Is there a way to add meshes/textures to the game?

[impiousimp]

I would consider making some new clothes items like a hoodie or something if I knew it were possible.  Is there anyway to add it to the database?

[Aggelakis]

Add, no, not without hacking that puts you over the DMCA line. PC already toes that line very carefully in and of itself.

You can use the /data/ folder to provide overrides but a) only you & other people who have downloaded them will see them, and b) you will no longer see the original thing you used to implement your override.

For instance, the vidiotmaps pack was a very popular override - it replaced the uninformative ingame maps with info-packed versions. But you could no longer view the original maps. Some people created clothing overrides, but only the people who downloaded the overrides could see them (replacing, e.g. the Bandeau top with something else; someone who downloaded it would see the new item but anyone who didn't download it would see the Bandeau top...and the people who downloaded the override no longer had access to the Bandeau top).

[impiousimp]

I would like to override then.  And how do you do that?

[GamingGlen]

I'd like to know as well.  There's plenty of costume options I'll never use, the plethora of shoulder spikes and pads being some.

[Leandro]

The meshes are in a propietary format (the .geo files inside object_library) and there are currently no tools to write files to that format (though the format is somewhat documented and there's code to read them in Paragon Chat in order to load the maps). Making a converter from another format to geo is not out of question, but it just hasn't been done yet as far as I know.

However, just getting the geo files is only part of the puzzle. In order to reference the meshes in geo files, the game uses a bunch of bin files under geobin (not very complicated to make) but also defnames.bin contains basically an index of the pieces. This last file is where things get bad, because it means you cannot distribute your own geo and geobin files and have others use them; defnames.bin won't reference them.

It's not an impossible problem to solve; Paragon Chat could rebuild defnames.bin based on the geo/geobin files you have in your data folder. But it's not a trivial thing to do.

[Codewalker]

There's a geo viewer that Guy wrote back in... 2011 I think... based on some work he and I did with a debugger and the geo loading code in the COH client. I've posted it a couple times, and also given the source code to a few people who showed interest in building conversion tools, but as far as I know nobody ever followed through and produced a working converter.

Paragon Chat uses a stripped-down variant that skips sections of the file that it doesn't need to care about, such as texture UV coordinates and vertex bone weights.

Textures are a lot easier to deal with. They do use a custom header, but it's fairly simple and there are a few tools out there -- mostly pigg viewers -- that can create them with varying degrees of correctness. I don't think any of them get the flags field quite right, but it doesn't matter if you're just replacing textures, since the real flags are loaded from the copy in the pigg file first (this is also why any replacements have to be the same size as the original).

Adding stuff to the menu requires modifying costume.bin, which is a whole other can of wax.

[GamingGlen]

Thanks for the info.

[impiousimp]

What I would do for a proper hoodie.