Planet specific starport interiors? (and a few other noob questions.)

Phenomenaut

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Hi there,

I'm an old skool SWG player, but I'm new to modding, and have a few questions that I was wondering if I could get some help finding answers to. (apologies if this isn't the preferred forum for that sort of thing. Please feel free to nudge me in the correct direction if there's somewhere else that you'd rather I ask these questions). Thanks in advance for any answers that you can provide.

First: I've downloaded Sytners IFF Editor, and have had a blast looking through everything that's going in in there - most of which I'm completely lost as to what to do with, but it looks amazing!

Now, what I was wondering is if it's possible to mod the textures of the interior of a starport and then assign that interior just to a specific planet. So for example, have a starport that is textured to fit the aesthetic of Tatooine, and another that's more fit for Naboo and so on.

I've found the right texture files, but as I suspected, the interior is (as far as I can tell with my limited knowledge) universal to the galaxy.

I was also wondering if/how one could/would go about creating textures for existing player created buildings and saving them as different buildings than the ones in game. For example: Creating textures that are unique for Lok or even Taanab, and assigning them to existing building models in the game, and then making those models craftable without overwriting the textures that already exist for Tatooine or naboo etc. housing.

Are there any guides or tutorials available already for that sort of thing?

Anyhow, thanks again for any help that you can give.
 

Pake

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First thought I had when reading this was why not make copies of the startport renamed as new objects so you have one for each planet?
 

Phenomenaut

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Pake said:
First thought I had when reading this was why not make copies of the startport renamed as new objects so you have one for each planet?
Puttering around I discovered that that's pretty much already the case: each planet has it's own starport assigned to it (though it's uniform for the whole planet, so I'm not sure if you can make one for Mos Espa and one for Mos Eisley with different interior texturing).

I can't quite figure out how to break out all of the textures, without going into each file .msh file, then finding the .sht file and so on.

At any rate, I've decided to mess with something smaller, and have started mucking around with the textures of the Tatooine Medical center in Mos Eisley, to try and give it a more "Tatooine" appearance inside. I don't have my own server or anything (though I have a friend who'd actually thinking about starting one up) so everything I'm doing is just client-side appearance stuff.

I am running into a few problems: (As I said before, I'm an extreme noob when it comes to most of this, so I'm sure most of this is fairly straightforward to you guys that have been doing it a long time. I'm sort of fumbling my way through things to learn my way around)

- Is it possible to open a separate repository window in SIE? So I don't have to keep jumping around and looking for these things? (The "find" function seems to not work for me.)

- Is there a way to get texture and shader files I've edited to show up in the SIE repository?

- I can edit everything in SIE, replace texture files and the like, but I can't seem to get the changes to commit/save. It asks me if I want to save changes to the model with I exit SIE, and I say yes, but when I load into SWG_EMU, the textures are not what I "saved" but rather the default texture image (that picture with trees and such). And when I load back into SIE, nothing was saved.

That's where I'm at at the moment...thanks in advance for any pointers.
 

Timbab

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Don't have the time atm to go into more than this;

But in terms of having unique stuff for each city/planet, you'll want to edit the snapshot starport entries to unique versions of each starport.

This entails duping quite a few files though, for example, Tatooine globally uses:

object/building/tatooine/shared_starport_tatooine.iff

Which, appearance wise, points to:

appearance/mun_tato_starport_s01_u01.pob

The .POB will link to all the mesh's for the rooms and exterior and what not. So, if you want to have unique versions, you'll likely have to duplicate the entire chain up to the .SHT and .DDS (Don't need to do .EFT + .VSH/.PSH). It's quite a bit of manual editing and renaming work.

Real world example of the tree edits I did for SWGEmu's Christmas update, I duped the entire.APT chain down to .SHT (And .DDS in some cases), renaming each file and each link with a "_winter" suffix, so they wouldn't clash with the other planets when they were reused, which quickly ballooned up to 600+ files.

Also, the easiest way to grab all the files, is in SIE, go to either the Object IFF, or the .APT in the Repo, right click > Extract Chain. This will extract the whole link chain of each file, but you'll still have to manually edit it all and again, you don't need to edit/include EFT/VSH/PSH. Random note, Chain extract will sometimes grab string/ files on accident, ignore those, if you're not extracting an Object IFF file.

Before I go, are you talking about a second Repo window when you said 'seperate', or to split/have the Repo be its own window by default? If it's the first, nope, can't have a second Repo window currently, but I want to include some form of being able to browse multiple things at once inside the repo in the next Update, which will most likely be something related to tabs in the Repo window. If you just want it to be its own window though, in the settings.lua, set "repositoryInTab" to false.
 

Phenomenaut

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That's excellent information! Thanks Timbab. I think that'll get me going in the right direction.

Yeah, it sounds like quite a bit of work, but I think I might carry on with it, at least trying it out on some smaller buildings, just as a way of learning some of the ins and outs of SIE and the modding experience in general. I've never been a fan of the "generic" look of a lot of the buildings in SWG. Love the game, but the galaxy could look a whole lot more unique in my opinion. Hence the interest in modding, now that I've finally got the game back, and have the free time to mess with it.

And I actually meant being able to browse multiple things at once, so I'm looking forward to that update when it comes. 

Thanks again.
 

Lasko

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There's a couple of other things on top of what Timbab said that might help you.

With the files you extract and edit, there is an easy way to see your changes when you load into your client. Without having to create a new tre file and add to server and client.

If you look in your clients main folder, you'll see some folders like /string and /texture.

If your editing a .sht, you can create a folder called /shader in your client folder and place your newly edited file in there. As long as you leave the name the same for now, when you load the client it will read the files from this folder last so will show any changes you make. This is basically how most of the basic modding is done. This will only show up on your client tho.

Once happy with the changes you can then decide on how you actually want to add it to your server, ie. create a new tre file and add to server and client etc.

Note, this process works for pretty much all files in the tre's, Have fun:)
 

Phenomenaut

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Thanks for the additional information Lasko. I'll be sure that will come in handy when I get to that point.
 

Phenomenaut

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Actually, I've come across something odd. It may just be my inexperience showing again - probably is - but please and thank you for bearing with me...(No need to rush to answer btw, since it's that time of year and I'm sure you're all busy).

There's an .IFF file in the "small" shared hospital (object/building/tatooine/shared_hospital_tatooine_s02.iff) folder named "shared_base_building.iff" that just displays the default appearance block, so I don't know what it is. Also, there's a similar file called "object/building/base/shared_base_palace.iff" that likewise is unviewable in the SIE editor. I'm assuming they're important enough to include, and I'm sure I don't really need to know if I'm just dealing with textures right now, but I'm just curious as to what they are.

also...is there a trick to saving these edited files so that I can view them in the editor?  Or is the only way to see the changes in the client, once I save the shader files to the SWG directory as Lasko suggested?

Again, thanks for all of the help and patience, you guys are outstanding.  Happy holidays!
 

Phenomenaut

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I have another oddity going on...

Somehow I've corrupted the original .sht and or .dds file on the floor to one of the rooms of the small medical center. I've deleted the modded files in the SWG shader and texture folders, and even tried to copy over the original unmodded files, but it still shows a default placeholder texture (the treeline of endor, or wherever it is. I'm sure you've seen it in your travels).

Nothing I seem to do resets the texture to "factory standards".

Any ideas on that one?

Again...nothing major, as it's not breaking the game or anything. It's just another curiosity.

thanks.
 

Phenomenaut

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By the way Timbab, I forgot to mention this before, but if you have access to Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Bridge, you can do a batch rename on all of the files, which I believe would cut down on your time and effort considerably, if/when the need ever arises again.
 

Phenomenaut

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Oh and Timbab, I forgot to mention it earlier, but if you have access to Adobe Bridge (and maybe just Photoshop), you can rename multiple files, and add whatever you want to the file name, if the need ever arises again.
 

Phenomenaut

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So I've been playing around with the textures and finding my way around SIE to try and learn some things. It's been a pretty informative last few days.

I've figured out how to do the re-texturing that I'd like to do, but it occurred to me that it might be nice to take the customization to another level, and make some changes to the interiors that are specific not just to the planet, but also to the cities themselves. So for example, make the textures of the interior (and maybe the exterior) of the Mos Eisley cantina building different from those of the Cantina in Mos Espa, and so on.

I've figured out how to set up everything, but I can't figure out where to set it up so that the different versions of the cantina to load in different areas of the game.

Basically I need to know which file holds the Tatooine NPC building data, and I can't seem to find that info.

Any chance I can get a nudge in the right direction?
 

levarrishawk

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Phenomenaut said:
So I've been playing around with the textures and finding my way around SIE to try and learn some things. It's been a pretty informative last few days.

I've figured out how to do the re-texturing that I'd like to do, but it occurred to me that it might be nice to take the customization to another level, and make some changes to the interiors that are specific not just to the planet, but also to the cities themselves. So for example, make the textures of the interior (and maybe the exterior) of the Mos Eisley cantina building different from those of the Cantina in Mos Espa, and so on.

I've figured out how to set up everything, but I can't figure out where to set it up so that the different versions of the cantina to load in different areas of the game.

Basically I need to know which file holds the Tatooine NPC building data, and I can't seem to find that info.

Any chance I can get a nudge in the right direction?
snapshot
 

Phenomenaut

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levarrishawk said:
Phenomenaut said:
So I've been playing around with the textures and finding my way around SIE to try and learn some things. It's been a pretty informative last few days.

I've figured out how to do the re-texturing that I'd like to do, but it occurred to me that it might be nice to take the customization to another level, and make some changes to the interiors that are specific not just to the planet, but also to the cities themselves. So for example, make the textures of the interior (and maybe the exterior) of the Mos Eisley cantina building different from those of the Cantina in Mos Espa, and so on.

I've figured out how to set up everything, but I can't figure out where to set it up so that the different versions of the cantina to load in different areas of the game.

Basically I need to know which file holds the Tatooine NPC building data, and I can't seem to find that info.

Any chance I can get a nudge in the right direction?
snapshot
Blerg...

I had looked in there, but I didn't see the buildings. Guess I didn't look hard enough.

Thanks!
 
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