Strange custom character problem

[USAgent]

Ok, This is strange, I went to play with this character "pacific tattoo" (a old West Coast Avenger villain- Pacific Overlord Tattoo) in the rumble room today and I noticed his skin was the standard skin instead of his assigned skin, so I went in the game editor to reassign his correct skin (on male_heavy mesh) but his skin was no longer there, and when I scroll through the skin there was only 2 skins to choose from?? 

Spoiler

Standard skin

Other skin

Spoiler

I have no idea what skin that even is, it isnt even my male heavy skin folder??

So I thought "what the heck? where are all my male_heavy skins?"  I open up the C-tool to check and they are all there:

Spoiler

I open up the hero editor and it looks just fine:

Spoiler

I tested other hero files that use the male heavy mesh and they all work fine. And when I scroll through the skins in the game editor they are all there including the Tattoo skin, but that skin in the 2nd pic is not.
I reassign him to the male heavy mesh and tattoo skin using the hero editor but no go.

I'm sure I could fix this by making up a new hero file or using a different mesh, but I was just wondering if anybody has any ideas on this?

[GogglesPizanno]

Check to see that one of the skins in the male_heavy skins folder is not dds format.
If any of the skins are DDS and the others are TGA, you can run into this.

Its weird.

The game seems to whack out when they mix TGA and DDS skins.
See if removing/converting the odd man out (TGA or DDS) fixes the problem.
It has for me in the past.

[USAgent]

I had thought of that too, but all the skins in the male heavy skins folder are all TGA format.  I still can't figure out where that 2nd skin (2nd pic) is at, it sure isn't in the male heavy skins folder.  There must be another male heavy folder somewhere that its looking at. But why is it doing it to just one hero file out of all the ones that use that mesh is the million dollar question. 


(I wonder if that 2nd skin isnt the "thermite" skin in the FFX/art/library/characters folder) Its a DDS file, but why would it look there is beyond me.

[JKCarrier]

(I wonder if that 2nd skin isnt the "thermite" skin in the FFX/art/library/characters folder) Its a DDS file, but why would it look there is beyond me.

Yup, that's the Thermite skin. Not sure what's going on there... somehow having male_heavy in two different locations is confusing the game?

[USAgent]

Ah, well at least I know now what other skin that is.  I just went ahead and made a new hero file for that character and its fine now. But it sure was strange it was looking in the FFX folder for the mesh when I assigned the correct location of the mesh using the hero editor.  Ah well.

[daglob]

Like someone else mentioned, it probalby has to do with FFv3R using dds instead of tga. I have had that problem iwth Male Muscular (something or other) and with Male Heavy. In both cases, they were all tga, and only one skin would read and the Male Muscular wasn't a skin-it was just a pink thing (and I know that is caused by missing glow or reflectino files-the files were there, they just weren't being read).

It has affected a couple of other meshes, but only a couple, and as far as I can recall, it didn't do that at first, only some time after I had converted them from FF1 to FFv3R.

It's gemlins.

[Gremlin]

It's gemlins.

That's really ignorant of you, daglob, and I don't appreciate it.




=P

[GogglesPizanno]

He said gremlins plural...
Clearly he was talking about the army of crazy clones you let loose upon the world.

[JKCarrier]

He said gremlins plural...

Actually, he said "gemlins", which I guess means he has little tiny diamonds and rubies lodged in his computer, mucking up the works. 

[USAgent]

Thanks IPS,  I have all my meshes in the "program files" directory, because of the immense load time I with a couple thousand meshes. I originally thought of the same thing you just mentioned, so I checked out the "User" directory when it happened and I never had any meshes in that "custom character"  folder at all. (I removed them all when I went the "program files" route.)

I found that the mesh and skin it was using was in FFX/art/library/characters folder.  I have no idea why when the game loaded it would look for the mesh in that folder but the hero editor looked for in in the correct folder???. But I ended up just making a new hero file for him any way and its been fine.