Female Gnome Avatars

[Domi]

Here is the thief avatar - I like it. But it has the hood, so you can't see her hair at all.

 

http://members.shaw.ca/domi/halfthiefav1.jpg

 

And here is the generic one, and it has those huge feet and muscular arms, that is distinctevly not Peony:

 

http://members.shaw.ca/domi/halfclerav1.jpg

[berelinde]

oops--post jumped on me. Gotta check the generic.

 

Actually, I like both of them, but I think I actually like the generic one very, very much for Peony. The feet don't look at all big, IMO. For a halfling, they really should be a bit bigger. To me, the scale of the feet is less important than the overall scale of the avatar in conveying that Peony is tiny and delicate.

 

You didn't do that avatars for Moinesse's avatars, did you? If so, maybe a long-haired, hooded halfling thief?

 

Any animation artists out there. Stick some long blue hair on that, and it would look fantastic.

[Domi]

You didn't do that avatars for Moinesse's avatars, did you? If so, maybe a long-haired, hooded halfling thief?

 

No, Moinesse never worked on these ones. Berelinde, just like scaling the elven avatars, it takes a huge amount of work. An avatar that joins the party has 23 BAM files (if I am not miscounting). A female wizard has those 23 BAM files multiplied per 4 to accomodate various levels of cloaks and robes. Each of those 23 BAM files consists of 8 to 99 sequences. Each of the sequence consists of 10-16 frames. To add long hair Moiness edited every front-facing frame. Moiness up to date was the only person who could handle that much of the complicated and endless work. You might have noticed that some of her animations have the conditions like "Must wear a robe of the level of the Robe of Vecna", because she did not edit every sequence of BAMs. Because it is a very difficult and time-consuming labor that requires high skill. The colors you see on BioWARE BAM animation are NOT true colors. Mixing them up will screw up the 'replaceable' colors, ie clothes, skin and hair.

 

So, no, as much as I can sit here and which that someone add long hair to the hooded avatar, I doubt that it's going to happen ever. BioWARE was too greedy to spend $$ on the animatiuon artists' time, so we are now stuck with horrible avatars for short females.

 

The feet don't look at all big, IMO. For a halfling, they really should be a bit bigger. To me, the scale of the feet is less important than the overall scale of the avatar in conveying that Peony is tiny and delicate.

 

How can she be tiny and delicate, if her shoulders are twice as wide as her hips and her feet look like a clown's? If it was like the thief's one proportionally, I'd have no problems with it. But it is not. It looks like a bruiser.

[Twani]

I have to admit, when I was running through the alpha, I killed Peony and Control-Red her to get her back to the gnome. The beard is less troublesome to me then the tallness- to me, it just doesn't fit at all. And even the elven resized would be a bit much for me; elves have an entirely different body type then gnomes, I think.

 

I would use either halfling avatar, myself. But again, it's up to you.

[Kulyok]

It seems that both gnome/halfling-looking Peony and elven-looking Peony are popular. Maybe a small optional component, "Choose Peony's avatar" could work? Like with Darian/Xan/Deheriana's class?

 

I know Kelsey has an optional "human avatar" download available on the forum(it's been requested more than once), and if Tiax the Halfling will be requested(the way he looks in Spellhold), I'll probably do an optional component, too.

[berelinde]

It's actually 11 to 6 at this point, not 10 to 7 in favor of no elven avatars for gnomes. Somebody clicked the wrong button.

[Domi]

No, it cannot be done via option. When the character dies, the game restores it to the default avatar, and I have to restore the appearance via a spell. Since I will have no way of knowing at that point what the player selected in TP2, I won't be able to add an option.

 

Since hooded avatar is the least disgusting to me between the BioWARE halfo-dwarven generic hybrids, and everyone is so hang on the tallness part, discarding everything else in favor of it, fine, I'll bite it back and replace poor Peony with a hooded thief avatar. Beacuse there is no way in the Nine Hells I am releasing this mod with BioWARE's default avatar for female gnoem wizards.

 

Wast majority doesn't want their PC touched, so I'm not including that option - as I said before.

 

Now, sorry, I'll go sulk and repeat a thousand times that the road to Hell is paved with the best intentions.

 

elves have an entirely different body type then gnomes, I think.

 

But they don't!!! That's the whole ridiculous thing! They don't! In the Handbook, in NWN2, they gnomes look just like smaller elves with wider faces, not short and stocky like the dwarves. BG is the only game that makes them look super-ugly.

[berelinde]

To be completely honest, her lovely blue-haired character portrait is better than the short-haired avatars of any race at conveying her sense of style, anyway, so you lose nothing by letting her wear a hood.

[Rabain]

Also if you resize the elven avatar it would have to be to a similar size and shape of another existing avatar otherwise none of the weapons will appear correctly in game. They will float somewhere above her hand rather than in it.

[Mike1072]

No, it cannot be done via option. When the character dies, the game restores it to the default avatar, and I have to restore the appearance via a spell. Since I will have no way of knowing at that point what the player selected in TP2, I won't be able to add an option.

I don't quite see how this is unfeasible... if you didn't want to change much, couldn't you make 2 spells with the same name - the one that changes the avatar, and another one that does nothing, and then copy over the nothing one in the optional component?

[Alinia]

Personally, I'd rather see the elven avatar than the bearded one. And I also like seeing her hair - very distinctive. It would be nice if it were shorter (or if bioware had just made good gnomish female avvies), but . . .

[Rabain]

You could possibly remove the dwarven beard by placing an elven head on every frame.

 

A lot of work that would be, hundreds if not thousands of frames!

 

I started doing a similar thing years ago to get round shields back into BG2, i got about halfway before burning out. I never went back.

[Domi]

I don't quite see how this is unfeasible... if you didn't want to change much, couldn't you make 2 spells with the same name - the one that changes the avatar, and another one that does nothing, and then copy over the nothing one in the optional component?

 

I can make as many spells as I want, they don't need to have the same name, and I have no idea why I need a spell that changes nothing (?).

 

What I cannot know inside of the game is which option the player chose while installing the mod after the game started. You see what happens if your character dies in the game, and gets ressurected, the hard-coded IWD2 ressurects the character with the default avatar. Now, if I replaced it with just one avatar for Peony, I simply recast the spell every time she dies and gets ress'd. But if the player has the choice of two CRE's at install, there is no way for me to know if s/he wants elves or hoods.

 

So, the only thing I can do is to internally change Peony (or PC) and maintain that one avatar for her throughout the game.

 

So... if you don't want elves except for me and Alinia, of course (and yes, yes, BioWARE/Interplay cranked out five games in IE and never bothered with a decent small sized female spellcaster is annoying as hell), do you want hoods, or the bald, fat, bearded dwarf is how you envision your female wizard PC if she happens to be a gnome?

[berelinde]

Mike1072 and I seem to be thinking along similar lines.

 

You're going to have to extend DPLAYER3.bcs to get the avatar-changing script into the game, anyway, right? Why not do separate blocks, where all they do is force the spell that changes the avatar on raising, like you were going to do anyway, but have them use different spells. One for elves, another for hooded figures. Then, using subcomponents in the tp2, the player can decide which block to use to extend the script. The other one doesn't show up in the game at all.

 

I had wanted to figure out the actual script block works, but I've got a killer headache, and I don't really think I can sort through that much code to find it, so I'm just going to use some dummy ones with completely fabricated triggers to illustrate.

 

For the elven avatar, you could save this block as IWD2NPC/BAF/ElfAvatar.baf:

 

IF

RaisedFromDead()

THEN

RESPONSE #100

ReallyForceSpell(Target,ELF_AVATAR)

END

 

For the hooded avatar, you could save this block as IWD2NPC/BAF/HoodAvatar.baf:

IF

RaisedFromDead()

THEN

RESPONSE #100

ReallyForceSpell(Target,HOOD_AVATAR)

END

 

Then, in the tp2:

BEGIN ~Female Gnome mages use Elven female avatars~

SUBCOMPONENT ~Gnome Avatars~

EXTEND_TOP ~DPLAYER3.bcs~ ~IWD2NPC/BAF/ElfAvatar.baf~

BEGIN ~Female Gnome mages use Hooded avatars~

SUBCOMPONENT ~Gnome Avatars~

EXTEND_TOP ~DPLAYER3.bcs~ ~IWD2NPC/BAF/HoodAvatar.baf~

 

And everybody gets to use the avatar they want. Would that work?

[Domi]

Actually, while thinking about it, what Mike originally thought, and what is the easiest to do is to copy over one of the 3 spells into the override under the same generic name, then it's but one scripting block that recast the same spell, but depending on pc's choice it leaves the gfms as dwarves or substitutesto hoods or elves.