Cat Mansion Boys for DS2

I'm having problems finding helms for 11 of the DS2 mesh textures. No matter what I try ugly holes and transparent textures result. Still have some more DS1 helmet meshes to try but I'm getting near my wits end.

There's no problem with the skeleton, he can use any texture on any armor mesh without problems.

Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

For reference the DS2 armor textures effected are type06, type07, type09-13, type15, type 18 & 19 and type20. These are some common helmets such as adepts helm, sorcerer's cowl, elementalist cap, tribal headdress and woven hood. I'm not sure if you could define just helm textures to act just on a race as occurs with the body armor.

What about an all white alpha channel that might turn off the holes

Iryan, Which DS1 Cat Mansion Boy Meshes did you use? Where they the ones from adepts just renamed to the DS2 way of naming things or did you use some other Cat Mansion Boy meshes? I believe that Ddilulu used the CMA meshes as a starting point for what he did with the Cat Mansion Girls. I know he redid the helmet meshes to some extent for the DS2 Cat Mansion girls because when you put on helmets you you get bunny ears, cat ears, maids hat and so on. I will have to look at what types of helms change and let you know.

As you can see most helms are now head bands, hair clips, ears and so on. So I would guess that the Cat Mansion Girls also had holes in their heads too. Air Heads Unite

That's a very good idea, I'll have to check the skeleton's skin texture to see what alpha was used there if any. A way of plugging the holes so to speak.

As for what meshes I'm using, they're from Adepts.

This is the vindicator armor on type5 ds1 cat mansion boy's mesh. Looks great I think.

Another one, spiked helm on type34 mesh.

I also discovered that you can use DS2 half-giant and male meshes on the cat mansion boy model. The head size is too small though and the face is all messed up on this tribal head dress, which is one of the helms that shows lots of holes and transparent gaps.

However some head transplants work very well.

Well the all white alpha channel works to remove holes in helms. I thought it might work because when I was doing the dryad armor I forgot the alpha channel and ended up with a totally transparent cat mansion boy. However I will have to be a bit more careful with the helm types that cover part of the face, of the poor boys will be running about blind. Happy to hear that the half giant and male ds2 meshes work. You said the head was to small what did you mean by that Iryan. Because I have noted that the Cat Mansion Boy in DS2 is slightly smaller than the Cat Mansion Girls In DS1 they where the same height. You said the meshes for the male and half giant worked for the head/helm. Did you try the Dwarf? I was thinking if that worked and you made the cat mansion boy dwarf size he might be just right. Just letting my mind wonder about and drop out ideas so if this does not make sense you will know why.

What we need are head ornaments that way we could like stick on cat ears on anyone oh look it is a skelly wearing cat mansion girl bunny ears.

I've compile yet another alpha of the current work which is a lot more optimized and hence smaller file file
http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/DS2_CatMansion_Boys_Alpha_1d.ds2res (9 Mb)

I tried using a white alpha channel but failed so I included the DS2 heads in this release so you'll be able to see for yourself how they look. There's 9 helms that I can't get right no matter what DS1 helm I use (I tried all 50!).They're type06, type07, type09, type10, type11, type12, type15, type17 and type20. If you replace any of these with any of the DS1 helms found in art/meshes/characters/good_a_heroes/farmboy/helmets you'll see what I mean about the gaps.

It's quite bizarre that the Cat Mansion Boy Model will accept Male and Half-Giant helm meshes from DS2. The Dwarf doesn't work unfortunately, it locks up all helm selections. The same with the skeleton, he won't accept any of the DS2 helm meshes. But then again he doesn't suffer from the transparent holes in his head syndrome. Well he is a skeleton after all.

Here's a small merchant map where you can buy all the helm types in DS2 and Broken World for convenient testing http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/Test_Map_Merchant.ds2res

Here's a zip of the source textures in bmp form for easy editing
http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/boys_source.zip (12.7 Mb)

Basically all the armor textures are from the same source just renamed for each race.

HELMS
Yes you are right. Some look great outstanding in fact. Others squish the head (I would guess painful). Others mess up the face to a point where you can not tell what is going on. I was wondering since one can make an armor item for only one type of character like the girls only cat mansion costumes. Could you reverse that so that a character type like the cat mansion boys could not use a helm types that causes problems? Or maybe do a swap from the types that do not work to a type that does work through a template? So that when a type is picked that looks wrong it would pick one of the good ones? I have blocked the use of items, but never tried to make a template that blocks the use of an item for only one character type.

BODY ARMOR
I will leave you to tweak with the helms Iryan. I am vexed by the type1 armor and the ds2 cat mansion boys. I need to figure out exactly why the silly ds2 cat mansion boys have an issue with
type1 armor with an alpha channel that is not all white. I mean if I could make all the cat mansion characters in DS1 handle alpha channels the same and the ds2 boy is using the ds1 meshes renamed it should be a no brainer. I must not have a brain cuz I am still having problems figuring it out even after helping Kathy with Geordie 1 and his armor issues.

I agree you would think it would be possible to make it so that the helm mesh wasn't displayed or make it so that an alternative mesh could be selected for that particular helm type. It's possible with the body armor but doesn't seem to work for the helms. I hope one of the more knowledgeable modders here like Phoenix, Ghastley or KillerGremal may be able to help with this.

Yes you're right in saying what worked in DS1 should work in DS2 as you're using the exact same meshes and textures. Another mystery which is beyond my understanding. I hope you can figure it out.

Seeing that bare_elf was complaining of snakes or rather asps last week I couldn't help myself by providing her with a playable one, courtesy of Ghastley


I also added DS Revived's Gargoyle


And Snowfox's playable Goblin

Here's the lastest alpha http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/DS2_CatMansion_Boys_Alpha_1e.ds2res (21.5 Mb)

The armors work well enough with them and there's no holey helms to be had so far (Only the Cat Mansion Boys seem to have that problem). The ingame portraits needs fixing and the gargoyle's flying/walking animation is broken.

I did try making the pack compatible with Elys succubus manager but the method she uses to interact with the game overrides any priority that I try setting.

Thank you Irwin the extra playable characters are cool. Since I do not think I can get the DS2 Cat Mansion boys use alpha channels like they do in ds1. I checked that work I did when helping Kathy solve the problem with Geordie. Part of the change was altering the pants and shirts gas files located in the directory \world\global\skins I notice they are in the game files but do not show up in any character mods. I will have to add them and the changes I did for ds1 and see what occurs.

I have the ds2 cat mansion boys working like I got the ds1 cat mansion boys working so now they can wear the same kind of armor as the cat mansion girls. I will have to do a bit more editing to a few files then merge it into the latest version of Iryan's DS2 Cat Mansion Boys before I send it off to him. The changes I made were exactly the same changes I made with the DS1 boys. I will also send Iryan a little armor mod so he can test it. Note the character icon is fixed and this test mod was based on the version with just the cat boy and the skelly.

Cool. Glad you got it working.

Remember that the mod currently only has 1 skin tone for the armors. You'll need to make variations for each skin tone. Luckily I limited the Cat Mansion Boys to only 4 skin tones. In the DS1 version there's about 12!

It's not an issue for the other races as they only have 1 skin to choose from at the moment(though there are other variations available, I'll just have to test them).

Actually Iryan with the changes I made one armor drawing with alpha channel where the skin is exposed is in black and the displayed part of the armor is in white. Any number of skin tones will work 4 or 4000 with one armor image. Note this works only with Cat Masion Characters in this case.
It looks better however if you use a skin like this

Rather than like this.

Reason being is you get something like this

instead of this

My version of Cat Mansion Boys for DS2 which is version alpha_e_lf what else.

http://siegetheday.org/~bare_elf/ds2cmb/elfversion.zip

What I changed, added and/or Modified.
1. I added four armor images one for the dryad armor, one that allows bare skin to be displayed and two other armor images so that when I make an armor mod they will already exist.
2. I replaced the four skins that Iryan used with 12 of my own selection.
3. I modified the cat mansion boy's heroes.gas file to use the bare skin armor image
4. I changed global\skins\faces to take into account the new skins
5. I added the shirts.gas and pants.gas to the global/skins directory because the pants.gas file is required and it gets cranky if the shirts.gas is not there.
6. I replaced the armor meshes with the ones I had in my version of DS1 Adepts (they are really the DS1 Cat Mansion Girl armor meshes renamed for the cat mansion boy DS1) and again renamed for ds2 cat mansion boy.
I am sure I tweaked something else but my mind is getting fuzzy. Iryan let me know what you think. If it meets your standards. I will build a stand alone armor mod for it (without helms).

Hey people let me know what you think.

Very good work indeed.

The dryad armor works very well and one advantage of using DS1 meshes is that skin tones aren't effected so you can have as many skin tones as you want. Why GPG changed this system to one that required individual armor textures for each skin tone is beyond me.

So the Cat Mansion Girls armor meshes work for the boys? Maybe we can use that fact in an attempt to fix the broken heads? That's one of the two major flaws with the mod at the moment. The other is of course the dual wielding animations and to a lesser extent the throwing animations, which is common for all 5 races. I was hoping that Ghastley, Phoenix or KillerGremal, etc may have an idea but they don't seem to be around at the moment. Ghastley for example made the Naja so she doesn't display the helm that she is wearing (boots as well since she obviously can't walk).

With the armor meshes I now notice that the boys don't wear robes anymore. Doesn't really matter but maybe we need to change the armor textures used so they match the mesh instead of being messed up a bit.

Yes Bare_elf I think the work you've done is just as good as anything I could come up with so feel free with converting more of your DS1 Cat Mansion Boy armor to it. That's another advantage of using DS1 meshes, previous work can be ported over to work in DS2 with minimal work.

Tinkering around I found that the Cat Mansion Boys can use DS2 male animations so dual wielding and throwing now works!

I don't know whether it's because bare_elf has swapped the Cat Mansion Girls mesh for the Boys or what. I don't care as long as it works. Note how thin and petite Geordie 2 now looks!

Sadly however none of the DS2 animations will work for the other 4 races. So it appears if we want them we need to make them from scratch. 3 of the 4 races have art packs available for them but only Ghastley has the Naja source files. Unfortunately I don't have a clue how to do this (I have downloaded and installed Siege Max and Gmax but haven't a clue about weighing the animations, etc).

Embolden by my success with the Cat Mansion Boys animations I tried a head transplant (figuring if they now use Cat Mansion Girl bodies then maybe they would accept a Cat Mansion Girl Head or more specifically the headband mesh). Unfortunately my experiment failed. Geordie 2 can't put on the helm and it then breaks any attempts to even put on normal helms on him. So back to the drawing board. Any ideas anyone? Anyone?

I am full of idea. First, the catboy use the farmboy bones but scale down(about 0.66). So all the animations for farmboy work for catboy with deform skin. So i scale up catboy to farmboy height and the skin return to normal.
Doing so i was able to use the HalfGiant's boots,gloves and the farmboy's animations,ornaments. After that, a simple scale_multiplier = 0.68 put things to normal. Some tweaks here and there and voila!

I'm working with elfboy now. It is catboy with elf's ears. Took them from catgirl(i am not very good at modeling, but deforming yes). And yes i dont do all the helmets because i want to see the head of the catmansion all the time. I certainly wont hide them under some cover but anybody can put up a mod to add them later. I can help with that too, you know patching holes in some helmets(simple UV correction in the model).

Since i hate posting: so doing the catboy i wander away and took the idea of making some shades on the ds2's catmansion. I took the glasses from Pheonix work and make myself some ornaments for the catmansion, here some results:

Not bad if you ask me.

Hi AlphaDD
I can not wait to see more, it is some outstanding work when you reach a place where you can upload the mod to the internet I would love to try it out. This is just outstanding!!

Hey Iryan
I was going to look into why the robes where no longer working (like maybe putting back in the FB type5 mesh. but after seeing the work that AlphaDD has done I see no point at all in doing more unless AlphaDD does not get around to uploading his mod to the internet.

Maybe I will just crawl under a rock and take a nap.

I totally agree. Thank you very much. It's what the mod needs to become a highly polished product worthy of Hamcat's original work!

Feel free to use the public alphas to release updates, that's why they are public to get as many modders as possible to help refining the mod. Together we may be able to complete the mod.

I agree about the heads and it's certainly possible to do in DS2 as it's what Ghastley did with the Naja. She can equipt the helms but they don't show. Maybe some special heads like the pumpkin and bucket can stay but for most or all the others a headband head or just the original would be wonderful. After all most of the anime models used in other RPGs don't even show a change of appearance when equiping armor.

That I would stop working on the cat mansion boys for ds2 until AlphaDD has a chance to post his work. However I was a bit intrigued that the robe's had stopped working after I moved the cat girl armor meshes to the mod Iryan was working on. So I decided to return to Legends of Aranna and see what happens when I put on a robe using exactly the same meshes.

Great work AlphaDD. Thanks for doing this.

The glasses were my idea but the work of DDllulu is what brought them to life.

Here's probably the last alpha from me. Hopefully AlphaDD can turn it into something like the quality of the Cat Mansion Girls Mod for DS2
http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/DS2_CatMansion_Boys_Alpha_1f.ds2res

It includes dual wielding animations for the Cat Boys but the mesh is distorted when dual wielding (uses farmboys animations) so needs reweighing for Cat Boy's mesh.

The character portraits are fixed for the other races and the gargoyles walking/flying animations are fixed. The other races also have extra skins to choose from. I tried altering the dual wielding animations in SiegeMax to make them look better by simply rotating the shield but it didn't work. If AlphaDD chooses not to use the extra races in a future release I don't mind.

Ok i have upload it to megashares(look simple).

http://d01.megashares.com/dl/LWSvQpW/BW_cat_boy_alpha1.zip

Did upload it here at Siegetheday but i don't know how long it take to show or maybe i make a mistake, so i have try the link above.

I know the elf want it so.

PS. The site look very laggy at time. I have 2 logins for my account nice.

Thank You AlphaDD sometimes uploading things here can be tricky. I will take care of posting it here later today. Again thank you and hope to see more of your work very soon.

I uploaded your mod to the site and you can find it here: http://www.siegetheday.org/?q=node/2513
I will try it out today and see how it works. If it is the same as your other work for the DS2 Cat Mansion Girls it should be great fun. Once again thank you very much for your efforts. When I saw your first post I kinda guessed who you where

I've been out of commission the last several days, so lots of interesting things in the thread to catch up on. I'm sorry I missed your request for Dryad armor, Lili, but what you have come up with looks really good.

Yes, yes and yes. (yes!)

So does AlphaDD = DDllulu? If not, my apologies (and welcome). If yes, then welcome back!
In either case, your work thus far looks wonderful.

You folks make me jealous with your DS2 accomplishments!

@ AlphaDD You are correct in your read-me that you must have all four files from your DS2 Cat Mansion Girl Mod installed for the BW Cat Boys mod to work. If they are not installed then the game hangs on the create new character screen. So people make sure if you are going to try the Cat Mansion Boys and you do not have DS2 Cat Mansion Girls by Ddilulu you will need to download it.

@ Iryan I do believe that AlphaDD trumped our efforts. However I think we could remove our Cat Boy from the mod and release it with the other characters since they appear to work just fine. It is up to you but I really think it would be fun to have it.

Now off to try a few experiments with AlphaDD's Cat Boy.
UPDATE
I thought I would see if the cat mansion boy could support DS2 type6 armor (DS1 type1) along with DS2 types 1 through 5 just like the DS2 cat mansion girls. Yes he can! so it will be easy to take one of my DS1 armor mods and port it to DS2 for the cat mansion people. lot easier than having to do 16 different images for all the ds2 skin tones. :dance1:

As suggested by bare_elf I have released the mod with the other 4 races minus the Cat Boy Mod. Brilliant work AlphaDD!
http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/DS2BW_DS1_Character_Pack_Alpha_1a.ds2res (16.4Mb)

This pack includes the gargoyle (DS revived), goblin (snowfox),naja (ghastly) and skeleton (gpg). They can wear all armor but dual wielding and throwing weapon animations are messed up. The pack is compatible with the Cat Mansion Girls and Boys, as well as the Utraean race (from the DS1 map pack) and Ghastley's Succubus Queen.

I tried making it compatible with Darkelf's giantgnome mod but it breaks the Cat Mansion Girls and Succubus mods. The same with Elys Succubus Manager. It also won't work with any other mod that changes the hero character selection menu (faces.gas, hair.gas, hairtoheads.gas, heads.gas and character_camera.gas such as Gryhon's extra hair or Volkan's More Hair Plus mods.

Not sure if I'll expand this mod any more or if there would be any players interested in it (would it be worth converting mods like the lightelf mod by witness for example).

I would be interested in making an adepts type mod for DS2 and Broken World (converting all npcs and recruitable characters to Catdryads, Catelfs and Cathumans) if there was enough interest. Would be quite cool I believe.

Oh yes good sir let us do that. That would be so very very cool. I could port over all of the custom armor I did for Cat Mansion Adepts since both the cat mansion girl and boy can directly read all the ds1 type1 armor (in DS2 it would be type6} so it is just a simple rename of the armor and inventory images and putting things in the correct folders and a tweak here and there of the templates. Just a quick note. type6 armor uses type1 inventory icons. as soon as I get one changed I will post it so you can see how things are arranged. Oh some of the weapons like the war fans I have with the help of firebat converted years ago. Yes Iryan Adepts for ds2 how very very cool

There's me, at any rate. I like the dark/light elves much better than the stock DS2 elves.

Another excellent idea.

Although both the Cat Mansion Girls and the Cat Mansion Boys can easily wear DS1 armor so long as it is saved as type6 in DS2 there are some differences beyond the sex of the characters. The armor image for the cat mansion girl needs to be saved for each skin color 01 02 03 11 12 13 31 32 and 33 even though there is no skin color in the image (that being done by the black section of the alpha channel)
The Cat Mansion Boys only need one image and the image can end in any number that is 01 02 03 11 12 or 13. The armor also appears to be animated in some cases and I see no rhyme or reason for it -- nice effect however. Also I think the height of the boy should be adjusted a bit if possible as he is shorter than the girls. I know it has to do with the scale but my scale's battery died and the battery store has none in stock. Yes I know it is a different scale but anyway. Finally got the Cat Mansion People beach wear mod working needs just a few changes and I will upload it.