I’ve been playing around with the toolset and got it into my head that I wanted to make a module. A lot of the tutorials and info on here have been immensely helpful but there are two things that still elude me and I haven’t been able to find any writings on. I should also mention that I’m not using the EE.
I think if I explain what I’m trying to do it would make it easier for you to give me advice so here I go:
I want to customise the alignments in my module to have other names, descriptions and titles. I’ve been delving into editing 2da files and have my own tlk going but I can’t seem to find any way to do this. Is it possible? I’ve only managed to change the buttons in character creation but gotten no further than that.
I plan on making custom races, how do I go about changing the colour palette for skin colour and hair available to the player during character creation? Is it possible to limit it say to nuances of purple?
Thanks in advance, I’d really appreciate help with this.
1.) Did you find and edit all the entries for the alignments in the tlk, or just the ones for the buttons? If changing the button labels worked, it should work just the same way for the descriptions. I’ve cracked the default dialog.tlk open just now; looks like the alignment descriptions start on row 448.
2.) Going by a look at Ursul’s Palette Mod, I think you’ll need to extract and edit the colour palette files; “mvpal_hair.bmp” “pal_hair01.tga”, “gui_pal_hair01.tga” - and the skin versions, too, of course.
Looking at that mod, the problem Surazal reported is probably because that palette mod doesn’t contain the HotU-level extra colours; if you start with the HotU palette as a base, I think the invisible cloaks/inventory icons thing shouldn’t happen.
I might be dumb and have taken the entirely wrong approach to this, but can you just copy dialog.tlk and edit it directly? I tried that initially without success and all the documentation I’ve read (not a lot) says that the tlk file you associate with your module is treated as an extension of the base tlk. So what I’ve done is to change the StrRef in 2DAs (and in the case of the button, cg_alignment.gui) to point to my custom tlk. If I could just go into Dialog.tlk and edit stuff that would save me a lot of headache.
hmm! I… don’t actually know. It’s been ages since I’ve last tried to do anything that needed a custom tlk. I think it should work like that for sure if you make players temporarily exchange their normal dialog.tlk for your modified one, to play your module. It’d be a pretty extreme step, though. The route you’ve taken, where you modify the 2das to point to different rows from your custom tlk that stands in addition to the default one, is definitely the safer and cleaner way.
I’ve poked around the 2das a little and can’t find anything for the alignment descriptions either. ::headscratch:: Nor do the GUI files look to be pointing to any tlk rows, do they. Did altering the Obj_StrRef entry for the alignments do the trick for changing the button labels?
I don’t think I’ve got the solution to this one. Fingers crossed; maybe somebody else knows the answer. Maybe you could work around it by implementing your custom alignment choices as dialogue choices in a snazzy start-of-game extended character creation sequence and just ignore the “official” alignment. It’s not quite the same thing optically, but it’d probably do the trick fine far as storytelling goes.
Yeah, exactly. I did find two 2da files referring to the alignment, iprp_aligngrp.2da and iprp_alignment.2da, but changing the names there did nothing.
And replacing the dialog.tlk is way too radical. I suppose I could do with scripting instead but I’d much rather use the system already in place since it’d not only be cooler and stuff but also make things easier.
::awkwardly sneaks back into already beautifully wrapped-up dialogue::
I’ve got a knowledge-bit on that one, at least: The iprp_* 2das are about item properties. Altering those 2das might’ve changed the text of the alignment requirements for items.
I think it should work like that for sure if you make players temporarily exchange their normal dialog.tlk for your modified one, to play your module. It’d be a pretty extreme step, though. The route you’ve taken, where you modify the 2das to point to different rows from your custom tlk that stands in addition to the default one, is definitely the safer and cleaner way.
Maybe you could work around it by implementing your custom alignment choices as dialogue choices in a snazzy start-of-game extended character creation sequence and just ignore the “official” alignment. It’s not quite the same thing optically, but it’d probably do the trick fine far as storytelling goes.
