How to Make Your AI Unique

written by Springheel

Running into clones of the same AI over and over again can ruin the illusion of being in a realistic environment. Beyond that, it's just plain boring. Luckily, there are some fairly easy ways to make your AI look a little different from each other.

Skins

An easy--and quite effective--way to make your AI quite different from each other is to use an alternate skin. A skin is basically a different texture from the default. It could be as simple as changing the colour of an AI's tunic from blue to green, or a totally new texture that changes the clothing entirely (though obviously the basic shape of the model remains the same). See Creating Multiple Skins For A Model for more information on how this process works.

At the moment, not very many of The Dark Mod's AI actually have alternate skins to choose from, but things will improve slowly.

To use a different skin, you need to add the key/var "skin" "[skin name]" to the AI in the entity window. You can browse for skins in D3ed, but existing skins will not show up in the "Matching Model" section, so you would have to scroll through the existing skins to find them (they should be under "characters") (look this up). I don't know how this works in Dark Radiant.

Attaching A Different Head

Another option is choosing a different head. Most human AI have at least six alternate heads to choose from. See Swapping Heads on AI Models for instructions about how to do this.

Not every head looks good on every body. Some heads are too large or too small, or have necks that don't match up very well. Even on good heads, the necks can clip into the body in a somewhat displeasing way sometimes. Unfortunately we can't do much about that. Luckily it's usually only a problem when the AI looks up or turns in an odd way.