Configuring the appearanceInfo

As we saw earlier, our .inkcharcustomization file has a switcher and two appearanceInfos:

The first gameuiAppearanceInfo is for our off option; it does not call any .app resource or have any gameuiIndexedAppearanceDefinition . It is simply a placeholder that occupies our custom UI slot when this option is toggled. We'll just leave it alone.

gameuiAppearanceInfo

Let's expand our custom tattoo gameuiAppearanceInfo:

There are a handful of parameters in this appearanceInfo that make our custom tattoo work. Mainly, we have a resource: this is a path to our tattoo .app file. If you're unfamiliar with .app files, you can read about them here—we will be configuring ours later on.

Appearance Definitions

Right now, let's expand our definitions in the appearanceInfo:

We have a single gameuiIndexedAppearanceDefinition; this is telling our .app file which appearanceAppearanceDefinition to use for our tattoo. Our .app file is preconfigured to have an appearance for Male V and for Female V (w__chest_tattoo is our female variant of the tattoo because male/female use different .mesh files).

You can choose to rename these appearance definitions to your leisure—just be sure that your gameuiIndexedAppearanceDefinition is consistent with the appearanceAppearanceDefinition in your .app file and keep them unique to gender.

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Let's analyze the rest of our gameuiAppearanceInfo

editTags can be technically be left blank here; you will still have a working tattoo whether it is left blank or given the same values as our switcher: NewGame and Ripperdoc

enabled should be set to False, and hidden should be set to True. If you change them, you will have a problem:

Empty switcher at the top of the character creator

Switcher defaults to custom option instead of "OFF", but the custom mesh is not displayed

It is worth noting that leaving editTags blank will disappear the empty switcher problem, but not the default custom tattoo issue. gameuiAppearanceInfo works like a switcher (eye colors work this way) and the hidden parameter is what hides it. If you stick to the provided configurations in the template, you won't have any issues.

name is the name of the gameuiAppearanceInfo and must be included in the names section of our gameuiSwitcherOptions; this is how the switcher and appearance are linked:

Similarly, we must do the same with our UI slots between our switcher and our appearance:

randomizeCategory, same as our switcher, will be set to Tattoos.

As we discussed earlier, the resource will be the path to our .app file, which is already configured but will need to be reconfigured if you decide to build your own .app file or rename it; if you check "Update in project files" when renaming the .app file, it will update the path automatically:

Any files that you rename in this project should follow the same procedure because the paths have already been set for you in each template. Paths will only need to be updated if you decide to use different resources like custom meshes.

And just like that, we now have a switcher and a respective custom appearance for our new tattoo—but if you stop here, you won't have much luck getting it to work in the game; we still have to define these in our groups.