By Michael Gummelt
Date: 06-24-2002
NOTE: This is not a supported feature!!!
This shows how you can make your multiplayer skins turn surfaces on the model on and off.
You\'ll notice that in the game\'s ext_data/NPCs.cfg (this is the NPC config for single-player), that there are lines in some of the NPC definitions that look like this:
(using Jedi2 as an example)
surfOff \"head head_face\"
surfOn \"head_off head_face_off\"
This, basically, tells the game to turn off certain surfaces and turn on others. This gives you more variety to a model as you can make skins that work with different configurations of surfaces.
What is a surface? Read the skinning tutorial that came with the first tools release so that you can open up one of our .glm models and view it in ModView. In the left window you will see an expandable list of \"surfaces\". These are just a bunch of polygons on the model that are grouped together into something called a \"surface\". You can select a surface in the list and see it highlighted on the model. The surfaces that have slashes in front of them (and have the suffix \"_off\") are turned \"off\" (not rendered) by default when the model is just loaded and drawn. But you can turn some of these off and turn others on. This is exactly what the \"surfOff\" and \"surfOn\" fields tell the game to do. (If you would like to see what Jan looks like without the vest, etc., on, load up the jedif.mvs I included in the jan dir... this is a ModView script and you load it in ModView with the \"load script\" command... you can use the feature to save out certain animation poses and surface configurations for models so you don\'t have to keep resetting them manually every time you load a model in ModView).
In MP, you can do this, too. All you have to do is make a text file called exactly the same thing as the skin file that you want this to apply to... only rename it so that it uses the extention \".surf\" instead of \".skin\". So, for example, the skin model_default.skin would have a .surf file called model_default.surf. This .surf file just needs those 2 lines (though you can have just on or off surfs, you don\'t need to do both) in it, exactly as shown above. You can even copy these lines straight from the NPCs.cfg into your .surf file.
Now you can do some of the things you have been wanting to do with skins... like a female skin using Jan that doesn\'t have all the extras on (like the goggles, vest, chaps, etc) or a bald person (jedi2). Included are the jedif from SP (jan without the extras - jan/model_default_jedif) and the bald jedi (jedi/model_default_j2).
MCG
Raven Software