is there a way to change a NPC's appearance permantly to something eg changing canderous to a droid, so when you meet him hes a droid, when you revcruit him hes a droid ect.

can anyone help.
thanks
-Darth Dragoon

I'm surprised nobody has replied yet. This is actually relatively simple and a search of the forums would have yeilded the answer. However if you want to make a permanent appearance change for a character you simply locate all of the UTC files for that character and change the appearance entries in this file.

I think for Canderous it would be relatively easy using Darkender's method, although I haven't checked the game files. To do something similar with Carth wouldn't work since there are multiple instances of the same filename used for different Carths in different modules. In that case, you would have to edit appearance.2da to get the desired results.

Depends on the result you are going for exactley. In most cases though chaning the UTC is better even if it means changing 20 of them because that way you can check for glitches caused by equipment. Also if you have something that checks if the appearance is valid based on a 2da entry you will likely cause a crash or a glitch by changing the actual 2da entry. Not to mention the increased chance of making things compatible if you only edit the UTC.

If someone's changing Carth by .utc, they would most likely have to get into changing scripts in modules too, because there are at least eight carth001.utc files and most of them have different dialogues. So no one could change only carth001.utc and expect not to break the game.

Characters that can't be changed solely by .utc because the have at least one .utc filename that is the same as another but the file is different: Carth, Canderous, Bastila, Jolee, Juhani, T3-M4 (both games), Atton, Bao-Dur, Disciple, G0-T0, Handmaiden, Hanharr, Kreia, Visas.

Characters that have uniquely named .utcs so could be changed by .utc: Mission, HK-47 (both games), Zaalbar, Mandalore (two same name .utcs, but they appear the same at a glance, so could be safe), Remote (same as Mandalore).

So, depending on who you wanted to change the appearance of, you'd likely have to get into scripting, and in some cases a lot of scripting, to handle all the different versions of carth001.utc or visas001.utc. Even if you changed 15 visas001.utcs, they all have the same filename so would all overwrite each other and tossed in Override, the game would end up using thw wrong .utc 14 out of 15 times. You would have to script each module with a carth001.utc and change it to call carth003, carth004, carth005, on and on, so it would call the correct version of Carth into the game. That's a lot more work than changing his .2da.

If you don't care about the way the characters look in cutscenes, then you'd only need to change p_(charactername).utc and have done with it...except they might turn headless if you changed them into a droid or a single-body alien and then put clothes on them. In that case you'd have to change their .2da entry anyway, so why bother changing the .utc?

If I wanted to change Handmaidens head (Brianna) to P_FEM_A_LRG_04 what part of her appearance should I edit under the .2da?

The column normalhead in the row with Party_NPC_Handmaiden_Head in appearance.2da should do it. Locate the correct head in heads.2da and put the row index (should be the same as the row number in an unaltered .2da) into normalhead.

You won't be able to change her head with her hood up, IIRC.

If someone's changing Carth by .utc, they would most likely have to get into changing scripts in modules too, because there are at least eight carth001.utc files and most of them have different dialogues.
(...snip...)
...they all have the same filename so would all overwrite each other and tossed in Override, the game would end up using thw wrong .utc 14 out of 15 times.

The naming conflict problem mostly happens if you put the UTC files in the override folder though. You could edit the UTCs directly inside the module RIM files instead, in which case multiple templates with the same name wouldn't be any problem. There is usually no need to rename and update references to anything in those cases.

The exception is when you need to edit data that isn't module specific but inside the BIF data files, but there are other, module-specific resources with the same name. Then you'd still get naming conflicts. :)

stoffe, how would that be done? Would your ERF/RIM Edit tool do that?

stoffe, how would that be done? Would your ERF/RIM Edit tool do that?

The ERF/RIM Editor can extract, insert and replace files in the module RIM files. Just make sure you get the last version released a few days ago, since there was a nasty bug with the RIM handling in earlier versions.

For mod installation, the latest version of TSLPatcher should also be capable of altering GFF format files (like UTC templates) inside MOD and RIM files directly without overwriting them.