[HD Texture Project] Xenoblade Chronicles (v5.0U - May 17, 2014)

[poweredbykimchi]

@Flanqer

That map is really sharp. Looks great.

The last of the inventory icons are good too. However, I don't quite agree with reusing textures from other files (the collectopaedia + gem crafting) because they don't quite fit the original. That said, it works for now and I still greatly appreciate it.


@ScorpyX
That's a really nice way to do it. The metal textures look nice too.

And yeah, you can create sub-folders. But because you can keep files with the same name in different folders, it'll sometimes conflict. The button retextures are the main culprits for this.

[Flanqer]

@ frozenwings:

"It's really only useful for batch renaming ... textures that have multiple IDs for the same texture"

That's exactly what I'm doing with my batch scripts. I just need a more complete list of all the IDs for each texture. Something that'll tell me SX4P01_5a071f85_9 = SX4P01_d94a5760_9 = SX4P01_ce7dc0b7_9 etc. I took a look at BIMP; it saves its batch scripts as plain text files, so the batch script(s) you've made to do the batch renaming would probably give me the info I'm looking for, even if you're using a different batch script for each texture file.

Or I could use a dump of original texture files that includes IDs that are missing from messiahgov's texture dump. For example, if I could get a dump with 20 versions of the Area Maps icon and 15 versions of the Shulk-at-max-tension avatar that aren't in messiahgov's dump, I could merge those names into my batch script. (By 'versions' I mean files which are identical but have different filenames.) The folder structure doesn't matter for my purposes.

I took a look at BIMP. I definitely don't need it, Graphic Converter (Mac) has a much nicer UI for batch image operations and I have more powerful tools for batch renaming, but thanks for the suggestion.

@ ScorpyX:

Vector drawing tools wouldn't be any faster than the methods I was using; I have a few tricks for smoothing the edges on solid-colored areas and adding outlines. But using vector tools would certainly make it easier for me to add anti-aliasing, and give me the freedom to resize it later. For the next map I'll try using Photoshop for the initial work and then move it into Illustrator (which has better vector tools), and see how that goes.

@ poweredbykimchi:

Thanks. The hardest part was figuring out how the maps are stored. It turns out the RGB channels contain a black & white mask for the water, while the alpha channel contains the actual map as a greyscale image. Luckily I have an app that can split the RGB+alpha into two opaque images and vice versa, which makes it a lot easier to work on.

I have to disagree about those two icons. The original gem crafting icon looks like the furnace, viewed from the same angle as it appears on the gem crafting screen, and the collectopaedia icon looks like the collectopaedia screen, just simplified to fit into a 34x34 pixel area. Instead of trying to sharpen and repaint blurry details I could barely see in the original icons, I used screenshots that showed the same object from the same angle and edited them to match. I may tweak them a bit more later, but I think they already fit the originals.

What you said does apply to the inventory icon, though, because I relied on retextures that don't fit their originals. The perspective isn't quite the same, and the bag looks a little odd. I'll definitely want to redraw that one from scratch later. But I'm still not sure whether the inventory icon is supposed to look like a book, a box, or something else; what do you think?

[poweredbykimchi]

(08-05-2013, 04:15 AM)Flanqer Wrote: @ poweredbykimchi:

Thanks. The hardest part was figuring out how the maps are stored. It turns out the RGB channels contain a black & white mask for the water, while the alpha channel contains the actual map as a greyscale image. Luckily I have an app that can split the RGB+alpha into two opaque images and vice versa, which makes it a lot easier to work on.

I have to disagree about those two icons. The original gem crafting icon looks like the furnace, viewed from the same angle as it appears on the gem crafting screen, and the collectopaedia icon looks like the collectopaedia screen, just simplified to fit into a 34x34 pixel area. Instead of trying to sharpen and repaint blurry details I could barely see in the original icons, I used screenshots that showed the same object from the same angle and edited them to match. I may tweak them a bit more later, but I think they already fit the originals.

What you said does apply to the inventory icon, though, because I relied on retextures that don't fit their originals. The perspective isn't quite the same, and the bag looks a little odd. I'll definitely want to redraw that one from scratch later. But I'm still not sure whether the inventory icon is supposed to look like a book, a box, or something else; what do you think?

I agree that they look like the original, but I was afraid the smaller details in those icons may make them look different from the other icons which takes away from the uniformity. I have yet to test it in game, so I will take your word for it. I'll give it a run later today and give my opinions on it.

And that's a great way to do it. I'm admittedly not the best at this stuff, so that was something new to me. I only have an eye to critique

EDIT: So I just tried it out. I was wrong about the gem crafting. It looks great. I still have some mixed feelings about the collectopedia icon. If you could instead use generic boxes as text boxes instead of actual text, it'd be perfect.

Also, I think the inventory box can benefit from a bit larger outline. I think 1 or 2 pixels will do it.

[frozenwings]

(08-05-2013, 04:15 AM)Flanqer Wrote: @ frozenwings:

"It's really only useful for batch renaming ... textures that have multiple IDs for the same texture"

That's exactly what I'm doing with my batch scripts. I just need a more complete list of all the IDs for each texture. Something that'll tell me SX4P01_5a071f85_9 = SX4P01_d94a5760_9 = SX4P01_ce7dc0b7_9 etc. I took a look at BIMP; it saves its batch scripts as plain text files, so the batch script(s) you've made to do the batch renaming would probably give me the info I'm looking for, even if you're using a different batch script for each texture file.

Or I could use a dump of original texture files that includes IDs that are missing from messiahgov's texture dump. For example, if I could get a dump with 20 versions of the Area Maps icon and 15 versions of the Shulk-at-max-tension avatar that aren't in messiahgov's dump, I could merge those names into my batch script. (By 'versions' I mean files which are identical but have different filenames.) The folder structure doesn't matter for my purposes.

I took a look at BIMP. I definitely don't need it, Graphic Converter (Mac) has a much nicer UI for batch image operations and I have more powerful tools for batch renaming, but thanks for the suggestion.

@ ScorpyX:

Vector drawing tools wouldn't be any faster than the methods I was using; I have a few tricks for smoothing the edges on solid-colored areas and adding outlines. But using vector tools would certainly make it easier for me to add anti-aliasing, and give me the freedom to resize it later. For the next map I'll try using Photoshop for the initial work and then move it into Illustrator (which has better vector tools), and see how that goes.

@ poweredbykimchi:

Thanks. The hardest part was figuring out how the maps are stored. It turns out the RGB channels contain a black & white mask for the water, while the alpha channel contains the actual map as a greyscale image. Luckily I have an app that can split the RGB+alpha into two opaque images and vice versa, which makes it a lot easier to work on.

I have to disagree about those two icons. The original gem crafting icon looks like the furnace, viewed from the same angle as it appears on the gem crafting screen, and the collectopaedia icon looks like the collectopaedia screen, just simplified to fit into a 34x34 pixel area. Instead of trying to sharpen and repaint blurry details I could barely see in the original icons, I used screenshots that showed the same object from the same angle and edited them to match. I may tweak them a bit more later, but I think they already fit the originals.

What you said does apply to the inventory icon, though, because I relied on retextures that don't fit their originals. The perspective isn't quite the same, and the bag looks a little odd. I'll definitely want to redraw that one from scratch later. But I'm still not sure whether the inventory icon is supposed to look like a book, a box, or something else; what do you think?

I agree that BIMP probably isn't the best, but it's the best I have to work with for free on windows that I'm aware of. I'm not really any sort of retexturing/photoshop/etc. expert, so I'm not really familiar with many of the tools available.

As for a complete list of the IDs that reuse the same texture, you and me both :p. No one has a complete list because of the way Dolphin generates multiple IDs. If you look at my post here , you'll get a general idea of the hoops one has to jump through to get the IDs. Even though I spent over 150 hours on one playthough save/reloading while playing the game to generate IDs for the main menu and quest menu screens, I still don't have them all. The biggest problem is that I think there are outside factors that effect the ID generation. For example, the original 4.1 pack includes about 12-15 sets of Main Menu icons, besides the 5 that you just redid. So going through the game reloading at least 30-40 times in each area, I should have ran into an instance where I loaded up a main menu missing just the 5 retextures you did, with the rest of them retextured. But I never did. So I'm not sure if I was just extremely unlucky, or someone was using a different setting or a different version of dolphin for dumping those IDs.

If you look in the pack I uploaded recently, it contains all of the repeating texture IDs I've dumped so far. In the character portraits folder, there are generally two portraits for each character. The larger number of files for one portrait for one character is more than likely the art screen/skill screen portrait. The smaller number of files for one portrait for one character is the file used for the high tension battle portrait. There are a couple in game character icon type portraits too, but those should be obvious. Just sort by size or whatever in the folder, and you should be able to grab out the high tension files easily. I don't think there are high tension IDs for riki, melia, or fiora (both versions) in my pack, so I'm led to believe that they only use one texture for all of their high tension states. The same thing is true for Melia and Robo-Fiora's portraits for all of the menu screens. For some reason Dolphin is able to assign just one ID for all instances of their menu screens, but no one else. The pics I used for the high tension textures were the same ones used in the 4.1 patch: Shulk smiling, Dunban kind of shrugging or something with his arm up, Sharla kind of swooping in, and Reyn yelling. The other characters all use one file, or I just didn't have them dumped. So you'll have to get those ones out of the main pack.

As for the inventory icon, I think the devs just took a screen shot of the bag icon in the menu screen and just added a 3d effect to the tile. Whatever the bag image is placed on looks like one of the background tiles in the item screen.

[Truly]

Oops, nevermind.

[Flanqer]

I finished the Tephra Cave maps. This time I did most of the work in Adobe Illustrator so I can easily rescale it to any size. The attached files are 3x the original size.


Sample screenshot:
   


Texture files:

  Tephra Cave maps.zip (Size: 612.59 KB / Downloads: 220)

Addendum: I tried to make the maps a bit more accurate than the originals, particularly in the shapes of the Escape Pod Bay and Warehouse 2 (which are rather vague in the original because of the low resolution), but it's damn near impossible to map out the exact shapes and positions of everything. I think the mini-map's "you are here" marker is big enough to hide any small inaccuracies. I did a quick play-through before posting the maps to make sure it looked right and matched where I actually was.

I couldn't test the sections that open up later in the game because I haven't gotten that far yet; all I had to go on for those parts were the original textures from messiahgov's dump. Hopefully they're close enough.

I checked Illustrator's anti-alias option when I exported the maps to PNG, so there should be less jagginess than in my Colony 9 map.

[poweredbykimchi]

That looks pretty damn good. Wow. Thank you for this.

[frozenwings]

Indeed, looks really good. Thanks.

[SolarNova]

Hi.
So iv been away from the Dolphin scene for a good long while, last time i used it was not long after my contributions to the start of this project.
I recently got myself a GTX 780 Classifed to replace my 560ti, so iv been going over my old games and such seeing what new shinies i can turn on. For this game i can run Internal res of 2560x2112 (4xnative) with 4x SSAA, and a 'downsampled' screen res of 2400x1350 and peak at 90% usuage for a second on the opening battle scene, average usuage of around 70%.
That said, does this great game have a more uptodate compilation of HD texture pack(s) other than the september 2012 one on the OP?
And
Is there a better version of Dolphin to use with it now ? IIRC the current version i got((3.0.508-gf30aebf) with Xenoblade HLE hack 3.1 and x64 ICC build by Lectrode)still suffers from random crashes every so often.
cheers

[delroth]

The latest Dolphin version has no random crash, no audio issue, etc. (been playing it for up to 6-7h in a row)