Archetypes.xml - an easier way to customize?

[BadZombie]

Hi all,

In my mod I have a bunch of NPCs, and I want to customize each one unqiuely.

At the moment my method is making minor changes in archetypes.xml, loading up the world, and looking to see the changes, exiting the world, making another minor adjustment, starting up the world, looking to see the changes etc

This takes up a lot of time!!!

Is there anything out there similar to a char creator where I can see the changes realtime? Doing it this way I could be done with all my customizations within an hour. My current method will takes weeks - but I usually lose interest or get tediously bored and move onto something else.

 

[Cranberry Monster]

Way back in the day, there was this: 





Pretty sure it doesn't work any more, but it was before my time. I seem to recall the new archetypes also showing up in the character select screen by default, so looking at them there might be faster than going through the trouble of loading a world. Lighting might be different than in actual gameplay, though. When I'm testing mods, especially things I think might have errors in the xml, I'll often load the POI editor instead of a new world, since it loads much faster for me but will still show me any errors. You'd probably need to go to Playtest from there to spawn in entities, though.

 

[BadZombie]

Thanks for the suggestion.

I went into the character creation screen and I'm able to customize a look which I'd like to export to my NPCs but I've got no idea where the data is stored for that kind of stuff - had a quick look in the %appdata% folder, couldn't find anything.

If the archetypes for new characters is saved somewhere I could just copy and paste that info into my archetypes.xml in my mod

 

[Cranberry Monster]

Thanks for the suggestion.

I went into the character creation screen and I'm able to customize a look which I'd like to export to my NPCs but I've got no idea where the data is stored for that kind of stuff - had a quick look in the %appdata% folder, couldn't find anything.

If the archetypes for new characters is saved somewhere I could just copy and paste that info into my archetypes.xml in my mod

Looking around, it seems the customized player characters are saved in the same place as the saved games, only the file used isn't xml, it's something else--almost all of which was incomprehensible when I opened it with Notepad++. So I'm not sure that'll be much help.

Of course, this will probably be the last alpha we can use Archetypes to make NPCs and zombies, so it might be time to look to the future for your character modelling needs. Fuse is one program you can use (no longer updated, but you can find it around), but MakeHuman is my go-to for human generation. The price is right (free!), there are a fair amount of player-made clothing and accessories, and interface is very easy to used compared to something like Blender. You can either give it a standard skeleton in MakeHuman or use Mixamo to put one in, and it's pretty easy to get models out and set them up in Unity for use in 7d2d.

I've downloaded your casino mod and look forward to playing around with it when I start an A21 world. Thanks for sharing it!

 

[Guppycur]

...I wouldn't count on that xml even existing in a22; they've been systematically removing uma for a while now, and players are the last to use it.  Once they're gone (and allegedly, a22 is when they will be replaced), there's a solid chance archetypes will be removed entirely.