Grand idea for infinite number of Party Members

[harIII]

I'm presently working on a mod that will eventually construct a K3 and as I've been searching the forums, everyone has been saying that you can only have as many party members as there are spaces for instance. K1 can only have 9 and K2 can only have 10.

 

Wouldn't it be possible to create a mod that allows you to "swap" party members at your own will. Lets say that you're in K1 and have all 9 characters. At some point in the storyline you will get a 10th or an 11th character. Could I create a mod that would allow you to swap Carth for the 10th character through dialog. For example (All this will happen on the Ebon Hawk), you will talk to the 10th character and one of the dialog options will be "[Have (name) join your party selection?]" and if you click it, you'll see a list of all of your present companions. At this point, you'll select for instance Carth and then when you exit the Ebon Hawk, you'll see the 10th character portait in place of Carth. Then later on, you will be able to go back and change them back. At least in theory, you can have an infinite number of party members.

 

If somebody could give me instruction or direct me to help, I'd be thrilled.

 

The reason I need this to happen is that in order for me to construct my K3 mod, I'm going to have to have more than 10 party members.

 

Thank you

[xrefusex]

I suppose it's possible, but the way both games work most party members have some active involvement in plot/game development, so making them all interchangeable can very well result in messing up the game or at best you'll end up having your custom companions talking the lines of the 'vanilla' companions they replaced.

 

But K3 mod? I don't want to rain on your parade, but I'm sure if you look around you will find that it may be a bit too ambitious a project, particularly if you're just starting out with modding.

[harIII]

I know exactly what your saying about ambitious but if that is the case I could make it so that only a few of the major characters are interchangable or make it so that the missions make it more obvious to use a particular character.

 

Would you know of a place to get started on this?

[Omnimmotus]

I'd suggest carefully designing your story and dialog to check for which party members are in selection at the time. If done just right, I bet you could phase out the problems.

 

To get started, I'd just say look into module creation and scripts. Keep us posted. (Says the lurker )

[Kainzorus Prime]

I wonder why they always jump on a gun and want to create whole new game out of a mod for current one.

[Omnimmotus]

My guess is that they want to create the whole new game, and modding it is just the easiest way they can see to do it.

[harIII]

In responce to -DK- At least for me, I played through the game many times and after a while, I became bored with it. Eventually I learned about Modding and wanted to change things to make it more interesting.

[Robespierre]

In responce to -DK- At least for me, I played through the game many times and after a while, I became bored with it. Eventually I learned about Modding and wanted to change things to make it more interesting.

 

I'm going to make a...bold statement here: don't waste your time on Total Conversions that are most likely going to fail. If you're a good modder, then go join a modding team; there are plenty out there that could use your help. Revenge of Revan I believe is one that is a kind of Total Conversion, and the Slehyron project is another one worth looking at, Its just a much more productive use of your time than trying to start another ambitious project.

 

There are other ways to make the game more interesting without spending years making a mod that changes the whole game.

[xrefusex]

I wouldn't even class those as Total Conversions... they are for the most part new content mods, one of which is meant to restore cut content from KotOR. But yeah, I agree that if you feel confident or ambitious enough to tackle something as massive as that, you might want to look into possibly signing up to one of the existing mod teams to see how things work on that level.

[Omnimmotus]

You know, it may be best if you start off, to get your bearings and work out the kinks, by making an addon planet for normal KotOR II. (Or one I guess.) You could either try to use the normal companions, which would be best for an actual addon but a hassle for you, or you could make one or two temporary companions you get instead of your normal party that you could design and flesh out entirely yourself. If you do the second method, I suggest making very heavy influence and alignment opportunities in the module, so that in the course of the one planet you can completely influence your temporary companions. (Or change your alignment. This would be helpful since this would be almost a separate entity.)

 

Now once you've built an addon planet that is completely playable and satisfactory, THEN I suggest moving on to a total conversion. Hopefully, by this point, you will have a thorough enough understanding of dialog and scripting that you'll be set to make the system you're asking about here. An important note; if you want to keep things the best, I suggest mostly only adding content for areas and otherwise keeping the content in the original game. Even a full team would likely reuse most of the game content, so adding tons of new stuff would only be feasible for a large group of dedicated modders.

 

Really, what you're suggesting is mostly new areas and a completely new set of characters with full dialog and a plot to move it along. Weapons and armor can stay mostly the same. You might even reuse a bunch of the original areas.

[Kainzorus Prime]

You know, it may be best if you start off, to get your bearings and work out the kinks, by making an addon planet for normal KotOR II.

 

Which I'll point out, can also take a great amount of time, and that is where most TCs start and end.

[Omnimmotus]

Which I'll point out, can also take a great amount of time, and that is where most TCs start and end.

Best to start with a crash course and give up there than dive right into the ocean to give up. If you're going to give up, you'll give up either way. This is just an earlier step on the staircase.

 

Don't need voice acting though since its not going to be a final product, which cuts down on some of the difficulties.

[EnderWiggin]

Well, we're a bit off track here...

 

@OP:

As you described this, it will work just fine. If you intend to make this a K3, (however ambitious it may be) then the 'vanilla' characters would not interfere, as you would be making them yourself. As long as you stay away from modding in chatter between/with your party, then using scripts would certainly be a good workaround for the hardcoded party slot problem.

 

_EW_

[harIII]

With everybodys' recent comments I would certainly like to create a new add on planet. It might work even better to just create one of the planets from the K3 just to be able to have them both done.

 

For EnderWiggin

I haven't done any work with scripts yet and from what I understand it's programming lanquage. Would you know where there is a list of the possible lines of codes that have a deffinition?

 

Thank you for everybodys' help so far!

[Omnimmotus]

With everybodys' recent comments I would certainly like to create a new add on planet. It might work even better to just create one of the planets from the K3 just to be able to have them both done.

 

For EnderWiggin

I haven't done any work with scripts yet and from what I understand it's programming lanquage. Would you know where there is a list of the possible lines of codes that have a deffinition?

 

Thank you for everybodys' help so far!

There's an additional benefit to making a separate planet. First of all, you don't have to plan specifically to incorporate things from the final result. Of course, you can make some of the characters or something used in the final version, but they'd need tweaking. Second, the first planet you make is going to be riddled with bugs and badly designed. There's no getting around that. You have to make one badly to learn how to make one well. That's why I suggest making something you do NOT plan to use again.

 

Now if you're like me, you won't be able to focus on anything less than the final product, because you're not dedicated to whatever is necessary for its completion, you're dedicated to taking your ideas and putting them in physical form. In that case, I suggest you create a simplified version of one of your final planets. Reduce it to one main quest sequence with two parts, and one side quest. Maybe two merchants, only a couple areas. This will allow you to get the flow of things. Once you've got this down, you can fill in spaces inbetween and redo the first ones to fit them, and then flesh out the structure. That'll help you get where you're going.

 

However, I think you might have better luck if, instead of working on this project immediately, you go out and learn about various skills, such as coding, modeling, or writing. And when I say writing, I don't mean "Oh hey I wrote a two page story about a guy who hates his teachers so he kills them lol," what I mean is learning about the basic story concepts, learning what makes a character likable, learning what cliches are acceptable, and learning how to make things sound good without obfuscating them. One thing that pisses me off the most is when people try to sound smart by writing sentences that make no sense. Let me give an example:

 

Pseudo-smart:

"It's like a rift, a twist between points, a way of taking the impossible and making it possible, the mist made clear for the awaiting eyes of the student learned in my craft. You shall take the baton to the land of shadows, but do not break it. It is fragile; made of glass"

The problem here is that I didn't write those metaphors to try to make the other person understand, I wrote them purely to make the character sound strange. And worst of all, they don't sound like the ways someone who was inexperienced with a language would mess things up, they sound like someone trying to be something they're not.

 

Reasonable:

"It's like taking a piece of paper and folding it so that the two ends meet. On the sheet's surface, the distance between the two ends has not changed. However, in the third dimension, the distance between these two points has become almost nil. A subspace jump is simply folding 3D space to connect two points in 4D, and then making the "jump" between the two points across the four dimensional gap. To viewers in three dimensions, the ship vanishes at one point and appears in another. To one enlightened in four dimensions, however, this action would appear nothing more than a simple movement."

In comparison, my metaphor was intended to purely elaborate the point. All uses of large words were to beatify the sentence, but never take away from its meaning.

 

Of course, a little stretching of this is always acceptable. Putting the dialog just slightly beyond what is purely for explanation gives it a certain surreal element. Just make sure you don't go over the top. The line between surreal and laughably funny is surprisingly blurred.

[harIII]

Right now I am beginning my idea of a "rewrite" of K1 as a preperation of my building of K3. Rather than the original story being told through Bastila and the Jedi Order, the story will be told through Darth Revan and the Sith. You will be Darth Revan! At this point, I have only started on the Command Module of the Endar Spire and most of it is complete. I will need two script files.

 

1 - I need to know the code to make you appear in an area. Why? When you immediatly warp to a constructed module, you'll appear in an area that doesn't coinside with anything such as a door or person. I want to appear next to an Escape Pod in the Taris Uppercity after you escape from the Endar Spire.

 

2 - I need to know the code to make somebody join you. Why? Well that's pretty much part of the game. I will need to have new people join you such as Darth Malak, General Saul, and eventually Bastila.

 

Could anybody tell me where to go or what to do? I looked in the scripting area in the Lucasforums and found nothing in relation to this. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Lord2]

That's an amazing mod, I'd support it to 100%. Having all at the time is a great idea.

 

I just don't think it's possible... But that's me, and I'm no modder.

[HdVaderII]

For the moving to the new module, you might have to use a warp script that would start the new module, and make the character go to a desired spot in the module. I'm not exactly sure what that is at the moment, but you could probably look in the scripting or tutorials

[harIII]

I haven't done this yet for I'm not near ready for using this but how hard could it be. There are scripts out there to allow people to join you, there has to be scripts for people to leave you because of Bastila in K1 and Keira in K2. But seriously how hard is it, once you have the scripts all that would have to be done would be to enter the proper companions' names in the Journal and bam, you know what companions to have with you. If this is possible, I would like to know because if that's the case I'm going to have to rewrite some of my mod's diagram and figure out what to do.

[Lord2]

I haven't done this yet for I'm not near ready for using this but how hard could it be. There are scripts out there to allow people to join you, there has to be scripts for people to leave you because of Bastila in K1 and Keira in K2. But seriously how hard is it, once you have the scripts all that would have to be done would be to enter the proper companions' names in the Journal and bam, you know what companions to have with you. If this is possible, I would like to know because if that's the case I'm going to have to rewrite some of my mod's diagram and figure out what to do.

 

It can't be that hard, I mean... But then, how will the interface look like when you want to switch party members while playing...