Character Skins, Unlisted Parts?

[FurryEskimo]

I'm working on a custom character skin, and started to notice that parts of the character's animation file, seem missing, or rarely used.  'Nubs' get referenced every so often, and a more obvious example is when you wear certain gloves or boots.  They apply a new texture so the gloves go up your wrist or legs.  Does anyone know what these are called, and can we simply add them to our characters by naming a file (idk) 'wrist' and it will simply appear?  Maybe add the files and then in the code say "self.inst.AnimState:OverrideSymbol("wrist", "furryeskimo", "wrist")" or whatever it takes?

[IronHunter]

This is persistent problem of the esctemplate not being updated and frequently cited as a tutorial. It still works but its template is missing a few symbols including arm_lower, and SWAP_FACE. Its also possible it might not have all the up to date face symbols, haven't used that template for a while.

I recommend you use the code of the esctemplate but instead use the custom player animation spriter file.

Delete the unneeded symbols like the hat, swap_body, swap_object etc
You can open spriter files in a text editor, and manually edit things like pivots, or .png dimensions if you want to copy your old .pngs over.
If you need more help with spriter just pm me.

[PanAzej]

3 hours ago, FurryEskimo said:

I'm working on a custom character skin, and started to notice that parts of the character's animation file, seem missing, or rarely used.  'Nubs' get referenced every so often, and a more obvious example is when you wear certain gloves or boots.  They apply a new texture so the gloves go up your wrist or legs.  Does anyone know what these are called, and can we simply add them to our characters by naming a file (idk) 'wrist' and it will simply appear?  Maybe add the files and then in the code say "self.inst.AnimState:OverrideSymbol("wrist", "furryeskimo", "wrist")" or whatever it takes?

Hi,

The "nubs" are a symbol in character's build not used in actual animation.

They are meant to be used to override an existing symbol in character's build (other body part which is actually used in animations) when a specific skin is equipped.

You can take a look at my Custom Player Animation Template, which IronHunter linked in a post above mine.

That template includes all symbols used in most player animations.

"Wrist" symbol is actually called "arm_lower_cuff" in the build.

 

For example my "Jelliet" character uses "hairfront", "swap_body" and "swap_body_tall" to represent her hair.

Of course I had to alter a lot of animations to make it work as I intended, but the point is - you can use other symbols in your character build other than those shown in Extended Sample Character template.

Edited November 14, 2020 by PanAzej
rambling

[FurryEskimo]

Haha!  So I was right, there is stuff missing!  Thanks!

@PanAzej  And wow, yes actually I've been looking through your code for Jelliet actually, which is really what let me know something was wrong with my code.  You're a fantastic coder!  I was playing as your character when I noticed the feet animations you changed, and that was something I assumed was just not possible, but you did it!
I also saw all your edits using swap_body_tall and honestly, had no idea what that was for originally, or what your edits to it were for.  I've seen characters with pony tails and long hair in the front, buuuuut, did you edit it so the hair in the front is now long hair in the back?

I do have Spriter, but mostly used it to correct some extracted tent animations.  For some reason they're broken by default.  I thought it was just me, but all the tent-mods on the workshop have wonky animations.

And thank you again @IronHunter.  I'll try replacing my current animation files with that one.  With any luck I'll get it right on the first try!

Edit:  Ha, so this is rather different than what I've done before.  You have a new animation entity for each direction the character can face.  Is that going to be a big issue when converting the animation files?  I'm in the process of renaming files and animation entities, but you have custom code that selects what animations are used when, but most of that seems to relate to the mount animation code, which I suspect isn't needed, but was used to help people test the animations, right?

   

Edited November 14, 2020 by FurryEskimo

[PanAzej]

18 hours ago, FurryEskimo said:

Haha!  So I was right, there is stuff missing!  Thanks!

@PanAzej  And wow, yes actually I've been looking through your code for Jelliet actually, which is really what let me know something was wrong with my code.  You're a fantastic coder!  I was playing as your character when I noticed the feet animations you changed, and that was something I assumed was just not possible, but you did it!
I also saw all your edits using swap_body_tall and honestly, had no idea what that was for originally, or what your edits to it were for.  I've seen characters with pony tails and long hair in the front, buuuuut, did you edit it so the hair in the front is now long hair in the back?

I do have Spriter, but mostly used it to correct some extracted tent animations.  For some reason they're broken by default.  I thought it was just me, but all the tent-mods on the workshop have wonky animations.

And thank you again @IronHunter.  I'll try replacing my current animation files with that one.  With any luck I'll get it right on the first try!

Edit:  Ha, so this is rather different than what I've done before.  You have a new animation entity for each direction the character can face.  Is that going to be a big issue when converting the animation files?  I'm in the process of renaming files and animation entities, but you have custom code that selects what animations are used when, but most of that seems to relate to the mount animation code, which I suspect isn't needed, but was used to help people test the animations, right?

   

1. Jelliet's long hair basically uses two symbols: "swap_body" and "swap_body_tall".
Symbol "swap_body" is used by backpacks and armors, while "swap_body_tall" is used by Slurtle Armor and One Man Band.

Both of these symbols are actually a copy of one another and they are animated the same (in most animations).

I still had to alter them in some animations to make them work as actual hair.

2. The entity is only one here, there are multiple animations though.

What you should care about regarding creating a custom player build is the list of symbols which will be overriden in animations of player character, not the animations themselves.

You can even delete all animations but one (since compiler checks which symbols have been used in animations, you gotta use each symbol at least once in one of the animations in the SCML, otherwise it's going to ignore unused symbols).

I would recommend renaming the entity to BUILD_PLAYER, because otherwise the symbols may act quite wonky. I do not have access to entirety of AnimState code, so I cannot tell why exactly this name has to be used for the entity, but what I know is that it may cause problems.

I tried shortly explaining in the modmain of my template how exactly the *zip is loaded by the game, but there is a lot of really specific stuff I would have to show off to explain how exactly the graphics and animations are constructed and understood by the game and compiler.

3. Regarding the tent anims. Even after ~6 years of modding this game I don't have full knowledge of how exactly all of it functions, sometimes I'm surprised myself when I see what happens.

Some stuff gets broken while getting decompiled and that's just how it goes. I have successfully unpacked some animations, edited them and imported into the game just to find out that half of the specific objects is just invisible now.

Some unpacked animations have incorrectly numbered frames in symbols and the build just doesn't work with animations present in the game.

At this point I'm just rambling though. I guess I could write down all of this somewhere so that new modders can have all this stuff accessible.

Animating for this game with mod tools we have is working hours on end via trial and error (while trying to not go insane) and that's why I'm making new player animations extremely rarely.

 

Creating player builds is a piece of cake, though. If you have dumps of player animations to test if the builds will look fine in-game and you didn't come up with a build which requires tons of existing animation alterations, that is.

[FurryEskimo]

@PanAzej  That worked like a charm!  

As for the tent, I only have about half a year's experience editing this game, and while I do code I've almost never made mods before.  I did my best to fix the animations manually.  I'm sure there's a better way to do it, and a library of fixed animation files would help new moders, but you're right, some of the animations are rough, and would require a lot of effort to fix.  The tent's 'destroy' animation for example has around 67 keyframes.

You've already shown you can do a wonderful job animating characters though!  I haven't really figured it out, but hey, I animated a tent!  Haha, it's probably child's play, but it got me interested and I've been doing my best to figure out how to improve my work.  Thanks a lot for the help!