Actors are the graphical representations of objects in the game. They combine meshes, textures, animations and props, and also control some other graphical features (such as whether the objects casts shadows or has transparent textures).

Actor data is stored in XML files, which can be edited by hand, but usually the Actor Editor is used instead. Actor XML files are located in subdirectories of art\actors\ for a given mod (see mod layout).

Randomness

To allow some visual variety between otherwise-identical units, actors can contain 'random' elements. (They are not strictly random - a designer can choose a particular variation of the actor.)

To achieve this, the actor is split into a set of groups, each of which contains several variants. TODO: Example with screenshot

The frequency of each variant controls how likely it is to be chosen. If a variant's frequency is set to 0, it will never be chosen by the randomiser. A zero-frequency variant can still be selected by the game - for example, actors could have 'Summer' and 'Winter' variants, with the default always being Summer, and then the game could change the whole world to Winter.

Terminology

• Variant: a named collection of data items, specifying the actor's texture, animations, etc (or any subset of those data). Shown in the Actor Editor as a single row.
• Group: a set of variants; represented in the Actor Editor by a block of rows, separated from other groups by blank rows.
• Choice: a variant from a group, which has been chosen to be used on the actor. Choices are often made randomly, and combine to form:
• Variation: a set of choices, one from each group, making up a particular version of the actor.
• Selection: a text string that usually matches a variant name; the chosen variation will use variants which match one of the selections, where possible.

Actor XML format

The following is an example of version 1 of the actor XML (edited for clarity).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<actor version="1">
  <castshadow/>
  <group>
    <variant frequency="100" name="Base">
      <animations>
        <animation file="biped/inf_sword_ready_a.dae" name="Idle" speed="100"/>
        ...
        <animation file="biped/walk_spearshield.psa" name="Walk" speed="120"/>
        <animation file="biped/walk_spearshield.psa" name="Walk" speed="111"/>
        ...
      </animations>
      <mesh>skeletal/m_tunic_short.dae</mesh>
      <props>
        <prop actor="props/units/heads/head_hele_b.xml" attachpoint="head"/>
        <prop actor="props/units/shields/rome_parma_b.xml" attachpoint="shield"/>
        ...
      </props>
      <texture>skeletal/rome_ijv_b.png</texture>
    </variant>
  </group>
  <group>
    <variant frequency="100" name="Idle"/>
    <variant name="Melee">
      <props>
        <prop actor="props/units/weapons/verutum_reverse.xml" attachpoint="loaded-r_hand"/>
        <prop actor="props/units/weapons/verutum.xml" attachpoint="projectile"/>
        <prop actor="" attachpoint="r_hand"/>
      </props>
    </variant>
    <variant name="gather_tree">
      ...
    </variant>
    ...
  </group>
  <material>player_trans.xml</material>
</actor>