Any chances of adding new costume/character parts or...

[Grimm001]

polishing/updating older creation parts that are pretty dated when compared to newer parts available in the game?

 

Let's be real, older creation parts look pretty bad when compared to some of the newer pieces and a lot of them don't mix very well due to this. So would such a thing be possible, or be allowed?

 

Will Homecoming allow cosmetic mods? There used to be some costume part mods floating around out there when the game was still up and running...so would these things be allowed if modders were to start creating mods for this version of CoH?

 

Would the Homecoming team allow modders to pop the hood and do some texture work to spice things up? Would such a thing even be allowed in the first place? 

 

Don't get me wrong...I'm not expecting 4k textures or anything crazy like that...I'm mostly just curious about new stuff and minor touch-ups and if such a thing would even be allowed/possible?

 

If such a thing is possible, I want to let everyone know that I'm in the market for a T-1000 style smooth metallic skin option that works with clothing and hair options. I always wanted to create one of my old PnP characters in CoH back in the day, but it never had the skin options I needed to make it happen and look authentic.

 

Feel free to share/discuss if anyone know anything or has any ideas. I would be curious to see where things like this stand, and what could be done (if anything).

 

Finally, a  -H U G E-  thank you to the Homecoming team for bringing the OG Hero MMO back for another round. It is truly nice to have another chance to explore and invest into the experience.

[MetaVileTerror]

Fix the beards, please!  They look . . . glossy and plastic compared to some of the newer hair geometries and textures.  It's surprising me how much it's bothering me, heh.

[ChanelNo2]

I hope they can do it. I've seen a lot of people talking about the i25 not giving this kind of support for modifications, just the i24 and that's why some are still waiting to open a server with it ... BUT in a post made by the Homecoming staff these days, they said yes, it is possible to modify the game and bring new things.

[Rylas]

Could this be something that's crowd sourced? Provide the frame work for people to create skins, and let the community submit new pieces for consideration?

[MetaVileTerror]

A modding community, such as that for the Fallout games, would be a fantastic addition!

The only issue becomes; how does a server's operators determine which content to introduce?  Do we poll the players?  Create contests?  Just add it all for specific categories (like costume pieces)?

[The Fifth Horseman]

Updating textures is possible: you can have a locally installed texture pack (keeping in mind there's a 1024x1024 size limit). This is how VidiotMaps work. Updating models (or adding new ones) is a whole different kettle of fish that you should take up with OuroDev.

[Rylas]

A modding community, such as that for the Fallout games, would be a fantastic addition!

The only issue becomes; how does a server's operators determine which content to introduce?  Do we poll the players?  Create contests?  Just add it all for specific categories (like costume pieces)?

 

If we're just talking costume pieces, I don't see why they can't just add any and all player created pieces they consider acceptable (i.e. not adult rated).

[jubakumbi]

All done in the client side files.

There are multiple groups pooping up already that are looking into adding higher rez textures etc.

I think in a short time, there will be plenty of mods.

[Skele101]

Perhaps we could recommend community raised Issue Updates. So community creators that make mods can put forward designs and the like and we can all vote on new additions in future updates.

 

Unless the goal is only to maintain the server in its current form for preservation sake.

[Piledriver]

I hope they can do it. I've seen a lot of people talking about the i25 not giving this kind of support for modifications, just the i24 and that's why some are still waiting to open a server with it ... BUT in a post made by the Homecoming staff these days, they said yes, it is possible to modify the game and bring new things.

 

Nothing to do with i24 or i25. This is not a code issue.

 

The game code does not give us tools to write the formats. Those tools either were not leaked or were leaked to other parties who have yet to come forward.

 

The game code does not unfuckulate all the machine-generated definition files that organize game resources for the engine. That tool, too, either was not leaked or was leaked to other parties who have yet to come forward.

 

There are obviously some new things in i25 proving that additions can be made. SCORE has not provided whatever tools they used to do this. Even so, there's a very good chance that theirs are coder-oriented tools, even if they were provided; that is, command-line converters for mesh and texture resources and just plain manual editing of configuration files, which would not be trivial.

 

Homecoming is not SCORE. From what I can tell, GM Jimmy and crew haven't shown they can do anything without Leandro spoon-feeding them, yet. What they say has no more weight than well, what I say as an anonymous poster on the forum. Less. At least I can say I've modded CoX resources before (not meshes; SCORE has something for those that I've never had, though I have heard of a 3DS Max plugin for the format released to the public fifteen years ago or so, bearing in mind that that would be a plugin made for a long-obsolete version of 3DS Max that would also have to be dug out of mothballs).

 

Updating textures is possible: you can have a locally installed texture pack (keeping in mind there's a 1024x1024 size limit). This is how VidiotMaps work. Updating models (or adding new ones) is a whole different kettle of fish that you should take up with OuroDev.

 

Yeah, I don't know where you get that "1024x1024px" size limit from, though I have a guess. The map textures replaced by vidiotmaps were probably 1024x1024px to start with. So far as I can tell, the engine may not even have a hard limit. Not that it should be pushed too much. But that's beside the point: the scale of the texture is defined in a custom header in the *.texture file. All the community-created tools out there for *.texture file replacement don't actually write the headers, so they can't change the resolution from whatever was originally defined. You might be able to attach that header data to a smaller resolution DXT and have the engine accept it, but the header tells the engine to display it at 1024px, so it probably blows it up on the screen.

 

*edit* Alright, I see now that SCORE's *.texture tool (pretty sure it came from SCORE, anyway, since it bundles i25 source texture components in with the tool and the script's creation date is April 6, 2017) has been published on the OuroDev wiki, and it does write header data. It uses a Perl script, so needs Perl installed, and does the whole compression internally so you can't get any visual feedback in your DXT conversion tools, but it is enough to finally allow increased resolution client-side texture mod(s).

 

Extending the functionality of existing textures (adding reflection, glow, or transparency where they don't already exist) would still require alterations to the definition (text/xml) files as much as adding new textures, but resolution overrides could still make quite an impact.

[The Fifth Horseman]

There are obviously some new things in i25 proving that additions can be made. SCORE has not provided whatever tools they used to do this. Even so, there's a very good chance that theirs are coder-oriented tools, even if they were provided; that is, command-line converters for mesh and texture resources and just plain manual editing of configuration files, which would not be trivial.

At least I can say I've modded CoX resources before (not meshes; SCORE has something for those that I've never had, though I have heard of a 3DS Max plugin for the format released to the public fifteen years ago or so, bearing in mind that that would be a plugin made for a long-obsolete version of 3DS Max that would also have to be dug out of mothballs).

Both the SCORE code leak and i24 code leak contains source code of what seems to be 3DS Max plugins under \CoH\Utilities\3dsmax\

 

Yeah, I don't know where you get that "1024x1024px" size limit from, though I have a guess.

From the source code. It seems to set a limit on max accepted texture size at 1024x1024 . It can be changed, but to do so the game's executable must be rebuilt.

\CoH\Game\render\tex.h

#define MAX_TEX_SIZE 1024

\CoH\Game\render\tex.c

	if (tfh.width>MAX_TEX_SIZE || tfh.height>MAX_TEX_SIZE)
	ErrorFilenamef(filename,"Texture Too big - Max tex size is (%dX%d) this one is (%dX%d)\n", MAX_TEX_SIZE,MAX_TEX_SIZE,tfh.width,tfh.height);

\CoH\GetTex\gettex.c

		if (reason & 8) {
		printf("  Reason:  Bad texture (larger than %dx%d or bad file)\n", MAX_TEX_SIZE, MAX_TEX_SIZE);
	}

 

[Piledriver]

I stand corrected.

 

Happily so, at least in relation to the 3DS Max plugin sources.

 

Thank you!