'The single item that sticks out for me is Terrains,' says Kinkojiro, creator of the Expanded Galaxy mod (opens in new tab). So even though a lot of Pinnacle Station was built with existing Mass Effect assets, that didn't make it an easy task. 'That's the result of many years of reverse-engineering effort, and it allowed us to focus our efforts on the comparatively small number of object types that were significantly different between the games.' For the sake of compatibility with all the games in the series, Legendary Explorer can edit files from seven different versions of UE3, automatically resolving format differences. 'Most of the assets are repurposed from elsewhere in LE1,' SirCxyrtyx adds, 'but all the objects that define the level (the lights, the locations of all the meshes, etc) and the gameplay (UE3's Kismet visual scripting) had to be converted.' The original and remastered versions of Mass Effect run on different versions of Unreal Engine 3, which meant all of those objects were saved in different formats. The DLC is probably about 95% assets from the main game.' This means we just pull LE versions of assets like meshes, sounds, etc, because porting everything would likely be impossible. 'I built a 'donor' system', Mgamerz says, 'given an object path in the original game, this system looks for the same named object in the Legendary version of the game, which if found, is then used in the converted file instead. Getting this planet to look right was tricky because it used a lot of shaders that aren't in the Legendary Edition. We love making improvements such as these, because they can boost the productivity of everyone who mods Mass Effect, not just the ME3Tweaks team.' HenBagle says, 'we re-wrote a section of our Asset Database tool to make it easier for us to find replacement materials and textures.

Things only in Legendary Edition, like being able to run much more often, have a significant effect on the difficulty.'Īs well as updating Pinnacle Station, the modders updated the tools they were using to work with it. As Mgamerz says, 'this is Mass Effect 1 AI we're fighting. Some of the modes and maps have had their difficulty retuned in response to feedback from testers, since combat is fairly different in the Legendary Edition-and often easier. The original audio experience felt terrible, you essentially shot silent meatbags while Ahern yells at you.' For example, adding music to the level has had a pretty profound effect on making it feel more engaging. 'While this is a 'port', we’ve put in considerable effort to improve the quality of life of the combat. 'It's definitely feeling better than the original version when I've had to run comparisons between the two for testing', says Mgamerz.

The mod has a few improvements over the original Pinnacle Station. The mod fixes it, and you can see how he looks now by scrolling up. In the DLC this turian's mesh had the wrong texture, which went unnoticed by many due to dark lighting.

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