Hiya all,
I felt a pressing need to do something helpful (or at least in the slightest bit interesting) for the PS community. I usually don\'t frequent the forums but I hope to alot more over the coming months (and maybe even years!).
With that little intro out of the way, I\'d like to write a simple guide to customising your client to it\'s fullest capacity. This guide is written with Molecular Blue in mind, but who knows, various things may still be possible in future releases depending on how much the file structure changes. I\'ll also rewrite this guide to incorporate changes and updates when Crystal Blue arrives.
1. Your Character.You all know there isn\'t much variation at this point in time between character appearances. Basically, the only changes you can make for most species are those concerning clothing, hair and skin colouration.
However, you can change this completely. In the C:\\Program Files\\PlaneShift\\art\\textures\\races directory you will find folders for each of the currently implemented races in Planeshift, all containing the art files used for character appearances in-game. Note that the folders that start with an \'f\' denote female skins, whereas \'m\' denotes male. Obviously.
Edit them to your heart\'s content but remember one thing: you see characters according to your *own* files. Apply this to other people and you realise that they will not be able to see your custom skins. Sorry, but that\'s just the way it goes. Of course, you could always put your skins up for download...
[note: I highly recommend you use image editing software such as Paint Shop Pro 6 or Photoshop 7 for clean, natural looking images. There are many guides and tutorials on their use around the net if you need help.]
2. The GUIYes, you can change everything from the background of the chat box to the menu buttons, inventory, and even your health and MP bars. Files governing these appearances can be found in the C:\\Program Files\\PlaneShift\\art\\gui folder.
To properly skin the GUI you need to be aware of a couple of things at all times. There are two filetypes in this folder and you will be needing to alter both. TGA files are the hypothetical \'layer of skin\' that the game places over the other art file, the .png, which serves as a base or skeleton. The base file is used as a mask in-game, using pink as the colour of the invisible areas, whereas the skin layer is the image that will be visible to you.
.png files also manage the positioning of the GUI pieces. Try to make sure you keep your art in the same general position as the original art files- you may wish to make a backup of all the original files first and then compare the two.
3. Crystal Appearances.Although I havn\'t tested this, my assumption is that the tga files found in C:\\Program Files\\PlaneShift\\art\\textures are the ones you need to edit. Ignore the jpg\'s. Also in this folder you can edit the appearance of raindrops, although seeing as the file extension is .png, I\'m wondering if this is merely a mask type image. Must experiment.
4. Weapon Appearances.If you visited the last directory I pointed you to, you might be mistaken in thinking the subdirectory \'weapons\' in there contains the files you need. But it doesn\'t. What you\'re looking for is weapons.zip in C:\\Program Files\\PlaneShift\\art\\things.
The .spr files are the models of each weapon. I havn\'t been able to find a working editor for these files, so I can\'t be sure exactly what they are. However, I assume they\'re the actualy physical models.
When editing the .png files, be aware that the areas of black space outside the original weapon art will not be shown on the weapon model. You need to keep the basic shape and form or your skins may look distorted or worse.
5. Other art files/buttons/icons For the most part, C:\\Program Files\\PlaneShift\\art\\buttons contains all other misc files that I havn\'t yet talked about. You should probably ignore any jpg files you come across here.
6. Keymapping. People sometimes ask how to alter their key configurations. If you open up keys.xml (found in your root PS directory) you\'ll see a short list of all the currently assigned keys. You can edit this file in notepad, just make sure you save it as keys.xml.
7. Mouse Sensitivity. To alter the speed of your mouse movement when using the mouselook mode, open up psclient.cfg found in your root PS directory. Scroll down to Part 3 and look at the line just above it.
The default value here is 1.0 but I think this is horribly low. You may change this value to whatever you please, but for guidance I suggest you first change it to 3.0 and then test the difference ingame.
Well right now that\'s all I can muster. In the end I had accidentally deleted this *entire* post at least five times. Luckily for me I was using notepad to backup the text
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Additions to this guide are greatly welcomed if you wish to post here your own customisation methods. Any questions or comments, feel free also.
Thanks for reading and I hope it was useful!
