Hey HoL, Is it possible to make the player character a full-blooded Orc? More importantly, is it possible to make the PC use the Orc sprites (like my avatar) I love the Orc sprites. I would like so badly to use one as my main character. I would totally recruit Gar. Best Regards, Lukan
The closest thing that comes to mind would be creating a half orc character and using Virgil's Debug menu to change your race to purebreed orc. That, however, would make the game a bizarre one at least, seeing how it would completely screw up racial insults of NPCs, making them say things like this: Seriously, that was just rude. As for the sprites, I once briefly discussed with rroyo - our local modding guru - the possibility of playing as a female halfling. After I pushed the matter a big he hesitantly admitted that while is may not completely out of the question in theory, making a character with female halfling sprites usable would be a very demanding mission in terms of modding. My guess is the same applies for a character with orc sprites as well.
The consensus of the modding community has always been to stay the fuck away from animated sprites in Arcanum. Remember the movies you used to make at the corners of your notebook pages when you were bored at school, changing the pose of a strawman ever so slightly on every page creating a short movie when you flipped them? I've been told it's a bit like that, except of course that painting each is a million times more convoluted and you literally need thousands of sprites to make a functional character. I understand why developers prefer to work in 3d.
When it comes to creating a functional orc or female halfling PC, though, it is more like organising already existing notebook movies rather than drawing new ones from scratch. So much for theory, anyway. It doesn't sound that bad, but something tells me that if it were easy, someone would probably make a Bedokaan Living One mod by now.
It's possible to assign the orc sprites to the PC via hex-editing the savegame file. The orcs have animations for all weapons but staves and can wear the barbarian and plate armor, so you will do just fine with this character. Changing your race to pure orc, however, will screw up many dialogs, scripts and other things (e.g. the race based reaction modifiers), since this race was never meant to be playable.
By my estimations, that'd be much easier than making female half-orcs or female halfings since the Bedokaans already contain art for bows and swords....actually, hold on a second.... There IS a green skinned human female in the art list in world Ed. Although wearing any armor would result in the character's skin turning back to tan, one could temporarily use that as a female half orc. Also....really all you'd have to do to create more diverse races is to take those thousand or so .bmp images and apply a color replace to them via Photoshop.....it'd be painstakingly mind numbing work...but I suspect it could be done. A simple unpack and recolor isn't THAT bad. Making new anims is another matter. They are attempting to tackle this problem over at the Bear Pits forum for Jagged Alliance 2, a game which uses similiar isometric mechanics. (http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/board/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=185314#Post185314) They came up with the clever idea of multiple layer overlays. Smart fellers there. Wish I had them as a design team.
The easiest way to do 2D animation these days is to make a 3D model, texture it and what not, and then animate it and record each animation as a series of frames with a fixed interval. You need a modeling application that allows you to configure (and save) the viewport appropriately. Blender3D can do this.
