if i were to make a pre incident map how do i prevent the scientist and security guard NPCs from spawning in with the bloodied textures?
I don’t usually work with NPCs, but wouldn’t that just be in the entity’s keyvalues?
Nope, nothing in the entity keyvalues.
I also wonder about this.
interestingly enough however copping a scripted_sequence and it respective NPC from the example file bm_c1a0b.vmf does seem to force a specific skin but there are no parameters that cause this as far as i can tell
The bloody vs. non-bloody textures are determined through the character manifest system. In theory you could change this yourself, but custom scripting files are currently not working. For the time being, if you name an NPC after a canon NPC who never appears bloody (you can find many such names easily in the Anomalous Materials and Black Mesa Inbound maps) they will use that NPC’s manifest entry and will never appear bloody.
So … Copy the character_manifest from the bms_misc_dir.vpk, add your npcs to it and then packrat it your .bsp file when you’re going to release it.
Or…
Replace the bloody skin with the normal one and pakrat it.
No copying needed, just open it up and find a name that doesn’t use a bloody skin. If you want custom NPC faces, you could theoretically packrat it, but I’m not sure whether or not that would affect the base game in any way, or even load, since Steampipe’s ‘pure VPK content only’ restriction is still currently in place.
I’m hopeful that eventually the devs will implement a custom script system for files like this, so you can just include [mapname]_character_manifest.txt with the map and the game will load that over top the default manifiest, similar to the way more recent source engine games handle custom soundscapes.