Converting one of my old armor mods from DS1 to DS2

It took an hour to convert one armor, just the images not the template. So I guess to convert the entire mod would take 72 days working 24 hours a day. More realistically spending 2 hours a day it would take a little over two years to make the mod. I am really not up for that. So pick 5 body armors and I will convert those for you.

Do you have images of the characters? I may want to use some as npcs/pets/enemies like I want to do with Lisa's. That's of course you don't mind such a thing. I haven't read the read me. I can't use any nude ones (not sure if the're are any) due to Lisa's request in her readme. I think GPG did a terrible job with female characters, but I also don't want to go through the hassle of integrating characters from ds1 into playable ds2 characters. However, they can serve nicely as other characters. I'm also willing to give you my feedback on what models/textures look good, since you plan to convert some over.

Edit: I really think recycling ds1 content is a positive thing. I also have the models and textures Team Elemental created. They made it open source, so I don't have to worry about contacting the old team or AoR himself! Of course you can take what I work on and do what you want as long as I'm given credit. A good example of this is what Dark Elf did with custom pets mod. I feel really good about him creating such a large pet mod, starting off with just the two pets I made. If you or others don't want to share, I'll respect that too.

Edit again: If I ever get a nice map out, derivatives of that map would add tons of gameplay. I hope people, such as Darkelf, get interested in such a project. He did nice edits of GPG's regions .

Dulac the characters are the DS2 cat mansion characters that AlphaDD, iryan and I created. so yes you are welcome to use them. I was asked if I could convert my ds1 girl armor mod to ds2 format so a player could use them with the adepts mod. even though the armor is for cat mansion characters there was very little difference in the meshes between standard characters and hamcats original cat mansion characters. This is not true with the DS2 versions. The armor mod has about 300 body armors, a few dozen boots, at least a dozen helms, etc. plus weapons and shields. so it is a very big mod and would take a very long time to convert because of all the additional images used by ds2 that where represented by one image for DS1. Stupid DS2 skin color issues. :P

looks like with the work iryan and K.G. are doing with the adepts, the girl armor from ds1 could work as is with a few template edits, could do like what was done with Pinky from ElyS mod, make it so only girl armor characters could use that armor.

Dulac - the large pet mod was a pain in the butt. and the map edits are just that maphacks, examples of how to take existing maps and change the actors, I had to rip out lots of things with siege editor 2 to get them to work. but if u look at the maps and compare to original map area I took you can see what was edited, most was done with notepad that's how easy it was to make those crappy maps I made.

The DS2 character pack converted the Orc, Light & Dark Elves, Gargoyles from DS Revived, Skeleton, Snowfox's Goblin and Ghastley's Naja.
http://www.siegetheday.org/?q=node/2515

And of course the Legendary Mod converted the DS1 farmboy and farmgirl, dwarf, skeleton, barkeep, blacksmith, fortune teller, jeriah, king konreid, peasant old mesh, etc.
http://siegetheday.org/?q=node/1607

Also of interest should be KillerGremal's code [texture_switch_on_event] that allows variations of skin textures through the instance rather than base templates allowing for far more variation than otherwise would be the case. I think we all disliked GPG's lazy approach of reusing npcs throughout their maps.

So towns could be filled with dramatically different creatures, there's already the Goblin Warrens but imagine a city of Naja or Gargoyles? You have already mentioned a town of Light and Dark Elves.

For bare_elf, weapons and shields are easy to convert. For the armors have you thought about using extensions like in DS2BW Adepts? Technically you should be able to make the standard DS2 characters use the armors by defining them as armor_2\suits\character\types 6 to types14. Of course you would need to define a new nnk to define all of these new armor types but it should be feasible. Still would need to create all the different variations of armor textures for the various skins but they would all be identical clones so something like the File Renamer that you found for me when I was tackling the very same problem in Adepts, would help immensely.

And if I'm not too tied up with debugging the current version of the Legendary Mod, I'll be happy to help you.

Oh, the anime style Cat Mansion characters are not aesthetically appealing to me. My taste is very western. I think it has partial to do with anime not being around while I was growing up. I understand many people enjoy that sort of aesthetic. I tested out the alpha mod that included Lisa and others' characters. I wasn't sure if Strider, Snow, and Ghastly's models were open source. I'll have to d/l the new Adepts mod and see what's going there. I'm not sure how [texture_switch_on_event] works. I'm a bit confused by it. I'm also not sure what you mean by extensions. I haven't messed with any mods aside from the beta with Light and Dark elves. I have to admit, since I've been back I've been playing vanilla DS2 BW to understand what GPG has done and refresh my memory of the game.

@Darkelf, the brilliance of it is that it's easy to do. However, I'd love to push you to do a little more if you decide to give it another go. I found a cool trick GPG uses for generating monsters. Before, someone mentioned that my 360 fire nova spell wasn't too useful, because they really didn't encounter monsters behind them. This is true most of the time with GPG's map. However, you can place a generic trigger to spawn as many monsters in any place in the region. They are easy to setup, but you wouldn't know it unless you came across it in a Map. It would also be easy to edit maps to place these types of triggers to add a more unique experience. I could write a tutorial on it (not hard to do). What else could make a map seem new or more interesting is custom monsters. I find them very fun to make.

The hardest part for me is creating towns. I fixed all the missing textures for A2's town to work with a different node set (again GPG was lazy). I'm currently having issues with fading the nodes. I guess I'm a bit rusty. I was trying to do it the way GPG did with no luck.

Edit: I might just fade the nodes the way I do it. I was thinking they're setup this other way for a reason (I suspect the flick launching the interior mood of the building).

The major drawback for the girl armor mod is that it was done before I knew anything about how to use alpha channels. so to get them to work correctly I need to do alpha channels for every ds1 armor. then yes it is just clones of for the other skin tones. Making the alpha channels is not difficult just time consuming because some of the armor patterns are quite detailed and you do not want certain body parts popping out do to a registration error I would not have worried about that before but I am part of the staff here and we do not allow that here. See site rule 5. I am thinking along the lines of taking some of the updated ds2 armor from several of my current works I have done along with the converted weapons and repackage them into a girl armor for ds2 that supports the standard characters, cat mansion characters and the succubus characters. That would be much faster since it would by just tweaking some things here and there. Redoing things slightly to fit site rules hehe

Diversity iryan? I was thinking of making the town one race. Perhaps that's bland. Maybe I should make it a city with a bunch of various races. I was considering using some of Mcarp's nodes in it. I'm starting to dread that because I thought the A2 town inn had too many pieces, lol.

Mcarp's Cathedral really needs to be put in a map!

http://mcarp.earthstorm.com/reel/cathedral/index.php

There are a good number of mcarp node collections I think would be awesome. You usually find diversity in cities, so I should expand it if I go that route.

you talk a good deal about Mcarps wonderful nodes do you have his people? If you do not I uploaded them here.
http://www.siegetheday.org/?q=node/2970

I only know about his mgirl model for ds2. I don't think he ever finished it for ds2, but I thought he did a great job. Wish I was still in touch with him. I'll check out your link.

Having suggested the technique to bare_elf and then realising that it may not work, I had to test it out.

To my amazement it worked! These are pure unaltered DS1 armor textures being worn by the DS2 characters except for the fact that they're dds textures since they were copied from Adepts. Saved me a bit of time though RAW textures would have worked too.

These are a variety of type1 to type7 armor meshes renamed type6 to type12 as per the technique used in Adepts. The armor textures were cloned to produce the skin variations. Took me about 2 hours to do 14 armors.

Incredibly none of the characters heads were misplaced or fell off, even when changing helms. Boots and Gloves appeared normal except for type7 where the gloves and boots showed black and red, indicating that the engine couldn't find the mesh. How changing the armor can effect the gloves and boots mesh is a mystery to me.

The other bug and a very serious one is that the game crashed when trying to fit armor to the Broken World Dwarf. The Half Giant seems to work even though he's wearing a male mesh. Dryads and Elves are just normal female mesh fitted with different heads so it wasn't surprising that they worked when the human female mesh did.

If I or somebody else can get the dwarf to work with the armors then probably I will use this techniques in the Legendary Mod to add even more DS1 armors. Now I wonder if this technique would work with the gloves and boots?

I know about his nodes and I used some of his work in Adepts. You can even find his dinosaurs lurking around in the secret town in Adepts. The cathedral is a wonderful piece of work even though it has no working fades. To use them you would probably need to extend off the region or assemble the pieces in a new region as I found I couldn't use them as a prefab. They wouldn't join with anything I tried.

I wonder if we can find an old copy of gmax and use the old ds1 art pack for making new armor.

The art packs still exist here:

http://www.gamefront.com/files/listing/pub2/Dungeon_Siege/Models/ArtPacks/

I really wish we had DS2 art packs for 3ds max.

I've been considering trying to contact Chris Taylor for some in house tools (SE that would work with BW would make modding easier), models, and whatever else they would be willing to give us. That's quite a shot in the dark but still tempting. The game is old, so I figure they wouldn't worry so much.

A water city would be cool for the Naja. The gargoyles could chill in his cathedral. I'm sure you know the Catholic lore about them. That'll be hard to assemble! By no working fades do you mean the non-trigger sort of fade? I always fade with triggers.

I got the idea for a water city for the Naja from the dungeon beneath Hiroth Castle where they lurk. They look quite cool slithering through the water that exists in some parts of that dungeon.

Mcarp also had a lot of nice houses that he made which I wanted to use for the secret town in Adepts. Like you I didn't particularly want to assemble them from scratch as they are more complicated than the simple house nodes which exist in DS1 & DS2. So I tried to make prefabs out of them but they wouldn't join to the terrain in the region I was working with. So I abandoned the idea and used DS1 house nodes instead. Incidentally did you know that the bitmaps for most of the DS1 terrain nodes exist in DS2 (in dds format) yet the nodes themselves don't.

MCarp also has a lot of nice stuff on his site that hasn't ever been released.

Anyhow apologies to bare_elf for highjacking her blog post a little. Hopefully she won't be mad.

I have a copy of gmax 1.2 is that what you are looking for?
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows® 2000 or Windows® 98;
Intel or AMD processor at 300 MHz or better;
128MB RAM and 300MB swap space
Graphics card supporting 1024 x 768 x 16 bit color
OpenGL and Direct 3D/Direct X hardware acceleration
Windows-compliant mouse
CD-ROM drive (To install your favorite gmax-ready games!)

As you know I am running windows 7. I was able to get gmax installed and registered. DS1 Tool Kit and DS2 Tool Kit are both installed in the only place that win7 will install them.
Program Files x86. now when I try to install the art packs for ds1 I keep getting the error message that DS1 Tool Kit is not installed and the stupid installer does not allow me to change where DS1 tool kit is. What Do I Do NOW!

Obviously they can't be installed there if the installers won't let you and it appears that the installers can't find where the DS1 Tool Kit is installed.

Now to what to do. A silly question maybe but have you tried running Siege Editor at least once? I know from experience that until it is run at least once certain folders that it uses for editing the game aren't created. GMax needs those as that's where any new material you may create gets deposited.

If you have already done that then maybe check in the registry that the DS1 Tool Kit is installed properly. Run regedit.exe from the search box in the start menu. The settings for the DS1 Tool Kit is found in Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Wow6432Node/Gas Powered Games\DSTK\1.0 (for 64bit Win7, it's a little different for 32bit Win7). What does the install directory say? Warning! Don't change any values unless you really, really know what you're doing.

Then there's the old and sometimes true method. Uninstall the DS1 Tool Kit and then reinstall and run it at least once. I remember when I first tried GMax on Win 7 it made me jump some hurdles before everything worked but I can't quite remember what exactly (sorry was over 18 months ago).

It appears that the copy of Dungeon Siege Tool Kit that was installed was version 1.5 and not version 1.7 so even though things were loading correctly and the art packs say you must have version 1.1 installed once I deleted the older version and installed 1.7 all got better very quickly
Thank you for the tips. Now it is off to remember how to use qmax so that I can modify a few things with the characters.

Again tank you

You should be able to port the armor mod to DS2 without spending 6 months at it. I've just ported 120 armors from DS1 to DS2 in less than a day! 2787 files, 76 folders and 85 Mb in size.
http://siegetheday.org/?q=node/1607#comment-42029

The armors were actually copied from the DS2BW Adept versions to save time but no alterations were necessary. The DS2BW Adepts files were identical to the DS1 base versions except for being converted to dds format to limit their size. RAW format will work just as well but be about 60% bigger in size.

You were worried about the time necessary for making alpha channels for DS2. However if the armors worked in DS1 they should work without problem in DS2 without any alterations. As I said before it's a matter of making 21 odd duplicates for each armor texture but file renamer helps a lot here. I estimate that it saved me 95% of the time required otherwise.

To help you out I will convert the DS1 Adepts specific armors from DS2BW Adepts that I didn't include in the pack for the Legendary Mod as they weren't original game files. Some of these you created yourself.

This way you will have a framework already set up for you for converting your files plus something ready if you want to continue creating new armors for DS2. Give me a day or so to set everything up.

Anyhow I've set up the basic framework for any such mod should you wish to continue.
http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/BE_Armors/Test_Mod_DS2_Bare_Elf_Armor.ds2res

Since it is not obvious what I am talking about when I was talking about converting Girl Armor to DS2 so it can be used with DS2 Adepts I think I will post two images using a character with a purple skin.

As you can see having an alpha channel that is white where the armor is and black where the skin is you get this

Now this is an image where the alpha channel does not exist or is all white

Note the mismatch in skin colors.

No image for what happens if the alpha channel is all black.

This is true of Type1 DS1 armor and DS2 Type6 armor only and only on DS1 Cat Mansion Girls and DS2 Cat Mansion Characters.

Now I have discovered a few dozen type one armors that have alpha channel and another few dozen already made for ds2. So I will not need to do any edits. Just make a new mod. that contains my custom armor and weapons like the War Fan called undertakers friend and bows like overmage's deathwarrent.
I will even do two versions one where the weapons match ranges that exist in ds2 and one where the weapons match the real world.