Locking vault dweller sprites

Donitz

Donitz

First time out of the vault
Heia!

I bet this question has been answered before, but I had absolutely no idea what to search for, so apologies for probably making a repeat topic.

I am planning to make a small mod for Fallout 2 where you play as a special character throughout the game, but since many of the sprites you use are shared with other units (tribes outfit, armors) etc., I wondered if it was possible to always display the character in his/her Vault uniform, even if the player is wearing an armor?

I am using the Frame Animator and a Blender setup to capture sprites from 3d models and convert them to FRM files, and it works flawlessly, but I'm just stuck at this one detail.
 
Is it possible to edit armor so that it never changes the character's sprite?

If not, surely you can at least set every armor to be the same "type" - ie, all of them use the MAXX sprite or LTHR sprite or what have you. If so, can't you point them all towards a rarely-used sprite (like the purple robes, perhaps) and replace those FRMs with those of the vault uniform?
 
Snikers said:
Is it possible to edit armor so that it never changes the character's sprite?

If not, surely you can at least set every armor to be the same "type" - ie, all of them use the MAXX sprite or LTHR sprite or what have you. If so, can't you point them all towards a rarely-used sprite (like the purple robes, perhaps) and replace those FRMs with those of the vault uniform?
Click to expand...
Would using the Purple Robes work? As far as I have understood only certain characters have all the frames necessarily for all the actions available to the player.

After searching some more I found out that it's possible to use sFall to change the starting and default appearance of the chosen one.

;To change the default and starting player models, uncomment the next four lines.
;The default models can also be changed ingame via script
;MaleStartModel=hmwarr
;MaleDefaultModel=hmjmps
FemaleStartModel=hfjmps
FemaleDefaultModel=hfjmps

That solves one issue. But the problem remains that he/she must instead use some sprites that are barely used by any other characters in the game, and that putting on an armor won't change the appearance of the chosen one.

Perhaps it would be possible to replace all the other characters in the game which uses the same sprites with something else. What about the female tribes sprites, were those particularly common in the game?
 
Stupid me. I just assumed that the jumpsuit sprites were shared with all the other characters who uses jumpsuits in the game, but looking at them in the critter editor I discovered that the jumpsuit is the ONLY hero sprites not shared with NPCs.

The hero uses hfjmps, while the NPCs uses nfvalt. That is yet another issue fixed. Now the last issue is just making sure that armors won't change the appearance. As a list ditch effort, would it be possible to make it impossible to pick up other armors?

Edit: Wait a second, couldn't I just use the critter editor and point all the Hero Female critters (the one's using lthr, metal, etc.) to use "hfjmps". Was it really that easy?
 
Yes, it is really that easy. Just edit the armor protos and switch the armor graphics and done. It won't affect armors placed directly in the map unless you replace them, though.
 
So I edited the Object FRM ID for all the female hero critters by using an hex editor on the .pro files.

I also created this batch file which uses dat2, so I could easily deploy the mod on a full installation of Fallout 2. Works perfectly well.
Code: 
cd mod_data
dat2.exe a ..\critter.dat art\critters\*.FRM
dat2.exe a ..\master.dat  proto\CRITTERS\*.pro

The problem is that the hero still uses the original frames, even though the critter editor and Dim's mapper always shows the female hero wearing a jumpsuit. I am even able to place the tribal hero wearing a jumpsuit on a map, and in the game it is still wearing the jumpsuit, standing besides the original hero wearing tribal clothing. Now I understand that things placed on a map are saved separately, but the hero isn't pre-placed on any map.

Any ideas why this won't work? Does the game save the hero protos in some special place or something?
 
You sure you got the files in the right place and made them read only? The game tries to remove all proto files on startup.
 
Ah, so it is possible to put the .pro files in the data/proto/critters directory as well? The way I did it was that I saved them directly to the master.dat file.

Either way. Neither of these methods worked. Extracting the .pro files from master.dat shows me that they are indeed modified. But it still won't show me the correct sprites when starting a new game.

Edit: How come the armored hero protos are suffixed with (don't use) ?
 
I have really been going about this the wrong way. The hero appearance mod included in sFall already allows you to do everything I wanted. I'm not going to make more than one sprite set, so I guess I will have to duplicate the FRMs for each armor type. But at least those sprites will be used for only the chosen one.

Thanks anyway for all your help! This has been very interesting indeed.
 
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