A useful rant...

... finally!

Something About Mary 2.0 is out now. I have figured out (thanks to Agetian/Dulcaion) why just adding an inventory to an existing character does nothing. Inventories have to be attached directly to .mobs.

And you can't edit the existing .mobs of NPCs - even the simple ones of the gals in the Snake Pit, which are surely the simplest NPC .mobs in the game - because ToEEWB won't open things it can't understand (very sensible), and there are still things in the .mobs that haven't been figured out. (Because they actually refer to Arcanum? That'd be depressing!)

So how did I do it? Well, at first I powered up the Hex Editor - ahh, how good it felt to be doing some proper hacking!!! - but that was too long winded. So I did something much simpler.

First, I copied over the gals into the modules folder of ToEEWB, then tried to open them. They wouldn't, BUT the start of the .mob did load, so all the relevant stuff was in there - X and Y locations, offsets, rotation etc - and when I clicked 'new (mob)', they wre still there! The X & Y were already in and I only had to select what I wanted (practising the KISS principle again - at one point I tried to include all the little fiddly ones like render height etc, but the gals involved, the twins, didn't spawn properly. They were there but their models weren't, they were just empty circles on the ground).

So, I made my new ladies with attached gear. As you know, the names of the .mob files are based on their guids, and these are used for internal communication (ie .mob of NPC links with .mobs of their inventory items). So you can't just fiddle with the guids.

BUT you can happily fiddle the names of the files. So all I had to do was change the name of the .mob file to match the existing one. The internal guids were unchanged (different) and still happily linked to the .mobs of the inventory items. But the program will now read the new .mob file, with linked inventory, in place of the existing one.

Easy! And also possibly aleady explained in the tutorial section of ToEEWB, I haven't read it that closely ;). Yet another thing on my to-do list! Damn this is a great tool.