon flourish and have the weapon reappear.

 

3) Support Jedi. They need their own devices that distinguish them from the hack-and-slash lightsabers. I don't mean to veer from the sci-fi scene to a fantasy one... but maybe, for a Sith Lord, instead of holding a lightsaber, has a glow/fire/electricity/whatever around his/her hands. And, of course, they can always take the non-saber Deflection powers.

 

4) Last for tonight... is there a way to attach a light source to the player when they have their lightsaber activated?

 

5) I'll work on a longer list of this tomorrow, but for now, I got to thinking about how useful some powers are. This was triggered by Force Pull, which is a nice and frequently very useful skill, but it doesn't allow you to "specialize" in it - say, a second tier to disarm the target for 12 seconds, and a third tier to pull multiple enemies (or their weapons).

 

The gist is: There simply aren't enough powers in the game! My Jedi usually end up taking similar paths... there's no need or reward for focusing on one or two specific lines, or being mediocre at multiple lines. The Epic character force powers mod is nice, but it only has 1 power in each line (and they are WAY freaking overpowered, I'd like to know how to edit that, too).

 

Anyway, thanks for your time.

 

Edit:

 

6) Leveling items. Like your saber crystal... I don't know how difficult it would be, but a few really rare/expensive items that not only (or not) upgrade via the work bench, but gain power as you level, and/or focus on becoming "dark" or "light", each with its own properties and potential. Dunno, just floating ideas.

[Mav]

^^^

1. Editing movement speed, as far as normal movement meaning no force run, I'm not exactly sure as to how one would go about editing that, if it is possible I'd imagine it is somewhere in a .2da file. But you can get rid of the blurry vision from the force run, it is in the advanced graphic options somewhere, don't remember exactly where.

 

2. I usually just do this manually, by pressing H to holster things after I slaughter said beastie... savvy... (lol sorry couldn't resist)

 

3. I'm not sure this would exactly fit well, but if you want a Jedi/Sith in your party to use force powers and not have a saber, you could just set them to stationary or ranged with no weapons equiped... I'm not really sure what you're going for.

 

4. I don't know what you mean by this...

 

5. Editing force powers requires, .2da editing, scripting, and .TLK editing, other than that, I think that the game has a fair amount of force powers, I rarely end up using more than a few of them. At the same time, more force powers is always a good thing

 

6. I'm not sure how one would go about doing this, because the crystal in the game that was upgraded via Kreia was done by replacing the one crystal with another with the same name, so it wasn't exactly leveling, you were just getting a new crystal each time.

 

They are all good ideas, most I'm not sure how one would go about executing, but ideas usually get explored and new things are learned, so ideas never hurt anybody

[Zagadka]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm poking around with 2da editing right now. Linked tables are reminding me of my days as a database admin. Argh.

 

I also managed to come up with one other request... I need a specific style for a character. He's a Jedi (PC), but I want him to wear something that looks more like clothing or light armor instead of a robe... and for it to be white (I can always edit the graphic if someone doesn't want to do the white thing). Sorry, I'm new at modding, but I'm hoping to learn from examples, like any good Jedi should.

 

Thanks again!

 

Edit: Oh, and by #4 (the saber as a light source), I mean to emulate how they use sabers as torches to see better in the dark. I think it would add a level of realism if you run down an alley with a drawn saber and it lit the walls... but maybe that's just pipe dreaming. I don't see a way to do it easily... and you'd have to edit every saber type in the game to do it the way I'm thinking... Anyway, bleh.

[oldflash]

Aditional light source affect only placeables and characters and not all map (In Ebon Hawk a light source will affect bao-dur, remote, hk47, pc and workbench; the rest of hangar bay will stay as it is with default lightmap). Effect is unnatural. You can see if you edit any weapon's .uti and add light->blue to attributes.

!That light doesn't cast shadow.

[Mav]

No problem, but I'm sure this will all come quickly to you, best of luck. As far as your requests/ideas, I'm just assuming that you are talking about KotOR:TSL and not the original, but in either case your request as far as clothing/armor instead of a robe could be a bit complicated. As I'm sure you know, wearing armor in this game restricts the ability to use certain force powers so your choices for armor looking robes/clothes for a jedi is limited. In TSL there is the "Jedi armor" that looks more like a kilt with kevlar, but personally I don't find that very attractive. So your other choice would be to reskin clothing to look like armor or a robe to look like armor, much like Prime's General Kenobi robes, the problem with this is, that if you skin a robe/cloth to look like armor/metal, it will still behave like cloth, bend and flex and flow. Now the complicated choice would be to create a new line in the baseitems.2da where it uses whatever armor model you want and does not have restrictions on force powers.

 

Hope this helps,

Mav

[stoffe]

1) I was thinking earlier about how the worst part of the gaming experience is running back and forth across cities doing errands... I usually end up taking the Force Speed line, which is annoying (not to mention, blurry). I figure that changing movement speed would be simple (since such functions already exist), though I don't know how to go about it.

 

If you want to permanently increase the run/walk speed of the player character you can probably do that in creaturespeed.2da (or, if that doesn't work, change the values in the moverate and drivemaxspeed in appearance.2da for the line you use as your Exile appearance). Though some in-game cutscenes may look a bit goofy if you do so since the character may arrive much earlier than expected when walking arround and stand around for a bit before the scene proceeds.

 

If you just want to remove the annoying blur effect from the Force Speed series you can remove any instances where the visual effect VFX_DUR_SPEED is applied in the impact script of those powers (k_sp1_generic --> k_inc_force).

 

 

2) Looking at the "KotOR Cleanup Mod" that hides weapons in cutscenes etc, I was wondering if you could hide them completely when not in use (AKA, holster them), then do a weapon flourish and have the weapon reappear.

 

Should be possible to do, either by modifying the lines for the animations in animations.2da and setting the hideequippeditems column to 1 for each such animation. Might make cutscenes where characters are supposed to run around with weapons (like patrolling soldiers etc) look a bit weird.

 

Or you could alter the generic AI scripts to make NPCs unequip any weapons they have while not in combat, and then equip what's in their inventory before attacking. That's quite a bit of work for such a relatively minor thing though, and it'd give the player an advantage in combat since enemies would need to spend their first combat round pulling out their guns/blades rather than attacking.

 

5) I'll work on a longer list of this tomorrow, but for now, I got to thinking about how useful some powers are. This was triggered by Force Pull, which is a nice and frequently very useful skill, but it doesn't allow you to "specialize" in it - say, a second tier to disarm the target for 12 seconds, and a third tier to pull multiple enemies (or their weapons).

 

The problem with "Disarm" powers is that you won't make it look like you're actually pulling their weapons out of their hands. It's just suddenly disappear, and then magically reappear when the "disarm duration" has run out. You'd also need extensive Combat AI modifications to make NPCs not act braindead when their weapon suddenly is gone since 99% of all characters in the game have abysmal hand to hand combat skills, making them essentially helpless when disarmed. Though I suppose it's no worse than any of the Stun/Paralyze powers.

 

I couldn't make it look and work believably, but perhaps someone else has better ideas for how it could be done.

 

The Epic character force powers mod is nice, but it only has 1 power in each line (and they are WAY freaking overpowered, I'd like to know how to edit that, too).

 

If you mean the High Level Force Powers mod, then the force powers are balanced against my skill at combat in the game (playing on Normal difficulty) against enemies using a tweaked combat AI I've made to make them a bit more aggressive (and where the Jedi/Sith bosses use some of those powers against you as well). They may be a bit overkill, but so are powers like Force Crush and Force Storm (available much earlier), and a fully upgraded lightsaber swinged with Master Power Attack, against which they'd have to compete for usefulness.

 

Some of the powers are also a protest against how the game's autoleveler makes even the lowliest thug have way better saving throws than the Exile or party members ever could hope to have at comparable levels, quickly rendering the "all or nothing" (from a saving throw perspective) powers fairly useless.

 

As for tiers, I thought it was enough work to make 21 new powers. If I had to make every power have 3 tiers that would mean 63 new powers, and I'd probably get bored doing the mod and dropped it before it was ever released if I had done that. Not to mention lacking the imagination to come up with interesting variations for 42 new powers to make it feel worthwhile.

 

 

6) Leveling items. Like your saber crystal... I don't know how difficult it would be, but a few really rare/expensive items that not only (or not) upgrade via the work bench, but gain power as you level, and/or focus on becoming "dark" or "light", each with its own properties and potential.

 

The problem with this is that you can't really upgrade items via scripting. The Exile's crystal is handled by replacing the item with another copy of it with unique properties. While something similar could be made with other items like weapons/armor, the problem is when those items are upgradeable. You can't transfer or remove any installed upgrades automatically via scripts. So the player would either have to remove any upgrades from their weapon/armor at a workbench before it "levels", or otherwise they would lose those upgrades.

[Zagadka]

Hm, thanks for the thoughts again.

 

Leveling up an item, I guess, is out of the question, as is the point of the glowing lightsabers. I'll see if those speed hacks work.

 

As far as the armor/robe business goes, I would just be looking for aesthetics. I'm not imagining Mandalorian body armor on a Jedi, but some of the "Light Armors" look loose enough that they wouldn't restrict Force movement, and if they are given attributes similar to robes, then I think it can be called a fair replacement.

 

I was thinking; how hard would it be to add or extend feats? Do they work like powers?

[stoffe]

I was thinking; how hard would it be to add or extend feats? Do they work like powers?

 

Feats, unlike force powers, are not scripted but are handled internally by the game engine. As such you can't change how an existing feat works.

 

You can add new feats, but they won't do anything by themselves and are thus only useful as "status flags" that can be checked for in scripts elsewhere. (E.g. the player has the "Diplomatic" feat, so add +5 to all Persuade checks in the dialog persuade scripts.)