Converting MOUL Clothing + Editing Clothing in General

[kaelisebonrai]

Hi there, another.. odd question from me, again.

I'm wondering if there is any way, so far to edit clothing, I found a tutorial for this, on the forums, but couldn't seem to get to get it working terribly nicely, and, I there appears to be no way to export the MOUL clothing, or directly edit textures, or, even, replace them entirely... The same goes for PotS files, as well... =/

Any leads of ways to do this nicely? Hex Editing is nice and all, but, seriously, people have been working with these files for 5 years now... I'd be welcome to be a ginuea pig for programs, and tools, if necessary. I know a tiny bit of python, but, I'm more of an artist, than a coder. I do however know a bunch of coders, including a non-writer Uru-ite. I'd love to start messing with these files, indeed...

Thanks!
EDIT: I think this needs an edit. =P

This post was not a jab at anyone, by the way, its just a query as to how to do this nicely, if it is possible at all, after fiddling with things all night, and going crazy doing it... =P

[Aloys]

I'm not an expert on that subject, but I know clothing is not the highest priority in tools development. So I'm afraid whatever is the current method (if there is any) it shouldn't be too different from past methods.. It probably still involves a lot of Hex editing and manual fiddlings of all kinds. We don't have yet advanced tools for that unfortunately.
But maybe if there's enough interest some developers might work on such tools. Lately PyPRP has made a lot of progress, maybe it could be a refreshing change for a while to focus on something else than the Ages and have a look at those clothes?

(Does PRP Explorer 0.7 or 0.8 make any editing of that kind easier?)

[kyevan]

You rang? (I'm the non-writer Uruite coder mentioned by kaelis)

Clothing editing seems like something that creating tools for would be a Good Thing - clothing is a lot simpler to create than an age, conceptually, and it follows you everywhere. I'm sure there are hundreds of people who would love to be able to even just change the textures on a T-Shirt, which is something that really shouldn't be hard...

-- Kyevan

[Tsar Hoikas]

It's more complicated than you think. I've been trying to figure out an easy way to "Allow Granny to put her kitty on a TShirt." but it (forgive my Southern expression) "ain't that easy!"

... That doesn't mean that I'm not working on something though

[kyevan]

Like I said, conceptually. Granny can imagine putting a kitty on her t-shirt pretty easily, but thinking through Age-building is a lot harder - and trust me, I've tried and failed miserably a couple times, at the conceptual stage

[kaelisebonrai]

Well, here is what I'd consider "usably easy".

Open PRP
--list of:
---- clothing items
---- textures/mipmaps
---- models
---- model morphs
--opening clothing item shows:
---- clothing item id, as title.
---- Category (hey, game calls this a Top, etc)
---- Sub-category (hey, this is a short sleeved t-shirt, so, in the closet, its shown under there)
---- Icon Texture (hey, its going to look like this in the closet's choices)
---- Model Textures:
------ Tint Alpha Map
------ Tint Alpha Map 2
------ Actual Texture
---- Attributes (hey, this is a nonStandard, singleplayer item! or hey, this is an internal item!)
---- Models:
------ High Model
------ Medium Model
------ Low Model

or something similar, there would be, say, a list of the attributes on the gow-wiki, or sommat, too, or in a readme or manual file included...

[Tsar Hoikas]

You planned that, didn't you?

That's the exact layout of the clothing in the prp

Except the actual texture is a hashtable of textures... A base and a tint texture (separate from the primary/secondary tints). I already have some low level viewers that will let me look at the data this way (except for viewing the meshes although I do have the vertex format mapped out), but it's not the best way to edit them IMO.

[kaelisebonrai]

Here's the thing, you're simply not /going/ to get this so grandma can do it. =P

This is a modding community, and that kind of layout with nice stuff like "new item" and "copy item" / "duplicate item" / "save as new page" / ".age editor+.sum rebuilder" would be perfect, and/or "Convert item to: (MOUL, UU, POTS, ABM, etc)" is probably going to be perfect for anyone's needs. its perfectly understandable, at that kind of level, and is certainly on par with modding tools the internet over. Hex Editing, though, is well below par. =P

[IBnetweasel]

Hey all...Go GoW! You've done some amazing stuff so far...

This sounds like a really cool idea to me...I'd like to see some of the clothing we had in MOUL made available in the offline version. Also the possibility of making new clothing would be nice too...so long as we have a choice of what gets added or what we see...no need to have people making less-than-cool shirt logos/phrases. Would kind of be nice to get me a Greeter shirt...hehe.

IB

[kyevan]

Presumably clothing would probably work like any other custom data - it needs to be installed client and server side to work properly.

Actually, I wonder if we could rig something like ULM, Uru Wardrobe Manager, or something like that, to add/remove clothing from the local install?

Anyway, I'm with kaelis. At least at this stage, we don't need super-easy "give me the picture for the front of the T' and I'll do the rest" tools for clothing editing, but having a tool to extract and read the various portions of the clothing easily would be a HUGE plus.

Besides, that sort of thing would allow easier experimentation with it, which means more people with a better understanding, which means more clothes and more possibility of someone figuring out a way to make it REALLY east