i dont really have a good title for this one
as some of you may or may not know, i make dead rising mods, and doing so has taught me many things about the inner workings of the game. my latest mod, "Mall Employee Mod" is definitely my most complicated mod yet, and while im still working on an expansion to it, i thought i should explain how it was made, and the many roadblocks i encountered along the way.
the main feature is a "new area", the mall entrance. okay, i lied, its not REALLY a new area, and the keen eyed might notice where you are. if you were to enable noclip, and clip out of the rooftop into the parking lot, you would find that almost the entire area has collision, and zombies spawn and target the player perfectly fine!
unfortunately, there are some issues to this - primarily the lack of items, other than shopping carts and explosive barrels dropped from zombies. this is because of the absence of an itemlayout for s135 (the rooftop level). itemlayouts dictate where interactable items spawn, their id, and what requirements you need for them to appear, and without one, it wont be able to find any items to load.
this is not unlike the similarly functioning areahitlayouts, however, areahitlayouts work like triggers, mainly used for moving between levels, but they are also used for clothing items and save points. my mod uses these to make the mall entrance accessible!
now, you may be thinking: "if there is an areahitlayout for the mall entrance, why can't you just make an itemlayout?"
if only it were that simple,,, while it is most likely possible to make the game load a custom itemlayout, doing so would be extremely difficult, and would most likely require code execution of some kind (which is, definitely not my strong suit) the reason why i can add doors and other triggers to the mall entrance is because of how areahitlayout files are handled. areahitlayouts are shared between all levels within a certain part of the mall using a file, meanwhile itemlayouts use a different file for every area. for example, this means that while the trigger to send you to paradise plaza is in all parts of the mall under the "s1xx" file name, items between these parts of the mall wouldnt load.
while we are still on the topic of itemlayouts, i wanted to explain the second half of the mod, which is the addition of 3 new submachine gun spawns.
in dead rising, most areas of the mall have a unique submachine gun hidden in secret spots, a powerful automatic weapon that can wipe out entire hordes within seconds. however, some areas dont have any, so i decided to fix that. the movieland annex, north plaza and the meat processing area now all include special submachine guns, making the hunt for all of them just a little more interesting! this makes use of the "unique" item tag, which allows you to make these items only show up once. this might be a good point to admit that i am not nearly as knowledgeable with how itemlayouts work compared to areahitlayouts, because these files are CONFUSING. the unique item tag only works on specific values for some reason? otherwise it either wont spawn, or will never STOP spawning. something else that is unrelated but still interesting is how you need to have all the files for the item you want to spawn in the arc file for the mod, or else it will crash the game, or have missing sounds/textures. however, you can make the game load that weapon by simply having it in your inventory before you enter the area. this is to prevent the item unloading when you move areas, and crashing the game.
this was a long one, my apologies. if you have any thoughts, or you want to give me suggestions, let me know on my guestbook !!
vista | 05/10/25 16:42pm