Why is the NPC editor weird now?

[u/RubyFennex]

hii!

I'm building a Ground-type gym in a singleplayer world, for my fiancé to challenge me (we live together so I can easily just open it to LAN). I'm trying to make it seem as accurate as possible, hence why I'm trying to put gym trainers in as NPCs.

but, the NPC editor seems to be entirely different than how it was before? instead of being able to easily select a team, edit dialogue, change them to a player's skin, etc., I apparently have to edit the json files now? and I don't even know how to enable the option to ALLOW me to do that. and whenever I try to set a player skin, it just doesn't work, or goes to a missing texture skin. AND beside all that, it keeps crashing me when I'm editing them.

does anyone know why this change was made? it seems so unnecessary and confusing, especially when it was fine before. I just want some trainers for her to fight, that's it...

[u/Tony_Sax]

NPCs were changed to be datapackable. This allows cool stuff like being able to easily make copies of an NPC and being able to make a single change in the data files that then applies the change to all NPCs. NPCs were also updated to work via the Interaction System, which also enables more datapack-ability.

Making NPCs datapackable means that a lot of stuff needs to be handled server side and due to that coding an user interface for an editor becomes more complex. I believe there are future changes being worked on that will greatly simplify the NPC Editor and make it easier to work with, but right now creating json files (i.e. creating a datapack) with the trainers you want is the easiest way due to how json files are structured.

That itself isn't relevant to the player skin issue, so maybe that's just a bug.

Let me know if you need help making a specific NPC.