Reverse Engineering Jet Set Radio HD - Part 6

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I ran into the issue of the created binary file being too large to be inserting into PLAYER.AFS when modifying my favourite character, Mew's, texture. She was allocated much less memory than the other characters. This could not happen, I wanted her to be red so I would have to find a way around it.

AFS Explorer provides functionality to increase the allocated bytes for a file and then regenerate the AFS file, however, I ran into the problem when the 'regenerated' file needed to be saved, the write protection error popped up. Thankfully, after some Google searching, I found a forum thread with mods for PES which contained a workaround.

In AFS Explorer, click the hammer icon (Modify reserved space...), increase the desired the "Modified res. slot" by using the up arrow in the top right corner, then click the "Regenerate AFS!" in the lower right corner. Here is where the sneaky tactics come into play. Don't save it as an AFS file, save it under All Files, with a random name. For example, save as "big". It will have no file extension and for some reason the write protection error doesn't pop up. Go into the directory "big" was saved to and open a command window and type "ren big PLAYER.AFS" (obviously make a backup of the existing AFS file). Now your new PLAYER.AFS can be used in exactly the same way as the old one, it just has more space!

Now this worked fine, however, when I added Mew's new texture in, the game didn't like it and it crashed. This was due to her PVR file being compressed differently to Beat and Gum's. The difference is that (on top of the global index which I expected) was that her PVR texture didn't use VQ mipmaps, so created the PVR with the wrong information caused the game to crash, fixing it gave me red Mew!

So now I know PVR files can be compressed differently, I will give an example command line command to convert a specific character's UV map (though it probably will be different for other textures they have).

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