as of for only giving lvl one skills, it is because the rest of the skills have prerequisites. to remove the prerequisites, go to the same file and look under "mincharlevel" and simply change the values to "****" (4 asterisks).

As of for the game crashes, im not sure what causes it. I have created a similar all force/feats mod too but it works slightly different. instead of giving free feats, i increase the feats gained per level and also removes all prerequisites as i described above. maybe you can take a look at it for a reference. Or try using the mod that i created and see if your game crashes again during the chargen. alternatively, you can send your mod to my email at : gameunlimited@hotmail.com. I can check if it is working in my comp.

I'll try putting asterisks in everything first after saving a copy of the current one. (reviously I put in 0's instead of asterisks, thinking that in another table 0 was level 1.)Right now I'm wondering if I've acdidentally missed something with some feat or another. I'll go through them all though again before bothering anyone else with it :) I'm also removing prerequisites for this round, in case it's trying to put them on in an order where it was trying to put one on without a required previous one. Trying again now...


And nope. Argh. *grumble*

I'm wondering if part of it comes because of things like "skill focus" which were evidently intended but didn't get put in. I noticed it showing up in the 'attack' bracket...

okay. i have run acroos the same issue myself. you must first of all drop off all level prerequisites from all feats. so that any feat can be gained at any level. that caused my first crash.

second, there is a certain amount of feats you can be granted per level. whenever i had more than ten feats granted per level, the game crashed, ten and below is safe i think. but once i found out what the certain number was, and made sure no level ever gave more than that my crashes stopped. pretty sure ten is safe. but NO more.

and third, if you are thinking that feats that never made it into the game could cause problems you are right. anything that hass xxxx before it in the feat name column is not meant to be used. others are meant for opponent AI. they were put into the game for npcs other than party members. such as weapon proficiency grenade, i imagine is used by the sith grenadiers later on in the game. so, using any feat that has 4's all the way across the board is a big no no. though i REALLY wanted to check out gaurd stance.

Hmm, wonder if that was part of my problem. I tried to make it automatically give me the master ones right away at level 1, without any manual upping during levelups later.

that may or may not cause a problem. if you do that, then what you will need to do is remove any character level requirements. like you must be at level 8 to get this feat. that can be edited in the same file though. then you would also want to remove all feat pre-req's. like you must have this feat before gaining this feat.

however, were i you, i would not do this. some armors have feat requirements in a way that if you only have heavy armor proficiency you might not be able to wear them. the only reason i say this, is because while i was modding exar kun's armor, i noticed it had two feat requirements, one for light armor proficiency and one for medium armor proficiency.

i would recommend only awarding yourself feats you could not gain with your character class. or simply make all feats available, by plaing a 1 in them, and then award yourself say 3-5 feats per level. it is possible to gain all feats in this game, and not cause any problems if you're still awarded feats. say your at level 17 and all your feats are taken, and you are awarded feats. you simply click ok, and the game moves on since it's not possible for you to select a feat. so you have nothing to lose by simply making all the feats you want available and awarding yourself extra feats per level.

*blink* it is? I wasn't sure the code would understand I had all the feats, I guess.

Now how do I set a feat in availability to be available for only specific extra classes, not all of them? Hrm... I essentially want to snare a couple things from the Jedi classes, and get them for my Consular... :)

i think you have to go to the "xxx_list" column for that. but im not sure if that perhaps will cause the trouble again like last time.

nope. i have a scout that is awarded the first three levels of the sneak attack power. and then can select from 4-9 in the in-game feat menu. likwise, i have awarded a sentinel all 3 levels of force jump and force focus.

jennaida, i can send you my feats.2da file to look at if you'd like.

and i have tested the above mentioned issue. i went through five levels without being able to select any feats, as i already had them all and never had a problem. the game does manage to realize when there are no more possible feats to be selected. the same is true for force powers.

No, v1.0.1490.35666 is the latest - that last post was a copy-and-paste error :)

As long as the version number is higher, than the one you have, it is newer.

I hope you all enjoy the changes and improvements I've made to this latest version.

Special thanks to KittyKitty, Stator, eidospsogos and others for the feature suggestions. Extra thanks to KK for helping with testing.

Fred

P.S. tk102 - you're welcome!

Its possible to add new fields to 2da files?

Since I think the only way we can add custom armor/cloathing meshes is new Modoli and Texi fields.

Originally posted by Drakron
Its possible to add new fields to 2da files?

Since I think the only way we can add custom armor/cloathing meshes is new Modoli and Texi fields.

yes you can create new rows just save the 2da as an xml the edit it with notepad.Choose where you want the row to appeare on the 2da and type this <row name>****</row name>
you would replace "row name" with Modoli or Texi save the file the load the xml back into the 2da editor you may also get an error when you load it just hit continue and your new row will be there. :D

Ugh! I spend hours developing a grid to edit 2da's and you want to add a new row by editing the xml version? That's only slightly easier than hex editing the 2da file itself :)

There is an easier way. Just right-click on a row, choose "insert row", and a new row will appear between the one you clicked on and the one above it.

However, you did ask about adding new fields, not rows. I have not added the ability to add new fields (columns) because I figured it would be rather unlikely that the game engine would deal with them properly.

P.S. Read the readme.txt :D

BTW, if you copy (not move) the patch.erf file to your texturePacks directory, you can look at the tpc images and skills.2da file contained therein.

Also, for those who care, I think the "tpc" extension stands for "Texture, PC", as the Xbox version has the same file names, but the extension is "txb" (Texture, XBox).

Fred

Sorry, I figured out with the help they given me.

I dont know about the new fields will work or not since the body meshes in armor/robe/clothing appears to just look for the Model and Tex fields for what mesh they will apply the texture that indicates (if my texture skills did not suck I could release a mod that will make NPCs use their cloth mesh instead of the default robes mesh but a diferent texture being applied when using dark jedi robes, the red robes and blue robes) , I seens that the object mesh/texture information is model and text number (Darth Revan/Star Forge robes look at Modelj and Texj fields) but the object uti BodyVariation entry is =10 so perhaps it allow us to expand the number of Model and Tex fields for new meshes since without it only thing we can do is replace existing meshes id on the Model field.

A way around it would be the Sith armor/Sand people robes trick but the bad news is there is a mesh for each body type (small/medium and large) and a entry for each type in apperance.2da and even if, fortunatly, all the jedi NPCs are using "M" meshes that could not be the case of the player model, the player model only uses the M meshes if he is a scout.

Ok, so I'm working on some code for handling GFF-based files, like the Area (.are) and Creature (.utc).

As I'm hoping to present a friendly GUI for interacting with these files, which would you folks like to see editable first?

Area.

Perhaps I can fix the "levitating" jedi council with that ...

levitating?

(I have used what I have to make "Dead Eye" have a can of beer on his head. Oh how little it can take to amuse me...)

Fred,
When you get started on GFF file manipulation, you may find it easiest to think of the file primarily composed of two types of recursive objects: Structs and Fields (with the occasional CExoLocString etc thrown in). Maybe that's obvious to you, but it wasn't to me.

Yes, if you look at some of the council members in Dantooine you will notice their feets are not connected to the floor .

Actually, I already have a class implemented that will read GFF data and built a relational structure plus reference arrays for the structs and lists.

Here's a few links to the diagnostic output from the class when it's building itself from the stunt_eboqrts.git file in STUNT_00.rim , in case anyone's interested:


Text format:
stunt_eboqrts.txt (http://home.comcast.net/~armada/stunt_eboqrts.txt)

RTF format ("syntax colored"):
stunt_eboqrts.rtf (http://home.comcast.net/~armada/stunt_eboqrts.rtf) (You can save this to disk and open it with WordPad or MS Word)

As a side note, the units for x/y/z positions appear to be measured in meters (well, "virtual" meters), as most of the male charaters are about 1.6 to 1.75 units tall.

If you'd like to see the beer (actually plc_beer2) on DeadEyes' head, put this in the override folder and go to the dueling organizer's room in the cantina on Taris.

m02ae.git (http://home.comcast.net/~armada/m02ae.git)

Some might like to know that it appears that attempting to place two character models at the same x/y/z coordinates will cause one to be moved off to the side, apparently outside their collision radii.

Originally posted by Drakron
Yes, if you look at some of the council members in Dantooine you will notice their feets are not connected to the floor .

Here's Vandar's info; note the "ZPosition" :)

Struct- Type:4 Field count: 6
Field- Type: float Label: XPosition Value: 106.2865
Field- Type: float Label: YPosition Value: 31.36993
Field- Type: float Label: ZPosition Value: 4.445451
Field- Type: float Label: XOrientation Value: -0.5555701
Field- Type: float Label: YOrientation Value: 0.8314697
Field- Type: CResRef Label: TemplateResRef Value: dan13_vandar
End of struct

Vandar is fine, its the other two idiots (not the twi' lek) that are wrong.

The "Z" numbers for all of them are different, go figure :)

Hey Fred, I just gotta say, since I just realized I have never posted in this thread, I LOVE your tool, its by far the most useful thing modders have access to (but I'm sure you knew that already :)).

Also, I'm wondering, do you have any plans in the future to make an item maker type thing with an easy to use GUI?
I'm no programmer, but from what I've seen you do here, I don't think it would be that hard (by looking at the item files and such) to make something that lets you choose a name, description, and appearance, then add properties.

Thanks Again for an Awesome modding tool,
Shimaon

Thanks for the compliments; I'm glad you're happy with KT.

As the only reason I'm writing this tool (besides the fact that I like programming a great deal - I do it ~13-14 hours a day) is so that all of you folks can get even more out of KotOR, I'm happy to hear of the features you'd like to have.

That said, I haven't had the time to poke around to see what it takes to create an item manually, but if someone can give me the basic logic and steps behind it and what files and/or data has to be modified to do so, I probably can grant your request.

Anyone up to that task?


Now, with regard to area editing, I only have 1/2 of the code for the GFF files done; the part that parses them into a managable internal format that I can use. I have added this, for what use it is, into the latest version, which I should be releasing soon (maybe the evening of 2/8). It will let you Control-double-click a GFF -type file on the tree and you'll get to see the parsed file in syntax-colored text form in the new version of the text editor. A shift-double-click gets you the straight uncolored version.

The new text editor has most of the features you'd find in an external editor, like a "find" function, multiple levels of undo/redo, font selection, etc. Maybe most folks won't find it useful, but I needed the code for something else anyway, so you get the benefit. :)

Also, the image viewer, text editor and hex viewer all remember where you last had them and their sizes as well.

Watch for the posting announcement! :)

OK, new version posted :)

Hehe.. I actually had a dream the other night as I was waking up... I can distinctly remember dreaming that I programmed a tool that would do a bunch of cool stuff.. which I'm going to try to explain as best I could, though remember.. this all comes from the fragments of a dream so bear with me.. ;)

Anyways.. it would first obviously have to have path information, similar to kotor_tool. This is so that, when it does its first step, which would be to load up all the data, it could (if the option was selected) use files it found in \override instead whenever there was a possible conflict.

Now.. from here, the tool would basically have a graphic interface by which you'd be able to say.. select an area.. It would load that up, and (after having checked against all pertinent data), "know" what's going on there... Then you'd have lists of triggers, placeables, creatures, items, etc... which could be edited, or you could add things in simply because the editor already has all the templates and information.. so all you'd have to do would be to tell it what you wanted to place and where.

I got the feeling it was supposed to do a lot of other fun stuff too, but again.. it's only fragments.

The thing that was really annoying is that I very distinctly remember waking up thinking.. "wow.. that'd be nice.. and it wouldn't be THAT hard to do... " but at the same time, as I fully woke up, I immediately realized that my archaic and piecemail programming knowledge is nowhere even remotely close to "up for the task" so I sighed, ate breakfast.. and edited some stuff with kotor_tool instead. ;)


Now... so as to preserve SOME amount of topic integrity... You already know I love kotor_tool. As for new features, I guess native support for those GFF files (they have a more proper name, but it escapes me right now), which would probably lead to a feature *similar* to the easy item creation/editing I was mentioning above (since you're already getting into the area files and the like, which would realistically be the other roadblock for such an undertaking).

Assuming we ever manage to figure out the blasted model format, maybe a simple viewer which would allow loading up an MDL and acompanying textures in a 3d view would be nice. Especially if it gave us the ability to change the selected texture, and optionally save an exported mdl with those changes.

Of course.. I'm dreaming again, and really.. that'd be sorta silly the more I think about it.. since there are already lots of 3d modeling programs to do that job IF we can ever bust the format of the files and get a couple import/export plugins for the stupid things.

hehe.. anyways.. Keep up the great job Fred. I've yet to be unhappy with any release of the program, and I'm always happy to help test (and break) it whenever you need a hand. ;)

I'll also look into that item deal you mentioned about the files and steps needed etc... maybe if we collaborate a bit, I can help out and we could get it to work.. which would be a much better situation than the mess that would happen if I were to even consider trying to program something on my own at this point. ;D

-Kitty

Heh, I was actually gonna offer to help with the item thing, but I am know Kitty Kitty would be FAR more up to the task then me.

Also, does anyone have any idea how to get the 2DA Editor over onto my screen? Its kinda wierd, because whenever I open it, it comes up to the right of my screen and I can only use it if I maxamize it via taskbar.

Also, one last thing, Fred, do you think you could pull off the ability to copy and paste rows in your 2DA Editor? It would be a lifesaver for me...

Thanks,
Shimaon

The direction I'd like to see the tool go is in the one Kitty mentioned. It probably can get close; I just have to figure out the relationships between all of the pieces in the game. Then BioWare will hire me as a tools guy and that'll be the end of that! :D

As for copying and pasting rows, do you mostly need to paste one row's values over another existing one's or do you want to make a copy of it into a new row. I could code both, but picking one would get you the feature sooner :)

Also, if anyone is interested in being put on my pre-release list so they can get the latest tool emailed to them or at least email notification of releases, just drop me a line at the address in the readme.txt file. No address will be sold, etc., etc. - Some folks just want to know right when it comes out.

And, as always, thanks for the kind comments and praise!

Hmm...can you make the tool add new columns allso?

It may be possible to add columns, but would Kotor know what to do with them? Can you give me an example of where this would be used?

I belive so.

As I pointed out before, robes and armor look for Model and Tex for what meshes to use and what texture to apply to that mesh.

Not to mention the featgain and powergain, which is essential for creating new classes...

With columns we might go a big step further...

Originally posted by Fred Tetra
As for copying and pasting rows, do you mostly need to paste one row's values over another existing one's or do you want to make a copy of it into a new row. I could code both, but picking one would get you the feature sooner :)
Er, both?
I honestly don't know. Both are equally useful to me, heh.

Shimaon

A couple of things:

1. Please don't post the entire stack trace to the forums; it wastes space and doesn't mean much of anything to most people reading it. In fact, only the Exception Text section is useful. If you have errors like this, send me that text via email or PM. You may consider deleting your post to keep the thread clean.

2. I reposted the latest version. The one you downloaded did have that problem, which has been fixed.

3. As a bonus, taking a cue from something gameunlimited said in another post, you can now open/view ERF files located in your modules directory. Another minor bonus is that you can now have more than one hex editor open at a time. Not everyone might find it handy, but, hey, if you can, why not?

Fred

first of all, thanks for the great tool!

I have a question regarding this new version though. you said "you can now open/view ERF files located in your modules directory". I tried to do that but it can't seem to work for me. What I mean by it doesnt work is that the file does not expand to list the files inside it like. Am I doing something wrong?

I thought I had it working correctly, but it was only detecting ERF files with a .erf extension in the Modules directory. Module files which have an extension of .mod and are ERFs inside are now properly detected. I tested it by copying the lastbattle.mod file into the Modules directory and it does show up and its contents can be viewed correctly. Sorry for the hassle.

Fred

oh, i think i did it wrong last time. I was opening it not under the ERFs but under the category RIMs --> Modules. It works perfectly if i open it under the new module category that you put under the ERF :). thanks again!

now i have a suggestion for the next version of kotor tool, if you are making it that is. if possible, i would love to see a feature that allows you to combine files into a mod, rim, and/or erf file. :D

*feels guilty for asking too much from fred*

hmm... this might be just the case in my comp, or only with this specific file, but i get the "arithmetic operation resulted in an overflow" message (i think this is a the windows xp error message). this happens only when i try to open the Survival Battle mod file (if you want to try it, it is in my website). kotor tools work perfectly for the other mod files such as the lastbattle mod file. i thought you might want to know about this.

Originally posted by gameunlimited
hmm... this might be just the case in my comp, or only with this specific file, but i get the "arithmetic operation resulted in an overflow" message (i think this is a the windows xp error message). this happens only when i try to open the Survival Battle mod file (if you want to try it, it is in my website). kotor tools work perfectly for the other mod files such as the lastbattle mod file. i thought you might want to know about this.

The problem is your file. There is a resource that has it's resource type id set to an illegal value (-1) when it should be 3003 (0x0bbb), as it is a PTH (Path info) resource. I have a fixed version of the file, if you need it, though it would seem that KotOR must not be using that ID, if the mod works. Depends on if the intended paths are working.

Yup, you are right. It turned out that the ERF editor that I used to compile the mod file does not recognize the pth file, thus tagging it as unknown instead. Had to edit the ERF editor resources type itself, now it is working great. The file is readable using your tool now :)

New version of Kotor Tool released - v1.0.1502.18035 (2004-2-12 9:53 am EST)

See first post for details...

Very nice !!!!

Thanks for adding the ERF Builder support!! Really appreciated. :D

Ask and ye shall receive...

Assuming I can and want to do it :)

FYI - There's a bug in the internal GFF parser that prevents some data from begin displayed. This bug has been fixed for the next release.

Also, for those who are programming-minded, I have further developed the class that handles GFFs so that I can now access the elements of the file in an object oriented fashion. For example, to get at a file's 2nd Room's Environmental Audio setting, I can do things like:

audio = gff.GetNodeValue("Rooms(2).EnvAudio")

and

gff.SetNodeValue("Rooms(2).EnvAudio", 77)

This internal access abstraction will make it far easier to write GUI based editors for GFFs than worrying about byte offsets and pointers.

Currently I am working on the portion of the code that builds a GFF from the internal data representation of the (potentially modified) file. Once this is complete, GUI editors are next.

Fred

Do you think it would be much trouble to add in a model and animation viewer? That would be really useful for viewing textures without launching the game again.... I guess you'd have to figure out the different between a NWN MDL file and a KOTOR MDL file, which would probably make the rest easy.

I have some features suggestions for future versions:

1. Search function for the 2da editor

2. Conversation editor. It is the .dlg file. I understand that we can open the file using the GFF editor, but what I mean is an editor that will display the conversation sort of like tree with branches, just like how NWN does it. Also, if possible, it should look up the dialog text itself from the dialog.tlk file.

Sorry to bother you again by asking for more feature, just ignore it if you do not have the time, if it is impossible to do, or even simply do not want. Just a suggestion, thanks :)

Originally posted by chay80
The newest version (released on 2/12) won't work at all now.

When I click on the kotor_tool exe, the program will not start even though I see the program on the task bar. Clicking on the taskbar results in nothing.

The only thing changed in my system from earlier when the older version was working is I reinstalled a DVD player prog. When I d/l'd the new version it overwrote the previous one, also.

Version 1.0.1490.35 does work currently but 1.0.1502.18035 does not.

Thanks for all the time and effort you put into this toolset.

1. move your settings.xml file someplace else (if you care about it) other than the Kotor Tool directory

2. run Kotor Tool ; does it tell you that it has attempted to figure out your paths for you?

If you (or anyone else) needs a prior version, I keep and archive of them. Just send an email to the address in the readme.txt file.

Originally posted by Sunslayer
Do you think it would be much trouble to add in a model and animation viewer? That would be really useful for viewing textures without launching the game again.... I guess you'd have to figure out the different between a NWN MDL file and a KOTOR MDL file, which would probably make the rest easy.

Yes. Much trouble. Both you and Bneezy need to peruse the other threads so you'll believe me and others when we say "it isn't easy" :) I understand that not everyone is a programmer or 3D modeler, but realize that things such as 3D models are quite complex in their format. As such, it isn't as easy as opening a save game file in a hex editor and looking for a byte pattern that looks has the same values as the amount of credits you have or your Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, etc. and adjusting them until you're sure what they do. When it comes to models that include skeletal structures and up to 160 different action animations, you're lucky if changing a few bytes here and there doesn't simply cause the program to not run. At best, the model will just look totally funky in them game.

Please don't think I'm ragging on you; I just hope to dispel notions like "well, it has .mdl on the end, so it must be the same format" that I've seen others have (erroneously). As soon as someone (or some team) figures out the format of these files, we can start down the road to develop tools to manipulate them.

Fred

Originally posted by gameunlimited
I have some features suggestions for future versions:

1. Search function for the 2da editor

2. Conversation editor. It is the .dlg file. I understand that we can open the file using the GFF editor, but what I mean is an editor that will display the conversation sort of like tree with branches, just like how NWN does it. Also, if possible, it should look up the dialog text itself from the dialog.tlk file.

Sorry to bother you again by asking for more feature, just ignore it if you do not have the time, if it is impossible to do, or even simply do not want. Just a suggestion, thanks :)

It's never a bother to hear what folks would like to have in Kotor Tool.

Re:
#1 - I'll put it on the to-do list. Do you want it to highlight the cells as each succesive find is done, like in a text editor, or do you have something else in mind?

#2 - Since it is a GFF file and I am working on the GFF (re)writer portion of the GFF class in Kotor Tool, I'm not that far away from being able to write editors for various "flavors" of GFF-based files. Area (.ARE) files have the most votes so far, however.