Introducing Resource Packs: A new feature to manage and install texture packs

[JMC47]

Hey Texture Pack creators and users.  We've been a bit lucky to have a bunch of talented individuals making some of the most expansive texture packs for games that run in Dolphin.  While support hasn't always been perfect, things right now are pretty good with most major features working fairly well.  So, now's the perfect time to try and introduce a luxury feature from Spycrab: Resource Packs!

What is a "Resource Pack" you wonder?  It's support for a format that allows Dolphin to automatically install custom resources for a game, currently texture packs!  The new system can also keep track of which texture packs you've installed, to easily manage, remove, or just make sure they've been installed correctly and can be seen by the emulator.  An early specification of the format can be found here.  When you have several resource packs, you can easily access them and see it like this.



So, how do you install a resource pack?  Well, it's pretty simple.  You can use the included resource pack manager shown above to install a compatible zipfile.  This should make it a lot easier for users where before, they'd have to navigate through Dolphin's folders, find the correct spot, create a folder with the correct ID, etc.  This also allows you to have multiple resource packs for a single game!  The resource packs can be deactivated and activated as you please without the need for manually removing any files.  For a game like Kirby Air Ride, this means you could have a ton of skins for City Trial and swap between them without having to do any folder modification.

We're currently testing this feature in Pull Request 7600, so feel free to try it out or suggest modifications before it is finalized.  If you like it, let us know, if you're having issues or problems, let us know what we can do better.  Thank you for your time, and we hope you enjoy this new feature!

[Admentus]

That sounds awesome.

Does this mean that texture pack creators can include their texture pack for users to download? How would that work exactly? Could everyone author host a texture pack or is there is form of control? What decides which texture packs can be downloaded? Or is the feature meant for personal use to organize between texture packs?

Perhaps I am a bit premature with my questions, but this definitely piques my interests. I should keep reading this and test out the PR.

Uhh? Do we have a precompiled binary for testing? Or should I compile it myself with Visual Studio?

[JMC47]

You can download binaries from this link. They should auto-update until it is merged. https://dl.dolphin-emu.org/prs/pr-7600-dolphin-latest-x64.7z There are also precompiled binaries for other OSes too on the buildbot.

The resource packs are separate from Dolphin. You download a pack from say, the forum thread, and then you can install it into Dolphin. It'd actually be interesting to have Dolphin be able to look somewhere and grab them automatically too, though, but I think that's far out of the scope of the initial feature.

[themanuel]

(12-02-2018, 08:04 AM)JMC47 Wrote: You can download binaries from this link.  They should auto-update until it is merged.  https://dl.dolphin-emu.org/prs/pr-7600-dolphin-latest-x64.7z  There are also precompiled binaries for other OSes too on the buildbot.

The resource packs are separate from Dolphin.  You download a pack from say, the forum thread, and then you can install it into Dolphin.  It'd actually be interesting to have Dolphin be able to look somewhere and grab them automatically too, though, but I think that's far out of the scope of the initial feature.

Thank you for this update, JMC47 and to SpyCrab for this efforts.  This is a very neat addition to Dolphin.

One suggestion that seems almost obvious would be to have have a way for the user to select among optional textures.  Many packs have optional sets of textures for skyboxes or Mario's eyes, etc., and some even have UI button images for xbox and PS3 controllers to replace the originals.  These would be nice to manage within the tool itself.

[Admentus]

Assuming that DDS textures also work, there should be an additional descriptor (metadata) in the json that specifies the type of textures (PNG, DXT1/5, BC7 and so on).

[zemeon]

Sounds super useful, especially the multiple texture packs thing. I hated having to un-organize all the texture into the top layer of the pack when I wanted to overwrite with different ones. This just made something that might take half an hour take about five minutes, most likely less.

On a side note I find it funny that you went in the same direction as minecraft when you updated how texture packs worked. Texture > Resource, allow multiple packs to overwrite each other in a priority system. All we need now is the ability to replace sounds and models and we have a carbon copy of minecraft's system.

[StripTheSoul]

Oooh, very nice!

[Psycho]

I'm confused by the compression error. Like how are my textures compressed? It's a raw PNG made from scratch via Photoshop.

[spycrab]

(12-03-2018, 05:30 AM)Psycho Wrote: I'm confused by the compression error. Like how are my textures compressed? It's a raw PNG made from scratch via Photoshop.

It's talking about your zip being compressed. You'll have to create a zip with the "Store" compression method.

You might need extra software, like 7-Zip.

[Bighead]

I am adding a feature to my tool that should aid in creating these resource packs.

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

I think it was created correctly, I'm pretty sure I chose "Store" when packing into a zip. I'm able to add and see the resource pack by opening the folder and dropping it in and hitting "Refresh". I pressed the "Install" button, everything froze up for a second, but the textures are not working. It seemed like it copied them to somewhere due to the freeze, but they are not in the texture "Load" folder.

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

I'll continue to mess with the command line options in case it's my fault.

EDIT: Ahhh I see, it copied to:
C:\Users\Bighead\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Textures

Instead of...
C:\Users\Bighead\Documents\Dolphin Emulator\Load\Textures

This may be a typo/bug?