Skins Thread - Jade Empire in Style mod for Jade Empire

I was watching some videos on youtube of some guy who changed his selectable characters skins to look like skins of npcs. Can that be done in a way that doesnt interfere with your mod? For instance, I'm playing with Furious Ming, can I make Furious Ming look like some cowled npc instead of his vanilla look?

Thanks in advance,

Yes, that can be done.

It just so happens that I play the game as Crimson Khana right now.

The next release - which is due some time next week - will add a few new appearance choices...

Edited by: pecoes

woaa that cowled npc looks so amazing, I didnt even remember it appeared ingame until I saw it.

yea that would be cool. playing as Death's Hand with Death's razor

I'm afraid you'll have to wait another two weeks. When I advanced the last release to get the bug fixes out, it messed up my schedule. That and the fact that I have a stomach flu.

Out of curiosity, did you change the appearance files to add a new appearance to the starting selection or did you script them into the cheat menu appearance changer? And gute Besserung

Edited by: Noimageavailable

Noimageavailable wrote: And gute Besserung

Thanks! It's almost two weeks now. I'm sick of being sick.

Noimageavailable wrote: Out of curiosity, did you change the appearance files to add a new appearance to the starting selection or did you script them into the cheat menu appearance changer?

The new appearances are not in the current version yet, if that's what you mean. And they will be available through the console only. As far as I can tell the start selection is limited to exactly seven appearances. So I would have to take out some of the player characters...

It is possible to add a new character to the selection by adding a line to the player.2da. I'm using that method myself, but it results in glitches and crashes in several places, though it seems others don't have that problem. Also when the game changes your player model like when entering and leaving the spirit world, it gives you the Wu model instead of your new appearance. Thats why I ask about your method because I want to know if it has the same issues.

Sorry, for the very late reply! I did not notice your post until now. It's in my Treadwatch, but "Threads" is 0. WTF?

When you add more than seven characters to the players.2da you're asking for trouble. Consider e.g. the cutscenes that show your character. I counted 13 of those throughout the entire game. Each of these cutscenes exists in seven versions - one for each character in players.2a. Which one should the game pick, if there's more than seven? Yes, and there's the spirit world. When you enter the spirit world, the game overwrites your appearance. And when you leave it, it does so again. Another issue might be transformation styles. Depending on which model(s) you've picked transforming back into your regular appearance might fail. And don't even get me started on the problems my own gem armors may cause when you fiddle with the appearance (or the texture)... Oh, and then there's this other amusing little quirk: When you change your character's appearance during combat, the currently selected style won't work anymore...

It may sound weird, but you cannot simply set your character's appearance at some point and be done with it. The appearance has to be continuously maintained. I had to write an awful lot of code to fix all of this. And I'm not even done...

EDIT:

The way I say it there are only two good options:

1. Replace one of the appearances in players.2da. You will be limited to complete models (body+head) and cannot use mixed models, but it should work. If you want it to work in the spirit world and after, you also have to edit the two rows in appearance.2da that feature the living and the dead version of your character.
2. Wait for my next release. If all goes well, all these issues that make me swear and curse will be completely invisible in the final result. I'm doing it the hard way, so you guys can do it the easy way.

Edited by: pecoes

The cutscenes are usually no problem, they just default to one of the player characters. Only exceptions are the ones in the spirit cave and Gao's lair. As to overwriting appearance, there's also that one sidequest in the Imperial City with the play. And may I ask if the Watcher will be included in your next release?

Noimageavailable wrote: As to overwriting appearance, there's also that one sidequest in the Imperial City with the play.

Oh! Thank you! I completely forgot about that one! Nice catch!

Noimageavailable wrote: And may I ask if the Watcher will be included in your next release?

Yes, indeed. He's in the video, too, isn't he.

I actually found a guide on how to do this at papagamer but I'm too afraid of editing my files to attempt it myself...
I have found a few reskins, however. They aren't completely different, just changes colors, but they are a nice option. I've been enjoying a reskin of Radient Jen Zi that is almost exactly what I wanted.. I only wish I could figure out how to edit it to my tastes, but it's pretty great. I noticed you use a pink reskin in some of your screenshots. :3 But anyways! Wouldn't it be nice if people could use these with the option to revert if they wanted? Perhaps from the in-game console? But I am looking forward to seeing NPCs in character creation! And while I'm thinking about it, I am actually using a mod that replaces Dawn Star with Scholar Ling (though her mouth looks a bit broken, but I skip most dialogue anyways); there being mods for the other two playable females as well. I'm going to try Wu the Lotus Blossom Next. I was playing and staring at Sagacious Zu wishing I could completely swap him and Tiger Shen. Not sure if that would break anything though... What I -REALLY- want is to completely swap Radiant Jen Zi with Silk Fox. Maybe I'll look into it... maybe.
(Oh wow, I made a paragraph @.@)

Edited by: lilkillerduck

My plan for the next release is to make all human NPC models playable and provide an easy and well-documented way to re-skin them to your heart's desire. Swapping NPC models is not currently on my to-do list. That's a very nice idea, though.

Editing the skins is not all that difficult - at least if you already have the TGA files in your override folder. For Radiant Jen Zi that's P_Li01.tga and P_LiH01.tga. You can open and edit them with Photoshop, the Gimp or whatever other image editor you got.

As a quick and dirty way to swap the NPC models, I would recommend editing the MODELA-column in appearance.2da.

Edited by: pecoes

Why thank you! *Flails around in Photoshop for a bit* Ahh, someone has done their homework. C:
But I think I'll pass. I tried out that Dawn Star as Wu thing and her cheek keeps breaking. Not very pretty xD The only reason I'd even change anything else is to play as a unique character. I dunno about anyone else, but I wouldn't want to play as saaaay, Master Li, then walk up to Master Li and have a conversation like I'm NOT his long lost twin or anything. I don't think you should play as any unique character, and my definition of unique is if they have a dialogue. I totally want to play as one of the random children xD though I think that'd ruin the kissing scenes..

Any updates on this latest version? I want to try Jade Empire but I'd like to wait for the extra appearances you're working on first

Due to certain RL issues I had to put the work on this mod on hiatus for a while. The next version is half finished. There's about two or three weeks of work left.

[vague] I'll probably resume the work quite soon. You can probably expect the next release this month or early November. [/vague]

Edited by: pecoes

Hehe OK. Thanks for the response

pecoes wrote:

1. Replace one of the appearances in players.2da. You will be limited to complete models (body+head) and cannot use mixed models, but it should work. If you want it to work in the spirit world and after, you also have to edit the two rows in appearance.2da that feature the living and the dead version of your character.

I should also point out that one must extract (or already have) the desired npc's model (.mdl) and texture files (.mdx, .txb) inside the Override folder before/after changing the appearanceindex line in the players.2da, or else the game will crash when you will select the replaced character, due to the fact that the game has no model to refer to and display (this especially applies to NPC's from later chapters, like The Watcher , Death's Hand or Master Li in royal armor. Such models are not normally meant to be displayed in the character creation screen or Two Rivers, so they will need to be manually copied from their respective area directories in the data folder.)

Hi there!

I love the mod, but I have a tiny litttle question. How can I change back the Crimson Tears sabers back the vanila version? The model files renameing, in the override folder, riun the whole style. And the messing the StyleAdvance.2da and the stylesuperlist.2da seems no effect at all.

@nagyond:

To change the model(s) you have to change the "Weapon" column in stylesuperlist.2da and/or in styleadvance.2da. You seem to already have figured out that much. The catch, though, is: These changes will only take effect if you apply them *before* your character learns the style.

If you want to change the models in a save that was made *after* your character has learned the style, you will have to manually edit the savegame. You will need the SAC Utils for that. Make a sac_dump and open save.sav with K-GFF, navigate to PlayerCreature/Stats/Styles and find the style with the WeaponRef you want to change. When you're done, delete the old save.sac, recrompress the files with sac_fill and rename new_save.sac to save.sac. Oh, and make a backup of the save before you do any of that. This is a little like open heart surgery

Oh, so this is the trick. I never find out myself. Thank you.

Jade Empire - like NWN and KotOR before it - is quite excessive about baking stuff into savegames. More often than not the changes you make will seemingly have no consequences. And that's always because your savegame is too "late" for the change. As a rule of thumb: Anything that modifies either the characters or the areas needs to be modded before it's loaded for the first time.

Hello! I was wondering if this idea was ever re-pursued? Having little to no character modding experience, and wanting to play as one of the junior students at the Two Rivers school, I am kind of at a dead end xD

Not sure where else to put this, but your mod got me to replay Jade Empire and your modding wiki got me to try basic re-texturing for the first time ever. I successfully (I think) made Scholar Lings face less creepy, and then proceeded to change her look completely. I ended up with what looks like a blue-eyed half-white half-asian woman.

So, after putting work into that, will users be able to easily insert their own re-texturing into the new character customization system you've proposed? I've tinkered with the other characters, and I thought I might like to play as a changed up version of Smiling Hawk. Thanks!