Hey guys!
Sorry for the inactivity - I've been somewhat swamped with school/work stuff, plus I've been playing MHW a lot recently, so I haven't done much work modding. Since there's a ton of edits coming out, I'll just give a step-by-step guide on how to implement a mod, so you guys can create your own mod files. This way anyone who's interested can mod it themselves without having to wait on my flaky attention span. If you have any questions, just let me know and I'll clear them up for you. Anyway, here's how to implement a mod:
1) First, you'll need to download the latest release of Unity Asset Bundle Extractor (UABE) from here: UABE
2) Next, you'll need to make the edited art compatible with the ingame images. The game image formatting is:
- Full body pictures must be 1024x1024. Normal pictures and damaged pictures are separate files, and both have to be 1024x1024. Here's an example of what a full body portrait looks like:
- Full body pictures must have an alpha channel as a separate file - this is a 512x512 image. If you don't know what an alpha channel is, here's a short guide:
Alpha Channel. Here is an example of what an alpha channel file looks like:
- Team portraits (i.e., the smaller cutout you see when setting up a team) must be 512x512. This is split into a left side (256x512) and a right side (256x512). The left side of the picture is the normal portrait and the right side is the damaged portrait. Here is an example of what a team portrait file looks like:
- Team portraits come with an alpha channel as well, which is a 256x256 image. As usual, here's an example of what the file looks like:
3) Once your edited art is compatible with the ingame images, run UABE and do File > Open and select the original game file that you're modding
4) You'll see a pretty big filelist, but the only ones we care about are the "pic" files. You'll note that there are 2 of each file - one is for the sprite, and one is for the portrait. If you look at the "Type" column, you'll want the ones that are labeled as "Texture":
- The breakdown of each file is:
"pic_xxx" - Default full body picture
"pic_xxx_Alpha" - Alpha channel for the default full body picture
"pic_xxx_D" - Damaged full body picture
"pic_xxx_D_Alpha" - Alpha channel for the damaged full body picture
"pic_xxx_M" - Team portrait file
"pic_xxx_M_Alpha" - Alpha channel for the team portrait file
5) Click on the file you want to replace, then click on "Plugins" on the right and "Edit" from the screen after that. Next, click on the "Load" button next to the texture category, and select the file you want to replace it with. Lastly, hit "OK" - it'll prompt you to select a Fast/Slow quality setting, but this doesn't seem to make any difference from what I can tell, so you can choose either
6) Hit "OK" once you're done replacing all the files you want to change, at which point it will prompt you to save the file. Click yes to save any changes you've made, which brings you back to the main UABE file selection screen. From here, click on File > Save to save your changes as a new file:
7) Once you have your new file saved, you will need to edit it to match the exact filesize of the original game file. The way UABE saves files is slightly different from the game files, so you will have to hex edit it. To do so, first you will need to download a hex editor (any will do, just google one if you don't have one. Personally, I use HxD, but it doesn't matter). You then want to open both the original game file and the new mod file so that you can compare the two. You'll notice that the start of the file is slightly different between each one.
Here's what the original file looks like at the start:
Here's what the modified file looks like at the start:
You'll see that everything that comes before "CAB" is different, so what you want to do is to copy the bytes before "CAB" from the original file, and then paste that into the new modified file. Here's what the result should look like:
Lastly, you'll want to scroll to the end of the file to make sure that the filesizes match up. 99% of the time they will match up perfectly, but now and then there will be a couple bytes difference. If this is the case, the ending bytes will usually be 00 or FF, so just add/remove any extra bytes as necessary to get the filesizes to line up:
8) Once the filesizes match, rename your new mod file to match the original game file, and you're done!
It can seem a bit complicated at first, but once you get used to it it's actually super fast and easy - the actual modding/file replacement part only takes a minute or two per file. For the most part, it's editing the files to match the ingame format that's difficult, since sometimes you have to rotate/scale parts to match the team portrait, or create a new alpha layer if any body parts have been moved.
If any part is confusing or if you run into any issues, just let me know and I can help. In the meantime, I've updated the Google Drive with a few more mods that I've made, but that'll probably be my last work for a bit.
