Mr. Pennyway's Cosmetic Changes
Dee
Member Posts: 10,447
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Hello, all.
In playing around with some things in the game, I made a few discoveries.
First, that the "ordinary" mage robes (Traveler, Knave, and Adventurer) don't seem all that magical; they give minor situational bonuses to saves and AC, but these bonuses are barely useful enough to warrant an armor slot, much less require an identify spell.
That's not what this thread is about, though.
This thread is about an observation I made a few weeks ago, which was that if you change your character's armor, leather, and metal colors using Shadowkeeper or some other character/save editor, you only see those changes while wearing no armor at all. As soon as you put on any piece of armor, the armor you're wearing overrides what your character's natural colors are.
I don't like that.
So I did a few things. The first thing I did was remove all of the color effects from the "ordinary" mage robes listed above. Now, when you put on your adventurer's robe, the trim and straps will remain brown-ish if you haven't changed these colors for your character; and if you have, these changes will be reflected accordingly.
The second thing I did, because my first change made all of these robes identical, was to change the visual "Armor Level" for each robe. Previously all "ordinary" robes used Armor Level 3, which is the avatar with the cape and the shoulder pads. I've made the following changes:
Traveler's Robe: Now uses Armor Level 2 (the high color, no cape look)
Adventurer's Robe: Continues to use Armor Level 3 (Shoulder-guards and cape)
Knave's Robe: Now uses Armor Level 4 (cape, shoulder-guards, and hood)
The result is three distinct mage armors, all of which display the mage's natural colors for armor, leather, and metal.
~Screenshots forthcoming.~
So that's the first big thing here.
What's the Second big thing?
When I gave the Knave's Robe a hooded appearance, I realized that this left the Archmage robes looking somewhat lackluster. So I set about a much more involved process to make these robes look truly unique. Here's what I did:
I've added a color effect to each of these robes that overrides the wearer's Major and Minor clothing colors. Yes, this means that you will always look the same when wearing a given archmage robe (this has no effect on your character's feedback circle).
I also modified the existing colors to make a clearer distinction between "Good", "Neutral", and "Evil" archmage robes. Now, Good wears white and gold; Evil wears black and red and gold; and Neutral wears grey. They all continue to use the hooded appearance.
UPDATE (2013-03-06)
Attached you can find all of the above components, as well as my "uncolored" armor, helmets, and shields components. Briefly:
- All non-magical helmets and shields have had their color effects removed
- Non-magical Leather Armor (Leat01), Chain Mail (Chan01), and Plate Mail (Plat01) have had their color effects removed
- Many of the guards and soldiers running around in the game have been recolored to make better use of the uncolored armors, helmets, and shields.
It's all in the zip file, broken up into folders depending on which pieces you want. No WeiDU business here, so just grab what you want and drop it in your override folder.
SCREENSHOTS:
Hello, all.
In playing around with some things in the game, I made a few discoveries.
First, that the "ordinary" mage robes (Traveler, Knave, and Adventurer) don't seem all that magical; they give minor situational bonuses to saves and AC, but these bonuses are barely useful enough to warrant an armor slot, much less require an identify spell.
That's not what this thread is about, though.
This thread is about an observation I made a few weeks ago, which was that if you change your character's armor, leather, and metal colors using Shadowkeeper or some other character/save editor, you only see those changes while wearing no armor at all. As soon as you put on any piece of armor, the armor you're wearing overrides what your character's natural colors are.
I don't like that.
So I did a few things. The first thing I did was remove all of the color effects from the "ordinary" mage robes listed above. Now, when you put on your adventurer's robe, the trim and straps will remain brown-ish if you haven't changed these colors for your character; and if you have, these changes will be reflected accordingly.
The second thing I did, because my first change made all of these robes identical, was to change the visual "Armor Level" for each robe. Previously all "ordinary" robes used Armor Level 3, which is the avatar with the cape and the shoulder pads. I've made the following changes:
Traveler's Robe: Now uses Armor Level 2 (the high color, no cape look)
Adventurer's Robe: Continues to use Armor Level 3 (Shoulder-guards and cape)
Knave's Robe: Now uses Armor Level 4 (cape, shoulder-guards, and hood)
The result is three distinct mage armors, all of which display the mage's natural colors for armor, leather, and metal.
~Screenshots forthcoming.~
So that's the first big thing here.
What's the Second big thing?
When I gave the Knave's Robe a hooded appearance, I realized that this left the Archmage robes looking somewhat lackluster. So I set about a much more involved process to make these robes look truly unique. Here's what I did:
I've added a color effect to each of these robes that overrides the wearer's Major and Minor clothing colors. Yes, this means that you will always look the same when wearing a given archmage robe (this has no effect on your character's feedback circle).
I also modified the existing colors to make a clearer distinction between "Good", "Neutral", and "Evil" archmage robes. Now, Good wears white and gold; Evil wears black and red and gold; and Neutral wears grey. They all continue to use the hooded appearance.
UPDATE (2013-03-06)
Attached you can find all of the above components, as well as my "uncolored" armor, helmets, and shields components. Briefly:
- All non-magical helmets and shields have had their color effects removed
- Non-magical Leather Armor (Leat01), Chain Mail (Chan01), and Plate Mail (Plat01) have had their color effects removed
- Many of the guards and soldiers running around in the game have been recolored to make better use of the uncolored armors, helmets, and shields.
It's all in the zip file, broken up into folders depending on which pieces you want. No WeiDU business here, so just grab what you want and drop it in your override folder.
SCREENSHOTS:
First, the minor robes, in order from left to right: Traveler, Adventurer, Knave. (Screenshots taken with Canderous as the PC to show a baseline of what they look like on the player's unaltered character.)
Next, the Archmage robes: Good, Neutral, Evil.
Finally, the armors. I have Dorn, Jaheira, and Minsc standing in a row, to show off their (new, unique) armor colors.
Leather:
Chain:
Plate:
Next, the Archmage robes: Good, Neutral, Evil.
Finally, the armors. I have Dorn, Jaheira, and Minsc standing in a row, to show off their (new, unique) armor colors.
Leather:
Chain:
Plate:
Post edited by Dee on
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Comments
I'm too scared to play around with that stuff and cause my game to spontaneously burst into flames.
Keep up the great work!
Now you just need to fiddle with their stats so they are worth the armor slot :P
That armor pack doesn't include mage robes, so installing them both shouldn't cause any problems.
@James
That might take a little more work with scripting, with which I don't have much experience. Feel free to mention these changes to @demivgrvs, though.
1) I want to make them properly non-magical, so that they don't require identification. These robes are notoriously not powerful, and making them non-magical puts them in the realm of "armor for mages", which seems appropriate; and
2) I want to add mage robes to the inventory of more shops, including the Candlekeep Inn, and I want to reduce their price to something that a mage can afford.
3) I want to also add minor mage robes to several humanoid mages throughout the game, to diversify the way that enemy mages look. Only mages that would appear differently with them equipped, to maintain the existing balance as much as possible, and (perhaps) make them non-droppable as well.
Since these aren't cosmetic changes, I likely won't post them here; but @Cuv, when we put together our joint project, I'll definitely want these changes to be part of it if people are interested in them.
Thoughts?
I like the idea of the weaker or more common robes being found in shops, with the better ones being available in the magical specialty stores. Being unidentified would also be a boon. Changing the way enemy mages look also is something I'm cool with, but don't make the robes too cool looking or I'll be miffed I can't loot it from it's corpse ;P
cheers
I use it mainly for finding specific colors, although I've since discovered that NearInfinity works better.
Or you can simply remove those lines entirely, which will cause the item to use your character's colors instead. (Then you can alter the character's colors in Shadowkeeper as you like.)
That's great, I will play around with it a little.
The idea is basically to provide my PC with a magical item *item_name*.ITM, with magical properties that would be further enhanced with a certain threshold (such as PC reaching a given level, or completing a certain quest, or visiting an area...). Or is it safer to create another new *enhanced_item_name*.ITM, CLUA the new item in my game and simply drop the old *item_name*.ITM somewhere?
You should probably create the new item, CLUA it in, and then discard the old one, just to be on the safe side. But @Cuv might be able to tell you more specific information.
I'm relatively new to the modding "scene", but how does your WeiDU version work? Does it alter the existing .itm files, or does it just install the replacements?
Using NI / there are 2 fields for naming an item "General Name" and "Identified name". With a StringRef attached. I assumed that I had to create a new StringRef in order not to erase exisiting item names, but I tried with the "Add" button - there was an error message and I could not save *item.ITM*.
Same thing with description. There is "General Description" and "Identified Description". How does this work precisely?
Basically I am just trying out the template included in that post. All the installer does is copy files from the mod folder into the override folder. It also creates a backup folder so that it can restore anything pre-install (i.e. if I already had .itm files by those names, it would back my previous ones up). Running the setup again will uninstall the mod and restore anything that needs to be restored.
I was inspired by @Wisp's comments about how newer mods presented on these forums are not using WeiDU (likely because of new blood like us and maybe the current usability concern, i.e. dialog.tlk hard link) even though it was pretty much the standard for mod installs on BG1/BG2, etc.
Technically installing your mod with WeiDU right now is probably just as much work as copying the files manually into the override directory, maybe even more work if you don't already have dialog.tlk hard linked for other purposes (symbolic link won't work like it does with SK). However, the backup and uninstall is a nice feature along with keeping up with the "standard" of using WeiDU to install mods.