Playable DS1 Character Pack for DS2/Broken World

As always when the mod is ready for testing, your tester will be ready to test them. I am sure others will find it fun to play with too. I would say I am waiting with bated breath, but have not ate any fish recently. Oh help me I am being attacked by a run of puns!

This Orc looks fun to play!

 
Now just wondering a bit - do the two meshes have the same the number/order of bones? Resp. would it be possible to put the Orc head onto a half-giant body as well? And would it be still playable then?

I remember years ago when playing DS1 both striker976's Orc and Witness's Dark and Light Elves would cause a conflict with the DS1 Cat Mansion Characters when creating a new character. Just like Ely's Succubus characters for DS2 get all weird when the DS2 Cat Mansion Girls are installed. I understand why this occurs but it is not something I can explain clearly. I am sure you have found away around this right?

I doubt it as the Orc is actually modelled on Farmgirl! This has an advantage in that it can use the DS2 female animations so it's the only one that can dual wield and throw properly.

I tried making it compatible with Ely's Succubus manager and Dark Elf's Giants and Gnomes mods but wasn't completely successful. It also won't be compatible with Volkan's More Hair Plus and Grypthon's Unlocked Hairs mod for the same reason. This is because all character mods modify 5 files. The highest priority, or latest time stamp if no priority is found, will overwrite a lower priority mod. If the higher priority mod doesn't contain the information needed for the lower priority mods to function, it will cause a conflict.

If modders would update their mods with the corresponding values for the other character mods found in these 5 files, they would be compatible. I did this with the Cat mansion mods.

I used a priority level of 1000 to make sure the 5 conflicting files found in this mod would overwrite the ones found in the Cat Mansion mods and Ghastley's mod. Perhaps Elys and Dark Elf used an even higher priority or maybe some other method to overwrite other files (Elys for instance uses a loader to initiate her mod).

The Cat Mansion mods also modify formula.gas as well, which some other non-character mods also alter which can cause a conflict.

For DS1 I made a mod called Heroes to try to solve this problem (released May 2005). It compiled 15 races and 208 skins into one package (do you have this?). I guess this mod could be expanded into something similar for DS2 if there was support from Volkan (Phoenix) and Dark Elf, etc. to compile their work into one package.

I've uploaded another alpha of the playable character pack for DS2.

It's not perfect but the best I can do. Animations for dual wielding and throwing weapons don't work properly except for the Orc.
However the mod is compatible with the Cat Mansion Girl and Cat Mansion Boys mod just released. I was also able to make it compatible with Ghastley's Succubus Queen Mod. It's sadly isn't compatible with any other character or hero selection mods for reasons discussed in the previous post.

http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/DS2_Character_Pack.zip

Not sure where this mod can go to now as it's as complete as I'm able to make it but is lacking polish with some things like the animations.

I've made another alpha of the mod that should be fully compatible with Ely's Succubus Manager and Darkelf's Giants and Gnomes mod as well as the Cat Mansions Boys and Girls. I found a reference to the priority used for Ely's Succubus Manager and simply made the necessary updates to the conflicting files and packaged it with a higher priority.

http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/DS2_Character_Pack.zip

This means all those mods listed should now work with each other. It won't fix any other conflicting files like formula.gas (which both Ely's Succubus Manager and the Cat Mansion Boys and Girls both change). A separate compatibility fix would be needed for that. A compatibility fix would also be needed if anyone wants to use Volkan's More Hair Plus with this mod or any other character changing mod (apart from Ely's Succubus Manager for which he has a version available). I'll make these available soon.

Also the mod currently is for Broken World only. Theoretically only a small compatibility fix is needed to downgrade the mod to vanilla DS2 rather than releasing a separate version. I'll need to test that out as well.

Please let me know of any issues not listed.

I haven't played much DS2, so I'm afraid this is a really dumb question. If the mod is currently Broken World only, should it go in the BW resource folder?

Okay, cool. I thought that was the case, but figured I would double check. And Hi to you as well.

Iryan, When You say there is a conflict between Elys' Succubus Manager and The Cat Mansion Boys and Girls I assume you are referring to the Succubus Manager with the Succubus Modlet Enabled. Because I use the Succubus Manager with the Modlet turned off rather than AllSaves. It would be nice to be able to play both but not really an issue for me as I just turn off the cat mansion people to use the succubus modlet. Then reverse the process when I wish to use the cat mansion people. I find the dual wield issue more of a problem. There was a problem with the DS2 Characters (cat mansion girls and farmgirl both) very early on where they did exactly the same thing with weapons Firebat and I moved from DS1 to DS2 (example where the fans} but being so many years ago I can not remember how it was fixed. It might be worth comparing the DS1 fans and the DS2 fans. At one time I also remember seeing a ds1 mod for dual wield weapons but I do not have it. If you have it, it might be useful to see how it was done, is it a new mesh, or a trick of the light, since the moved characters are from ds1.

I agree dual wielding is a major issue and probably the one thing keeping the mod from being fully polished and worthy of public release.

I remember the dual wielding mod for DS1 as well but I doubt it would help as that only applied to farmboy and farmgirl animations. Except for the Orc, which uses farmgirl's animations, all the other characters have completely different animation sets.

I did try fixing the problem in gmax using the skeleton's animations as there's an artpack available for him (and all the other 4 characters as well). I managed to get it looking reasonable (when just holding the weapons) but it didn't show in-game plus all the existing animations for the set were wiped. Looking at the tutorials, it appears to take a mind boggling amount of work to do the animations from scratch, which is probably why there's so few new playable characters for both DS1 and DS2. If Ghastley was around he would be able to shed some light on how difficult it would be to make 5 sets of dual wielding animations for the other 5 characters.

Honestly I don't know if I would have the motivation to do all of that for characters I probably would never play myself, considering I have to prioritise what I do nowadays. Sorry.

They are DS1 Characters let them use shields :P

That's one possibility, simply refrain from using dual wielding or throwing weapons with them. Maybe when Ghastley comes back he may have some suggestions.

In the meantime I've discovered that Witness's Light-Dark Elves can use farmgirl animations so can dual wield and throw with the best of them! So there'll be at least one update to the mod whenever Ghastley or KillerGremal or another one of our talented and knowledgeable modders comes up with a suggestion to this problem. Maybe a script that prevents them using fs9 or fs10 animations.

In the meantime I want to get started on DS2 Adepts. I have plenty of ideas.

Thanks for putting this mod together, Iryan. It is so cool to see the familiar DS1 faces.

I've been playing a little bit but not enough to give feedback.

Guys, hear me out, wouldn't the Krug be the Orks of Dungeon Siege Universe?

On a unrelated note, I've changed the Dark/Light elves to Nymph and the Naja to Kell in my game, just like the Orks to Krug as it made more canonicality sense in my head

Like many Rpg's the female version of a race is almost always more human like, so the Naja to Kell made sense in my head

Oh yeah, and we need a playable Vai'kesh mod

What about the Morden?

I was actually thinking about that recently too, the Morden have some similarity with the Krug, so it's not that far fetched to think that Valdis corrupted the Krug into Morden, since there's no Krug in all of Ds2.

In a more Tolkienic vibe, the Morden are actually more in line with the Orks than the Krug.