Lightsaber Colors - Adding New Ones

[Jaxy]

Ok this has REALLY been buggig me. I do like the green red and blue colors. The new ones are -ok- But I thought there would be more. I'm looking on how to add new colors. I can make all the ncessary graphical changes with photoshop, but how do I add the new colors to the .pk3 files???? Any help/suggestions?

[Garik Loran]

I'm working on this, too. I want a silver/white saber like Corran Horn's.
So I edited all the jpg and tga files for menu and for ingame, and the white color works after i packed it with winzip and renamed it to pk3.
But the glow effect still has the color of the saber that I replaced, adding new sabers doesn't seem possible at the moment.

As you can see, the saber is white, but the blur and the glow on the ground is still orange.



If anyone knows what has to be eited to make the glow effects the right color please tell me. I also looked in the .shader files, but I can't find the right entries.

HELP, please, I want Corran's saber.

[ReaperFett]

Garik, who IS that model of yours? Looks good

[Garik Loran]

Oh, the model. That's my very own self created version of Keiran Halcyon aka Corran Horn.
It's not perfect yet, I'm looking for better blond hair textures.

[ReaperFett]

I think the blonde looks good. Whos it based on(model)?

[Garik Loran]

It's based on the Jedi Model with textures from the second Jedi.

I edited the face and the hair myself, but this was really just a first try, and I still want to make it look better.

[Garik Loran]

But back to my problem, forgot to ask. Have you some idea or experience how to change the color of the glow and blur?
I need this!!!

[Prophet]

This was the first bit of editing I tried, as I too wanted a white saber. I had the same problem though, and I searched through a lot of files and couldnt find colours for that part of the saber. I'm guessing its in the code.

[ReaperFett]

I had a look for you, I cant find a thing

[ManeFraim]

how did y'all go about getting as far as you did?

step-by-step, if you would...

I get slow

[Jaxy]

Wow. Didn't expect this many people were interested in adding/changing saber colors. I too what a white/silver saber, I just think it would look a lot better. I just don't know what to do :/

Have you tried editing the sabers.shader file?

[Garik Loran]

Ok, for all those people who like new saber colors:
Here is a short explanation what I did:

Open the assets.pk3 from the Jk2/gamedata/base folder with winzip and extract it to a directory you like.

Then find the files

color_glow2.jpg
color line.jpg

from the /gfx/effects/sabers folder
and

fx_color.jpg
saber_color.tga
saber_color_glow.jpg
saber_color_glow2.jpg

from the /menu/art folder.
Color is the color of the saber you want to replace.

Now open these files with a grapgic program like photoshop and change the textures.
Be sure to keep the selection mask in the tga files.

After you've saved the files you must zip the files with winzip, it's recommended that you only zip the edited files, so the archive won't be too big.
And keep the directories when you zip it.

Then rename the ending .zip to .pk3 and copy the new file top your JK2/gamedata/base folder.

That's it. now you should have a changed saber. If the game doesn't start the texture have the wrong format, so don't change the compression when you save the jpg files.

Right now it seems it is not possible to add new sabers, just replace them, and you have limitations. I haven't figured out how to edit the blur and glow color, so that's the next thing that must be done. Any idea from more experienced modders or any other people is welcome.

[Garik Loran]

Yes. I tried the sabers.shader. I also read the shader tutorial so that I understand what's in it. And as far as I know it just says that the color for the shader is taken from the texture.

So I think this file is only for the "flickering" effect of the saber, but not for the glow and the blur color.

If anyone knows better please correct me, I won't be angry

[StarWars]

has anyone messed with the files "blurcore.jpg" and "blurglow.jpg." It seems that each color has two files (glow and line) and then there are these two by themselves. There is also a yellow_glow.tga by itself.

[Necro]

i wanna know how we edit the pics without redoing the whole thing!

[CrazyJedi]

Does anyone else think the white lightsaber with the orange glow is actually kind of cool?

On a more relevent note, could you post image files for this somewhere? If I attempted this it would probably look like a lightsaber built by some, well, crazy Jedi.

[Garik Loran]

I checked the blur_core and blur_glow files, and they are just grey. No colors. so it there must be some other file or entry that is responsible for the colors.

@CrazyJedi
I wanna release a full Corran Horn (more Keiran Halcyon) when I figured out how to change this cool looking orange. But at the moment there are only some loose files, nothing I can release.

Only if you really (really really) want it I will pt together an archive, but remember, it's not ready and still beta.

[Garik Loran]

Yeah, I figured out what is responsible for the glow of the saber.

It's the entry in the sabers.shader
gfx/effects/sabers/saberBlur
{
cull disable

{
clampmap gfx/effects/sabers/blurglow
blendFunc GL_ONE GL_ONE
rgbGen vertex
}
Now I have to find a way to edit the vertex color.
I have to read the tutorial once again, and if someone knows what to do, you know what to do.
TELL ME!

[UniKorn]

I took a quick look at it, and according to me, if you create a new texture with a white glowing dot in the middle, 256 height, 256 width, and save it as white_glow.tga
Then add this to the shader :

gfx/effects/sabers/white_glow
{
cull disable
{
map gfx/effects/sabers/white_glow.tga
blendFunc GL_ONE GL_ONE
rgbGen vertex
}
}

@ work, cannot test it.

[Jaxy]

Hrmmm....seems we might be onto sothing. I'll try and see what I can do from where I am and see if anything works....I want my White Saber!

[Garik Loran]

@UniKorn

Yep, I did this on Sunday, but it didn't work. My files were titled silver... but there was no difference. I removed all lines with ornage and replaced them with silver, and all textures with orange were replaced with silver ones by me. but the glow was still orange, don't know why.

If you have some experience, would you mind looking again on this, or even test it? I can send you my edited files if that would help.

I looked at every file, I think I understand that things with the shaders, but I can't find the responsible files, that give the glow it's color.

I think I am going to give up until a SDK is released.

[UniKorn]

Can only test it at home, and I won't be there for about 3 more hours. MSN : wrld_unikorn@hotmail.com icq 99743637

[Garik Loran]

Hmm. The BlurGlow.jpg is a white texture, and the shader says RGBGen Vertex, so there must be another file that creates the colors, right?
The color_glow files don't seem to be responsible for this.
So where can I change this. This drives me crazy.

Em, if someone from Raven reads this, HEEEEEEELLLLLP, for my sanity!

[RedNight]

Where can I find information on editing the shaders?

[RedNight]

Just a thought but maybe the blur color has something to do with the color of the light the saber casts? If you can find out how to change that then maybe you can change the blur color.

[UniKorn]

You can send me the stuff now if you want, i'm at home

wrld_unikorn@hotmail.com

[billcow]

I got rid of the yellow glow:

available on my site is a pk3 file with the saber mod: http://billcow0.tripod.com/whitesaber.pk3

I did two things:
recolored the images
commented out the "rgbgen vertex" lines (mentioned earlier).

The only problem is that the light cast on the ground is still yellow, and the other sabers also are sans-colored-glow.

Next thing is to look at the models for the vertex color (that would only affect the yellow saber, and it would change the color of the light created as well... if there are different models for each saber color that is...)

[Garik Loran]

Yep. This also works when you change
rgbGen vertex
to
rgbGen identity,
but that also affects the other sabers. So the vertext must be in the model.
Do you know which model it is?

[SuperSumo]

ok, maybe I'm just stupid but I can't get this to work at all. I extracted the files and change the colors and everything, zip them back up, but when I start the game it doesn't work. Is there something specific I should be naming the .pk3 file. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Jaxy]

Hrmmm...that link isn't working for me...neither is the site itself. Did you take it down?

[billcow]

I looked through the assets0.pk3 and found the models for the saber handles, (in models\weapons2) but they didn't have any blades attached to them. Nor did it reference any of the glow textures.

The next step is to wait for the SDK to be released; that will surely allow us to change the sabers however we want.

[edit]
****! Tripod won't let me link to the files on my site. Sorry, there's not much I can do, my actual web site is on my own computer, and it's currently down (MySQL stopped working so the page doesn't work either). Not to mention that I turn my computer off except from about 3 pm to 9 pm EST.

[FrogLeggs]

Well the blur dot texture is I belive what is casted on the ground when u have ur sabre extended. Could the RGB Vertex have something to do w/ another shader ???? I'm looking into it as we speak ..err I type : I really want a BLACK sabre w/ a purple glow

[FrogLeggs]

Well I'm seeing some mention of sabre flares and effects in the effects.shader ..... maybe they have it stread out threw different shaders ?? there is also a yellow glow shader in there that uses the .tga yellow glow file in the sabre model directory.

[UniKorn]

The saber flare is the effect you see when two sabers hit each other. The yellow_glow is used for a texture.

[CrazyJedi]

I can't remember what it's called, but I think I found the image for the glow on the ground. I just unzipped the .pk3 and did a search for "orange", and I *think* one of the ones I found was the one responsible for the glow. I did this yesterday though, so I might be not be remembering correctly.

[fabrikashon]

I've been trying to get a new saber colour selectable under the player menu. I've looked at ingame_player.menu in assets1.pk3 but I've had no luck understanding where the colours for choosing are entered. Maybe someone else might know it.

I've added in extra code for the colour I named my files under sabers and ui.shader yet it doesn't appear automatically.

assets1.pk3/ui/jk2mp/ingame_player.menu

[Garik Loran]

It is not possible to add a saber, just replace old ones.
For the menu you have to search for this files from the assets0.pk3, and this works:
/menu/art/fx_color
/menu/art/saber_color
/menu/art/saber_color_glow
/menu/art/saber_color_glow2

choose the color you want and replace these textures with your new ones.
You can rename that files, but than you have to search for the filesnames in all files from assets0 and assets1, open the search results with a texteditor and replace the filenames with yours, but that wouldn't make sense at the moment.

[Garik Loran]

A black saber is not really possible, because everything in the textures that is some sort of black is transparent in the game.
I tried it, look at this:

[Yevin Orion]

Anyone thought of doing a teal/aqua saber? I think that'd be cool.... something like THIS