Hello, to start by apologizing for my English level.
I would like to do HD textures for Pandora's Tower but I am a beginner and I really don't know where to start, I did some research to get the textures from the game.
According to the tutorials, the textures had the extension "TPL" or "TGA" but inside the iso there were almost only "AAR" files.
Then I did a Dump of the textures, with this method I had a lot of PNG files, and I wonder if it made a "Dump" of all the textures of the game without going to each zone of the game. (I just went to the title screen).
-How do we rework/redo textures ? Roughly. (Link, video tutorial...)
-Is it better to rework or redo the textures from scratch ? Do you have any advice, links (video or others) to create/rework textures ? And what software is used ?
-What exactly are the".AAR" files ?
Thank you to those who will answer.
Quote:I wonder if it made a "Dump" of all the textures of the game without going to each zone of the game. (I just went to the title screen).
Just FYI, texture dumping in Dolphin happens automatically (I mean, once you enable the option). It basically dumps all textures that are sitting in the GC/Wii's emulated memory. Many games tend to load textures into memory that may not be related to the current screen (often for the next scene or whatever) so they're available later. It cuts back on the amount of data that needs to be transferred back and forth from the disc. So if you see textures being dumped that don't appear on-screen, this is normal. For the title screen, for example, it's going to load up a bunch of textures associated with the rest of the game menus, and maybe even stuff for some levels/zones/stages/etc.
Quote:-How do we rework/redo textures ? Roughly. (Link, video tutorial...)
-Is it better to rework or redo the textures from scratch ? Do you have any advice, links (video or others) to create/rework textures ? And what software is used ?
I don't have any guides, but most people use image editors like Photoshop, GIMP, or Paint.NET. It basically involves... doing art. This can be as simple as using a combination of techniques and editor options to clean up noise, jaggies, and other artifacts to completely remaking the texture from scratch. Whatever works best depends on how skilled you are and what you're comfortable with.
Quote:-What exactly are the".AAR" files ?
It could be an Axis Archive file, or it could be a random, proprietary format that the game developers made themselves.
Also, your English is pretty good. Welcome to the Dolphin Forums by the way!
(09-16-2018, 12:38 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]It basically dumps all textures that are sitting in the GC/Wii's emulated memory.
Not quite – the textures have to be used for rendering something before they get dumped. If it wasn't for that, Dolphin wouldn't be able to know which parts of the memory contained textures to dump and which parts contained other kinds of data.
I thought GC and Wii (along with N64) had dedicated texture memory space (TMEM or whatever). Don't tell me some games use that for data too?
(09-16-2018, 02:06 AM)Shonumi Wrote: [ -> ]I thought GC and Wii (along with N64) had dedicated texture memory space (TMEM or whatever). Don't tell me some games use that for data too?
I hope they don't
Indeed, the GC and Wii have TMEM. When I read your post, I thought you meant the general-purpose memory (the 24 MiB part and the 16/64 MiB part). I'm not sure exactly how TMEM interacts with texture dumping, since the GPU side of things isn't something I've worked on much, but either way, textures that just get loaded from the disc to general-purpose memory don't get dumped.
Thank you for the answers. I wonder if I need to change the resolution of the textures (in PNG) ? If so, how do I know the resolution I should put on an image that is for example 512x128 ?
So the AAR files are "useless" and impossible to open?
Are we allowed to ask questions about other Custom Texture Projects ?
(09-16-2018, 06:50 PM)Rom Wrote: [ -> ]Thank you for the answers. I wonder if I need to change the resolution of the textures (in PNG) ? If so, how do I know the resolution I should put on an image that is for example 512x128 ?
You should use an integer multiple of the original resolution. So if the original resolution is 512x128, you can choose between 512x128, 1024x256, 1536x384, 2048x512, and so on.
You can use the original resolution if you want to when making a texture pack, but then it wouldn't really be an HD texture pack
(09-16-2018, 06:50 PM)Rom Wrote: [ -> ]So the AAR files are "useless" and impossible to open?
They aren't useless, but I don't know anything about their format or how to open them.
Thank you for the answers. So I redid the whole game with the dump activate, once finished in the folder there are exactly 30759 PNG files.
Do I have to put them away (by levels, characters, objects... As in the Xenoblade project) ?
How do I choose the texture definitions to make it HD? For example for a 256x256 I epscale it by 2, 3, 4.... ? Sorry for this question, I'm not sure how to formulate it so that it's clear.
(09-18-2018, 09:22 PM)Rom Wrote: [ -> ]Do I have to put them away (by levels, characters, objects... As in the Xenoblade project) ?
You don't have to - Dolphin doesn't care about that. Do it if you feel that it's useful to you.
(09-18-2018, 09:22 PM)Rom Wrote: [ -> ]How do I choose the texture definitions to make it HD? For example for a 256x256 I epscale it by 2, 3, 4.... ? Sorry for this question, I'm not sure how to formulate it so that it's clear.
You have to decide. There isn't any specific scale that you have to use.