custom character problems

[comicstar100]

Diving back into the hobby after years. Playing on Steam. First character I uploaded was Superman_ren off Alex's webiste and it works fine. Any other custom character I've tried to add doesn't seem to work.  I thought maybe it was just a mesh without a skin but he has multiple skins. If I use the character in game he has no animations, doesn't walk just kind of glides. Then a few others I trued to upload just crash the game instantly.

[spydermann93]

Hey comicstar!

Which game are you playing? Freedom Force or Freedom Force vs the Third Reich?

If it's the first game, some meshes are built specifically for the sequel (FF vs the Third Reich) and will not work in that game.

If it's the second game, on Alex's website, there is a Hero Tool. The Hero Tool has a Nif converter that will convert nifs built for FF into something that works for FFvtTR.

And could you post an image of the contents of your character in your character folder? It sounds like either a) it's missing its keyframes file or b) the folder is structured incorrectly.

The folder structure should look like this:

Custom/Art/library/characters
>YourCharacter
>>skins
>>>standard
>>>other skins, etc
>>character.nif
>>keyframes.kf (or character.kf)

so you should have a skins folder, a character.nif file, and a keyframes.kf file in the character's folder. Inside the skins folder should be at a minimum a "standard" folder. That will be the default skin. The skins for a character must either a) all be .tga files, or b) all .dds files. .dds files are preferred as tga skins don't play nicely with dds skins in ffvttr. They might turn bright pink or just not show up.

[comicstar100]

Thanks so much for the info. Looks like they were missing the key frames. Thankfully I was able to track it down. I do remember having another problem years ago. After uploading a bunch of custom characters overtime in the game they would randomly turn pink, something was wrong with the models. I never did find a fix for that.
.

[spydermann93]

If a character is pink, it could be two issues:

1) that the character in question is using a tga skin while another is using a dds skin. You can use a variety of image converters to fix that. Just convert all of the tga files into dds files in the character's skins folder and then remove the old tga files.

2) the character is missing a _glow file in their skin folder. Say a character like Superman_Ren has a "superman.dds" file in his standard/skin folder. There should be something like a "superman_glow.dds" file as well. If a file like that does not exist, you can just make a 64x64 dds file that's pure black and put it in your standard skin folder. Alternate skins don't need it. Alternatively, you can copy it from something like "NoCapeMan", a default mesh that comes with the game.