Bubble's Workflow for Adding Costume Parts

Note: This page refers to tools that are not currently publically released. Once development on them is considered stable, and documentation written, they will be made available.

Data Gathering

Initial data for the costumes was generating using NDParse to extract all costume parts from the NPC .ND files. Further refinements of the program allowed the list to exclude duplicates. A final CSV of costume parts to add has been generated.

Additionally, GetVRML was modifed to dump the contents of all GEO files, which has provided additional information on parts that can be added, including parts not mentioned in the ND files directly due to default name assumptions used throughout the server.

CTM Processing

• The costume parts CSV is edited as needed for the next test run
• NDParse is run to convert the CSV into a number of CTM files
• These files are copied into the NDParse_Data folder of the mod directory tree
• ModMaker is run to merge these partial CTMs into the master CTM file by adding include statements at various points
• The output from ModMaker is copied into the bin server localdata folder
• Mapserver is run in the bin server to regenerate costume.bin
• The modified bin is copied to the test server
• If full in-game testing is planned:
  • The test server is shutdown, attributes regenerated and the server restarted
• Otherwise:
  • The test server is left running and the client is used to examine the results of the latest test in the character creator only