Setting up MIMICs
Basic MIMIC
Say you're writing an XMen mod and want two builtin characters with templates rogue and mimic to use the MIMIC attribute. Open up ffxS.py and change the line:
builtinMimics=['',]
to
builtinMimics=['rogue','mimic',]
This is necessary so that FFX can record who your character should change back into when they REVERT.
Special "Rogue-style" MIMIC
You want a MIMIC in your mod who can gain the powers of others without changing his or her appearance? Devil Doll in the Strangers does.
This special method will work only for the first character in the builtinMimics list - others will MIMIC as per normal.
Its slightly clumsier than the standard MIMIC to use, but here's how to set up a mod for this.
This power works using a bizarre phenomena I discovered. Open up a mission in FFEdit, and find a character in the mission map, notice how the grayed out NIF: box says 'Template object'? This means that when the game creates that object they'll use the NIF file associated with the character's template in the templates tab. Now find a generic object, say a streetlight (uyou may have to check the Layout box and sort by template). The NIF file will now contain a path to a definite file, e.g. library\area_specific\city\street_objects\street_light_single\street_light\street_light_single.nif
So what we need to do is create a positional marker with a hard-coded NIF file like this in every level, preferably in a unobtrusive part of the map. When we spawn the mimic there, they'll use the NIF file in question, but have the template (ie powers and abilities) of their target.
These are the steps for doing so (and you have to do this for every map):
- Open the level and place a minuteman statue in the corner of the map, away from the action.
- Rename this object to pos_mimic in the Editor using the N key
- ALT-TAB over to FFEdit and change the type from Generic to Positional, and press Save.
Now any character spawned on this specially named marker will use the minuteman mesh, which isn't exactly what we want.
- Choose a mesh for the mimic character, either the same as their normal one or a simialr one with lots of keyframes, say the AzBat keyframes.
- Copy the character.nif and the keyframes.kf into the folder [mod folder]\Art\library\area_specific\city\battery_park_objects\minuteman_statue
- Delete the original minteman_statue.nif and rename character.nif to that (including the spelling mistake - there's no u!
- Change the following lines in ffxS.py in your mod folder:
builtinMimics=['',]
mimicSkin=''
to
builtinMimics=['devil_doll']
mimicSkin='strangers/art/custom_characters/female_basic/skins/devildoll/female_basic.tga'
So that the template for your character is described as the first entry in builtinMimics, and the mimicSkin points to their default skin.
- Its now hex-editing time: open that minteman_statue.nif and change the texture name for the skin to mimic.tga (also changing the length of the name beforehand).
- Finally, you may want to change some of the animation names in your keyframes file by hex-editing. Some of your other meshes may use non-standard names (eg the male_dwarf used extensively in the Strangers uses 'melee_01','melee_02' etc rather than 'melee','melee_2'), so take some animations whose names are not referenced by campaign characters and change them to these non-standard names. This is necessary to allow the mimic to mimic the characters who use these non-standard anims in their attacks.