Easiest way to get a transparent character?

[jeromebaldino]

Hi everyone,

I'm doing something a little bit different I'm working on a Diablo2 themed clock. It will have character animations for every even hour. For this I need to get some animations from D2 in various places around all 5 acts. Since it's a lot of work I decided to record it using 2 instances of Diablo 2.
Since I need a moving character on a static screen I use one character to stand still and record while the other character does the "moves".
The issue is that I have to later delete the standing character which is a lot of complex video editing. I want to make the character invisible.

I've tried tinkering with edits on mpq files but I had no success.

How would one go about making a completely transparent druid that is just standing still doing nothing? I would think making the dcc files completely black? Any help would be appreciated, maybe someone already did something like this (on purpose or by accident) ?

So far I've extracted the d2char data/global/char/NE files. Diablo2 starts with -direct parameneter just fine.

I've then opened the NETRLITNUHTH.dcc and made it all black using SixDice. But when I save the file the game crashes when loading new game.

[Cypress]

Hello! In skills.txt, you can give a skill passivestate=invis. A character with this skill will become invisible, including their shadow. Although light radius will still be around, so you could also set passivestat1=item_lightradius and passivecalc1=-12 to make the light radius as small as possible. This should be a lot easier than having to mess around with Diablo 2's very clumsy and crash-prone graphical systems.

[jeromebaldino]

Thanks for the tip. Ive tried out this approach. I've extracted the skills.txt from patrch_d2.mpq. Then I've edited all necro skills and set the passivestate to invis for all of them. But still the character is there (in town and out of town). Regardles of selected skill etc. My char was edited to have all skills. The skills.txt is in data/global/excel in my D2 directory and Im running it with -direct modifier.
Any idea what else can be wrong?

[jeromebaldino]

I figured out that I forgot to add -txt on my command line. Now it works perfectly! Thanks for the help!

So if someone want's to replicate this effect here is the guide:

1. Open patch_d2.mpq using MPQEditor and Diablo2 filelist.
2. Extract skills.txt from data/global/excel
3. Put the file in diablo2 folder under the Diablo2/data/global/excel directory.
4. Edit the file, select a skill and set the passivestate to invis for the selected skill. Use D2Excel for easier editing.
5. Run diablo2 with -direct -txt parameters.

Thanks for help everyone.