How to make new Lot Ornaments placeable in any game mode

Written on 16 February 2009.

Hello Friends,

I am quite sure this is old news. However, after quite a bit of research I was unable to find any information on this on several sites so I thought I would share my findings . I understand most folks don't actually play the campaign portion of the game but I still enjoy it in addition to sandlot movie making.

Its very easy to convert existing game assets (or other meshes) to lot ornaments which are placeable in the campaign or sandlot modes and still available as props.

Lets look at a "practical" example: Its always irked me that in order to get that 5 star rating for your stars you always ended up resorting to plopping the giant stone pillars near the stars trailer to boost its rating. A more pleasing to the eye alternative would be to convert the unused golf cart to an ornament. 

Using (All Hail!) MED extract the p_buggy mesh for external editing. Also extract the following individual files: Props\p_buggy.ini, Propblueprint\p_buggy.ini, and (optionally) the contents of the explainers folder which I will discuss in a bit.

Next, create the following folders inside C:\Program Files\Lionhead Studios Ltd\The Movies\Data: ornament, props, and propblueprint. As you know, The Movies data like most other games, ships in a proprietary archived data structure. When you replicate the folder structure and place uncompressed files in it, they will take precedence over the originals. Open Notepad and paste the following:

and save as C:\Program Files\Lionhead Studios Ltd\The Movies\Data\ornament\p_buggy.ini. I used the values for the stone pillars, but you can adjust them as you see fit. Under the [extra_info/explainer] heading, you will find the pointer to the particular interaction that the ornament has. While not perfect, I choose the fountain_lionhead which gives the appearance of sitting and rubbing the (presumably leather!) seats. Of course, you can change this as you see fit. As another example of interactions, below is the ornament ini I made for the directors chair:

Next, open your p_buggy Propblueprint ini and change to the following:

Quote

and save as C:\Program Files\Lionhead Studios Ltd\The Movies\Data\Propblueprint\p_buggy.ini. One other step may be necessary, my Vista machine required me to copy the mesh and texture files to their applicable folders inside of Data in order to get it working while my XP machine was happy with just the ini files.

I hope someone finds this useful. Some other candidates for ornaments you may want to investigate are p_bush_desert, p_bush_redberry, p_tree_leaning, p_crashmat (stuntmen need interactions too!), and many other unused assets.