The 14-02-23 update to the game changed the way game assets are stored and broke almost all mods including this one.
TLDR: The latest patch broke easy peasy modding for Gotham Knights and a lot of mods will never be fixed until someone in the Unreal modding community releases new tools so don't expect my mods to be updated any time soon.
The long explanation:
Before the update, modders could unpack and edit asset files (.uasset files) outside of of Unreal Editor and repack them as .pak files to be loaded by the game as mods. The new storage format (ucas/utoc files instead of pak files) means that this is no longer possible as tools do not exist to allow the editing and repackaging of uassets in the new format outside of Unreal's editor.
Mods that edit standard UE classes like skeletalmesh and texture2D can be remade in UE4 and stored in the new format. Mods like this that edit custom C++ classes cannot be remade in UE4 without access to the source code or by reverse engineering the code to recreate those classes in the editor.
So as of the date of writing this, this mods and the others I have made will not work with any version of the game updated past this date and it is unlikely they can be remade until new UE modding tools exists. I know some tools that are in development to handle to ucas/utoc format but I have no idea how development is progressing.
By updated, do you mean working after the Feb 23 patch? I'm curious to know if there are tools that allow modding to the same extent as before the patch but regardless, you can release any version of this mod on the Nexus you want.
If full modding is back, I might start playing the game again but I can't be bothered to create, release and maintain my own mods for this game after WB decided to nuke modding the first time.
TLDR: Do whatever you want with the files of this mod.
Yes, updated for the newest patch. There aren't any third party tools as far as I'm aware, but you can mod the game by compiling UE 4.25 Plus from the source/github. It's not as simple as editing the assets with UAsset and packaging though. You'll need your UE project set up with dummy assets for every reference your edited assets has/will have. The assets from this mod don't have too many references though, so it's fairly simple to repackage with the Editor.
I don't have the game installed but I'm 95% I didn't mod the mask in that pic. In the only other pic I have of the Knight Ops skin, he has blue eyes... so maybe it's linked to the colorway? It looks like I'm using an all black/grey one here but I don't remember the name of it. Or maybe it's just the lighting in photo mode. Sorry I can't be more help.
oh ok the logo looked blue but guess it does look grey now that you say that. i really want to play the new game plus mode with this skin but with like the knightwatch mask but i dont know how to do mesh codes LOL
Meshes are stored in uassets. Uassets are containers that include references to physics assets. You can also swap e.g. hair meshes by simply copying/renaming the uasset, renaming the export data by editing the name map and packing it with the correct folder structure. So you can have mesh A in folder A, put it in folder B and rename it to mesh B. Then edit the name map so the export data does not say mesh A in folder A but mesh B in folder B and you're done. It is much simpler than editing recipe files.
No worries. If you want to know why I prefer to edit recipe files, I'll briefly explain:
1) AssetEditor throws an error if I try to save a mesh uasset, saying it won't save correctly. Whether this is true or not when all you are doing is editing the header, I don't know, but why risk it?
2) Physical mesh swapping, in general, means that meshes aren't where they are supposed to be so even if the outfit you're trying to change looks OK, other files that are looking for that mesh are gonna find the wrong one. It probably won't break your game but you can end up making unwanted changes or producing graphical bugs.
3) Physical mesh swapping often isn't enough to get the result you want. In the case of hair, you need to change the hairline used in the face materials for that outfit. If you swap a full helmet for a small mask, you need to add hair in the head slot for that outfit. It's just easier to edit outfits as a whole because you can account for everything and it only affects that outfit.
4) As Zhandao says above, the mods are only a few KB in size because the recipe files are just text.
There's probably more to it that I can't think of right now but for me it's cleaner and simpler and gives the results I want, so I do it that way. But if you decide to make a mod, you can do whatever you want or what makes sense for the project you are working on.
Are we talking about the same mod? I don't replace the Knightwatch hair, I put it on all the other outfits. If it's not working, maybe you have a conflict with another mod. I played the whole game with both mods installed and this fixed the physics on every hair mod I made (although I release that one). Make sure you don't only install that mod and this one and remember that it doesn't work with mesh replacement mods that involve exporting/reimporting the hair mesh out of the game without it's physics info intact.
I meant notryzer's mod, the mod that switches Dick's Knightwatch hairstyle with his default hairstyle, my bad. I only have those two and a mod that alters his Knightwatch colors to look more comic-book accurate. Which other mods should I install?
I unfortunately still don't know how to add the FnX physics pointers to my custom hair meshes. I came up with a workaround by adding the modifications I wanted to the head mesh instead of the hair mesh, and then just used the original vanilla hair mesh. Long story short, I just uploaded a new version of my Day-One hair mod which is now compatible with your mod (and which, thanks to your mod, now has working physics for all costumes): https://www.nexusmods.com/gothamknights/mods/214
This is because there is physics data is stored in the BaseMesh. And you can use anybody's BaseMesh so BaseMesh provides many value properties, whereas the the Suitbase is the visible physical mesh*
I found this out because I swapped Jason Todd Batman's CC_AL_Bruce_BatmanSuit_BaseMesh with CC_AL_Bruce_Suit06_BaseMesh and I lost all cape physics.
Moreover: Batman by Suit 6 is way after his cape is torn off in the intro. (There are no capes in the Suit6 recipes, if not earlier)
(e.g. Jason's basemeshes don't have a headpiece node (only one head node) so it'll crash if I try giving him headwear.. Unless I swap him to Nightwing's basemesh. And there is zero visual difference. It just gives the visual mesh the capability of adding a second headslot mesh)
The basemesh is just a single triangle and the bones required to animate the the complete outfit. The replacement basemeshes in this mod contain every single bone from every outfit used by a single character.
If you are doing a complete swap from one character to another then yes, swapping the basemesh out will do the same thing. The trouble is combining bones from two different characters. Which I think you already found out, doing the Robin/NW head swap.
On a rigged mesh, different bone placements will distort the mesh. You can't put Nightwing's masks on Red Hood's face, even if it fitted correctly, which it doesn't, and even if they share the same skeleton, which they do, because all his face bones are in a different place. If this happens, the only way around it is to re-shape and re-rig, which defeats the purpose of maintaining physics by copy and pasting a few lines in Asset Editor, which is the full skope of this mod.
There are some possibilities with doing physical mesh swaps AND adding cloth bones only to the basemesh because they are not connected to the main armature and therefore their placement won't affect any other part of the mesh and probably doesn't matter at all if past experience is anything to go by. But you still need to find a way to link the physics data in UE4 by installing the Chaos physics plugin and linking dummies with the same name.
Lol I realized I was doing something similar to what you're doing.
However what I did was modify the Basemeshes so that they referred to e.g. MaleHeroic_Skeleton, as Basemeshes are instances of the base _Skeletons.
As such, not every variable from the base _Skeletons were passed to each Basemesh. Also, the _Skeletons also define the "sockets" (e.g. rightHandgunHolsterParent leftHandgunHolsterParent) and their rotation/placement/scale.
Thus I needed the base skeleton to recognize that those two variables were passed to the mesh. Meaning I had to replace two of the bone names, renaming them (thigh_twist or something). Ones that as you said didn't really connect to the suitbase mesh. This also let me modify the sockets as mentioned.. by creating a duplicate custom _Skeleton... meaning this basemesh was now an instance of MY skeleton.
Thus holstered up Batman with cape.
I also just did - Nightwing as character base: Nightwing's head, Robin's Knightwatch suitbase, and Batman's basemesh (to have both cape physics AND to refer to MaleHeroic_Skeleton. Threw "leftEscrimaHolder" "rightEscrimaHolder" onto the thighs again. Then I scaled down to 0.
And then there are also the FACERIG skeletons. Lol. And you can define those in various locations. Except you can't sometimes.
(I managed to pull martial law and replace all the facerigs with Bruce facerigs (Animation folder). Perfect Batmen. But weird when not in Bathead.)
Oh and that problem with Dick is annoying because it happens with Bathead also. There's one missing bone, or named and positioned differently. Annoying. Especially because I can actually use Bathead on Robin. Dick is just... a Dick
34 comments
TLDR: The latest patch broke easy peasy modding for Gotham Knights and a lot of mods will never be fixed until someone in the Unreal modding community releases new tools so don't expect my mods to be updated any time soon.
The long explanation:
Before the update, modders could unpack and edit asset files (.uasset files) outside of of Unreal Editor and repack them as .pak files to be loaded by the game as mods. The new storage format (ucas/utoc files instead of pak files) means that this is no longer possible as tools do not exist to allow the editing and repackaging of uassets in the new format outside of Unreal's editor.
Mods that edit standard UE classes like skeletalmesh and texture2D can be remade in UE4 and stored in the new format. Mods like this that edit custom C++ classes cannot be remade in UE4 without access to the source code or by reverse engineering the code to recreate those classes in the editor.
So as of the date of writing this, this mods and the others I have made will not work with any version of the game updated past this date and it is unlikely they can be remade until new UE modding tools exists. I know some tools that are in development to handle to ucas/utoc format but I have no idea how development is progressing.
If full modding is back, I might start playing the game again but I can't be bothered to create, release and maintain my own mods for this game after WB decided to nuke modding the first time.
TLDR: Do whatever you want with the files of this mod.
Edit: It might be "Chroma Grey Ghost"
1) AssetEditor throws an error if I try to save a mesh uasset, saying it won't save correctly. Whether this is true or not when all you are doing is editing the header, I don't know, but why risk it?
2) Physical mesh swapping, in general, means that meshes aren't where they are supposed to be so even if the outfit you're trying to change looks OK, other files that are looking for that mesh are gonna find the wrong one. It probably won't break your game but you can end up making unwanted changes or producing graphical bugs.
3) Physical mesh swapping often isn't enough to get the result you want. In the case of hair, you need to change the hairline used in the face materials for that outfit. If you swap a full helmet for a small mask, you need to add hair in the head slot for that outfit. It's just easier to edit outfits as a whole because you can account for everything and it only affects that outfit.
4) As Zhandao says above, the mods are only a few KB in size because the recipe files are just text.
There's probably more to it that I can't think of right now but for me it's cleaner and simpler and gives the results I want, so I do it that way. But if you decide to make a mod, you can do whatever you want or what makes sense for the project you are working on.
Take it easy.
I unfortunately still don't know how to add the FnX physics pointers to my custom hair meshes. I came up with a workaround by adding the modifications I wanted to the head mesh instead of the hair mesh, and then just used the original vanilla hair mesh. Long story short, I just uploaded a new version of my Day-One hair mod which is now compatible with your mod (and which, thanks to your mod, now has working physics for all costumes):
https://www.nexusmods.com/gothamknights/mods/214
I found this out because I swapped Jason Todd Batman's CC_AL_Bruce_BatmanSuit_BaseMesh with CC_AL_Bruce_Suit06_BaseMesh and I lost all cape physics.
Moreover: Batman by Suit 6 is way after his cape is torn off in the intro. (There are no capes in the Suit6 recipes, if not earlier)
(e.g. Jason's basemeshes don't have a headpiece node (only one head node) so it'll crash if I try giving him headwear.. Unless I swap him to Nightwing's basemesh. And there is zero visual difference. It just gives the visual mesh the capability of adding a second headslot mesh)
The basemesh is just a single triangle and the bones required to animate the the complete outfit. The replacement basemeshes in this mod contain every single bone from every outfit used by a single character.
If you are doing a complete swap from one character to another then yes, swapping the basemesh out will do the same thing. The trouble is combining bones from two different characters. Which I think you already found out, doing the Robin/NW head swap.
On a rigged mesh, different bone placements will distort the mesh. You can't put Nightwing's masks on Red Hood's face, even if it fitted correctly, which it doesn't, and even if they share the same skeleton, which they do, because all his face bones are in a different place. If this happens, the only way around it is to re-shape and re-rig, which defeats the purpose of maintaining physics by copy and pasting a few lines in Asset Editor, which is the full skope of this mod.
There are some possibilities with doing physical mesh swaps AND adding cloth bones only to the basemesh because they are not connected to the main armature and therefore their placement won't affect any other part of the mesh and probably doesn't matter at all if past experience is anything to go by. But you still need to find a way to link the physics data in UE4 by installing the Chaos physics plugin and linking dummies with the same name.
However what I did was modify the Basemeshes so that they referred to e.g. MaleHeroic_Skeleton, as Basemeshes are instances of the base _Skeletons.
As such, not every variable from the base _Skeletons were passed to each Basemesh. Also, the _Skeletons also define the "sockets" (e.g. rightHandgunHolsterParent leftHandgunHolsterParent) and their rotation/placement/scale.
Thus I needed the base skeleton to recognize that those two variables were passed to the mesh. Meaning I had to replace two of the bone names, renaming them (thigh_twist or something). Ones that as you said didn't really connect to the suitbase mesh. This also let me modify the sockets as mentioned.. by creating a duplicate custom _Skeleton... meaning this basemesh was now an instance of MY skeleton.
Thus holstered up Batman with cape.
I also just did - Nightwing as character base: Nightwing's head, Robin's Knightwatch suitbase, and Batman's basemesh (to have both cape physics AND to refer to MaleHeroic_Skeleton. Threw "leftEscrimaHolder" "rightEscrimaHolder" onto the thighs again. Then I scaled down to 0.
And then there are also the FACERIG skeletons. Lol. And you can define those in various locations. Except you can't sometimes.
(I managed to pull martial law and replace all the facerigs with Bruce facerigs (Animation folder). Perfect Batmen. But weird when not in Bathead.)