Fixing appearance issues for custom skin colors

[Silver_fox 398]

I&B allowed players to customize their characters' appearance, including skin color, but those customized characters do not always display as well as their more default counterparts. I don't know why I decided to make a drow-like High Elf, but that made me notice that the game has quite a number of textures that don't work well with non-standard skin colors - the skin shade sometimes bleeds on the armor parts or alters the tone of things that are obviously not a part of character's skin.

 

In Sacred 2, application of the character's skin color depends on two factors: the "skin" shader applied in the surface.txt to surfaces of every items that show at least some skin, and the special h/hx textures. I looked at the scripts and textures to understand where the troubles with appearance come from, and it turned out that skin shader effect is generally linked to the alpha channel of h/hx textures, but some of those textures that were created before I&B don't have any alpha at all. So I quickly made a number of fixes that correct the hx maps and improve the appearance of some items for non-standard skin colors (the change is more noticeable with dark skins, but shows on all).

The first correction, albeit a smaller one, is for the h texture of the High Elf herself - the original texture did not have an alpha channel, so the skin shade was applied to the entire Elf. I changed the texture to prevent the skin color from showing on eyes and teeth (according to the look of h map, this is what the devs intended, but did not make). The effect of original h texture is pictured on the left, on the right is the changed texture:

 

And a similar correction for the Dryad:

The following changes correct the look of various armor sets. The pictures show only one color variation per set, but the actual change affects all color variations.

 

For the High Elf Diamond Set - the chestplate and legsplates got correct h/hx textures with added alpha channel:


For the High Elf Raven Set - the torso h map was corrected so that the skin color does not bleed on the shoulder plates anymore:

 

For the High Elf Leather Set - the torso h texture was corrected to prevent the skintone from showing on the back of the armor:

The last is the fix for the chest from High Elf Pearl Set. This one is trickier. The h map for this item was correct, but the neck still showed the unaltered skin color. This was because surface.txt entries for this part of the texture that includes the neck did not have the skin shader applied. This item was fixed by changing the script and altering the textures to accommodate the different shader. Alternatively, it could have been fixed by altering the UV-mapping of the model, but for me changing the textures was easier.

 

These fixes would be released with the next Community Items Mod, but if there is enough demand, I can post them as separate mini-mod.

 

Also, the skin color problems can appear on many Fallen Angel items (Dragon Mage and his wardrobe seem to be completely OK), and I don't think that I found all such issues. If any of you play as characters with customized appearance and noticed glitches with the way armor looks, you can post about these issues in this thread and I'll try to correct them.