Hey all, I was wondering....

How hard/easy would it be to spawn npcs, set their skin/hair color, race/gender etc, equipment types, slots, equipment colors etc in eq2 emulator?

I had the idea recently for screenshots...etc.. and was wondering, has anyone else made their own little worlds out of zones in eq2 using the emulator, or more so... dressed up NPC's successfully and properly to look like their live characters o however they wanted to?

I'm having a really hard time getting it to work using an sql editor for NPC skin and hair color let alone finding out how to put armor on them.

Customizing a spawn is fairly easy, once you learn what all the values are and which ones are valid. Easiest way to do this is to go in-game, and use the /spawn create command. That puts a plain-vanilla spawn in the zone, and once you /spawn add new {location-name} it, then it will be written to the database.

The next steps are trickier, because we do not yet have all the fields editable in the game, but you can set a spawn's appearances by setting it's "randomize" value. /spawn randomize will give you a list, and if you are using the latest dev code from SVN, you'll have more options than with the 0.6.5 release code (serverpacks).

If you do not wish to /randomize your spawns, then you have to use a SQL GUI tool, or get fancy with SQL queries at the command line, and you need to set up all the possible appearances for a spawn. Here is the non-soga list: Each one of those has an RGB value (if it is a color) between 0-255. So, skin_color, 255, 255, 255 = a really white spawn

The other values that are NOT color, are signed int values between -127 and 128 (though I think SOE only uses -100 through 100), and are for shaping cheeks, noses, eyes, etc. Mostly, this is experimental for you to figure out what you like best - or, my advice, /randomize non-color values. The differences are very slight... and if your spawn is wearing armor, you can't tell what his nose looks like anyway


Armor you say? There is a difference between a Player wearing items that have appearances, and a spawn wearing armor/weapons. You cannot "dress up" a spawn by putting items in his inventory. Instead, you go to the npc_appearance_equip table, and input "appearances" as equip_type, then set it's color and highlight options.

To further detail, NPCs equipment are nothing more than textures added to the base model. So you want to put a chest plate on an NPC, you need to decide which one. You can use normal "Items" data to identify the appearance ID you want. Go to Items, find a nice chest piece you like, then look in the item_appearances table at the "equip_type" column. That value is the same value you need to put in the npc_appearance_equip field.

All Appearances have a base color/highlight to them, but if you add 0-255 values for RGB and Highlight RGB, you can significantly alter the appearance of the item the NPC is wearing.


With this information in mind, I'd suggest heading to the sample DB we released with ServerPack 1.2, and you can see now now an NPC can wear items and look certain ways.

Hope this helps.

Thanks. Yeah I had a basic idea of how to do it before, but I understand a lot more now and I am using SP 1.2 with some modifications to zone tables to access sent. fate zones..etc. I customized the repack a bit for my client to have a little fun.

I've been able to basically decorate the hell out of zones like a guild hall, just not IN a guild hall. The emulator is so fun to mess around with, and I've had my copy of the repack up and running for 3 days straight now to test how long it would run without problems and it's still chugging away, the in game time is all right still too. I had some problems with it freezing. But those pesky NPC tables were getting to me. First, obviously skin color... then to assign the armor "texture" assets to the character but then it just kept getting deeper, the armor RGB's etc and you mentioned the shape of the character's face and stuff. I had no idea eq2emu was capable of that just yet. Pretty cool stuff. When I have an entire couple of days off I'm going to sit back down with it and just get more familiar with it.

Chrisworld wrote:The emulator is so fun to mess around with

Glad you are enjoying it! This is the entire purpose of why we are doing this; for fun. I only wish more people would understand what you have discovered... EQ2 is a beautiful game, and EQ2Emulator is quite functional, even if we've barely scratched the surface of what we can do here

If i didn't nuke the first server i ever had and actually took screenshots, id post them. I used to have Castle Mistmoore as my own private guildhall complete with crazy decor.