Creating A New Character Full Guide - MoonlitDeath/Link-Evolution-Editing-Guide GitHub Wiki
Since a few people had some issues adding entirely new characters, I will write a guide here step by step to help out a bit.
This guide assumes you already read the main guide page of how to unpack the files and already have Nzxth’s tools to edit, which are listed on another page here on the wiki.
Steps-
First you need to choose a character that you want to add, in this example, I will be using Sonia from Pokemon as she will take a break from researching Pokemon and turn to dueling to help out for the guide.
Step 1. Open the character editor and open the chardat file that is located in the YGO_2020/main folder and choose the language you play in (chardata_E for instance refers to English, with the rest being F-French, G-German, I-Italian, J-Japanese, and S-Spanish. You only need to edit the one for the language you are actually playing in. Keep in mind that you may want to copy your files over to the other languages if you are creating a full mod so people from other languages can play your mod as well. After opening the file, it will look like this-
There’s a few things to pay attention to here, most importantly the ‘ID String’ at the bottom, that is very important and will be needed for multiple other steps later. Here I just named it sonia. Even though it may not matter for most things, you should try to keep letters in lower case and without spaces or other symbols so as to not mess anything up later. Also make sure you use an ID that is not used by anyone else, as that will create conflicts with those characters. Also note that this ID name does not show up anywhere in game, this is only for the game to recognize the character. You can put the full name in the Name space under the ID string of course. Here you can write the name however you want (even if it’s the same name as an existing character) and this is how the character’s name will show up in game.
At the top, the character ID is also very important, here she is number 192 or C0 in hex, you will need to remember that number later.
The series is basically what series her challenge will take place, if any. Followed by the ID of the challenge deck and arena ID.
Always make sure that each character you want to be in an actual duel is checked in the playable box and marked with 1.
Once you’re done setting that up, save it and that’s it for this step.
Step 2.-
Next you will want to look in the YGO_2020/pdui folder. Here you will see a chars.png and chars.dfymoo file. First open the chars.png, mine is from my mod and looks like this-
For modders (can skip this if you are just making quick changes to a few characters in your own game)- I put multiple characters in this image that I am not using in my actual mod in case other people want to use them. I also uploaded the avatars from every single Tag Force game here Note that you still will need to piece together and fix those images as they are broken up and I wrote a quick guide in there how to do it. If anyone wants to fix them up and make a full collection of them, that would be helpful as well.
We need to put an image for our character here in this image. You can use Photoshop or Gimp for this step, I personally use Gimp and put a new layer down as a grid to help keep things aligned, then edit the bottom layer and delete the top layer or the grid when done. After I edit, it will look like this-
You can see Sonia now in the bottom left of the characters. That red X mark is not in the actual image, but I put it there so you can notice it’s position. If you see in the very bottom left corner, the numbers ‘1, 3175’, these are the actual X and Y coordinates of the image inside the chars.png, you will need this for the next step. After you finish your edits here, you can save it and move on to the next part.
Next you want to open the chars.dfymoo file that is in the same location as the chars.png you just edited. When you open it, it will look like this at the very bottom-
These are all the characters in the game, you will need to add your new character here. As you can from the image, I added Sonia to the bottom with-
~
n sonia_neutral
s 1 3175 128 128
~
This says her ID name that we created her with in the character editor (just ‘sonia’) and the rest of the name, the ‘_neutral’ part, so it knows which expression of hers to read from the character select screen, and also it will know how to read her in the busts.zib folder we will do later. This is very important to get the character’s name right here, and of course the 1 3175 are the X and Y coordinates of her image in the chars.png and then the 128 X 128 is the size of the avatar in that file (most are roughly 130 X 130 but you can just keep it at 128 X 128 and it will be fine). Some other characters that are smaller have extra lines and numbers here for positioning of making them smaller and such, but you don’t need to do that here if you set up the images properly in other files. So we are done with this step and can save it.
Step 3.-
This personally is the most annoying step for me, but next you will need to look into the YGO_2020/pdui/dialog_chars folder. Here you will see all the character images in the game, and that’s where you will need to add your new character. Also make sure to put the proper ID name again as well as the expression here, which will be _neutral. You can actually add different expressions to characters if you are planning to make a story for them and can use those different images there, but this time we will only be adding a regular Neutral image that will show up on the duel select screen.
I edited, named and saved her picture and it looks like this-
The annoying part is getting character’s actual size to show up properly on the duel select screen as sometimes they can appear too big or too small and need to be tweaked a bit, for now we are done with this step.
Step 4.-
Now we need to give her a bust that shows up on the deck screen and before a duel, to do that we need to look in the Busts folder and create a 512×512 image and name it exactly the same as we just made her dialog image and we have this-
Save that and we are done there.
Step 5.-
Next up, we need to edit the actual YGO_2020.toc file to make sure it recognizes and repacks our new image. Note that anything in the zibs folders you will not need to add to the toc, so we only need to add her dialog image right now and have it show up like this-
The actual numbers before the entry don’t matter that much, just make sure everything is properly aligned so the names go straight down in order with no spaces messing up the positions. In this case I literally just copied the Solomon_Muto entry and replaced the name with Sonia. Also while these don’t have to be in alphabetical order, it helps for editing purposes to leave them that way so you can find it later when you need to. Anyways for now that’s all we need to do here (will need to do this for every single character you add later though) and we can save our .toc file and move on to the next step.
Step 6.-
Now that we are almost done, we just need to put her into an actual duel. In my Requiem mod, I added new duels, and there’s details on how to add duels on another page, so for now we will just put her into an existing duel, the 2nd duel in DM, The Heart of the Cards. I open the duel editor and find that duel and it will look like this-
Everything here is pretty self explanatory, the only thing I changed here was the ‘Right Character ID’ and I changed it now to be her ID number which is 192. I save that and now we are done and time to repack our files.
Step 7.- After moving and renaming the test.dat and toc files, we can finally open the game and starting a new game we shall see the 2nd duel now looks like this-
Note you can fix or adjust any images later (this was just a rough and quick test to show how it was done, so she could be fixed up a bit later, but for now it works since she is fully playable.) She stood in for Kaiba this time while he went out and screwed the rules somewhere else, but you can give your characters new decks and challenge decks as well if you want, that stuff is covered in another guide here, but for now that’s all there is to it and adding new characters into the game.