[Stellaris] Drow of Stellaris >;-)

[Nessa]

OK, some clothes news. (No pics yet though!)

 

For next version:

• Pops on cold planets get cold clothes.
• Pops on planets with the aphrodisiac orhallucinogen modifiers get skimpy.
• I'm changing the Sidh/Eilistraee around a bit. They are going to skimpy but with a bunch of jewelry. (Gives me an excuse to use a bunch of jewelry that wouldn't work for other clothes.)

Haven't tried it yet but I'm also going to attempt:

 

• Hats for cold climates only. (Via new hair styles.)
• Fallen pops/leaders all have the same eye and hair color. Plus dark/black clothes.

[Princessity]

Squeee! Exciting! I recently ended up combining your jewelry with some of the dresses and it actually looks really good! And I can't wait to see the hats ^^ I love hats! Free the hats! Hats for everyone!

 

Oh and yesterday I managed to do something I didn't think I could. I took an artwork and turned it into a working portrait, with animations, blinking and everything! That changes everything! If I polish it up a bit now I may be able to actually release my mod instead of just talking about it in your topic XD

[Nessa]

So was the animation bit very difficult? I thought you had to use Maya or something but maybe I'm mistaken?

 

You should release your mod by the way!! I'd get it!  

[Princessity]

Turns out not really! Apparently it all functions on magic. That's what I got from it so far. The entity I'm using as base (portrait_human_female_05_entity) works with your body and any head I put on top of it. It somehow even pinpoints the location of the eyes, even if there's a minor variation between portraits, and makes them blink!

 

And I didn't even have to do anything special. All I did was glue the face onto the body, blend and position it roughly so that eyes are in the right place and that's it.

 

Tho I suspect mipmaps have something to do with it. I save all my dds files with BC3/DXT5 compression and generate mipmaps, exactly like the vanilla textures.

 

I think you would need Maya if you wanted to create an alien with nonstandard anatomy, but just for creating humanoid portraits the existing human models seem to be enough.

 

 

And I think, I will release it! I've put way more work into it than I ever thought I would and learned so much in the process. It would be a waste to keep it to myself n_n

 

But I will have to clean it up a bit and finish a bunch of things *looks at system initializers and wants to cry*

[Nessa]

Huh... well if that's the case there really isn't anything stopping me from making new faces and the like!! It's a bit of a bigger deal with faces since I make them huge then size them down. I think I'll attempt -one- and see how it turns out.

 

After the next release though! Got all the scripting in place and made a bunch more jewelry-ish outfits. (Some for guys finally too.) Right after next release I'll get going on a new test face.

 

System initializers are a pain aren't they? I kept making the mistake of copying some of Paradox's example systems and they include stuff that doesn't translate over. So I was running into moons insides planets and a bunch of other nonsense.  

[Princessity]

System initializers are a pain aren't they? I kept making the mistake of copying some of Paradox's example systems and they include stuff that doesn't translate over. So I was running into moons insides planets and a bunch of other nonsense.

 

For me the problem is mostly lack of visual feedback until I load up the game and try to see if I got it right. On my first try I put 2 gas giants in hugging range of each other, managed to create half a screen wide gap between the sun and its first planet and pretty sure put a few asteroids on a collision course with the empire capital. RIP civilisation 2016-2016.

 

And also I'm actually trying to recreate a cluster of 5 systems, with lore-abiding planets and sizes and orbits and everything. Because I like to go the extra mile. And I may be a bit insane. If I was creating systems from scratch it would be just the regular kind of gruelling but actually trying to translate distances is soooooo haaaard! I can barely judge lengths and distances when I'm staring at them, it's like 3498764357 times harder when I'm doing it in text editor.

 

And oh, I think I know what your issue was. You probably didn't include the constants. They are defined at the top of the document, things like @base_moon_distance = 10 and such.

[Nessa]

 

For me the problem is mostly lack of visual feedback until I load up the game and try to see if I got it right. On my first try I put 2 gas giants in hugging range of each other, managed to create half a screen wide gap between the sun and its first planet and pretty sure put a few asteroids on a collision course with the empire capital. RIP civilisation 2016-2016.

 

And also I'm actually trying to recreate a cluster of 5 systems, with lore-abiding planets and sizes and orbits and everything. Because I like to go the extra mile. And I may be a bit insane. If I was creating systems from scratch it would be just the regular kind of gruelling but actually trying to translate distances is soooooo haaaard! I can barely judge lengths and distances when I'm staring at them, it's like 3498764357 times harder when I'm doing it in text editor.

 

And oh, I think I know what your issue was. You probably didn't include the constants. They are defined at the top of the document, things like @base_moon_distance = 10 and such.

 

 

Yeah that was probably it. Must have missed the constants at the top. I think I assumed they were hard coded constants rather than defined in each system initializer. OOPS!

 

Oh, about mip-maps, some of the base bodies in vanilla don't have mips. But I have noticed that the formats for image files are a bit... um... unorganized in vanilla. Some clothes/bodies have mips while others don't. (I'm looking at human females right now and the first 4 bodies have no mips while body 5 has mips!) Also Paradox has done something really crazy with dds. A dds is only supposed to be a square or... multiple of 2 or something. When I was making my new city styles I couldn't save the images as DDS. So I saved as TGA and then renamed to dds. It was the only way to get it to work that I could figure out. (As near as I can tell, vanilla city files are either tga renamed to dds or a dds with no compression. Wonky!)

 

[Nessa]

OK, so I couldn't leave well enough alone....

 

I decided to try making a test face. So far... not too bad but I must need to do something to the eyes because well...  she's crossed eyed! Blinking seems to function properly at least.

 

 

 

 

The other problem is between the makeup and the fact that she needs a tan, she ended up waaaay too goth looking. She doesn't look that way up close but sizing down is what does it. I'll need to go a lot easier on that in the future.

 

Now to figure out the eye issue.... 

[Princessity]

Umm I think it's because your eyes may be misaligned. Normally textures look like this:

 

 

Note that the original eye sockets are empty, transparent, and the actual eye textures are hovering above her head. If you go with this method, you have to align the sockets perfectly.

 

My custom portraits look like this:

 

 

I decided that hollowing out the eye sockets was too much work so I simply left the original eyes in place. They still blink sooo... I guess it works XD

[Nessa]

Maybe that's the trick. Keep the eyes in the same spot, move everything else.

 

Anyway, think I got the eyes fixed. It was a case of maybe have them in the wrong spot in the base file and... using the wrong human anims.

 

Latest:

 

 

 

Eyes are too dark and she still is looking funny to me. Back to tinkering!!

 

Your portrait looks fantastic by the way! You've got to release that!!!

[Symon]

Nothing wrong with Goths Nessa (grin).

[Nessa]

Right you are Symon!

 

Trouble is, when I want to do elves, I get goths. Hey, maybe I should -try- to make a goth and then it will end up Elven?

 

OK, new try. And believe it or not, this is the same face! (It's been awhile since I've done stuff like this. I think the previous face was a bit too round.)

 

 

 

The eyes... mostly work. I guess.

 

So I looked into the whole animation process. It's not -that- bad. But... I think I'll have to generate "anims" for everything. Meaning, happy, sad, idle, etc. Perhaps if I've done it once, it won't seem so crazy.

 

EDIT: With all this goth talk, now I'm thinking about vampires. I'd better stop now before I make ANOTHER race mod!

[Nessa]

Alrighty.....  this time I just gave up, and made the new eyes fit the old eye sockets exactly.

 

 

 

 

That seems to be working. Eyes blink and they aren't.... too bad looking. (Though I'd prefer the eyes that I made!) I don't know, I've been looking at this for too long. Worth keeping as pheno4 or toss?

[Princessity]

I love it! In fact I love all of the above XD Goth elves sounds totally like a normal fantasy thing, I'm pretty sure there are elves for everything.

 

And oh, I released my thing! Yay! Thank you so much for all your help with it <3 I don't think I would have learned anything about Stellaris modding on my own.

[Nessa]

Well that settles that! I'll adjust my little goth elf and I'll get 2 new phenos out of it.

 

Oh dear... I'm already having a thought...  Are fallen empire elves all goths?

 

That's great about your mod! I am downloading that right now!

[Nessa]

Migrated the new bases over to the Drow today....

 

 

 

 

I'm just loving the last one on the right. That expression is priceless!

[Princessity]

It is the smuggest face I have seen in my whole life, I love it! XD

[Jimbonda]

Any chance this can be made to work on patch 1.1? Is there some older version of this mod I can download from somewhere?

[Nessa]

Any chance this can be made to work on patch 1.1? Is there some older version of this mod I can download from somewhere?

 

I seem to still have copies of some of the older versions but the trouble is I don't know which version was working for Stellaris 1.1. If I go too far back you'd have lots of errors like the "Trump hair" issue.  (Which was just me making typos in a few files.) Oh yeah, and no ships. You'd be stuck with recolored Avian.... eeew.

 

Why stick with 1.1 anyway? That had a lot major annoyances that Paradox has fixed now.

[Jimbonda]

Nah, don't bother if it's too much trouble. I just didn't like the balancing paradox did, especially to slavery, which is now a big hassle to deal with.

 

If there's no easy way (like editing a line) to make it backwards compatible - forget it

 

 

[Nessa]

Well... you could try it. The only thing that may cause errors are some of the system initializers... which would probably break the game... but maybe not!

 

Of course, without the new one your slaves won't have slavey clothing anyway. Can't have unfashionable slaves!

[idonotlikeusernames]

Can't wait until you update this thing for Leviathans and make use of the greatly expanded functionality for the Drow fallen empires. I want my cute dark-elves dammit.

[Nessa]

They may be even cuter than you think. I'm thinking of switching over all elves/drow to the new slimmer space elves. But it's going to be a bit. Have to make the base "without apparel" first.

[Nessa]

Ok so fixing the ships wasn't that big of a deal after all... 

 

About the update:

• Drow fallens are the only one with sense: xenophobic.   Also, they may be too nasty. I haven't been able to play a game in 1.3 yet to find out. If you're only using Drow, there is a relatively high chance you'll get them if you crank max fallens up to 4. They are -guaranteed- to have lots of fleets and a titan so beware.

[idonotlikeusernames]

Will Drow/Dark Elf fallens react differently to Drow players than they do to other, lesser, species though?