'Save Scales' Tailor option
By
Electric-Knight,
Posted on: 2010-12-28 10:59 in Suggestions and Ideas
The scales seem to be saved within the costume files. If you are looking to replicate the same scales on multiple characters, you could just save a sort of "Blank Slate" costume that is just the default tights, then load that costume when creating a character and go from there. But I know I could be building a 7' tall muscular costume, then go to the load screen and load a completely different (but same skeleton) costume and have the scales automatically adjust.
@Winter. Because I'm Winter. Period.
I am a blaster first, and an alt-oholic second.
Yeah, the scales are indeed saved as part of the costume file.
Trying to load costumes onto other scaled characters or scales onto other costumes... it gets tricky.
I know there's a reset scales button, however I can't remember if it resets all scales now or not. At one point, it was only resetting... Head scales, I think (or maybe it was body scales...).
Height is also saved and loaded!
Whatcha tryin' to do, Tech?
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
I find figuring out the costume file format and figuring out how to "tweak" it to be one of the best ways to accomplish the "impossible".
In fact, that was how I copied over character height back when height didn't seem to be being loaded from the file. (Not sure if that was a bug or not, but it's fixed now, so I don't care ) I would adjust the slider, save the file, then open it and see if the number matched the costume file I was trying to copy.
If you're having trouble loading a particular slider, there could be another bug.
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It's not all that tricky, you just open the 2 files and copy and paste the scales.
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Originally Posted by Electric-Knight
Trying to load costumes onto other scaled characters or scales onto other costumes... it gets tricky.
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Excellent suggestion!|
Originally Posted by Shadow State
It's not all that tricky, you just open the 2 files and copy and paste the scales.
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That is the easiest and most effective method.
However, opening up other files and editing them as such is indeed too "tricky" for some.
Some people don't want to get involved with anything that isn't done through the game's interface.
Of course, as someone comfortable with demo editing straight in notepad, I'm not saying that opening the costume files and swapping numbers is difficult in the slightest, hehe.
Anyway, that is indeed the most concise and quickest way to do it.
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
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I agree completely, the existence of a work around shouldn't be used to justify not implanting something. Power's can be saved as a whole or as just the primary or secondary alone, I don't see any reason not to make costumes savable as a whole or broken down into outfit or scales.
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Originally Posted by Electric-Knight
Excellent suggestion!
That is the easiest and most effective method. However, opening up other files and editing them as such is indeed too "tricky" for some. |
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You know, I could probably write a programme to do that. It should be as simple as reading the first 19 rows off the "scales" file then reading the rest of the "costume" file and just writing that to something.costume. Hmm...|
Originally Posted by Shadow State
I agree completely, the existence of a work around shouldn't be used to justify not implanting something. Power's can be saved as a whole or as just the primary or secondary alone, I don't see any reason not to make costumes savable as a whole or broken down into outfit or scales.
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*edit*
There's something weird going on with costume files. It seems like some of them have a CostumeFilePrefix value right at the start, yet some of them don't. The values appear to be "huge," "fem" and "male." I think older costume files don't have that but newer costume files do. Furthermore, some costume files have a BodyType value right at the end of the header, yet some don't. The only BodyType values that I've seen so far have been 1 for Female costumes and 4 for Huge costumes, but Male costumes don't have that variable at all. It could be assume.
If I can pin down the exact format of these things, then copy-pasting slider values automatically should be easy. So easy, in fact, that I'm not sure why it hasn't been done already.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Definitely check the dates those costumes were saved, Sam...
Things may have changed a few times, but certainly when the Science Booster came out and allowed for changing model types and such.
Sort them by date and/or re-save a bunch in game now and test on those.
Best of luck!
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
I think people aren't quite getting what I mean here.
Example; I was editing my Blaster the other day. The major tweaks were a few to the overall body structure and a lot of facial tweaking. The guy has all five costume slots, all of them filled. He has three where face is important. It was an almighty pain to transfer the scales of the corrected costume (#2) to the other two non-helmet slots (#3 and #4) because it involved saving the first file, then going to the second costume to edit and loading that, then resetting everything except the face. Now, that would be fine, but the reset buttons DON'T reset colour. So I had to ckeep flicking back and forth to make sure everything matched up as it should be.
All of that hassle could be averted if the scales could be saved as a seperate file, much like power customisation offers the option to save all, just primary or just secondary. That doesn't seem like a ground shaking thing to try and achieve, does it?
Oh, and I can't open costume files. I don't know what you need to do so, but I don't have it. Really, this shouldn't even be a problem in the first place.
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
I think people aren't quite getting what I mean here.
Example; I was editing my Blaster the other day. The major tweaks were a few to the overall body structure and a lot of facial tweaking. The guy has all five costume slots, all of them filled. He has three where face is important. It was an almighty pain to transfer the scales of the corrected costume (#2) to the other two non-helmet slots (#3 and #4) because it involved saving the first file, then going to the second costume to edit and loading that, then resetting everything except the face. Now, that would be fine, but the reset buttons DON'T reset colour. So I had to ckeep flicking back and forth to make sure everything matched up as it should be. All of that hassle could be averted if the scales could be saved as a seperate file, much like power customisation offers the option to save all, just primary or just secondary. That doesn't seem like a ground shaking thing to try and achieve, does it? Oh, and I can't open costume files. I don't know what you need to do so, but I don't have it. Really, this shouldn't even be a problem in the first place. |
I think people understood.
Now that we know exactly what you were trying to do...
I can only help you in one way and that is in helping you open costume files.
You just need to tell it to open up using a simple text editor (notepad for windows... not Microsoft Word).
So, I'd go into my COH folder, into my costume folder... and open up the techbotalpha.costume file and choose to open it with notepad.
Once you let your operating system know what program those files should be opened up with... you can just double click them right up into notepad (or its equivalent) every time.
All that being said... Yes, it would be nice to be able to do it simply through the game. Load up these saved scales and replace the old ones... voila!
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
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Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Probably gonna' have to re-save all my old files just to make sure. Really, though, if I can pin down the format, the costume files aren't all that complex to parse. They're downright simple, especially considering they're delimited with new line symbols. The files aren't big, either, so it shouldn't take much memory to work on them.|
Originally Posted by Electric-Knight
Definitely check the dates those costumes were saved, Sam...
Things may have changed a few times, but certainly when the Science Booster came out and allowed for changing model types and such. Sort them by date and/or re-save a bunch in game now and test on those. Best of luck! |
Yeah, I'll try to have something done at some point tomorrow, just to prove a point if nothing else.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Oh, it's not difficult, you can open it with Wordpad or Notepad. The bigger issue of course is that it is a workaround, not an in game solution, and that at least on my installation the directory has only Administrator permissions. |
Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
Oh, and I can't open costume files. I don't know what you need to do so, but I don't have it. Really, this shouldn't even be a problem in the first place.
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Does anyone know for sure what the directory is? I think it's /data/costumes/<username>, under the City of Heroes directory, but I'm sure that's not exactly right. Probably the best way to handle it is to create a directory where you can edit them, then copy the whole contents out of the CoH folder. Then after you made an edit, drag and drop it back into the game directory. If you can find screenshots, you should be able to find it.
At least this way you have a quick fix solution, although of course getting the devs to make it easier to work with would be better.
(Then again, it would be better if the devs gave us a better interface for dealing with keybind files, and an interface AT ALL for macro files, and of course a respec process that doesn't require clearing and reconstructing all your trays, and a way to record your power selection and slotting so that you could reproduce it more easily, and...
)
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For costume files? The default is C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\costumes
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Originally Posted by Jade_Dragon
Does anyone know for sure what the directory is?
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Oh, those cheeky developers! When you leave sliders at their default settings, they don't actually save to the file So, I assume, if the parser doesn't find any value for face sliders or model scale, it just defaults to middle value.
Why would you do that?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Well, I wrote up a pretty simple Java programme that takes the sliders out of one costume and adds them to another costume, and it works reasonably well. It'll even check to make sure you're copying within the same model skeleton.
I'm not sure how legal it would be to distribute it, though, considering it is kind of messing with the game's files. Besides, I wouldn't know where to host it either way. If anyone wants to test it out for me, though, be my guest. The worst it can do is is produce is override an existing costume file with one that won't load if you don't treat it right. I didn't exactly bother to put in too many safeguards
But, yeah, the process is entirely too simple.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I've had slots readjust the sliders on my characters before, and this is for a character where her sliders shouldn't be different no matter what costume she is wearing.
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I have an in-game workaround for changing scales.|
Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
Example; I was editing my Blaster the other day. The major tweaks were a few to the overall body structure and a lot of facial tweaking. The guy has all five costume slots, all of them filled. He has three where face is important. It was an almighty pain to transfer the scales of the corrected costume (#2) to the other two non-helmet slots (#3 and #4) because it involved saving the first file, then going to the second costume to edit and loading that, then resetting everything except the face. Now, that would be fine, but the reset buttons DON'T reset colour. So I had to ckeep flicking back and forth to make sure everything matched up as it should be.
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Save a costume of the scales you want, switch to the slot you want to change the scales of, go into the 'load costume' part, select the 'new scales' outfit but don't load it just back out of the screen. The scales will adjust and you don't have to change or reset anything (unless you want to). This includes height on the surgeons.
Tyger (50), Mutation-Controller Mind/FF - oldest Mind/FF on Union
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Originally Posted by Dispari
I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.
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Anecdote time:
I was making a new costume for my shapeshifter dragon girl, so I needed to change a copy of her default dragon costume into another, much smaller human costume. I did this by copying my other human costume and altering that, but because I was speaking with Serge who doesn't change model and height values, she ended up REALLY tall. Because I didn't want to load the other save and start all over again at the cosmetic surgeon, I resolved to import the proper sliders from the proper human costume into the improper human one.
Turns out the programme I wrote for this had quite a few bugs in there, but sure enough, it did exactly what it was supposed to and swapped my sliders from one costume to the other without affecting any colours or costume pieces. So it works, and it works pretty well.
If anyone wants to test this for me, shoot me a PM and I'll send you a copy. Like I said, it's not dangerous.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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One of the most annoying things to try and replicate from costume to costume is the scales on a character. So, we have costume save files, power save files...why not the scales? Because they are far more fiddly than either of those two to replicate over and over, something I had to do last night.