Ok, tonight Dhuran and I were trying to lay the basis for the update to Undead Rising which will have a custom Undead faction with Skeleton soldiers and Zombies. The problem is we can't get the faction to use my custom undead skins. I was trying some experiments to see if I could get the AI to use any of my custom skins and I found that I could but only randomly even after I tweaked the % values of what other skins they would use would show up to zero.
I fired up Stardock's Faction Creator and went to a race I know I had skinned, the Quendar. In the pic where it shows what Race you want your custom faction to be it shows a picture of the race. About 1 out of every 3 or 4 times it would shows a pic of my custom skin, like this:
What we need to accomplish to get the skins working for Undead Rising 2.0 is to FORCE the Faction/Race to use my skin all the time and NOT use the other skins that could go on that associated model. My undead skeleton skin uses the standard human model so it can shows up on a wide range of races in game. I only want it to show on one custom race, the undead, for making the undead faction. When we set the AI to play as the undead faction we want them to design units who's models use ONLY my custom skin and not any of the other human default skins. I'd also like to take this knowledge and apply it to updates for my other skins so the AI uses them instead of the default skins.
There are a couple different areas where we tried to tell it to use the skin. First we started in the obvious places. CoreSkins.Xml has these entries:
<RandomPeasantUnitLiklihood>50</RandomPeasantUnitLiklihood>
<RandomMerchantUnitLiklihood>50</RandomMerchantUnitLiklihood>
<RandomHeroUnitLiklihood>50</RandomHeroUnitLiklihood>
Which I tweak to 100 and then lower the likelihood of the other skins showing up to 0. Even doing that though my custom skin only shows up randomly 1 out of every 4 or 5 times. If I redefine the skin sets that the race can use it still uses the other one's associated with it's model type and doesn't always use mine.
Then we thought "Maybe we have to define a specialized undead race and tell it to only use the skin. So we checked out the Xml's dealing with Races, of which there are two. CoreRaceConfigs.xml and CoreRaceTypes.xml . Both of them have a value named:
<GenericUnitType_Male>Men_GenericBaseUnit_Male</GenericUnitType_Male>
That defines what model the race uses but Not what skin it puts on that model. Tweaking the likelihood of certain skins showing in the CoreSkins.xml doesn't work, and these two xml's don't even have a value line to define the skin. Can a line to define the skin a race uses be added so it doesn't use other skins that work with it's model?
Please tell me we can do this without needing to open the model files and define what skins it uses there, because we don't have the tools to open the model files formats which come in two flavors, HKB's and DDS's. There has to be some other way to define specifically what skin a model/race/faction will use and have it use no others.
Please Devs.....HELP!!!!! Anyone?
Note: Sorry if that seems confusing talking mostly about the Undead and showing the Quendar. I showed the Quendar in the example because I got it showing up (though only once every few tries of picking Quendar as a race). Once I figure out how to get the Undead skin to show for ONLY the undead "race" and get it showing every time the AI would make a unit, I can apply that knowledge to my Quendar and Urxen as well so I face the ones I skinned in battle and not the default ones. This will also come in handy for other mods and modders who want to force a race/faction to use a custom skin for making races in mods.
Thanks for the help.
