DST custom character mod sprites not loading

[zonydragon]

First of all, I'd just like to say that I'm very new to modding. In fact this might be my first time doing something like this, but it's going okay so far. Anyway, I'm working on a character mod and I'm using the "Extended Sample Character DST" mod on the Steam workshop as a base. In Don't Starve Together/mods/taran/exported/taran, where all the body parts are and such, I've taken every single part and replaced it with the one I want. I've drawn each one and it took me hours, and I've also been testing it with the taran.scml file using Spriter. Same thing with the ghost body parts. Everything looks the way it's supposed to be, but when I go into the actual game, the character doesn't look like what I've changed at all. It's just the default Extended Sample Character DST model. Same thing goes with the voice, I've tried changing it into a different instrument using mp3 files that I've recorded myself, but it didn't work even if I watched several tutorials on it.

So, what am I doing wrong? If I didn't provide enough information, please feel free to ask for it because I really want to make this mod real.

NOTE: The character's name that I'm making is Taran, hence the name of some of the files.

[Haruhi Kawaii]

2 hours ago, zonydragon said:

First of all, I'd just like to say that I'm very new to modding. In fact this might be my first time doing something like this, but it's going okay so far. Anyway, I'm working on a character mod and I'm using the "Extended Sample Character DST" mod on the Steam workshop as a base. In Don't Starve Together/mods/taran/exported/taran, where all the body parts are and such, I've taken every single part and replaced it with the one I want. I've drawn each one and it took me hours, and I've also been testing it with the taran.scml file using Spriter. Same thing with the ghost body parts. Everything looks the way it's supposed to be, but when I go into the actual game, the character doesn't look like what I've changed at all. It's just the default Extended Sample Character DST model. Same thing goes with the voice, I've tried changing it into a different instrument using mp3 files that I've recorded myself, but it didn't work even if I watched several tutorials on it.

So, what am I doing wrong? If I didn't provide enough information, please feel free to ask for it because I really want to make this mod real.

NOTE: The character's name that I'm making is Taran, hence the name of some of the files.

If still not working please upload your mod attached, including exported, this will be easier to solve

 

[zonydragon]

5 hours ago, Haruhi Kawaii said:

If still not working please upload your mod attached, including exported, this will be easier to solve

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jj9DYANKU8VdNK2IefHW04R9rUjUkCYR?usp=share_link I can't upload the folder here, it's too large so I hope a google drive link is fine. Also, the tutorial is great and all but it didn't really say anything about the issue I'm having, it never touched upon that.

[Chesed]

Hi there!

Your character build is missing the sprites in "headbase_hat". One is missing, and the rest appear to have the wrong name. This is causing the autocompiler to fail.

Replacing the sprites got your character to compile on my machine. Their sprites seem to be misalligned however.

Wish I could help you with the sound but that's not my forte unfortunately. I'll compare your character to my own with a custom voice and see if I spot any issues.

EDIT: found the sound issue. In your "taran.lua" your character's voice is still set to Wilson!

Quote

inst.soundsname = "wilson"

Change it to "taran" and that will fix it.

Edited February 7, 2023 by Chesed
Found the voice problem.

[zonydragon]

11 hours ago, Chesed said:

Hi there!

Your character build is missing the sprites in "headbase_hat". One is missing, and the rest appear to have the wrong name. This is causing the autocompiler to fail.

Replacing the sprites got your character to compile on my machine. Their sprites seem to be misalligned however.

Wish I could help you with the sound but that's not my forte unfortunately. I'll compare your character to my own with a custom voice and see if I spot any issues.

EDIT: found the sound issue. In your "taran.lua" your character's voice is still set to Wilson!

Change it to "taran" and that will fix it.

Hey, thanks! The audio thing works now. And my character model load in properly as well, which is great. However, like you said, they're all misalligned. A lot. How can I fix that?

By the way, I don't know if this is just me but when I look closely at the model in the game, It kind of looks like there's a tiny white border over the lines. Again, I don't know if I'm just seeing things. Also, I made this comparison in-game. The biggest problem is the placement of the head, face, mandibles and tail. I think I know how to fix the mandibles (by just making them a part of the head base png) but I don't know about the rest.

[Chesed]

I had to deal with the white outline too. For me it's a result of using Clip Studio to draw my sprites... the autocompiler just doesn't like it for some reason.

The fix is very tedious but you can fix it. (There may be another fix for this but this is the only one that worked for me that didn't involve just redrawing everything.)

First you need to download Ktools:

Once you have it, do this:

1. Open two folders side by side - the one with your sprites (let's say the headbase for an example), and the one with Ktools.

2. Click and drag a sprite (let's say headbase-0.png) on top of the Ktech.exe.

3. Ktech will open it and generate another file in the sprite folder: "headbase-0.tex".

4. Drag "headbase-0.tex" back on to Ktech.exe again. It will turn it back into a .png and overwrite the one already in the folder. You can delete the .tex file after this if you want.

5. Have the Autocompiler export your character again.

The outline will be gone. You can see the difference in the head here.

It is super mind numbing to do this so I recommend doing it once everything is completely finished. Otherwise you'll have to do it again whenever a sprite gets tweaked.

Quote

The biggest problem is the placement of the head, face, mandibles and tail. I think I know how to fix the mandibles (by just making them a part of the head base png) but I don't know about the rest.

This is going to be hard for me to fix but I can give you some advice.

Moving your sprites around in spriter doesn't actually change how your character looks in the game. The game itself is quite rigid with where it places sprites, since every character animates the same.

We can see in your pic you took of your character standing next to Wilson that the game is trying to place the eyes and head level with Wilson's (the head floof being level with his chin.)

If you want to move these parts around, move them on the canvas of the sprite, not spriter.

I did this very quickly to see if I could get it closer to what you wanted...

This seems to be more what you were after (mandibles aside), so I think it's doable without redrawing things.

I will warn you that I have a character with a misplaced face and it does cause some emote animations to look scuffed, so it's your choice whether you want to redraw the character to look more like Wilson's proportions or just deal with the scuffyness.

Also I definitely recommend making the mandibles part of the headbase if you can. The hairfront sprites don't seem to be used any more by Klei and generally gave me nothing but grief when I tried to use them (they tend to not animate or just vanish during certain animations).

Hope this helps. If you have any other issues I'll be happy to check it out.

Edited February 8, 2023 by Chesed

[zonydragon]

5 hours ago, Chesed said:

I had to deal with the white outline too. For me it's a result of using Clip Studio to draw my sprites... the autocompiler just doesn't like it for some reason.

The fix is very tedious but you can fix it. (There may be another fix for this but this is the only one that worked for me that didn't involve just redrawing everything.)

First you need to download Ktools:

Once you have it, do this:

1. Open two folders side by side - the one with your sprites (let's say the headbase for an example), and the one with Ktools.

2. Click and drag a sprite (let's say headbase-0.png) on top of the Ktech.exe.

3. Ktech will open it and generate another file in the sprite folder: "headbase-0.tex".

4. Drag "headbase-0.tex" back on to Ktech.exe again. It will turn it back into a .png and overwrite the one already in the folder. You can delete the .tex file after this if you want.

5. Have the Autocompiler export your character again.

The outline will be gone. You can see the difference in the head here.

It is super mind numbing to do this so I recommend doing it once everything is completely finished. Otherwise you'll have to do it again whenever a sprite gets tweaked.

This is going to be hard for me to fix but I can give you some advice.

Moving your sprites around in spriter doesn't actually change how your character looks in the game. The game itself is quite rigid with where it places sprites, since every character animates the same.

We can see in your pic you took of your character standing next to Wilson that the game is trying to place the eyes and head level with Wilson's (the head floof being level with his chin.)

If you want to move these parts around, move them on the canvas of the sprite, not spriter.

I did this very quickly to see if I could get it closer to what you wanted...

This seems to be more what you were after (mandibles aside), so I think it's doable without redrawing things.

I will warn you that I have a character with a misplaced face and it does cause some emote animations to look scuffed, so it's your choice whether you want to redraw the character to look more like Wilson's proportions or just deal with the scuffyness.

Also I definitely recommend making the mandibles part of the headbase if you can. The hairfront sprites don't seem to be used any more by Klei and generally gave me nothing but grief when I tried to use them (they tend to not animate or just vanish during certain animations).

Hope this helps. If you have any other issues I'll be happy to check it out.

Thanks again! It really does help. I'll try out the outline thing after I'm done with the sprites. I've managed to fix up the placement of the face on the head and the head itself (and the mandibles), however I'm still struggling to figure out how do I properly place the tail. I've tried moving it around like how I did with the other parts, but there isn't enough space on the canvas to be able to achieve what I'm going for (e.g the picture below). So I've also tried moving the tail to tail-1.png, but it honestly made it worse. Now it looks like the second image below. The only solution that comes to mind is somehow making the canvas bigger? But I don't know if it's safe to do that. Also, another question. I noticed that when I look at my character from the back view, his head appears to be in the front while the back is behind. I kind of don't want that, so is there any way to do the opposite (the head being behind, back in the front)? It's because of his "hair" and it looks kind of weird (look at the third picture). Any suggestions are very appreciated, thanks again.

[Rickzzs]

To fix image size:

1.check the image size in scml match actual image size.

2.check build.xml, too. You can find it in a zip generated by autocompiler.

That's all.

There is a hairpigtail layer you can try.

If you change the image size you may also want to edit scml to find a good pivot.

Edited February 9, 2023 by Rickzzs

[Chesed]

^ Pretty much.

If you change the canvas size of any sprites, you'll have to open taran.scml in an editor like Notepad+ and edit the canvas size listed there too. That might help you solve the tail issue. Sorry I'm not more help - I've never made a character with a tail!

My character has slightly long hair and I make it cover his back using the "hair-2"/"hair_hat-2" sprite. I literally just copy and pasted the bottommost part of his hair and moved it until it lined up.

Just be aware that the headbase backsprite is mirrored and the hair backsprite is not mirrored. So if you copy and paste it, swap it around.

If you want it any longer than this, you'd probably want to use the pigtail layers as was suggested above, but those are in two halves and tend to jostle around a lot. You can get an idea of how they work by looking at Wendy's Nostalgic skin.

Edited February 9, 2023 by Chesed
Forgot the headbase is mirrored lol

[zonydragon]

9 hours ago, Chesed said:

^ Pretty much.

If you change the canvas size of any sprites, you'll have to open taran.scml in an editor like Notepad+ and edit the canvas size listed there too. That might help you solve the tail issue. Sorry I'm not more help - I've never made a character with a tail!

My character has slightly long hair and I make it cover his back using the "hair-2"/"hair_hat-2" sprite. I literally just copy and pasted the bottommost part of his hair and moved it until it lined up.

Just be aware that the headbase backsprite is mirrored and the hair backsprite is not mirrored. So if you copy and paste it, swap it around.

If you want it any longer than this, you'd probably want to use the pigtail layers as was suggested above, but those are in two halves and tend to jostle around a lot. You can get an idea of how they work by looking at Wendy's Nostalgic skin.

Hey, thanks a lot! I've figured the placement of everything and all of it is just how it needs to be. Even the tail. And the white border across the character is gone, too. I'm very happy you took your time to help, it really means a lot to me. So thanks :] Just a question though, how do I change the tiny icon of my character, like on the map? And the drawing on the frame thing when you hover to the character head when selecting him? Like the picture below.

[Chesed]

The portrait art is in \taran\bigportraits and the map icon is in \taran\images\map_icons.

They should automatically compile and update when you edit the .png files in those folders and launch the autocompiler.

 

If you're asking because you've already tried to change them and the autocompiler won't compile them, you might be experiencing a weird problem that a few users and a friend of mine have had with the autocompiler where it only seems to register the character itself and won't compile anything else.

If that happens, I don't know how to fix it, but I don't have that problem and don't mind compiling the sprites if you're unable to find a computer that the compiler will behave with.

Hopefully you don't have that problem!

Edited February 9, 2023 by Chesed

[zonydragon]

Yeah I don't have that issue, thank you so much for all your help. It really means a lot to me and I'm glad everything is functioning as it should now, I'll publish my mod soon. Thank you <3

[zonydragon]

8 hours ago, Chesed said:

The portrait art is in \taran\bigportraits and the map icon is in \taran\images\map_icons.

They should automatically compile and update when you edit the .png files in those folders and launch the autocompiler.

 

If you're asking because you've already tried to change them and the autocompiler won't compile them, you might be experiencing a weird problem that a few users and a friend of mine have had with the autocompiler where it only seems to register the character itself and won't compile anything else.

If that happens, I don't know how to fix it, but I don't have that problem and don't mind compiling the sprites if you're unable to find a computer that the compiler will behave with.

Hopefully you don't have that problem!

One more thing though, and then I'll be done for sure. During the eating animation the cheeks are way too low, and normally I did what I did with every other sprite that's misplaced; I move it around in the canvas, and if it's not tall/wide enough (like in this case) then I create a new one and save it with the name of the original image. However that didn't seem to work this time, the two sprites only got further apart and not higher up. The first image is what it looked like originally, and the second one is when I tried to fix it but somehow made it worse. What can I do about this? And thanks for your help, again.

[zonydragon]

12 hours ago, zonydragon said:

One more thing though, and then I'll be done for sure. During the eating animation the cheeks are way too low, and normally I did what I did with every other sprite that's misplaced; I move it around in the canvas, and if it's not tall/wide enough (like in this case) then I create a new one and save it with the name of the original image. However that didn't seem to work this time, the two sprites only got further apart and not higher up. The first image is what it looked like originally, and the second one is when I tried to fix it but somehow made it worse. What can I do about this? And thanks for your help, again.

Nevermind, I figured it out. I just forgot to change taran.scml in an editor like Notepad++ and edit the canvas size listed there too. Thank you so much!