[Tutorial]Small modifications

Hi there, and welcome to another kind of blog entry!

Today I don't want to discuss just one big topic. Instead, I want to make a list of small, easily overlooked tips, which are actually pretty helpfull.

1. Changing the ingame tips.
2. Changing the startup logo.
3. Changing the weather on a map.
4. Changing the ingame graphics settings.
5. Adding hair or faces to the character select screen.


1. Changing the ingame tips

The ingame tips are the small notes at the top of your screen you see while you are playing.

Changing this makes your game more proffesional, and it can save you alot of time. When you first open the list of tops, there will alot of tips about maintainences and links to the original Rose Online website.

Well, you probably don't share the same dates for maintenences, and you probably don't share the same website either. So lets change it, shall we?

The file you are going to need is LIST_HELP.STL, which is located in 3DDATA>STB in your 3DDATA.VFS file.

As you probably noticed, this is an STL file. There is also a STB file, but you don't actually need it unless you want to change the color of the announcement.

Once you open the STL file with your favorite STL editor, the rest is easy. There are about 4 rows in the STL, the first 3 are numbers, and the last row contains the tips.

Just change the tips, save, and patch.

Easy, right? Now, so you don't forget anything, here is a list of things I always change when I start a server:
- Change the Rose Online website references to my own site;
- Change the Rose Online maintenance notices;
- Change the promotion of certain item mall items, because I might not have those items in my item mall;
- Change the tip about flying to other worlds in case I allow players to use /go;
- Change the tip about getting skills in junon, in case I allow players to use /allskill.



2. Changing the startup logo

This is going to be short and easy. I'm not a designer or anything, so I cant tell you how to máke a logo. But changing the logo is one thing I can explain.

What logo am I talking about? I'm talking about the logo you see when the game starts up. You know, the blue/gray logo that says Rose online.

You might want to change this, because it's always good to give your client a look that matches your server. If your server is called "Flaming Rose", and your game starts up with a Blue ice-like color.. It's not that much of a problem, but it adds some professionality to your server.

You can find the logo in your client folder, ánd in 3DDATA>CONTROL>RES>LOGO.DDS. I suggest you replace the both of them with your own logo, just in case.

Remember, your logo must be either in DDS- or PNG format. Any other extension will not work.

(PNG could be something else, I'm not entirely sure)



3. Changing the weather on a map

I remember walking in Xita Refuge, thinking it would be funny to replace the leafs with snow. One way of doing this was replacing the actual leafs effect with the snow effect. But changing that would give problems on the long run.

The best way to do this, is by opening LIST_ZONE.STB. In this STB file, find the row of the map who's weather you want to change.

Once you find the row, take a look at the header of your STB editor. It should say Weather somewhere.

The best way of finding out which weather uses which ID, is by checking the lines of maps, of which you know have different weather conditions.

For example:
1. Xita Refuge uses leaves, so go to the line for Xita Refuge.
2. The weather row in the line for Xita Refuge is 2, that must mean ID 2 equals falling leafs!

You can do the same for Luna to find out the snow ID.

One tip I can give you is to release a LIST_ZONE.STB on the forum with all weather effects removed, because some computers just cant handle processing all of these effects, causing major lag.

The problem with this is, with your busy life as a developer, you are bound to forget to update it:
1. You release the LIST_ZONE.STB without weather effects.
2. 3 weeks later you release a new map.
3. A player downloads the LIST_ZONE.STB on the forum, and puts it in his client.
4. The player will no longer have the new map you added, but cán go to it, causing his character to bug.



4. Changing the ingame graphics settings

I guess this is one of the cool, yet strange things in Rose Online. You are able to change the graphics settings in the game itself, making it look great.

So why isnt this an option for the players? Why cant they change it?

I have nó idea. If you put the settings the way you want them to, the game looks really smooth. The only thing I could think of was that they didn't want anyone changing it, so players wouldn't set the settings higher than their computer could handle.

I guess it's understandable, but that doesn't stop me from putting the settings just a líttle bit higher.

The file we are looking for is located in SCRIPTS>INIT.LUA. Extract the file, and open it with notepad.

If it looks confusing to you, don't worry, just search for this line:
setFullSceneAntiAliasing ( 0 )

Change the 0 to an 8, save, put it in your client and start the game. Vóila, if your computer is able to handle it, you should see the effect as soon as you start playing.

Look out though, the higher the settings, the higher the requirments are for your computer. So you should play around with the settings, as long as you don't set them too high.

Even if your computer can handle it, older computers your players might be using, wont. The best thing to do in this case is to just release this file on your forum, with a small guide. This way players can choose weither or not the want to change it, and how high they want to set everything.



5. Adding hair or faces to the character select screen


Sometimes developers don't like the NaRose hair and faces, so they add the Wish Online hairs and faces, which are more detailed, and look better in my humble opinion.

The problem is, Wish Online has alot more hairs and faces, so in the end, even if you replace the old hairs and faces, you would only be using about 60% of them.

The file you need to change this can be found here: SCRIPTS>SYSTEMFUNC.LUA. Just like in my guide about changing the ingame graphics, open the file with notepad.

Now the line you should be looking for is this one:
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "10", 78);

First off, never delete the following line:
SC_SelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 ,0 );

It sort of indicates that this is the end of the list of faces, which is what we will be working on. Alright, lets see what we have here.
The 1 indicates that is a face, the 10 means it's the 10th face, and 78 is the ID of the face.

The 1 should always be a 1 when adding a face, the 10 should go up by one for each face you are adding, and the 78 is the id of the face you want to add, which can be found in: 3DDATA>LIST_FACE.STB

Open up LIST_FACE.STB. As you can see, there will be about 4 filled lines, followed by 5-6 empty lines, and so on. What you need is the first line of each block of 4 lines.

Why is this? Well, the first line is the normal face, the few lines that follow are the same face, except they have different facial expressions. For example, it would be the same face, except it's crying, or angry.

Lets say we want to add a face with ID 95. If the line in SYSTEMFUNC.LUA used ID 10, like in my previous example, we will have to use ID 11:
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "11", 95);

That's as easy as it gets. Our list with faces will now look like this:
--face
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "1", 1);
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "2", 8);
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "3", 15);
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "4", 22);
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "5", 29);
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "6", 36);
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "7", 43);
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "8", 64);
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "9", 71);
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 , "10", 78);



SC_SelectItem4CreateAvatar( 1 ,0 );

The same concept applies to the hairs, except you will have to find the ID in LIST_HAIR.STB, and you will have to add it in the section that starts with:
--hair
SC_AddSelectItem4CreateAvatar( 2 , "1", 0);