Costume creator won't load a costume literally all my female toons have

[Jimpy4]

When creating a new toon I got an error Could not find a match for parts (13, Right weapon).  Costume creator may not have access to costume parts.  

 

As I said all my female toons have this costume.  I can make it the hard way I suppose, but the save and load costume buttons are so I don't

 

Jimpy

A snappy message should appear here

[Jimpy4]

Curiously, when I Clicked on the proper costume part, it pulled up the proper part. As for the weapon, What weapon?? The original costume had a rifle, but none of the other toons with that costume have one. I was able to recreate the costume, but it shouldn't have been that hard

 

[UberGuy]

So sometimes the costume menus are modified or parts recreated slightly differently, and this can invalidate saved costumes from before that change. The unfortunate reality is that the costume data hierarchy is very inflexible, and sometimes what seem like costumes that are perfectly legit (as in you could create them from scratch with the editor) are saved as files using out-of-date references the editor no longer understands.

 

Improving this is probably on the devs' wish list somewhere, but from what we've been told, it sound like addressing it would require a pretty substantial gutting of the current design and redoing a bunch of it in better ways.

 

I would love to learn my info on that is way out of date.

Edited April 6, 2021 by UberGuy

[srmalloy]

48 minutes ago, UberGuy said:

Improving this is probably on the devs' wish list somewhere, but from what we've been told, it sound like addressing it would require a pretty substantial gutting of the current design and redoing a bunch of it in better ways.

If I had to guess what it would entail, I expect that it would require saving all of the current costume piece indexes and the associated piece names, rolling all the costume pieces out to individual files, rebuilding the master file from the individual files and generating a new list of indexes with their associated piece names, produce a crosswalk table from the two index lists that maps the old indexes to the new ones, then go through every character and costume slot updating the old indexes to the new ones (and doing it for any NPCs that use the costume pieces, like AE missions), then having an update so everyone gets the new costume piece file(s)... and writing and releasing a tool to do the same thing for saved costume files on your local computer if they didn't want to just make them useless.