How to make a follower pack with a custom category

This guide was created for users of Followermaker to learn how to group several of their newly-created followers into a single PK3 file, complete with its own custom follower category.

WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO?

You open your followers' PK3 files in SLADE, you make a new PK3 file using SLADE, you copy everything in your followers' PK3s into the new one you just made, then you save that and (optionally) you add a custom category.

...WHAT?

Correct. In order to achieve all of that it is important to understand what a PK3 file is and how it works.

OKAY. WHAT IS A PK3 FILE?

PK3 files are containers for several file formats used by Ring Racers. They're pretty much like zip files (more on that later), so the idea is to open them up and edit their contents. To do this, you will need to download an additional program: SLADE.

Followermaker exports follower files using the PK3 format by default, so the first thing you should do is open one of your followers' PK3 files in SLADE and take a look at its contents:



In order for Ring Racers to recognize the contents of PK3 files, these contents must be categorized under folders of specific names, according to the type of content that they represent. Relevant to followers are the following folder categories: "soc", "sprites".

SOC: This folder is for SOC files. When it comes to followers, SOC files are used to identify the existence of a follower, as well as several properties of one such as its name, sprites it's using, its horn, animation states, etc.

Sprites: Follower sprites must be found in this folder. Note that this excludes the follower icon used for the menu.

Files of these two kinds can be found in subfolders each, but these subfolders must be in either of the two folders depending on the content. Followermaker will generate two additional folders: "graphics" and "sounds", which merely exist for organizational purposes as the kinds of files in them don't have to sit inside of a folder of a specific name.

NIFTY. NOW WHAT?

The idea is to place all of your followers' files inside of a single, new PK3 file, ensuring that there is no overlap between these files. Followermaker will automatically generate individual follower PK3 files such that there is no overlap between any two of them (provided they're each named separately from each other, through the "name" and "prefix" parameters of followers), so all you have to do is copy and paste all of the contents of the follower PK3 files that you want to bundle together into a single new PK3 file and you save that.

So you make a new "Zip Archive" file...




And you copy the files of these two followers...




And you put them in your new file! And you save the file as .pk3!



Presto!


(Baron Bat Wand and Muu followers from @casual koopa's Mecha-Koopa Pack. Used with permission!)

IT'S THAT SIMPLE?

Yes!

NICE, BUT THERE'S MORE I WANT TO DO. CAN I MAKE MY OWN CATEGORY?

Of course. In order to make a new category all you need to do is create a new SOC file with information needed to identify a follower category.

Let's start by creating a file in the "followers" folder of the "soc" folder. For tutorial purposes, we'll name it "aacategory.txt"




To start editing it, click on it then click the "View as Text" button:




A follower category in a SOC file consists of three lines, two of which are parameters you can adjust:

FOLLOWERCATEGORY
Name = Example
Icon = ICONEXMP

The "Name" parameter is the name of the category. Category names can have a maximum of 16 characters.

The "Icon" parameter determines which icon sprite the category will use. Follower category icons are identical to follower icons themselves, down to the dimensions and white border. Adding brand new icons onto the PK3 requires knowledge on importing images onto PK3s and the method for converting them, which is covered elsewhere. Note that the names for follower category icons can only have a maximum of 8 characters.

Once that's done our category should look something like this:



Now that we made our own custom category, we'll want to change the categories of any followers that we want to include under this new category. We'll go to the individual SOC files for each follower and change the "Category" parameter in them:




After we're done, we save the changes in our PK3 and head right back into the game.

IT DOESN'T WORK. THERE WAS AN ERROR MESSAGE. MY FOLLOWERS ARE GONE

Of course, there is an important, easy-to-miss detail about PK3s that has yet to be mentioned: the order in which its files are loaded.

Though naming your category file "aacategory.txt" should mean that it gets loaded first as most everything assumes an alphabetical order, PK3 files are explicitly not like this. PK3 files have a certain method of ordering files which usually has to do with which files were added onto or created for the PK3 first.

For the sake of clarity, let's reset the ordering of files inside the PK3 to match the way in which the game loads files. All we have to do is right-click the "Name" ordering tab on top of the PK3's file list and click on "Reset Sorting":



After that is done, we should be able to clearly see that our "aacategory.txt" file is all the way on the bottom of the "followers" folder inside of the "soc" folder.



We can bring the "aacategory.txt" file further up in order to remedy this:




Save the PK3 and load it in the game, and there we have it:



(Once more, Baron Bat Wand and Muu followers from @casual koopa's Mecha-Koopa Pack. Used with permission!)

WOW, THANK YOU. HEY, CAN I ADD CUSTOM COLORS TO THIS?

As it's a PK3 file, you can add all sorts of things to your follower pack, but this is where I end the tutorial.

One last thing before I do: PK3 files are literally just renamed zip files. You can open these using Windows or 7-Zip or what have you. It's better to do everything using SLADE for this game, regardless!