1. Wizard ready Item Definition Lists
Illusion wizard is a wonderful tool, and from my understanding, it was originally created to make the patching process automated and therefore easier to apply and remove any mods that would otherwise require you to potentially unpack and re-pack several PP's which would take quite some time. It definitely lives up to its purpose and can be used for any file in a PP, including lst's.
If you don't know what an Item Definition List is (which I will simply call Item List), see here.
The idea is to have a "test" item list in addition to the ones you will be using to actually work with. You will also have a "test" pp file for all test items that you are developing (that includes importing too).
In my case, this is my set-up:
- mo_00_00_37.pp - item definition list and uncle oak xx file
- mo_00_00_38.pp - default items (item_00_15.xx through item_00_61.xx
- mo_00_00_39.pp - custom items. Contains all my custom items
- mo_00_00_40.pp - testing. For all testing purposes before I move them to 39.
I have set up several item lists, one of which includes
"[DigitalYuusha][ItemLists][TestSet].7z" for the wizard. It is similar to the default list, except every index from 15 through 61 point to the test pp. It doesn't make a difference when I'm just developing, but it does make a difference if I suddenly get bored and want to make scenes instead.
"[DigitalYuusha][ItemLists][TestSet].7z" for the wizard. It is similar to the default list, except every index from 15 through 61 point to the test pp. It doesn't make a difference when I'm just developing, but it does make a difference if I suddenly get bored and want to make scenes instead.
With the wizard, you can quickly switch between your working set and your testing set easily without having to swap pp files or re-pack anything. You can also quickly switch between any custom item sets that you've defined that would be suitable for specific scenes. You might be making a pretty long story that uses all sorts of items and simply cannot store them all in one set, so you logically break them up based on the set of scenes and when you're going back and forth to do some brushing up it becomes convenient to be able to close the poser, force apply item set, and then reload client again.
2. Map definition list
Similar to items, we can also map stages by name. Unfortunately, it seems like we can't specify the PP file this time, so it will be reading mo_00_00_07.pp. This means that if you have many maps, prepare to have a very large pp file. I personally have put together about 70 maps and the file is almost 1 GB (because some maps have too many things on it)
The file of interest is located in mo_00_00_05.pp called "mo00_00_00_08.lst"
When you look at it you'll see that it has indexes from 0 to 12 (it seems that the 12 is a mistake, because we can only choose 12 maps on digital yuusha, and none of the th... files exist).
All names can be customized so you don't have to use the defaults ms00_00_00, mh00_00_00, etc.
To change which map should be loaded, simply point to a different map name and re-pack the pp.
the second element contains the name of xx file that holds our map.
The third element is the xa file. Not sure what this is for, but it may contain things like wind behavior.
The fourth element is the xl file. It seems like some xl files crash and some don't. I don't know which ones will work or not, but it doesn't hurt to try. If there was a way to modify xl files that would be great.
All of the other elements can be re-mapped as well, but as it doesn't seem like you can customize them yourself, you will have to make do with what is given.
You can see that you can now keep all of your maps in one spot and simply re-pack the significantly smaller 05.pp file, AND you can keep dozens of different map sets for various purposes easily and efficiently (both space- and time-wise)
3.Character test pp
mo_00_00_00.pp is a massive pp containing 500 files. For me, it takes 10 seconds to pack. That's ridiculous, considering how often I'll be packing that thing since I'm experimenting with clothing mods and eventually character mods.
So what can we do about this? One option is to break it up into chunks. If you're only working on one character, you don't need to re-pack all the other characters. Simply unpack it, move the character you want to another folder and re-pack that one. You should end up with a significantly smaller file that should take much less time to pack.
4. Re-using lst files
Yuusha uses a_limb.lst and a_exp.lst across all female yuusha characters. Since all of the models are constructed the same way, this is a feasible way to do it. And it makes sense as well, since we want to reduce the number of files to edit.
This practice should be adopted when importing illusion characters, or importing your own custom characters. Typically, models in each separate illusion game use the same skeleton structure. That means you only need to write one limb and exp file and then just share it across all models.
HitArea may need to be personalized, but at least you don't have to modify multiple files when optimizing models.
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