Alias Secton of the swkotor.ini file

[harIII]

I'm getting ready to start a project in which I will be adding all NEW modules (reskined and remodeled). But the other day I was exploreing the "swkotor" file in the main system file folder of K1 and found what I believe some directories, under [Alias].

 

My question is can I add to these directories to make the game look for example, reskins in a new folder within the override folder? If so I want to put all the reskin files in a reskin folder, all the audio files in an audio folder, and so on.

[N**]

No, I'm fairly sure the Alias entries can't be delimited to add multiple folders. If you wanted to distribute the mod that way, asking the user to edit swkotor.ini is just asking them to trash the file anyway. (Incidentally, KotOR does have an "OVERRIDE:textures" option to change texture paths, but I think it is not exposed.)

 

If you use Windows Vista, you can take advantage of the virtual file system and keep all mods confined to the user directory. I like to do that to keep a pristine copy of the original game files.

 

If you are making a total conversion mod, you could have the installer use hard links (on XP) or symlinks (Vista) to organize the new data files.

 

 

NWN solved this problem by adding HAK support: basically archives which contain custom content that are loaded on a per-module basis. I think KotOR does not support automatic hak loading, but maybe you can try replacing Override\textures.hak for your mod. I have never tried doing this, so I have no idea if it works.

 

[harIII]

I have absolutely no knowledge of how to do this, would you be able to provide more detailed instructions or possibly refer me to a tutorial?

[Darth InSidious]

I believe Darkkender experimented with haks in 03-04, but with little success.

[N**]

Yeah, after looking at it for more than 2 minutes this time, I realized that hak's aren't supported at all. BioWare ripped out the the file format support for them, but left in the .hak extension. At loading time, it cycles through all known ERF extensions (nwm, mod, sav, erf, hak) and reads from any files found, even if they aren't used.

[harIII]

I'm sorry but I'm still not following. I'm absolutely positive that changing the directories will work but as far as I know making multiple ones will not work. If I were to do this I will have to take all the original models and other files and place them in the new directories and that is what I'm trying to avoid.