Alter the appearance of NPC player entities to have a specific skin

Question

I'm creating a bukkit plugin that's making a world in Minecraft outside the ordinary and that includes having NPCs (bots) entities that look like actually players and not villagers. I've already got the bots working programming wise but I want to have each bot have a different skin based upon it's name. Can I do this with maybe a resource pack or something? currently they take the names of Minecraft players with the same name but I'd like to override this.

TL;DR

Can I change the appearance of player entities by name with:

a Resourcepack?

a server side command?

playerConnection.sendPacket?

Answer 1

This is currently not possible without modifications to the client. If you want to, you can use Spoutcraft, but this requires users of the plugin to have the Spoutcraft launcher for the textures to show correctly.

There's no way to do this with the vanilla client, however, short of buying a bunch of Minecraft accounts and assigning them appropriate skins.

Answer 2

You should try out the DisguiseCraft plugin for a quick fix. DisguiseCraft is currently available on the Bukkit website. Do keep in mind that it also requires ProtocolLib to function properly, and you will need to have both installed on your server. You may find a link for ProtocolLib through the DisguiseCraft page. I currently use the two on my server and have had no issues with functionality.

If you would prefer a more direct approach however, since you are coding your own plugin, consider looking over the Lib's Disguises Developer API. Like DisguiseCraft, it too requires ProtocolLib, but the source for Lib's is publicly available and is intended to target developers. Just like DisguiseCraft, you may find a link for ProtocolLib through the Lib's page.