Difference between revisions of "Utilities (PSX)"

From Chrono Compendium
Jump to: navigation, search
(utunnels Assorted Tools)
(Room Viewer)
Line 63: Line 63:
 
*[http://chronofan.com/Black/Other/PurpleCatTools_v0.3.zip v0.3 Download]
 
*[http://chronofan.com/Black/Other/PurpleCatTools_v0.3.zip v0.3 Download]
 
*[http://chronofan.com/Black/Other/PurpleCatTools_v0.4_ALPHA.zip v0.4 ALPHA Download] (not entirely functional)
 
*[http://chronofan.com/Black/Other/PurpleCatTools_v0.4_ALPHA.zip v0.4 ALPHA Download] (not entirely functional)
 +
 +
====Model Importer====
 +
 +
Created by Magil.
 +
 +
*[http://chronofan.com/Black/Other/Modelviewer.zip Model Viewer] (version 2; download includes all room and model rips, plus actual script; Blender must be downloaded separately)
 +
 +
The new importer is based on Luminaire's old work, however, it now focuses on importing animations. The script is stilling using blender 2.49 APIs, so whoever use it need to get that version. I'm planning to port it on new blender, but for now it only works in 2.4x.
 +
 +
How to use?
 +
 +
# Get a blender 2.49b from here: http://download.blender.org/release/
 +
# Download import_ccmodel2.py
 +
# Put the script in blender's script folder (on windows, it should be in .blender\scripts under your blender installation directory).
 +
# Get the model rips. Extract them in a folder.
 +
# Edit import_ccmodel2.py:
 +
 +
* Find line 2740, edit the directory to match where you extract the models, there should be a "Battle Models" folder, that is your destination. On windows you should replace use \\ instead of \
 +
* Find line 2745, the value can be either 'battle_model', 'room_model', 'room_anim' or 'tech_anim', the paths to the models and animations are defined in several tables(chars, rchars, ranim, techs). I will explain later.
 +
* Line 2746 is the index to the battle model or tech animation. For example, if you want to import Serge's model with standard and attack animations, change the value to 0. If you want to import Serge's Luminaire animation, you need to change line 2745 to 'tech_anim', then change line 2746 to 180.
 +
 +
6. When you are done editing the script, run it from the menu: file-->Import-->Chrono Cross Model V2, and wait for blender to finish.
 +
 +
7. Find and reopen the output file in blender. For battle models, the .blend files should be saved in your "Battle Models" folder, for tech animations, the files are in "Battle Models\techanim". It is important to "force" blender to refresh by reopen the file.
 +
 +
Now you can preview the animations by pressing the right arrow key on your keyboard.
 +
 +
Character Table format:
 +
 +
* i -- Index, it has no use but making it easy to find things
 +
* m -- model file path. It is relative to your "Battle Models" folder, the script will add the file extension ".mdl" for you.
 +
* w -- weapon model path. Check "Battle Models\weapons" to find the files. Again, the script will add ".mdl" for you so leave it alone. If you don't fill this value, "dummy" will be used, it is for those with no visible weapons.
 +
* d -- Can be 0 or 1. If it is 1, the character will wield two weapons. For now, only glenn2 has this.
 +
* a -- Alternate texture suffix. For example, by default Serge.mdl will use Serge.png for its texture, but if you add 'a':'2' to the table, the script will use Serge2.png instead. This is used when you want to edit the texture manually but don't want to overwrite the original one, for example, Harle use HaleA.png instead, because of the transparent pants.
 +
* p -- prefix to the model object to be created. Useful when you want to import two models into the same .blend file.
 +
 +
Tech Animation Table format:
 +
 +
* i -- same as above
 +
* c -- character index, see above, basically, it is the i value from the character table.
 +
* w -- weapon, if you want to override the model's weapon. For example, Viper does not hold his weapon when using Flag Bearer tech.
 +
* t -- tech animation path, check "Battle Models\techanim". Those are usually ripped from battle field drps. This time the script will not add file extensions for you.
 +
* p -- same as above
 +
* d -- same as above
 +
* am -- Import the model instead. Usually this is used to load a model inside a tech drp, for example, Starky's robot. If am is set, t can be a fake path just to save the output file.
 +
 +
How to fix the meshes?
 +
 +
Well, the importer will leaves unused vertices. They are not visible but if you want your models to be clean, you can delete them manually.
 +
 +
It is pretty easy to do:
 +
 +
# Switch to edit mode
 +
# Right click or open the Select menu, click Non-Triangles/Quads (hot key: ctrl+alt+shift+5).
 +
# Press delete key, then click vertex
  
 
====Room Viewer====
 
====Room Viewer====

Revision as of 02:34, 7 May 2018

General Information

Several utilities are functional with the playstation release of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. If the utilities here do not work, do check out http://www.zophar.net/utilities/psxutil.html for more options. If you need an emulator, grab ePSXe.

Chrono Cross

Blender Model Importing Plugin

Author: Luminaire85

You can take the model OUT files that Nemesis's translation tools put out and import them into Blender using this plugin. It's still a work in progress; not every model will import correctly.

Changelog

v0.4.0: 2009.01.29

  • Ground-up rewrite to take advantage of Python's object-oriented capabilities.
  • Modified to be able to handle models with multiple textures.
  • Modified to be able to handle textures of varying size.
  • Improved console output to facilitate debugging.

v0.3.1: 2008.05.27

  • Steps to improve Blender viewing of models: turn off mipmapping and interpolation, enable transparency in rendering.

v0.3.0: 2008.05.14

  • Fixed remaining bugs in vertex unpacking; all models' vertices and faces are now viewable with 99% accuracy.
  • Deferred attempt to derive armature from joint data.

Chrono Cross Save State Editor

Author: Deus

This savestate editor works with saves made by ePSXe. It requires Python and wxPython to run; these can be found here and here.

Enemy Editor

This is one of Magil's toys—edits enemy stats, Elements, etc. and optionally outputs a .ppf patch to apply to a disc image. This is written in C# and requires the .Net framework, so this one is Windows-only.

Purple Cat Tools

Alfador's ongoing project, whose purpose is to produce a set of extraction and editing tools that will allow as many as possible of the files on the Cross ~CDs to be edited without reference to the documentation collected here. ;) Written in Perl (hence multiplatform).

0.3 was the last real release. There is reasonably complete documentation in the README file.

Features: break apart Cross CD images into their component files and rebuild them, or extract individual files and reinsert them.

Known problems: never much tested on Windows, creation of EDC/ECC data for CD sectors is really slow (not an issue unless you're rebuilding an entire CD).

0.4_ALPHA contains most of what was supposed to be the next version.

Features: In addition to just about everything the previous version can do, allows breaking down composite (drp and cpt) files into their component parts and rebuilding them, somewhat functional LZSS decompression and recompression. Faster at creating CD sectors than the previous version. Supports project settings files, so that you don't have to keep typing all those switches.

Known problems: the README was only partly updated, filebuilder.pl was never actually written, relzss.pl never worked properly (it's okay for short files, IIRC, but I screwed up on "what you do when you hit the end of the buffer"), some scripts don't work properly on Windows even though they're okay on Linux. I have a set of corrections someone on Triple-Tech gave me that I never got around to incorporating.

Model Importer

Created by Magil.

  • Model Viewer (version 2; download includes all room and model rips, plus actual script; Blender must be downloaded separately)

The new importer is based on Luminaire's old work, however, it now focuses on importing animations. The script is stilling using blender 2.49 APIs, so whoever use it need to get that version. I'm planning to port it on new blender, but for now it only works in 2.4x.

How to use?

  1. Get a blender 2.49b from here: http://download.blender.org/release/
  2. Download import_ccmodel2.py
  3. Put the script in blender's script folder (on windows, it should be in .blender\scripts under your blender installation directory).
  4. Get the model rips. Extract them in a folder.
  5. Edit import_ccmodel2.py:
  • Find line 2740, edit the directory to match where you extract the models, there should be a "Battle Models" folder, that is your destination. On windows you should replace use \\ instead of \
  • Find line 2745, the value can be either 'battle_model', 'room_model', 'room_anim' or 'tech_anim', the paths to the models and animations are defined in several tables(chars, rchars, ranim, techs). I will explain later.
  • Line 2746 is the index to the battle model or tech animation. For example, if you want to import Serge's model with standard and attack animations, change the value to 0. If you want to import Serge's Luminaire animation, you need to change line 2745 to 'tech_anim', then change line 2746 to 180.

6. When you are done editing the script, run it from the menu: file-->Import-->Chrono Cross Model V2, and wait for blender to finish.

7. Find and reopen the output file in blender. For battle models, the .blend files should be saved in your "Battle Models" folder, for tech animations, the files are in "Battle Models\techanim". It is important to "force" blender to refresh by reopen the file.

Now you can preview the animations by pressing the right arrow key on your keyboard.

Character Table format:

  • i -- Index, it has no use but making it easy to find things
  • m -- model file path. It is relative to your "Battle Models" folder, the script will add the file extension ".mdl" for you.
  • w -- weapon model path. Check "Battle Models\weapons" to find the files. Again, the script will add ".mdl" for you so leave it alone. If you don't fill this value, "dummy" will be used, it is for those with no visible weapons.
  • d -- Can be 0 or 1. If it is 1, the character will wield two weapons. For now, only glenn2 has this.
  • a -- Alternate texture suffix. For example, by default Serge.mdl will use Serge.png for its texture, but if you add 'a':'2' to the table, the script will use Serge2.png instead. This is used when you want to edit the texture manually but don't want to overwrite the original one, for example, Harle use HaleA.png instead, because of the transparent pants.
  • p -- prefix to the model object to be created. Useful when you want to import two models into the same .blend file.

Tech Animation Table format:

  • i -- same as above
  • c -- character index, see above, basically, it is the i value from the character table.
  • w -- weapon, if you want to override the model's weapon. For example, Viper does not hold his weapon when using Flag Bearer tech.
  • t -- tech animation path, check "Battle Models\techanim". Those are usually ripped from battle field drps. This time the script will not add file extensions for you.
  • p -- same as above
  • d -- same as above
  • am -- Import the model instead. Usually this is used to load a model inside a tech drp, for example, Starky's robot. If am is set, t can be a fake path just to save the output file.

How to fix the meshes?

Well, the importer will leaves unused vertices. They are not visible but if you want your models to be clean, you can delete them manually.

It is pretty easy to do:

  1. Switch to edit mode
  2. Right click or open the Select menu, click Non-Triangles/Quads (hot key: ctrl+alt+shift+5).
  3. Press delete key, then click vertex

Room Viewer

Created by Magil and written in C#. Check utunnels assorted tools below for a download link.

~R-Y Toolset

This was a re-write of the C++-based portion of the Terminus tools that was left unfinished after the Squeenix C&D forced the author to abandon it.

Terminus Translation Tools

These tools were used by Terminus Traduction to translate Chrono Cross into French. This is the oldest set of Cross tools. Heavily focused on dialogue editing, it predates the discovery of the purpose of many of Cross's files, and possesses minimal English-language documentation in the form of a PDF bundled with the programs. Written in a mixture of C++ and Java.

TIM Viewer

Author: Rveach

TIM Viewer can view, flip, resize and extract .tim (texture) files.

utunnels Assorted Tools

Updated July 2016 with a better LZSS tool. Includes some rough tools not found anywhere else, such as compilers and decompilers for fieldscript and battlescript, a de-~LZSS-er, a de-~DRP-er, and a texture remapper (remaps 2-textured battle models to use a single texture, for improved Doppelgang compatibility), all (I think) in C# .Net. Also includes the following:

  • Just wrote a tool that imports tim files into vram so you can use a vram viewer to check their positions. This was originally designed to construct battle field textures, but in theory it can be used for any tim files. How? Select all tim files and drag-drop them on the exe. The output file is vram.bin
  • Similar tool but imports egfx file int vram. Useful when finding element textures (for example, starky's mecha)

Walkmesh OBJ Exporter

Author: yaz0r

This is some quick and dirty code that can export walkmeshes to OBJ files. Inputs are the OUT files corresponding to the walkmesh as output by yaz0r's tools.

yazoo's Tools

Yazoo's tools can also extract the script, etc.

Lost Tools

Fieldscript

yaz0r had a fieldscript decompiler, and http://static.grumpycoder.net/yazoo/ccScript.rar was once the location of either the item itself or a thwack of scripts that had been run through it. yaz0r recently got back in touch and provided us the decompiled fieldscript as collected here:


Common use of the TIM texture format for image files makes a TIM viewer/converter an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to do graphics work on Cross—http://www.romhacking.net/ has several. (If you need one that works on a non-Windows system, I can confirm that ~PSicture sort-of works under WINE. Use File > Scan rather than File > Open, and give your files short names if you don't want it to get cranky.)

It's possible that some utilities originally created to work with other PSX Squeenix games such as Final Fantasy ~VII-IX, Xenogears, Threads of Fate, etc. may be able to operate on Cross files with minimal or no adaptation, but this has not been tested. FFVIII and Xenogears are thought to have the most similar engines.


General

Highly Experimental

Author: Neil Corlett

Highly Experimental can play .psf soundtracks for Playstation games. It is a Winamp plugin.

PSXMC

Author: Some Japanese dude

PSXMC is a useful utility that allows playback of streaming .xa files, as well as .str cutscenes. They can also be ripped as .wavs or converted to .avi or other movie formats respectively.

From: Modification