Chaemelion's Texture Manager (Update 4)

[Gazoinks]

Woops, I'm a bad boy, I forgot about this. I will try to remember to release my next texture(s) so they're usable with this. This works with stages, right?

[chaemelion]

Yeah, and I think I got sets to work, but I need a friend to test it real quick before I release it.

[n64billy]

Jun 2, 2009 10:59:34 GMT -5 chaemelion said:

Yeah, and I think I got sets to work, but I need a friend to test it real quick before I release it.

I kind of did give you my MSN silly, Just give me a shout whenever you need a hand

[VILE]

This should soon have Cupash support, maybe make it like this?

You zip up a file having:

You character .pac and .pcs
Your tga big for CSS
Your tga small for CSS

So you end up with a zip with these files in it:

character.pac
character.pcs
big.tga
small.tga

(yes with those names)

Then your manager asks you what rar file you want in what slot and then it unzips and put the files in the right spot and puts the CSS tgas in the right spot.

[chaemelion]

I really dont know much about the CSP side of things... first, the only way my texture manager knows what files go where is by their names, so the tga files will need to have the same name as the characters to begin with but could be renamed if it's required.
So let me get this straight, you're proposing the texture hackers release their textures along with the CSP stuff inside a neatly packaged .rar so all you have to do is download it to a location and let my texture manager take care of un-zipping it, renaming it, copying the textures to the right place, and copying the CSP where ever it needs to go? btw, could you explain how the CSP works?

[KirbStomp]

CUPASH provides a nice neat way to change the .tga image files into the files that the game uses.

There are two CSPs for each texture - large and small. The large textures are used for character selection and shown after the battle, while the small ones are shown in the battle.

Cupash can take all the files and convert them straight into the form that the game uses. Have you downloaded it? It includes a perl file that has all the code, so if you can read perl you could draw on that and maybe integrate it into your program...

[chaemelion]

I can READ anything, but understanding it may take some time. If I had to, I could keep the perl script and use my texture manager to feed commands to it. So it takes .tga files IN and converts them to a format the game uses. Two questions:
1. What format do the .tga file get converted to?
2. what do they get named to and where do they go?

[KirbStomp]

I'm not sure if they get converted so much as they get zipped into another file. But don't quote me on that.

If you have the cupash folder and all the programs it needs to use, the .tga files need to be properly named and placed in the "newfiles" folder.

As far as the small images go, they are each placed in their own file in "info/portrite" and renamed to InfFace###.brres. Those files should be ready to go in the game, under the same subfolder. (Or else I had to make a modification to it - there might have been a problem with the naming.)

The large files I'm not sure about - careful, this could get hard to follow. Cupash produces a number of files under "menu/common/char_bust_tex," but not as many as there are CSPs. I think the CSP files (still in TGA format?) are grouped inside the .brres files - one file for each character.

The final thing that Cupash produces is the file "common5_en.pac" under the "system" folder. This file needs to be renamed "common5.pac" before it can be placed in the game.


So in review:

The small CSPs are each placed in their own .brres file.
The large CSPs are placed in a .brres file with other large CSPs from the same character.
The common5_en.pac file is produced, which must be renamed common5.pac.
All this stuff plops out in subfolders of the "newfiles" folder. The "newfiles" folder itself is where .tgas are placed to go into the program, so don't get them mixed up.


An important thing to understand is that Cupash itself doesn't do any of this - it just calls on other programs in sequence, some of which are proprietary.

[chaemelion]

Right, I know it calls on the other programs in there, but I wasnt sure how what exactly happens. I guess the easiest thing would be to have CUPASH in a folder and the same directory as TM and let TM call the batch commands and move the necessary files to their proper place.

[KirbStomp]

Prob'ly, especially since you can't get to the source code for most of the batch components...