Minor PakTool update; Tropical Freeze support added. 18 quintillion possible IDs is no longer good enough for Retro; they've started using 128-bit file IDs now. Anyways, due to differences in the new pak format, there's no decompression, list dumping, or repacking support for Tropical Freeze currently. As far as I can tell only one format is compressed anyway (MTRL, with zlib).
I only have one pak to test with so I can't guarantee it'll work absolutely perfectly.
As an aside, basically every format is completely different in Tropical Freeze. Very little that looks familiar.
A lot of this stuff is going WAY over my head (primarily the programming talk), but it does seem stupidly cool that we can hack the Prime games now. Awesome work to everyone involved.
So, with MP1 in mind, can anyone summarize if there's been any new cool discoveries found within MP1? Anything left out, that helps speedruns or even allows for more SW's (such as looking at the collision detection on all room objects to see what are flat and what are actually angled etc).
There's not really a whole lot in the way of things helping speedruns. The main thing there is it's giving us more insight into how the game works and why some of the various glitches people have run into over the years actually happen, which can certainly be useful.
Although I do know Miles is in the process right now of setting something up to visualize load triggers ingame, which I imagine is gonna be pretty useful. So there's that, at least. Being able to see how collision is structured is nice too.
So, any chance of Prime Audio Decoder supporting CAUD files? They seem to provide metadata for CSMP files, particularly filenames (but probably other stuff I don't know how to read too). It'd be nice to have files output with real names instead of hex numbers.
ok, added CAUD support. Should dump out the correct sound names if you give it a CAUD file, while if you give it a CSMP directly it'll still use the original input file's name. Lemme know if there's any bugs. also it supports Tropical Freeze CAUD/CSMP now
I don't really know much about the format, I only started looking at it today at Bearborg's request. What I posted still seems to work pretty well but I guess just bear in mind it will probably miss some of the CSMPs, since it'll only dump one per CAUD.
First of all, I know absolutely nothing about coding and can only grovel in awe at your uncanny powers of hackerdom. Sorry. But I'm completely enthralled that this thread even exists and you guys are awesome!
Gushing aside, I'm trying to create a text dump for Prime (and eventually Echoes). I used the PakTool to unpak and decompress everything and I'm using the STRGEditor to pull the text, but, unless I've missed something, it looks like you can only open one STRG at a time. Which is, you know. Tedious. Is there a function (or could there be?) where I can open several files at once (like, hopefully, all of them from the various Paks)? It would be even nicer if there was a handy "export" button that would take all the values and pump them into a notepad file. I mean, if I have to keep copying and pasting, I definitely will... but I thought I'd ask.
Unfortunately the tool isn't really designed for working with STRG files in batch, it's just meant for individual editing. So that particular tool doesn't contain any batch features, and I'm not planning to add any. Sorry :/
STRG isn't too complicated a format, though. I know you said you aren't a coder, but if you wanted to try scripting it or know someone who wants to try for you, I'd be happy to share info on how the format is structured to help get it working. I'm a bit too busy to do it myself though...
By the way, if you care about non-English languages, the NTSC version of Prime 1 is missing all foreign language text, and the NTSC version of Prime 2 is missing Japanese text, so you should check out the PAL/JPN versions of those as well. Although I do believe some of the English text was modified between versions, too, so I guess it's worth checking out both.
Ah, alrighty. Well thanks for making the editor at all, it's better than nothing! And thanks for the info on the NTSC/PAL. Right now I'm planning on focusing on the English text, but there are notable differences in the English between PAL and NTSC (the retconned Chozo Lore and Pirate Data spring to mind immediately), so I guess I'll figure that out later.
I do have someone I could ask about adding some batch functionality. If I can coerce him into helping me I'll bother you again for that info. Thanks!!
STRG is actually a fairly simple format in MP1 and 2, MP3 is a tad more complicated but it's not terribly difficult. I have all three documented for the most part. Also that Batch command only works for ascii characters, MP1 and 2 use utf16, while 3 uses UTF-8 and Shift-jis.
Yeah, I've actually resorted to outputting the data as a .doc, changing the encoding, and then saving it out as a docx, so there's at least line breaks where there should be. But then I still have to manually go in and fix the formatting and eliminate the wacky characters. It's tedious but it works. I was just happy to be able to unpak everything lol. Right now I'm half way through Phendrana or something.
...Unless you just happen to have text dumps at your disposal that would end my suffering. :P
I know it's not really a priority, but is it possible yet to view Prime 3 CMDLs? I've found the models for several cut enemies (salamander, Vaporwing, Phase Sprite etc.), but I can't actually view them myself.
yeah, I actually added MP3 support to my CMDL maxscript a while ago but just never released it. Here you go.
also, I added a little switch you can use if you want. You can go into the script and near the top there's a variable called weldverts. Turning that off will turn out much messier/worse-looking geometry, but it will also import much much faster, so that can be useful if you just want to see what a model looks like and don't necessarily care if it looks nice.