Jade Empire modding (see first post for info summary)

[RedHawke]

Since ChAiNz stickied tk102's tool thread to keep it from getting 'lost' I'm sticky-ing this one as it is also a tool thread. One that I don't want to see 'lost'.

 

I will install this darned game someday... someday! Curses DDO!

[croma]

At last, the power supply replaced. No more internet via mobile phone.

 

It's a screenshot from the game using a quick re-skin I've made of the Radiant Jen character, which I'm currently playing as:

 

So it's just re-skinning? I thought I saw ponytail there. My bad eyes.

 

Anyway, I've replayed through both of my SWKotOR and tried to mod it myself (succesfully though not much, yay) instead of dnloading pre-existed ones just to get more grasp on those wonderful tools. Now I have theories:

1. It seems like everything can be hexed. I never tried though, never knew it, never had it.

2. The .txi files can override some .2da entry.

3. If theory 2 is true, maybe the .mdx files can do the same.

 

Anyone can help me on this? Any clarification, confirmation, comments, or curses are very much appreciated.

[tk102]

If anyone would like to test drive an alpha version of DLGEditor for Jade Empire, you can download it here: http://www.starwarsknights.com/forumdl/jedlgeditor_230a2.rar

 

Please note, unlike KotOR dialogs, Jade Empire relies exclusively on the dialog.tlk file for its conversations. Thus you will want to download stoffe's TLKEd program to do any custom editing.

 

If you do download this, please take the time to tell about the bugs you find. I don't have Jade Empire, so if there's a particular dialog that has trouble, send me a copy in an email (address is in Help: About JE DLGEditor).

[Gargoyle King]

It's a screenshot from the game using a quick re-skin I've made of the Radiant Jen character, which I'm currently playing as:

 

Is there any chance you could release that skin Stoffe, it looks awesome! So JE modding has finally begun, only a matter of time really; i hope it eventually becomes as diverse as K1 & TSL modding has!

[Aash Li]

Id like to have Stoffe's skin of her too.

[Alkonium]

Id like to have Stoffe's skin of her too.

Come to think of it, so would I. I mainly play as a customised (stat-wise, not appearance-wise) Tiger Shen, but that skin might give me a reason to play as Radiant Jen Zi.

[stoffe]

Come to think of it, so would I. I mainly play as a customised (stat-wise, not appearance-wise) Tiger Shen, but that skin might give me a reason to play as Radiant Jen Zi.

 

I've uploaded the reskinned textures here if you want it. Unpack the files and put them in the override folder. Remove any files with the same name with an .TXB extension found in the override folder, otherwise the game will not use the modded textures.

 

[Aash Li]

How do you rotate the camera around so you can see your chara? I cant seem to zoom in or anything. >_>

[stoffe]

How do you rotate the camera around so you can see your chara? I cant seem to zoom in or anything. >_>

 

As far as I know there is no "Vanity Mode" in Jade Empire, unfortunately.

 

It can be partially faked, somewhat, in combat mode by pressing and holding the Block key, since this will allow you to rotate the camera around your character with the mouse. If you do this long enough it sometimes gets stuck in that camera angle when you release the block key until you attack or move, allowing you a look at your character in the normal combat stance as well.

 

This, along with screenshots from dialogs/cutscenes is what I've used to make screenshots of my characters so far. It might be possible to make a mod that allows you to put your character into cutscene mode at will and pick a camera angle, though I haven't looked into how the game allows camera movement yet to be sure.

[Aash Li]

I think its rather stupid that teh console game allows it, but the pc version doesnt... whats the point of having it on the console version? Is there screenshot abilities on that, that I dont know of?

 

Where do you get the skin for Scholar Ling's face? I found her clothes, but not her...

 

Also, the clothing mod for your character isnt working for me, for some reason. O.o The head reskin does, but thats it...

[Aash Li]

 

Drow! haha... anyone know where the body textures are found? :3

 

 

Guess Ill have to play the game through once before I can play as an npc I like better.... heh

[Ztalker]

Heya...finished the game yesterday, but something felt...wrong...

 

In the Kotor games, you could freely choose where to go. In JE, It bothered me that you had to do this 'major' quest for a ship, when you can only visit 2 places with it.

Also, I felt like I was being pushed in the right direction by the game.

 

I'm seriously sorry for buying the game...I just don't like it somehow...

 

Anyone else feel this way? Or am I doing something wrong?

[stoffe]

In the Kotor games, you could freely choose where to go.

 

Well, freely might be stretching it a bit. The beginning and end acts of both KOTOR games are quite linear with the freedom to choose where to go and what order to do things only being present in the middle "find the four plot items" act.

 

(Which, on a tangent, seems to be a popular theme for the roaming part in RPGs as of late... "Find the four waterdhavian creatures" and "find the four words of power" in Neverwinter Nights, "find the four star maps" in KOTOR and "find the four jedi masters" in TSL. )

 

In JE, It bothered me that you had to do this 'major' quest for a ship, when you can only visit 2 places with it.

 

Four places (Tien's landing, Imperial City, Palace, Dirge), though you also have Kang's line of quests involving Lord Lao's furnace and all the shooter mini games to go with it. Jade Empire isn't much of a galaxy hopping game where you need to go around a lot.

 

Also, I felt like I was being pushed in the right direction by the game.

 

Jade Empire is a fairly story intensive games that, while it has side quests, mainly focuses on following the main plot. It's not an Oblivion type game with 250+ hours of roaming around exploring the countryside doing things at your leisure. It wasn't a very long game, but that didn't bother me much since I have so many other games that take forever to get though so some variety was nice. Over all I thought it was worth buying and playing though a few times.

 

Anyone else feel this way? Or am I doing something wrong?

 

I thought it was a good game with an interesting plot and fun characters with plenty of Bioware style humor and a combat system that made you feel more involved in the fights rather than like watching an interactive cutscene like the KOTOR games sometimes feel. But it's a matter of taste, so you are of course equally entitled not to like it.

[Ztalker]

Originally Posted by stoffe

Four places (Tien's landing, Imperial City, Palace, Dirge), though you also have Kang's line of quests involving Lord Lao's furnace and all the shooter mini games to go with it. Jade Empire isn't much of a galaxy hopping game where you need to go around a lot.

 

4 Places? I made a little mistake then. I thought I could never return again after going to the Imperial Palace the frist time....

One more thing: How did you guys play your character? I ended up with using only 4 styles (out of efficiency): -Thousand Cuts -Longsword -Jade Golem -Spirit Thief.

I ened up like...a Jedi Sentinel from Kotor. Is it worthwile (and balanced) to play a full-Melee or a full-Magic character?

[Alkonium]

Hmm, I hope I'm not going out of line by asking this, but since BioWare's rather slow on the patch, what are the odds of user-made bug fixes for this game?

[tk102]

I'd say very good as long as they don't involve .bik movie files or models.

 

What bugs need fixing?

[Alkonium]

I'd say very good as long as they don't involve .bik movie files or models.

 

What bugs need fixing?

I'm pretty sure most, if not all of the bugs in the game are scripting errors.

Well, the ones I've encountered are the issue with the first pirates you see on Gao the Greater's island not turning hostile when they should, combat going buggy after killing one of the two imperial soldiers who attack you after the first bit of flirting with Silk Fox, and the infamous combat glitch involving Sir Roderick.

[tk102]

The Jade Empire Save Game Format (.sac) is exceptionally simple:

32 bit (n)   Number of GFF files in this .sac
-------------
begin GFF list
-------------
32 bit (x)  Number of bytes the GFF filename including null
x*chars     Filename including null termination
32 bit (y)  Size of GFF
y*bytes     GFF formatted file

(repeat n times)

 

The last GFF file in the GFF List is called save.sav and contains all the player related information. The other GFF files appear to be area/module information.

[sekan]

Is it just me or can you walk through walking people?

[stoffe]

Is it just me or can you walk through walking people?

 

You can, since the random nameless people roaming around who you can't select aren't technically NPCs, they are a special "crowd" object that runs a number of dummy people who move around to make the area seem busy.

 

Since they aren't NPC/creature objects but rather just visual effects they have no collision detection or pathfinding. As such they are unaware of your presence, and you can walk right through them.

 

I guess things are made this way to reduce the load on the game engine. Pathfinding and AI are quite expensive for processing.

[sekan]

Okey... Is there some way to turn them into npcs?

[stoffe]

Okey... Is there some way to turn them into npcs?

 

Well, you could remove the crowd object and put an equal number of NPC objects into the area, place waypoints where they are supposed to walk and assign them custom AI scripts that make them patrol the waypoints, fake entering buildings etc.

 

A lot of work for no obvious gain, IMO, unless you plan to use those NPCs for something else than decoration and ambience. This will lead to the game slowing to a crawl whenever you are in populated areas, and being able to select all the nobodies, making it harder to locate the NPCs that actually have something to say.

 

There is a reason why the crowd objects where introduced into the game engine after all. The Aurora engine is awful at handling large amounts of NPCs moving about in an area without killing performance due to (among other things) poor pathfinding and an inefficient (for the task) scripting system.

[sekan]

If it's so much work then i wont do it Stoffe is there a spawn script for JE?

[Mindtwistah]

Is there a modding site with JE mods?

[tk102]

Jade Empire Savegame Editor v0.6 released

 

I've uploaded the initial release of a savegame editor for Jade Empire. See the first post of this thread for the download link.

 

 

Edit: I've also uploaded SAC Utils to extract/pack the the save.sac file just in case anyone wants to try low level tweaking of their savegames with K-GFF.

 

Edit: v0.2 released: Fixed Appearance behavior -- now shows list and found an extra field in the GFF that needed to be tweaked to get the changes to stick.

 

Edit: v0.3 released: Added Weapons, Plot Items, Flyer Improvements, Techniques, Amulet, Gems nodes. Also added ability to Add/Remove Styles and the aforementioned elements

 

Edit: v0.4 released: Added Henchmen selection/availability and fixed style bars (was off by one)

 

Edit: v0.5 released: Fixed the bug that was causing journal entries to disappear.

 

Edit v0.6 released: Fixed handling of early savegames where Silver and Alignment fields are not defined. The symptom was that Silver or Alignment were showing up as the values of Chi but when edited, they actually changed the Chi. That's been fixed.