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Old 07-12-2013, 08:44 PM
Gnomish1987
Fire Beetle
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Posts: 9
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That kind of thing sounds complicated. And yes, I noticed right away how problematic it would be for the string thread. Ugh, all these files Verant were cranking out were full of so many counterintuitive and downright inefficient quirks! Then again, there code dates back to 1999 in a lot of instances, if not further back! I've thought of a potential workaround for my problem that wouldn't entail having to attempt to mess with string tables or any of that, though of course it also has a snag. :(

It is, in theory, possible to edit the _chr.txt file for a zone so that it loads the rat model both from qcat (Qeynos Catacombs) and Ak`Anon. Since both the ncat and Ak`Anon models are being imported in the zone's _chr.txt file as "rat", this is a redundancy. But in theory, a person could replace/overwrite all three rat textures from Ak`Anon without touching those from Qeynos Catacombs and thus have six unique rat textures for use in a single zone without losing any of the old stuff! However, I guess there's still a major catch that might prevent this from being possible, which I'll explain at the end.

My idea is as follows. Let's say I want to create three custom rat textures (gray rat, black rat, albino rat) without losing the three originals (brown rat, clockwork rat, diseased rat). I duplicate qcat_chr.s3d and rename it something like CUSTOMqcat_chr.s3d. Then I go into that .s3d including getting into and fiddling with the actual .wld and renaming ALL instances referencing the rat textures (such as ratft0001.bmp, which handles a rat's foot, to something like Craft0001.bmp -- keep the first two letters of the NPC abbreviation and throw a C for custom or maybe low-incidence character like X or non-alphanumeric like * if it's even possible...). Afterward, I go into the _chr.txt file of the zone I want six rat textures in and add in a line to import Cra,CUSTOMncat_chr alongside rat,qcat_chr so that it pulls up that cloned rat alongside rat,qcat_chr? The mesh/model data would be 100% identical for this custom rat, it's just that the textures being referred to in the .wld would have been updated in the clone to point to new ones that, in theory, ought to function 100%.

And now for the catch. If I do all this, presumably the copied+pasted custom rat would somehow still be handled as Race 36, Giant Rat, which would be identical to the race ID # of the non-custom rat, so again this might put me at square one and thus be entirely useless brainstorming! Ugh.
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