Creating a New Contact

There are four potential places to start in creating a new contact, some of which are similar to those you need for other projects. You can start in any of these places but eventually, the individual or team needs to be ready to do all of them.

Option 1: Decide what you want the new contact/npc/villain to look like and make the costume in the character creator, AE, the special npc only costume creator, or some combination thereof. Now might be a reasonable time to give them a name, although you are still early enough in the process that renaming them is easy. Once you have everything formatted and imported there is a reason the existing files contain numerous files with *different* display names. You can go back and redo things after a certain point it just might not be worth the effort for something no *player* will ever see. Once you have that costume saved you will need to do a few things to make it accessible for your project (which I will get into in that specific section). Make your life easier and start in either AE or the regular character creator unless you absolutely have to start somewhere else. Note that the earliest steps of creating the costume file and getting it imported are identical whether you are creating someone intended to be a contact, trainer, enemy, hostage, ally, or anything else of this nature. Make the costume and save it on your computer. In fact make several costumes that interest you for projects you want to work on and save them in a good place. Now go try the dev only costume creator, understand what it does and how it works. If you absolutely must have something from in there you *can* import a custom character into it and then add that one thing and export them back out...is it worth the effort and still less annoying then using that thing from the start? You decide.

Option 2: Go hunting for where you would like your new NPC/Contact to stand on the map. type /loc when you get there and record those coordinates and which map you are on. If you have already learned how to do map placements of contacts great, if not it is not easy to put in type so I occasionally conduct live training and hope to eventually have a video. Get to know a few places that you are interested in doing some thing with and make sure you can get back to them. Put them in a notebook or on a file. Note: If you really want your contact to stand on a tiny, tiny rock be prepared to work very hard to get him in that exact spot.

Get to know the slash commands and the MMM menu. Practice spawning critters and jumping between maps if you are not already familiar. You may wish to set yourself invisible or invincible to avoid getting slaughtered by your own toys. This may not seem like part of the job but you need to understand this part of it to test. This is also another chance to play with the dev only npc creator...warning it is a one way trip you must shut down your server/game when done.

Option 3: Go learn and practice map placement of contacts/npc or partner with someone who has this skill down...MAKE SURE TO HAVE A BACKUP OF ANY MAP FILE YOU ARE PLAYING WITH before trying this or any map skills....believe me you can and will break a map learning how to do these things. This is related to option 2 but has you focusing on gaining the skill rather then making a creative decision.

Option 4: Make a copy of an existing .npc and .contact file place it in a somewhat rational spot for your project and name it for your character, get to know the structure of where various contacts live or ask and I can find pretty much anyone. Some of it is a bit weird but knowing where to look gets easier after awhile (warning do NOT try to move existing files, way to many things require exact paths and have hidden dependencies. Plus if we start moving things to new places we have even more potential issues transferring content between servers.) I find it easiest to clone and rename an existing .npc and .contact file and start making changes one by one after I have all the visual stuff ready. Let your new contact give the same mission as whoever you are cloning for right now. Feel free to actually be creative, and figure out data about the character, but until you are looking at the files and have pstrings working it won't matter. Once you are familiar with the info you need - an alternate Option 5 is to start in purely creative mode.

Note: You will have to deal with pstrings but you can ignore them and use whatever text comes with whoever you are copying at the very beginning

Now that you have a bit of an idea of the basics we need to get more into how you accomplish these various things (to be continued)