Appearances: How to beautiful your world!

[John Adams]

(edit: These posts were moved from Content to Tutorials to give you a general idea how we're cleaning things up - and are based on the results of EQ2PacketCollector data and PacketParser.exe results)


These are a little more involved, since it can include everything from physical attributes, to armor/weapons, to initial stances.

Here is an example of a parsed NPC that appears to be running, slowly, in place facing the wrong way!

running.jpg

In this case, you would have to use /move_spawn to twirl her around the other direction, then use the command:

Code: Select all

/spawn set visual_state [#] (where # is a bit-wise number, I believe?)

...to get the appearances right. This is the one part of the DB/Emu I am not horribly intimate with... as I have never gone around and tested all of the 8804 known visual states yet. Any volunteers?

What I usually do is try to find an NPC that is at the preferred stance, do a quick /spawn details to see what their visual_state is set to, then go back to my NPC and edit it as above.

And this is just one aspect of "Appearances"...

You have race, wings, hair (table: spawn_npcs) eyes, cheeks, lips, tattoos (table: npc_appearance). You also have their armors and weapons (table: npc_appearance_equip) and of course those items must exist in the DB first (another story).
Note: NPCs are not the only things with Appearances. Refer to this post for some other ideas.

There is a lot to this, but the good news is that most of this should already be done for you before you get into your zones. In spot-checking data, I have found 90% of the mobs I compared to live were accurately portrayed in the collected, parsed data (KUDOS LE! ). But occasionally you will run into that odd looking bugger that needs tweaking. We're not really seeking absolute perfection, but that depends on your attention to detail and how much it bugs you that Dockmaster Wilson is seen as a 2" tall barbarian druid.