A Few Modding related questions

[Zero Kenshin]

A Few Modding related questions

1) I've been thinking for a while now that It would be cool to make a group mod of Fable adding new quests, creatures, weapons, trophies, armour, spells, augments and areas. Anyway would anybody here be interested? (of course first I would have to re-learn everything from my previous attempts at modding (its been a while )

2) How much of what I put in my question above would be possible? I know that there is a way to create new weapons, armour and the like without overwrighting the old ones but I have no idea If it is possible to create new areas.

um That's all I can think of for now, thankyou for your time ^_^

 

[deama]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

I can make armour but I don't know how to texture it and put it inside fable explorer so...
but anyways I am cider interested.
BTW: do you know how to texture?

 

[Zero Kenshin]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

Well I am alright at gimp and pretty good with photoshop. (learnt it last year and the year before when I was doing the Art side of a game dev. course, also learnt 3ds max so I'll just need to learn what formats to export the meshes and textures as and how to load them into fable via one of the Mod Utilities and I'll be set .)

edit:although I would probably need to look up on placing nodes and things like that in a tutorial

 

[deama]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

Oh ok well can you try and texture the Tyrael armour?

 

[Zero Kenshin]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

was gonna ask you what it was but I just found it anyway lol
looks sick man.

I'll have a crack at texturing it for you couple of questions for you though

1)a. Have you unwrapped its UVW coords?(if you haven't/don't know how I could do it for you)
b. What did you use to model it with and what version?(don't need to answer if you have already Unwrapped)

2) What kind of colour scheme would you like? (a link to some reference would be nice )

 

[deama]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

A. Well I will try and upload another one with the UVW if you want...
B. I modeled it with 3d max 7 or 2009 they both work.


2. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/22794-1-1235603284.jpg
this would be a good one and I know it doesn't look like I made mine but you should try and texture the once that you can...

BTW: did you mean by " unrwrappe UVW " or is it another command? If yes then heres the link
http://rapidshare.com/files/299559516/erty3764.max.html

 

[Zero Kenshin]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

well if you don't feel like unwrapping it I will do it for you its no hassle one thing I only have 2008 and I can't remember if max saves will work with previous versions *shrugs* either way doesn't matter to me

EDIT: just an afterthought but if the save won't work backwords we could just export it as a .obj or whatever it is I'm a little unsure as I haven't used max in a little while

 

[deama]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

K thx, well I'll go off and play with fable explorer...
Edit: It should work ( I hope gulp* )...

 

[Zero Kenshin]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

Hey looks like you'll need to export it as a .obj for me to be able to load it.(I guess you made it with 2009?)

I get a "file failed to open" error.

 

[deama]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

Oh... but I made it in 3d max 7 and could load it in 2009 wtf?
anyways...
heres the link
http://rapidshare.com/files/299689078/f2342234w.obj.html

 

[Zero Kenshin]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

What are you putting in?

That's my only beef with "community" mods - the figure head doesn't do anything except tell others what he'd like in the mod. I'm out.

3D models and textures (new art)

oh and sorry for sounding naive but

No.

Why?

No.

Why?

No.

Why?

and by why I of course mean what is it that makes it impossible?
(I don't care so much about spells but the other two are ones I was really interested in)

Oh and one I forgot was new expressions and new sounds(for added weapons and other stuff), is it possible to add them to the game? (again if not a reason would be good thankyou)

 

[deama]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

the new areas not sure if it is possible but you can upgrade or update or whatever to the existing areas...
I'm not sure about quests though.

Edit: I am not sure if you can make spells but you can modify them like add new abilities new effects ect...

 

[deama]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

big list

 

[Zero Kenshin]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

Don't realy mind about spells or expressions the ones already existing are good I just thought some new ones might be cool.

Hearing that about quests is a bit of a downer I thought it might be cool if we could add a new quest line but meh whatever doesn't really bother me too much.

@JohnDoe:
Sounds... well sound really difficult but the only thing I'd want to use them for is to apply to new weapons seeing as quests are out of the question. Although from the sounds (woops there I go again :lol: ) of things its to difficult to even bother.

Levels: So new map areas are possible? Just so difficult you would "rather walk on molten lava" lol wow they must be quite the trouble to do :hmm: I think it would be worth it but I mean thats just me and before I get into anything that difficult I would like to learn more basic stuff again like first making new weapons then armour, then retexture an existing creature and modify its attacks and then perhaps try my hand at a new creature (ugh rigging and animating).

A few more questions sorry about this.
could you point me in a tutoriol for exporting the correct files for textures and mesh and then putting them into game?

I'm gonna go ahead and assume that it is possible to add a scripted event to an area? (would be good to know this for the future)

And do you know if Fable uses Normal maps?

Anyway thanks for all the help so far you've been so far you've been a splendiferous help!! +rep Really you are a life saver it would have taken me forever to find all this out without you!!

@Deama: Just got the .Obj and got it to Import/merge so I'll just have to Unwrap it now and then I'll get straight on to texturing the model !! just wanted to say that if Fable does use normal maps a lot of the detail on the armour could have been done with normal maps :hmm: doesn't matter either way just that there seems to be a lot more detail in some places over others. Anyway I'll try to be done by the end of the weekend.

EDIT:I am so glad that this armour is mirrored down the middle makes texturing a lot quicker

 

[Zero Kenshin]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

While I am an arrogant and pompous ass, I don't say this to make myself out to be important or talented or anything of the sort, but if anyone in the active Fable modding community was going to do it, I fear it would have to be me. This statement is very depressing.

lol hilarious but from the looks of things you are very good, so it wouldn't be to surprising (lol I'm such a kiss ass). Its just good to know that it is possible even if it is incredibly hard.

Oh that, that's pretty easy so long as you're building it off of an existing creature,

Yeah I would just start out making modifications of existing ones but someday it would be good to try to create one.

I did this as a proof-of-concept

ew is he vomiting out his arse?

And you would assume wrong.

oh well ok then. How about when you use something something happens? I believe at one stage I saw a video of a mod that made it so when you activated a sign or something you turned into a balverine.

Normal texture maps? Yes, standard DDSXTn. Bump maps are inverted for some reason, no idea why.

Normal texture maps are exactly what I was talking about so thank you. Inverted? If I remember correctly normal maps are usually blue for neutral height so would it be khaki? instead?

On to the meshes - You can edit in any format, but you can only export and import as DirectX, whatever you use must be compatible with normals and UVWs (most software is), but also helpers, bones, weights, and sub-frame hierarchy, and the only software out there that I know does this is 3DS (with import/export plugins).

Cool I have 3ds Max 2008 where might one find these plugins (in case my searches on google yield no results)

Now, you must import over existing meshes, animated meshes over animated meshes, static meshes over static meshes, collision meshes over collision meshes, and FE doesn't support the dynamic mesh - it's in a different, tagged format and so doesn't work.

:wassat: um so are you saying that if I want to bring in my own custom sword mesh I would have to overwrite another static mesh to do so?

Sorry for being a noob and having to ask you all this stuff but at least I know some nore about what is and isn't possible now.

Thankyou JohnDoe you've made me one happy chappy with all this info

 

[deama]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

So how goes the texturing...

 

[Zero Kenshin]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

Export plugin (settings need to be tinkered with for it to work right); Import plugin (can export static meshes, but Pandasoft plugin is better for that and can do animated as well).

Thankyou I'll have to do some tinkering with that at some point especially seeing as I just found this post by you ^_^

At first, yea. You can make a new mesh entry first and import mesh subheader and entry data from an existing entry if you want, but it's faster to duplicate entries. In the end, meshes have to be imported over original data because...

It would be nice If you could simply right click on graphics.big and 'create new entry' like you can for game.bin but I guess that has something to do with a difference between .big and .bin.

Look, this is another one of those long and essentially useless stories, do I really need to explain it all? Just trust me on this.

heheh Normally my inquisitive nature would force me to ask you the reason... buuut I think I have bothered you enough for now ...lol

btw I was trying to use the "ghost sword" mesh as the mesh for a new weapon and couldn't figure out for the life of me why the game would crash every time i went into my melee weapons in the menu.. until I found this at which point it all made sense

And this is the only question that I have this time. If I overwrite a weapon mesh with one I have made can that cause the game to crash for any reason (assuming I have not made any mistakes) basically I want to know are there any weapon meshes that I should not overwrite?

and yeah I'm trusting you after all you haven't steered me wrong so far.

Thanks *bows to JohnDoe*

So how goes the texturing...

ah I've unwrapped the shoulders sorry I've been tinkering around in FE a bit :blush:

EDIT:JohnDoe just noticed this in that post you made in that 'texture help' thread that I linked to

Now. Create the FMP. Include the renamed texture and mesh entries. Without saving the changes, close FE. Then open FE again. Then load the FMP. If all went well, there will be a new mesh entry and new texture entries.

does that mean that afer you load up the FMP as long as you didn't save the changes you will still have the original mesh and textures? Because that is the way that I interpreted that... could just be that I don't know jack about this and misunderstood.

Sorry I know I said that I only had one question this time but... well curiousity killed the cat as they say...

thankyou... again *smiles sheepishly*

 

[deama]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

Ok........

 

[Dark Drakan]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

Always good to see some productive questions and answers between modders.

JohnDoe is an extremely talented Modder despite being quite modest. :lol:

 

[Zero Kenshin]

Re: A Few Modding related questions

You can import over any mesh as long as it is the same type. I would suggest meshes that are also roughly the same size so that they look nicer in the inventory menu (too big or too small is noticeable in the inventory menu, it's more of that other mesh data). The point is that in the end, it will be a completely different entry - you won't be replacing weapons in the game, you'll be adding them.

Thanks mate its good to know.

You I don't mind answering questions for - you take the time to look around and read and learn as opposed to most Fable modders these days, a trait that I really appreciate. So no problems, I don't mind a bit.

Well that's cause I don't just want everything now. I want to take the time to learn all about this so I can make brilliant mods for the community some time in the future .

JohnDoe is an extremely talented Modder despite being quite modest. :lol:

from what I've seen I couldn't agree with you more