Alternate Image Viewer - Current Version 0.5_D

[HwitVlf]

Cool info! Nana is a handy tool; I use it often in translating. ‎  Have you found any other images in Echo Night? I would be surprised if all the images were 16BPP. Usually, it's just title screens or "rendered backgrounds" that use 16bit color. Things like textures are usually lower color.

[StolenBattenberg]

Nope, not so far. I found out I got it wrong, it was actually only 8BPP, guess I was tired. :3

I had a look at Shadow Tower again, and I found some files with Nana, but I can't find them in an actual hex editor, because the file is too big for Nana to show the offset.

I would've spent more time on Echo Night, but stopped for now because I can't really think of anyway to find out what palette belongs with what image... I was thinking I might just rip all the palette and images, and use the new 'CLUT Swap' feature I've added to let people choose what palette they want to use.

In other news, full support for both reading and writing of TXR is in now, a bunch of new image formats, like Gamecube textures, Valve textures and even Call of Duty textures... Ugh, Hate that game ‎  ... I've also added a pretty sloppy '3D mode' which lets you use a loaded image as a texture, though it only works for primitive, pre-built objects, but I'll have some way to load a model from a resource to preview the image on soon.

Other less important things added: Image Playlists, Shockwave Flash and offsite youtube video playing, TIM writing, using video memory to store images rather than a .TGA file in the skin folder, Saving files actually working for once and brand new fast filter effects.

Cool things added: Better zoom, View CLUT, Replace CLUT, Greyscale CLUT and finally; A status bar which tells you things like image width, height, mouse_x pixel, mouse_y pixel.

Oh yeah, and the FSTim rewrite let me make it support 4BPP and 8BPP with any image size.

[HwitVlf]

Those are some pretty spiffy new features. ‎  Nice work. I hope that tools like this will encourage people to make more mods for Playstation games like there are for NES/SNES. Quite a few games could be reworked into decent fan made sequels by editing graphics and some of the gameplay mechanics.

I wonder why they separated the palletes? What a pain! It looks to me like most of the Echo Night textures are in Green.Bin and they have 8 bytes of some kind of header. I wonder if all the palettes are in a single chunk somewhere in the bin? ‎ 

I think nana just cuts the last digit off if a file is larger than 0xFFFFFF, so you can still see a graphic's location to within 16 bytes. Since PS1 file start locations always begin in at multiple of 4, that narrows the graphic's start location down to 4 places 0x0, 0x4,0x8 or 0xC.

[StolenBattenberg]

They might all be in one section... What I really have to wonder is why they're so protected in this one, do you think From Soft were having problems? It seems that in later From games, they're really well protected. Either that or it's a way they made it easier on the loader.

I had a look at the PS2 from games as well, but I've not found anything in those, chances are more than likely it uses 24BPP or 16BPP images. Eternal Ring looks like it'd be 16BPP.

Though, I don't think anyone has ever done any work on the PS2 since I've found zero documentation on any of the files... I do know that PS2 development used a system like windows has, code libraries etc, and KF4 appears to use these.

[StolenBattenberg]

One of those updates few to zero people read again! Sorry this one is taking a while, and that there's still no downloadable release. I was working on SoM2.0, and it's too buggy to release at the moment due to the full re-write.

I've been working a lot on the 3D perview side and managed to get it so you can load in a custom model and it'll display the image on it, using the defined texture co-ords. At the moment this only applies to two model formats. For once one of them is relevant to SoM, and I think it's the first external viewer for the model format ever made.

The two formats are Metasequoia .MQO, and Wavefront .OBJ; but this is only a small section of what I'll eventually expand this system to load. Currently, both models can be displayed with a texture, and both of them support every single image format AIV can load. This includes the now fully supported .TXR and .TIM, plus any of the other from software game textures.

All this 3D stuff is going to be very nice later on, as I'll probably make some function specifically for game developers, like generating Heightmaps/normal maps. Well, any way. Here's a screenshot of a TXR being loaded onto a .MQO; with a .TXR I stole from the SoM data files to use as a texture.

[StolenBattenberg]

Alternate Image Viewer from this post on, won't be a tool which is updated anymore. I've decided to work on something much, much more appreciated.

A complete asset viewer. This will include everything from these category's:
- - 3D Models
- - Images
- - Movies
- - Sounds

Here's the thing. This isn't going to be your standard everyday market based tool, with .obj loading etc. This is going to be a tool made by a lazy game modder, for game modders . I will be including EVERYTHING in the department of editing. Here's a list of that:
- - Binary editing tool, with different data size alignments (u8/s8, u16/s16, u32/s32).
- - 3D Model Viewing.
- - Visual Hex Image data viewer.

I'll also be adding support for making translations easily.

I already started doing some stuff, like the TMD loader. It actually works and looks pretty good.

Any comments etc, I'd love to hear. If anyone has documents on the SoM model formats, I'm still interested in those too.

[Verdite]

I had actually been following your posts, but it seems that you have discontinued your original project. If you are making a much better one though, huzzah!

What files will it be able to open, and will it be more centric around game assets, or 3D program files (.blend, .mqo, etc)

I'm also curious as to what prompted this, will you be spreading the programs funtionality out across multiple platforms?

[HwitVlf]

This could be very nice. Some ideas about features:
1 An animated TMD maker. Or even a non-animated OBJ to TMD converter so that people can use their favorite modeler.

2 A generic file inserter/extractor (ie insert file A into file B at given location) which saves/loads a list of file locations for the current project so you don't have to re-enter the insert/extract location every time.

3 A PS2 raw image de-swizzler and viewer.

4 A raw image <=> BMP converter that also inserts/extracts and has support for palette location input.

5 For translating, I think a feature that auto-generates a file to insert translated text and edits pointers to match would be helpful. I would probably be impossible to make a tool that supports every game's text, but just supporting SJIS format games could be quite useful. ‎ 

[StolenBattenberg]

Verdite;

I had actually been following your posts, but it seems that you have discontinued your original project. If you are making a much better one though, huzzah!

- ‎  ‎  I was continuing the original project still. I just found I'd ran out of stuff I liked to do with it. So I've decided to start this, which should be much better.

What files will it be able to open, and will it be more centric around game assets, or 3D program files (.blend, .mqo, etc)

- ‎  ‎  I'm not 100% sure, it's going to open these for sure though.
- ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  - .TMD
- ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  - .PMD
- ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  - .MD2
- ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  - .MD3
- ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  - .OBJ
- ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  - .MQO
- ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  - .X
- ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  - .MS3D
- ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  - .U3D

I'm also curious as to what prompted this, will you be spreading the programs funtionality out across multiple platforms?

- ‎  ‎  Well, I just feel like there's no one creating a tool like Photoshop or 3DSMax for game hacking. I figured it'd be something very good to have.


HwitVlf;

An animated TMD maker. Or even a non-animated OBJ to TMD converter so that people can use their favorite modeler.

- ‎  ‎  If I can find a reference for Animated TMDs, I'd do it. But from what I found, TMDs don't hold animations, TOD files hold that data. And I'll be supporting that. :)

A generic file inserter/extractor (ie insert file A into file B at given location) which saves/loads a list of file locations for the current project so you don't have to re-enter the insert/extract location every time.

- ‎  ‎  How about archive profiles? It would work by letting you create a loader for the header of a file which is an archive. I'd also include a basic inserter/extractor.

A PS2 raw image de-swizzler and viewer.

- ‎  ‎  Not sure what that is exactly. If you explain more? Haven't worked much with PS2 formats yet.

A raw image <=> BMP converter that also inserts/extracts and has support for palette location input. ‎ 

- ‎  ‎  Again, explain. Does it let you choose separate data to turn into a BMP? like separate palette and image data files?

For translating, I think a feature that auto-generates a file to insert translated text and edits pointers to match would be helpful. I would probably be impossible to make a tool that supports every game's text, but just supporting SJIS format games could be quite useful. ‎ 

- ‎  ‎  I can agree with that, but it would be nice to have more information. Since you've done a lot of translating games, It'd be nice to get given some design ideas when I create the translating tools.


Anything else? :D

[HwitVlf]

It would be great to be able to edit PS1 animations. As far as I know, you're right that the TMDs are just the mesh. I just meant they're what you see on screen as animated.

How about archive profiles?

That would be perfect!

Not sure what that is exactly. If you explain more? Haven't worked much with PS2 formats yet.

Attached is a simple description of Swizzling. I haven't dealt with it much myself.

Again, explain. Does it let you choose separate data to turn into a BMP? like separate palette and image data files?

I meant for graphics like the KF textures, something that let you scan a raw file using an interface something like NANA, and when you find a graphic, let you scan for the location of the palette data (if applicable), and lastly extract the graphic+palette as a BMP. And also it would remember the location of of the palette/image for later reinsertion after editing.

I can agree with that, but it would be nice to have more information. Since you've done a lot of translating games, It'd be nice to get given some design ideas when I create the translating tools.

When you get there I can tell you my thoughts about it. I've had to make several such tools for the Brigandine project; they all operate similarly, but are customized to a specific file format. I should have taken the time to make a configurable tool that would work for all files, but really can't justify spending the time with my schedule. Basically, the user provides the text begin and end locations, the pointer block begin/end locations, the offset (ie if text at 0x10 in file, pointer value is 0x2010, offset is 0x2000), and lastly, the text end-byte.