Looking For Help With Plugin Project

Looking for help with creating a mod plugin that has the function to make every enemy in the game unique based on what area the player is currently in. This maybe taken a step further if enemy names or id's can be detected, for example having NM's being unique models over the normal enemies. As of the main goal is to just have more unique enemies zone to zone. Making Apex crabs look different over the blue crabs in valkume dunes, or make all the enemies within Limbus be unique.

I'm more of a texture artist and have no experience with coding or creating a plugin. However it seems likely this plugin would work based on whats already been made. ZonenameID mod plugin would be likely be the best place to start and then finding out how to redirect the loading of game files to plugin mod folder.
https://github.com/onimitch/ffxi-zonename/blob/main/regionZones.lua#L6

If there's more artists that want to join in, it would help with the workload.

Some of the work already done for the project.









I have made some others, but they don't seem to fit the project.

Currently working on a bunch of crab textures at once as this is the quickest method to understand how the textures are wrapped without any extra guess work.

Those are cool
Limited knowledge on the subject
I think the game shares the same texture across the mobs
If it's possible at all you would need to intercept something and give just the selected mob the new skin without changing all of them, I don't think there is existing framework to do so

Or it would be a lot easier to make a multiplayer dress up addon for dat modding

The biggest blocker is going to be that if you want to load a different model through the game's system you're limited by the dat lookup tools, which will have limited ranges specified to hold model ids. Changing the model id based on zone and/or name is relatively easy, as is inserting dats into any available empty slots. But, there are likely not enough empty slots to add the amount of variety you intend to add, so you'd need considerable reverse engineering done to change the way model ids are resolved and the way the dats representing them are looked up.

Not sure what you mean by slots. Im assuming it means how many textured variations I can have within a given zone. I only plan to use 1 variation per enemy type for a zone unless there's multiple reskin enemies already within the area using different .dat files. Based on some feedback given to me, would require different xipivot pathways to be triggered based on the zoneID over the core game files.

There might be a way to add in NM textures in the game but due to stuff like private server rules and what not. It would give a unfair advantage and would be againist the rules to run the plug in. Unless its a forced spawned NM that uses its own .dat file over other enemies.

On unrealted note, I have tried AI'ing textures to come up with new designs and it ended up being a mixed bag since it could not have any clue what it was looking at when it was a unwrapped texture.



Scrapped Enemy.

It's not per-zone, no. The game uses a universal model ID for all models it loads and there are only a few thousand slots, most of which are in use already. A real solution would adjust the code that translates a model id to a loaded model/dat path so that you can use a greater range of model ids and allow you to load whatever you want for each mob.

Dynamically shifting pivot to different folders is certainly a lot easier to do, but it is clunky and has more limitations.

I don't know if this could be helpful or not, but all the Crawler's Nest [S] apex/locus mobs are recolors, could check and see how they are handled?

Its in its own folder and is basically a different .dat file from the other crawler files. Not helpful.

FFXI doesn't handle texture files like FFXIV does. It basically glues them on the models, where XIV it just selects from a set collection of .png files to dress up the 3D models. Basically XI has dupe of 3D models for every retextured enemy in the game, which further bloats the game size.