[MOD] No More Muppets for X3TC

[dertien]

No More Muppets Mod.
--------------------

Version 1.0
-------------

What is it ?
------------

Are you also tired of talking to those muppet like creatures that seem totally out of place flying those badass ships ? Than maybe this mod is for you. This dat file contains stills of all the pilot avatars that appear in the top right contact window while in space (also the plot driven ones, like Noah and Ban Danna). They have been cartoonified, but don't look muppet like at all. Screenshots are included.

The 7 races and plot characters a player communicates with got new avatars.

- Argon, Boron, Teladi, Split, Paranid, Pirates, Terrans/Aldrians will show new faces.

Permission to use the grafic work was granted by:

- Wen-JR: The split that wears no helmet. (http://wen-jr.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d1nv0kc). The concept drawings I found from the split look a bit too "Elven" to my taste. So I chose something more warlike.
- Axeface: For his Boron and Paranid characters. (http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=202956).

The others are part of television series screenshots (Dr Who, Cyberman helmets and Weyland Yutani helmets for the Split)
- Humans, screenshots from the forum of EVE online's character creator creations.
- Teladi: (Dr Who television show; Alaya and her twin sister from Hungry Earth) since Teladi all are females, she seemed like an appropriate choice.

- A big thank you to Illuminatus to put me on the right track.

What will it delete/overwrite ?
----------------------------------

it will delete/overwrite file 00001.dat in the mov folder of your X3TC installation.

How to install
---------------

Keep a copy of the original should you want to reinstall the muppets.
self extracting installer point it to temp file and copy over to MOV folder.

Have fun communicating.

Terran avatars:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/600/94114076.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/26/44557628.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/196/42898587.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/853/44080612.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/51/99814653.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/196/42898587.jpg/


D3rt13n

Download via xdownloads
[ external image ]

Outdated link
https://www.box.com/s/6cc6026bcd622cb32389

[Alkeena]

They look good.

Could I perchance trouble you to post the pirate portraits? Honestly, the sole use I have for the talking heads are identifying the race of anyone offering a mission--pirate heads being the most important of the lot.

[dertien]

Sure,

Here goes.

Pirates of all races in no definite order.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/834/83745160.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/232/27753008.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/521/28194445.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/826/31366999.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/42/48453176.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/207/98744345.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/338/34405114.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/44 ... irate.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/84 ... rate2.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/57 ... irate.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/51 ... rate2.jpg/

Unfortunately the Yaki and the Pirates share the same avatars in the Vanilla portraits as well.

A little technical introduction on the mod here, and the reason there are so few characters ingame:

I prepared many more characters, but I have 3 issues to get out of the way to get them all in the game, which are a bit above my abilities:

The problem is that Egosoft did not forsee a lot of different character possibilities, and this was probably something they didn't think modders would tackle. They solved the speech system in an elegant fashion, but it leaves little room in the possibility of modding.

You see, the video.txt file contains the start and stop times for all the normally animated characters depending on what race ship or station you select. What it doesn't contain is the stop and start times of each animation loop part, after they have finished their lip motion/speech.

The movie of each character comprises a part where it moves its lips, and a part where it just moves. So at first when contacting, it will "speak" depending on length and then it will jump to a moving part (without lip motion) and loop indefinitely as long as the contact window is open, so it doesn't seem to be a still image.

If I knew where the loop part was defined, the 00001.dat file could be made significantly smaller. Almost every character has a 22 second animation. I had to keep that so, to make all characters appear correctly. That is the reason that the file is still over 100 MB in size with a limited number of characters.

The other issue of only having a limited number of characters is due to the fact that the list that the game has assigned to characters is finite. There is a limited number of slots, so to speak that can be used in the videos.txt file. Looking at the list below for example, one cannot add another Argon Military female on slot 110 in the videolist.txt file. The chance is very large that the full scope of the game mechanics eludes me. Maybe there is a script in one of the vanilla cat/dat files that points to slot 101 for argon female. If that is the case well, that is one problem out of the way.

I tried to define the characters movies to another file for example 00003.dat and change the entries in the video.txt file accordingly, per character. No dice. The game engine would still go for the 00001.dat video file. Very annoying. You can add new videos for the ads on the billboards but not for the characters; I found a post by Observe on the matter of billboards, but that wont work here. I have tested this.

And last but not least:

Each character can only contain 1 avatar/talking head. I am not a scripter, so as long as no one else can find a way to create a script that will "collect" the ID number for an Argon Military Female (101) from the videolist.txt file, and redirect it to choose a random ID out of an array of custom ID's in the same or another videolist.txt file, we are bound to this many character avatar possibilities ingame.

So in short to add many more I would need to know:

- Where the looptime is defined (character start and stop for speech video is known)
- Make the game engine use a different dat file (only 00001.dat can be used now for characters) changing the beginning numbers in videos.txt to 0;0;0;0;3 will for example not make the game use 00003.dat. file.
- A script that would redirect a specific ID according to ship race/pilot to a random ID in an array of numbers (for ex 10000 - 10050) for argon
in the videolist.txt file, and that with knowing an answer to the first two issues to create new stills/animations in a new Dat file with new looptimes and animations.

Code: Select all

id      face 

Argon: 
101      Military Female 
102      Military Male 
103      Military Officer 
104      Transporter Female 1 
105      Transporter Female 2 
106      Transporter Male 1 
107      Argon Male 
108      Argon Male 
109      Argon Female 

Boron: 
201      Boron 1 
202      Boron 2 
203      Boron 3 
204      Boron 4 
205      Boron 5 

Split:        
301      Split 1 
302      Split 2 
303      Split 3 
304      Split 4 
305      Split 5 

Paranid:    
401      Paranid 1 
402      Paranid 2 
403      Paranid 3 
404      Paranid 4 
405      Paranid 5 

Teladi: 
501      Teladi 1 
502      Teladi 2 
503      Teladi 3 
504      Teladi 4 
505      Teladi 5 

Pirate: 
811      Pirate Argon Female 
812      Pirate Argon Male 1 
813      Pirate Argon Male 2 
821      Pirate Boron 1 
822      Pirate Boron 2 
831      Pirate Split 1 
832      Pirate Split 2 
841      Pirate Paranid 1 
842      Pirate Paranid 2 
851      Pirate Teladi 1 
852      Pirate Teladi 2 

Goner: 
901      Goner Priest 1 
902      Goner Priest 2 

Terran: 
1131     Terran Male 1 
1132     Terran Female 1 
1133     Terran Male 2 
1134     Terran Female 2 
1135     Terran Male 3 
1136     Terran Male 4 
1137     Terran Female 3 
1138     Terran Male 5 
1139     Terran Male 6 
1140     Terran Female 4 

Special Characters: 
120      Elena Kho 
121      Saya Kho 
122      Brett Sara / Exterminator 
126      Julian Brennan 
131      Argon Female (info terminal) 
142      Argon / Terran female (unknown) 
158      Ban Danna 
815      Don Tony Marani 
816      Miria Marani 
910      Kyle Brennan 
915      Thomus Becket 
916      Ion 
917      Dogun 
1141     computer interface 
1100-    ware images 

Illuminatus ? Observe ? any Ideas ?

[dawnrunner]

My apologies for reviving such an old thread, but I"m coming back to this game after a bit of a long break, and I can't believe that there aren't any other mods that have tried to improve upon the immersion breaking pilot avatars used in-game.

At any rate, I'm somewhat interested in potentially modding the same file that the OP here... editing the video to show different images for each of the pilots within their designated span of the video. @dertien, if you're still active, any chance you could share the program you used to edit the dat video file? I can play it just fine in any given player, but none of my video editors seem to like it very much. Does anybody else know of a good way to edit the video?

If it can't be edited in its native format, how would I go about converting it back to a .dat? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[X2-Illuminatus]

.dat is not a specific file format. Any kind of file (music, video etc.) could be saved as .dat. In this case, the 00001.dat is an .mpeg video file (MPEG-1 iirc). No dedicated converting is required if you have an .mpeg file already, simply change the file ending to .dat.

[dawnrunner]

.dat is not a specific file format. Any kind of file (music, video etc.) could be saved as .dat. In this case, the 00001.dat is an .mpeg video file (MPEG-1 iirc). No dedicated converting is required if you have an .mpeg file already, simply change the file ending to .dat.

Thank you for that, your help is greatly appreciated. I've come to a similar conclusion about it being an MPEG1 (one of my video editors labeled it as such) , but I can't seem to be able to figure out a way to get an edited file back into a .dat format that the game recognizes. It's been a little frustrating.

Pair that with a seemingly? unrelated bug that I'm experiencing with my 100% clean Steam installation of X3: Reunion that nostalgia has pushed me to revisit, where the pilot videos don't loop as they should - there are a few milliseconds of an adjacent video with the incorrect character in the loop, and it seems like if I want to fix that issue I may be forced to do a little editing regardless.

I should probably start a new thread on that topic in the bug forum, but has anybody ever experienced it before? I know it's quite the coincidence given my tinkering noted above, but I've not touched my actual game files, instead copying out files for experiment... and even then I've only ever messed with those from my AP/TC file which is completely separate. It's a real head scratcher/hair-pulling-out-er!

EDIT: Between HitFilm and VLC, I've worked out the right process to make the .dat file editable, and then converting it back to an mpeg-1 set up the right way to work in X3 - which was probably the hardest part given that it's a relatively archaic format in 2019. Now if I could just fix that issue in Reunion... (I did open up a separate thread for it in the tech support forum).

EDIT2: I've finished up my modded 00001.dat for TC/AP and I'm pretty excited with the results. I just need to take a few screens and maybe video to show it off before submitting a new post for it. I'll post a link here to that post as well. I honestly can't believe that there aren't a ton of these alternate character mods about with how out of place the original character models appear to be within the rest of the game! Stay tuned!

EDIT3: For a slightly different alternate flavor, as promised above:
viewtopic.php?f=94&t=418382&sid=498606b ... 61b7e831e2

[manuches]

Is there another download link. The box link never downloads for me, even on different browsers.

[X2-Illuminatus]

Here's a working link.