MM's Stickie Thingie - MIA

[Uncle Yuan]

My son and I have been playing the original campaign - but Frank has no stickie thingie.  All the animations are intact, but until he's knocked out he's stickieless.  Any ideas?

[ow_tiobe_sb]

All the animations are intact, but until he's knocked out he's stickieless.  Any ideas?

Performance anxiety?

I'll preface myself by saying that, if this is a known problem, 'tis news to me.  A few possibilities come to mind:

1. Video card issues: This problem seems unlikely for FF1, but it might be worth investigating.  IIRC, upon its initial offering, FFvTTR created some incompatibility problems with ATI Radeon video cards that either required a patch or a workaround.  Of course, that problem did not affect FF1, and I'm not sure why Minute Man's staff would exhibit symptoms of a problem and why nothing else seems to be demonstrating the same rendering error.

2. Mesh or skin misconfiguration: Normally, I would ask whether or not a glow or reflection map were missing or in the wrong directory (or if the texture had been made transparent via an alpha layer, which, AFAIK, is not native to the mesh or its skin); however, since you made it clear that you are playing the campaign and not using a custom or modified character, the problem may be due to

3. Defective game disc or corrupted data on your hard drive: If no other investigations bear fruit, try reinstalling the game.  Perhaps the art.ff file became corrupted during installation.  Of course, if your game disc is defective (and no other problems exist), reinstalling will not help.

There are a few things you might try first.

A. Create a custom character in-game using the Minute Man mesh.  See if the staff shows up in the in-game character creator.  If not, we may be looking at problems 1 or 3 above.

B. Open your art.ff file (located in your "Data" directory of the game installation path).  It should be approximately 109,000 KB.  You can do this by making a backup copy and naming it "art.zip."  WinZip or another .zip archiving programme should be able to read the backup copy of art.ff ("art.zip") as if it were a normal archive file.  Locate the files belonging to the Minute Man mesh and skin.  They should be located at the path "Art\library\characters\minute_man."  Extract these files into your custom mesh folder.  Then try to view Minute Man's character.NIF using CTool1.  Again, if the staff is absent in CTool1, we are probably looking at either problem 1 or problem 3 above.

C. If you are using Windows XP SP2, make certain that you have applied patch 1.3.

I'm certain that someone else will think of a simpler or more well known solution.  Good luck!

ow_tiobe_sb
Phantom Bunburyist and Fop o' th' Morning

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

It is a known problem.  It's a new bug brought on by patch 1.3.  Fortunately, it's easy to fix, just delete the unpacked .nif for MM in the data folder, which will force to game to use the unpatched one.

[ow_tiobe_sb]

And there you go.  Much simpler.  Thanks, cat! :)

ow_tiobe_sb
Phantom Bunburyist and Fop o' th' Morning

[Uncle Yuan]

It is a known problem.  It's a new bug brought on by patch 1.3.  Fortunately, it's easy to fix, just delete the unpacked .nif for MM in the data folder, which will force to game to use the unpatched one.

Irrational games > data > art > library > characters > MM

deleted .nif

Stick is back, but no animations - he just glides around and doesn't swing

And apparently, "copying" the file doesn't allow you to repaste it after you delete, so now I don't have that file at all to replace it.

[ow_tiobe_sb]

Did you also delete the keyframes?  I believe the problem you describe happens when a NIF is missing its keyframes or trying to use incompatible keyframes.  Good luck!

ow_tiobe_sb
Phantom Bunburyist and Fop o' th' Morning

[Uncle Yuan]

That did the trick!

Except now I'm caught up replaying the original campaign!