Fan Art BattleTech Custom F95 Characters

Atherin

Well-Known Member
May 25, 2017
1,296
11,178
BattleTech Custom Characters

So I was playing Battletech and thought to myself... man this is taking too much time away from playing F95 games. SO! Looked into modifing the game files to make all the pilots be girls from F95.

Battletech.jpg


Note that these only replace the "Backer" pilots that appear 5% of the time in the Hiring Hall. I tried making strait up new ones and in the current version of the game, a fair number of the internal lookups are done via a SQLite database, which is in some kind of jacked up 2nd-3rd normal form. Short story, broke the fuck outa my install. It's possible that creating new .json files for each pilot and adding them and the .pngs to the versionmanifest.csv would work for a new game, but I haven't tried yet.

The tarball below has the file structure replicated, should work for any 64-bit Windows installation but I based it off the Steam install. Just copy it into the same folder as the BATTLETECH folder and let it replace the files.
Steam install should be at:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common


I very much recommend backing up the data/pilot and sprits/portraits folders before hand. Just in case.

Games Included so far:
Become A RockStar
False Hero
Dr. Amana Sexual Therapist
Big Brother
College Life
The Witcher 3

I set them all to, unlike the normal "Backer" pilots, have no default skills selected and instead come with 20,000 exp to spend out of the box. A little cheaty I know... It's enough to take them up to "Elite" but it's less than half of what it takes to max a character out. Also they will have 12 health instead of just 3. Because I watched Cortana die once, I don't want to experience that pain again!





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garbage.kun

Newbie
Jun 8, 2018
17
26
hey,

nice work :D

just letting you know that there might be a couple of slight typo that can cause some problem if someone wants to try parsing the JSONs later

pilot_backer_Alaniz.json : i'm guessing that the escape character was supposed to be a \n ?

JSON:
 "Details": "'Being A Rockstar'\,The Rock Goddess. ..."
pilot_backer_Shields.json: the leading quote in the value was missing

Code:
"Icon": guiTxrPort_backerShields_utr"
thanks for the mod and sorry for my broken english :D(y)
 
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Ryahn

Birb Skull Fuckery
Staff member
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Game Compressor
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Jul 5, 2017
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Fixed it. I hate json. Why couldn't they have used XML like a human freekin being?
JSON is easier to parse and read than XML. I use to love XML myself but after working with JSON for a while now, I love it more.
 

Atherin

Well-Known Member
May 25, 2017
1,296
11,178
hey,

nice work :D

just letting you know that there might be a couple of slight typo that can cause some problem if someone wants to try parsing the JSONs later

pilot_backer_Alaniz.json : i'm guessing that the escape character was supposed to be a \n ?

JSON:
 "Details": "'Being A Rockstar'\,The Rock Goddess. ..."
pilot_backer_Shields.json: the leading quote in the value was missing

Code:
"Icon": guiTxrPort_backerShields_utr"
thanks for the mod and sorry for my broken english :D(y)
Thank you! Yeah I was just using NP++ to edit these, normally I just use good ol' not a real fucking language Java for my work so I only kinda knew what I was doing and was struggling to find sloppy typo bugs, unless they were big ones that kept the game from loading. Learned the "-" is a reserved character like "\". Had them all over the place in my strings... bleh... As long as we can learn and get better, the world is a good place. Right?

Also, I'm not much of a writer, I've played/mad-clicked all the games I put in and tried my best to write something intereasting, but I'm not super proud of the bios. They can be better. If anyone thinks up a better bio please post it! I'll happly swap it out and repost!
 

garbage.kun

Newbie
Jun 8, 2018
17
26
edited : uploaded the wrong file.

tl;dr : please backup your savegame and battletech.exe before trying this :rolleyes:

if you're still interested in making them as new pilots (not replacing the backers), if you don't mind using ModTek (still not allowed to post links. try googling "modtek battletech mod"), there's a mod called Omega Squad that does exactly that. The thing is ModTek will make some changes to your battletech.exe which i heard will confuse steam. i think there's a workaround for that though.

ModTek bypass the SQLite problem by (at least this is what i think it does. no guarantees) building another copy of the DB based on the installed mods and forcing battletech to use ModTek's DB.

I've made a quick and dirty script to give your pilots and icons a uniqueID and modifies the jsons to link them. Just to be safe, i also changed the isVanguard to false (might not be needed).

I've attached the result of that script. Unfortunately, it seems that there are pilots that refer to icons that doesn't exist. I removed those pilots for now. To try it, just install ModTek and copy the F95PilotModTek folder into the mods folder.

I haven't done an extensive testing, but i have load one of my old game, recruited one of them and at least it didn't broke my save :) the problem is, i'm also using RogueTech which gives me random crash from time to time. makes it kinda hard to identify the problem (if any) with this method.

A quick tip though, when i was still fiddling with the JSONs, i did damage the DB (at least, that's my best guess) and prevented me from starting or loading a game :D But since this is a ModTek mod, you can try clearing its cache (delete the .modtek folder). that solved it for me.

as with all modding, the pathway to better games are filled with... some risk:oops:

btw, yeah. Java is great. i'm stuck with python and scala for the foreseaable future though. python is seriously messy

"what is all this python recipes??? i want my javadocs!!":mad:
 
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Atherin

Well-Known Member
May 25, 2017
1,296
11,178
Updated the pack w/ some False Hero pilots. tx to the community for getting the fan art thread going.
Additionally the bugs that you found garbage.kun have been fixed.

(expired)





I'm not much of a writer. If anyone can come up with better bio's I'll jam them in!


And below is my edited GameConstants file. Mostly just cheats for funds management, salvage sells for something other then lol 5%, but not so much that you can just sit at any market and buy/sell create money.
 
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Atherin

Well-Known Member
May 25, 2017
1,296
11,178
Thanks garbage.kun! I know it's been a while, but I started using . So I spent the last few days on the Being a DIK: Fan Art thread figuring out some character assets.

I've done it! It's finished! Here is the result of all our hard work!

For anyone that plays , I've done a simple mod that will insert the DIK girls into the game as Ronin Pilots. You'll need to run it, which is pretty simple to use. Just drop that and this unzipped folder into the steam/steamapps/common/Battletech/Mods folder and bOOm! You got Maya, Josy, Jill, etc for pilots.

(Requires )
Updated to 1.1






I've also gone back and re-uploaded the original pack I made, that did not use Modtek, since apparently free uploads to zippy only last like 2 months.
Keep in mind, that while these two will not conflict, If you all-in and get something like that will certainly break the old one. You'll get the new img' with dude names/voices... but if your into that sorta thing... who am I to judge?
 
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Atherin

Well-Known Member
May 25, 2017
1,296
11,178
Apparently I never posted this. Likely wasn't finished... meh...



Looks like tag teams w/ characters from Dr. Amana, Dik, and Rockstar.
F95_CoPilots_Alex_x_Izzy.png F95_CoPilots_Cassie_x_Emily.png F95_CoPilots_Cathy_x_Jade.png F95_CoPilots_Jane_x_Amanda.png F95_CoPilots_Jill_x_Isabella.png F95_CoPilots_Lisa_x_Jade.png F95_CoPilots_Maya_x_Josy.png