For my upcoming project I'm trying to think up suitable solutions to come up with new content and game-mechanics. I was wondering if anyone out ther could give me a detailed description of the layering of the moveable bodyparts and background/foregrounds.
Until you're ready to create SWF mods in Flash, that data isn't useful.
Most Flash modders don't worry about layering, and there's only a tiny subset of mods which actually
modify the game's layering logic. The game's code does not provide a complete list of its layers; full understanding would require access to
@Konashion's source files (which we don't have).
I figure it;s a sequential list of layers on top of each other, could someone sum this up for me?
In it's complete form preferably.. That would really help me out to grasp the entire scope of my possibilities here!
Imagine that you walk into a car dealership. You ask the salesman to print off a complete list of every car you could buy - including trim variants, lease and financing options, paint colors, etc. You'd get hundreds of pages, and you'd immediately suffer information overload. Your new tome wouldn't allow you to make an informed decision. It would show you that many possibilities
exist, but it wouldn't help you to
understand any of them.
Here's a partial list showing some of the layers which constitute the girl's body. The names are inaccurate; they're human-readable, but if you wanted to do any serious modding work then you'd need to make the connection "chestUnder" → g.her.torsoBack.chestBack. The list completely omits hair layers, and it doesn't show some internal details
(such as the fact that hand sprites include sub-layers for nail polish). The list doesn't differentiate between clothing layers and skin layers, nor does it explain the meaning or importance of that distinction. It doesn't tell you anything about how the girl's layers interleave with the guy's layers, nor does it explain how those rules
change during bodycontact. It doesn't explain how some layers are masked or blended together in order to produce fancy visual effects (or to correct mistakes made during game development). You can learn this stuff by studying
decompiled code, but the return-on-investment is abysmal.
What you're asking for isn't really a list; it's an illustrated textbook (or perhaps an apprenticeship). The problem is that writing a textbook (or teaching an apprentice) requires a large time commitment. I spent dozens of hours documenting the behavior of the hair subsystem, but the resulting
posts would be useless to a novice modder
seriously: do not read those posts, it's a waste of your time. If I wanted to fully explain the hair system to someone who had never touched Flash then it would take hundreds of hours. I would need to postpone a bunch of other work, and I'd probably go insane halfway through the process. And that's just the hair subsystem! Hair animation doesn't actually occur until the characters move around ... so we'd need to write about IK and tweens and animation smoothing and etc.
Anything else you can tell me that is key to structurizing and remodelling the mechanics of moving parts, is also welcome
I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you don't actually need to know most of what you're asking for, and you'll have trouble finding someone who's willing to explain it. Flash is obsolescent. If someone already knows it then there's no harm in
using that knowledge, but
learning it in 2017 is probably a waste of the student's passion and potential.
Instead, I would encourage you to proceed with your dialogue writing work. Ask for help and guidance on
specific topics where you've run into difficulty (such as mod loading, dialogue script syntax, linetype prioritization, etc). If you have ideas then go ahead and post them. If you need something new then ask a Flash modder to create it.
