Mods: Creating Patterns and Stickers

Step by step guide to creating new painting features.

Managing Mods

Before update to version 0.24 mods are only available on a beta branch, if you want to check it out now please see our Discord[discord.gg].

Accessing Mods

By default mods are disabled in Gunsmith Simulator. To turn them on, you have to click [1] in the main menu. You will be asked to confirm then mods window will open. Mods will be enabled from now on, but you can disable them by disabling check box [3].
To download more mods you can browse them on our Steam Workshop page, it can be opened directly from this window with button [4].

Managing Mods

Steam will automatically download the data and it will be displayed in this window [2]. When you enable a checkbox mod content is loaded and ready to use in the game. It will be reloaded every time you restart the game until you disable it or unsubscribe from it.

Creating Mods

The button in the lower right corner [5] goes from the main menu to a mod editor in the game.

Example

There's an example item available, a packet with 4 ace Stickers and tartan Pattern. If you subscribe to it, Steam will download it and it will be available in the game. To use it you need to enable it like mentioned above. To examine files after it's downloaded you can navigate to:

 \Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\1101120\3123892985 

Packet - Steam Workshop Item

Create Packet

In the mod editor you need to first create a new Steam Workshop Item, which in Gunsmith Simulator corresponds to a Packet of downloadable content. Click [1] to create a new Packet. This action will create an empty uniquely identified item on Steam Workshop. Adding content to it is a separate step. Local files for this Packet will be in your game installation directory most likely at:

 \Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Gunsmith Simulator\Gunsmith Simulator_Data\Mods\3123892985

You can check what is uploaded to Steam by looking at "files you've posted" in your Steam Workshop widget.

Access Packets

Local Packets that you have created and can edit will be listed in this window [2]. To open and edit contents click on one of them. You can direct the game to rebuild all Packets from your files with button [3].

Packet Manager

Each Packet has [1] title, description and preview image [6]. Steam Workshop supports translations, but right now everything in mod editor is expected to be in English. You can still add translations, more preview images or videos in Steam Workshop on the items page.

 Warning! Preview image size must be smaller than 1MB! 

There's basic information text in [2] for a quick check-up.
To add content use buttons in [3].
After elements are added to the Packet they are displayed in [4] and you can edit or delete them from this list.
Control buttons functions at [5]:

• Reload all from disk.
  
• Delete the Packet.
  
• Save files to the the disk.
  
• Open Steam Workshop item site to see what is uploaded.

When you want to send data to Steam use button [7].

Files

When Packet is saved to disk it will save all data to files. Textures will be copies of the files you have supplied and meta.xml is a file detailing what are the relations of the elements to each other, i.e. which texture is used by which Sticker etc.

Adding Textures

Right now both Stickers and Patterns only use textures as their data. To create anything you need to first get or create image files and then add them in to the Packet with Add Texture at [3]. A dialog window will appear where you can paste path to the file or navigate to it. You can check preview if this is what you wanted to use and change texture size from native size it had in the file. It is good to use power of 2 sizes for compression (i.e. 256, 512 or 1024).

Sticker

Set sticker name with input field in [1] and set textures with buttons below it.

Albedo

Texture used in Albedo is "normal", it will take color data as colors and transparency as transparency.

Smoothness Metallic

Texture that controls glossiness of a sticker is special, it uses Unity's Standard material schema. Alpha channel (transparency) represents Smoothness. A fully opaque pixel is like a polished mirror and a transparent pixel is completely rough. Red channel represents metallic property. Black pixel is not metallic and white completely metallic.

For a uniform paper sticker you can use almost fully transparent black texture (and small size like 64x64 will be good to use as there's no need to waste space if it is not used). For extremely glossy sticker you can use almost fully transparent white texture.

Buttons [3] functions:

• Apply Sticker to the preview [4]. You should always check if it displays correctly in the preview before using it any further.
  
• Clear Sticker from preview.
  
• Delete Sticker from Packet.
  
• Confirm your changes.

Pattern

Set name with [1] and set textures with buttons [2].

Base Texture

Patterns in Gunsmith Simulator allow user to change colors and for this functionality they have to be specially authored. Instead of texture representing colors used in the image, it represents Paints used in it, and user may change colors and transparencies of each of them. In practice there are at least two ways to go about it:
1. If you already have an image, you need to separate the colors. In Photoshop it can be done with Select > Color Range. Pick one color to be the background, then select additional colors and create fill layers for each of them. Then change color of fill layers to red, green and blue.
2. If you create a new image, put each color on separate layer. After you're done, you can duplicate all of these layers and change colors to red, green and blue.

 Warning! Pattern will be best if it has seamless texture, then it will never clip even if scale is set to very small. 

Each color channel is representing "how much of the paint will be applied". They are applied one after another and may cover each other. First paint is background and it is applied uniformly to entire surface. Second paint is used where red is in the texture, third for green and fourth for blue.

A solid black texture with red circle in the middle will be completely covered by first paint and the circle will be later also covered by second paint.

If you don't want to paint over gun material completely you can set first paint to be completely or partially transparent.
In the Tartan example some parts of the texture are black - they only use first paint. Red is sometimes darker - less of second paint will be used there. Green is over red and it makes it yellow both paints are used on these pixels.

Preview Texture

This is normal texture used to show how patterns looks with default Paints.

Default Properties

You can set default values in [3]. Number of colors should be lower if you don't use all 4 channels. Set colors to your initial design so that preview [4] looks like Preview Texture. You can also set glossiness, metallic and scale - user can change these values but your Pattern will start with the values set here.

Interactive Preview

Preview on the cube [5] has a known issue when first paint is opaque and other paint is partially transparent.
Like with Stickers the buttons [6] apply or clear preview on the cube, delete the Pattern or confirm changes.

Feedback

If you have some problems ask or comment in our Discord[discord.gg]. This guide will be updated when mod editor in Gunsmith Simulator gets updated.

[Elpximso]

This guide is probably good but i understand f**k all even after reading it, feels like its missing a few steps