STAR WARS™ Knights of the Old Republic™ II: The Sith Lords™

STAR WARS™ Knights of the Old Republic™ II: The Sith Lords™

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How do I upload a mod? (PC Steam only) - Further Explanation
By Effix
This guide will provide more details about how to turn your mod into a Steam mod.
The basis for it is the instructions provided by Gilgamesh on the Aspyr Support forums.

This guide will not cover how to make a working mod, only how to turn a mod into a Steam mod.
   
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Introduction
This guide will provide more details on how to turn your mod into a Steam mod.

The basis for it is the post by Gilgamesh on the Aspyr Support forums.
Make sure you read that first, hopefully this guide will explain anything you don't understand:
https://support.aspyr.com/hc/en-us/articles/205258020?utm_source=Steam&utm_medium=WorkshopPage&utm_campaign=KOTOR2

This guide will not cover how to make a working mod, only how to turn your mod into a Steam mod.
Preparation
Prepare some folders with short paths that you can easily remember.

Examples

Your main mods location:
E:\MyMods

The mod you want to upload:
E:\MyMods\MyFirstMod

Make sure you always put your mod's contents in a folder named override, so for the example you put them all in E:\MyMods\MyFirstMod\override

Some easy to find location for your preview images:
E:\MyMods\MyPreviews
A Vdf File - Your Upload's Recipe
You now need to make a vdf file, which will act like a reference file for your upload.
It needs to have the file extension .vdf, but it is a plain text file that you can make with a plain text editor like Windows Notepad.

Start with this as content, with example values, you can tweak it later:

"workshopitem"
{
"appid" "208580"
"contentfolder" "E:\\MyMods\\MyFirstMod"
"previewfile" "E:\\MyMods\\MyPreviews\\myawesomefirstmod.jpg"
"visibility" "0"
"title" "My First Mod"
"description" "This is my first KotOR 2 Mod!"
"changenote" "Version 1.0.0"
}

Notes:
- "appid" is the id for KotOR 2, so don't change that.
- "contentfolder": notice the double backslash, use that instead of single backslash. Also notice that this path does not include the override folder (it still needs to be in there though).
- "previewfile": must be under 1MB in size. Suggested formats include JPG, PNG or GIF.
- "visibility": I found that this gets ignored. If you want to hide your mod after publishing you can go to it on Steam and turn off the visibility there if you like.

p.s.
You can change the title and description after publishing.

Save the file as a .vdf file once you have tweaked the values.
The location is not very important as long as you can find it again. To stay in line with the examples it could be in E:\MyMods\VDF and as a file name MyFirstMod.vdf.
Steamcmd.exe
Now we need to get the program that will use the vdf file to upload your mod.

First get it at:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD

Again I recommend to keep the path to this as short as possible.
If you only have a C: drive then I would put it in C:\SteamCMD. If you have more drives then maybe put it on another drive to keep your C: clean.
Make sure after extracting that steamcmd.exe is in that folder and not something redundant like C:\SteamCMD\steamcmd\steamcmd.exe
The Command Prompt
steamcmd.exe is a basic command line program. Some of you may know what that means (and could possibly skip this section), some of you may have never seen the Windows command prompt.

Before there was an operating system with a graphical interface like Windows (and after), we used to do things by typing commands. Some programs still do and there is still a way to use those programs, with the command prompt.

In most of the latest Windows versions the easiest way to start it is the Run option:
- Hit Windows key + R
- type cmd

You will now likely start at your user account folder, you will need to learn about a few basic commands to navigate to where you stored steamcmd.exe.
- to go to the root of the drive you're at, type: cd\
- to change drives, for example to go to E:, type e:
- to change directory, type cd foldername, for example: cd SteamCMD

You're ready for the final sections once you've navigated to the folder where steamcmd.exe is located.
Publishing your Mod
Now through the command prompt it's a matter of running steamcmd.exe with the correct parameters. You can't have Steam running for this to work.

For example enter (tweak to your situation):

steamcmd.exe +login YourSteamAccount YourSteamPassword +workshop_build_item E:\MyMods\VDF\MyFirstMod.vdf +quit

If all went well then you can check out your mod on Steam, maybe add some more images, tweak the description if needed.
The .vdf will get a new line, with the id of the mod. If you use the vdf again it will update the mod because of that line (instead of making a new mod).

A Word of Warning
Some words of warning, from what I learned:

- I recommend starting with a reskin mod or something straight forward like that
- If you know how to add unique items that aren't in the game yet then that's fairly safe too, make sure you add details
- A part of the Steam audience will just hit the subscribe button after seeing an image, they will ignore instructions, warnings, might not know English etc. If they run into problems they will turn to you, or worse turn to the general discussion area having no idea what's going on.
- After learning about how restricting Steam mods are I can't say I'd recommend including any .2da files in your mod. Also note that most people use TSLRCM, which includes quite a few of them. You can try to communicate things but with the above point in mind... I would not recommend it.
19 Comments
Algo 1 Nov, 2023 @ 6:28pm 
Thanks putting the time into writing this. An archived version of the Aspyr post appears visible through the Wayback machine, but it seems like you got all of it down in any case:

http://web.archive.org/web/20150926114537/https://support.aspyr.com/hc/en-us/articles/205258020?utm_source=Steam&utm_medium=WorkshopPage&utm_campaign=KOTOR2
Effix  [author] 19 Aug, 2022 @ 2:09pm 
It looks like the original Aspyr post is no longer available, so I'm glad I wrote this guide. I've tried to expand on the info in that post so I don't think we've lost any details.
Effix  [author] 23 Oct, 2021 @ 3:05pm 
I'm using Win 10, I'm sure steamcmd would also work on previous versions. So, yeah, no idea what that popup is about, never heard of it.
I'm afraid I don't know what's the issue if you're sure that you're pointing it to the correct location.
Johann Hauptmann 23 Oct, 2021 @ 10:50am 
i did it as simple as possible, changed it a couple of times as well, to make sure if it something wrong. Also, before it i had windows pop up saying: this apllication wouldn't work on your computer
Effix  [author] 23 Oct, 2021 @ 9:50am 
Your path to the vdf and/or the filename of the vdf are incorrect.
Johann Hauptmann 22 Oct, 2021 @ 5:46am 
"ERROR! Failed to load build config file" why's that and how to fix it?
Cole T 22 Apr, 2019 @ 10:47am 
Will do
Effix  [author] 22 Apr, 2019 @ 7:51am 
Hm.. I can't say I ran into that.
The only advice I can give is to start again from scratch using the above instructions, maybe you overlooked something.
Cole T 21 Apr, 2019 @ 3:40pm 
Hey there. I get this error, any ideas?

\src\tier1\keyvalues.cpp (2958) : Assertion Failed: Error while parsing text KeyValues for resource workshopitem
ERROR! Failed to parse build config file "D:\Steam\MyMods\KOTOR2\MovieStyleJediMasterRobes\workshopitem.vdf".
Effix  [author] 10 Jul, 2017 @ 11:12am 
No, that's great, good luck amigo :)