ASIMO says: Konichiwa! If you've ever attempted using the 'replacetexture' tags to get a new texture in the game, you must know what a pain in the arse it can be when it doesn't work, there's so many possible errors, and so many possible causes! This tutorial will hopefully help you out.

ASIMO says: Let's first take a look at an example screenie. You can see the modder was trying to get a custom skin to the model of an Aztec Warrior Priest. The bit of this XML telling the game what model and texture to use now consists of three types of lines; the line telling the game which Granny 3D model to use (Red), the line telling the game what textures to replace (Green), and the line telling the game what textures to replace them with (Blue). All of these lines can contain errors, but fortunately there's a way of telling in what type of line the error is!



ASIMO says: The first possibility is for the red bit to contain faulty info. The result:



ASIMO says: Indeed, you'd see nothing. There are really only two things that can cause this:

1. The model you are refering to does not exist
2. The file path contains a typing error.

ASIMO says: Another possibility is for the green bit to contain faulty info. The result:



ASIMO says: Yes, that's the original texture. There are a few things that could have gone wrong:

1. You misspelled 'replacetexture' or 'from', so the game doesn't get the order to change anything
2. The texture you are refering to does not belong to the 3D model. Check this through the Granny Viewer.
3. The file path contains a typing error¹.
4. You've used the 'replacetexture' tag so often the game becomes overloaded. This is not very probable, though, unless it's a major mod you're working on.

ASIMO says: Let's not forget about the blue bit! Too often it happens people make mistakes here and the unit shows up like this:



ASIMO says: A nice colour, but you probably didn't want it to look all black. Here's what could have caused it:

1. You misspelled 'to', so the game doesn't know what texture to use.
2. You ordered the game to use a texture outside the Art folder. This will never work, just stop trying.
3. You used the entire file path, including 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires III\Art\'. There's no need, AoE3 will automatically start in the Art folder².
4. The file path contains a typing error.

ASIMO says: These were all possible causes for your texture to show up wrongly, I'm off.


peugeot407

¹ = This happens very often. A nice example is the texture of a Spahi horse, the correct path is 'units\cavalry\spahi\spahi-horse-guard', but where ES normally uses underscores (_), now they've used a hyphen (-)! It's incredibly easy to type an underscore without noticing, then wonder for hours why your texture doesn't work.
² = "Starting in the Art folder" means 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires III\Art\units\...' should become 'units\...'.

This tutorial was made possible by the World Organisation for Robot Entertainment Spoofing

[This message has been edited by peugeot407 (edited 11-04-2010 @ 04:15 PM).]