mod_characters_editor/docs/en.md

Characters Editor — editing a mod's characters in a form

The Characters Editor edits the characters of a mod while the game runs: the name in every language of the mod, the portrait, the walking sprite for RPG maps, the battle numbers, the recruit chance and the battle actions. Save writes the mod's files, and the game uses the change at once.

It opens from the tool box (the hammer on the toolbar) as Characters.

An edit and its result in the game

In RPG Plus, the hero of the village is the character rpg_hero of the mod rpg_plus_game. Choose that mod at the top, pick Hero, type a new English name and press Save (Ctrl+S):

Only the English line of the mod's locale/en.properties changed. The party member on the character panel right after:

The panel shows HP 42 and ATK 12 while the file says 24 and 6: in RPG Plus the hero's class and stats (Stats Engine with Classic RPG Rules) compute the battle numbers and write them over the file's values. In a game without stats the file's numbers are the ones used.

The form

• Id — the character's id; scenarios, parties, battles and maps find it by this id.
• Name — the translation key and a line per language of the mod.
• Portrait — the picture on cards and panels; … opens a grid to pick one.
• Charset (RPG) — the walking sprite on RPG maps (3 frames × 4 facings).
• Level, Health, Attack, Defence, Action points, Experience — the battle numbers of the character. When the character has Stats (from the Stats Engine), Health, Attack and Defence are read-only: the stats compute them, and the form shows the computed values under the fields (see the party block below).
• Recruit chance — 0 to 100: the chance to capture the character after beating it (see Recruiting).
• Behaviour and Actions — how the character fights and which battle actions it has.
• Loot — what drops when the character is defeated as an enemy: a list of rows, each with an item (a picker of the items the game knows), a minimum and a maximum count and a chance from 0 to 100.
• Fields of other mods — fields other mods describe for characters in their schemas (for example Stats Engine's class, stats and traits) appear in their own section.
• Id of a saved character is read-only; Rename… under it changes the id and the references to it (see below).
• Other fields — the rest of the character's JSON, edited as JSON and kept as it is.

The toolbar: New (Ctrl+N), Copy (Ctrl+D), Delete, Undo/Redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y), Save — only changed files are written; texts go into the mod's locale files.

Renaming an id

Rename… under the Id of a saved character asks for the new id and lists every file that names the character before anything is written: the character's own file, the scenarios that give it to a party or start a battle with it, the placements and maps that place it. Files of other mods that name it are only listed, and they are not changed. Rename saves your pending edits first; Undo rename in the toolbar puts every changed file back exactly as it was. Ids take letters, digits, _, - and / between their parts, and must be free in every mod.

The party block

Below the fields, the party block shows two things:

• Party leader — the character whose sheet the player walks with on RPG maps. The leader is the character the game's stats.player names; without one, the first character of the battle party. The block says Party leader or Not the party leader for the open character. Choosing a new leader is not a button yet: it is a setting of the collection, changed through the mod manager.
• Computed battle numbers — when the character has Stats, every stat with its value and its battle number. The hint says that health, attack and defence come from the stats, so you edit the stats, not these fields. Without Stats the block says so, and the battle numbers are the fields above.
• Joins the party when talked to — tick it to write the join scenario scenarios/<your mod>/party/<id>.scenario: it sets the flag <id>_joined to 1 and adds the character to the party (action party.add). Unticking deletes the file at once. The leader never joins (the box is disabled). If the character's actor object already has a dialog (its Interaction opens a scenario or has its own lines), the join comes after that dialog: the dialog plays, then the character joins, and the dialog is not replaced. The map editor writes this when the character is chosen in its Characters tab. To make the character a companion on a map, place it from the Characters tab of the RPG Map Editor: talking to the placed actor joins it, the actor leaves its cell and the companion walks behind the hero.

Characters of other mods

The list shows the characters of the chosen mod. Tick Entries of other mods to add the characters of its dependencies, marked ↗ owner. Editing one writes a patch in your mod (patches/character/<your mod>.json) with only the values you changed; the owner's file stays byte for byte the same. Reset to inherited removes the patch, and ↺ next to a field removes your value of that field. Only mods installed as folders can be written to.

If something goes wrong

1. Changed health or attack has no effect. The game computes the numbers from stats, as RPG Plus does for its party.
2. The character is not in the RPG Map Editor's palette. The palette's Characters tab lists the characters that have a walking sheet (Charset); a character without one cannot be placed. The Actors tab lists the actor objects of rpg_object, not the game's characters.
3. The mod list is empty. Packed mods cannot be edited.