Add bin merging (+ any other major Aemulus features still missing) to Reloaded II / PersonEssentials

[true bronze]

In Persona Essentials you'd add a new IFileMerger (presumably SpdMerger) and then in Mod_Merging.cs you'd add it to the list of fileMegers in OnBind (it'd need to be before PakMerger so spds in paks work)
Then in that SpdMerger you'd basically replicate what BfMerger does. It's a bit complicated but I can help more if you have specific questions when you start looking at it

[lethal orbit]

I'll probably start doing that either tomorrow or during the weekend

[true bronze]

Then for the api you'd probably need roughly the same functions that bf emulator has, you can see them in BfEmulatorApi.cs. To expose that api you'd need to add a line in Mod.cs like

_modLoader.AddOrReplaceController<IBfEmulator>(context.Owner, new BfEmulatorApi(framework, _bfEmulator, _log));

(bf emulator's one).

That's a very brief overview, when you do decide to work on it I can try and help with any more specific stuff

[lethal orbit]

I'll let you know

tysm for the help so far

[true bronze]

All good, I'm very happy to see someone else working on this stuff

[hollow thicket]

i would like to help too - but i don't have any knowledge on C# - i would probably break more things then implement :/
i honestly don't even know where to start learning C#

Hopefully i can contribute something to the Modding Community too :/

[cedar shuttle]

It's okay ^-^

Everypme starts with small steps 😉

[lethal orbit]

finally got it to work without the original files being included, realized I could just do what the pak emulator does and use the spd path to check for and extract the spds from the cpk. Just need to figure out how to get the ones in paks

[lethal orbit]

turns out I swapped height and width when reading from the dds file and that's why it looked like that

[simple timber]

[lethal orbit]

[true bronze]

If you're going to do it that way you could basically do the same thing for paks. Just check for a file extension in the path (that isn't .spd) and if there's one then it's in a pak. That's pretty much what pak emulator does

Paks are one of the main reasons I did bf emulator like it is with the dummy files, either way is a bit jank but I thought that way was better (and there was no real pushback from other people)

[lethal orbit]

In that case I might be able to get away with copypasting the entire pak merging code lmao

Oh btw how does bfs in paks work? For mod creators specifically

[true bronze]

Same way any bf does except the dummy file would go somewhere in FEmulator\PAK
Like to edit init_free.bin\init\field.bf there'd be a dummy bf in FEmulator\PAK\init_free.bin\init\field.bf and then the flow in FEmulator\BF\field.fow

[lethal orbit]

yea I think I'm starting to see why you did what you did...

if I don't have something put in the PAK directory, it won't be exposed to the pak emulator

[true bronze]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can work around that with the pak emulator api though. I think it's AddFile

[lethal orbit]

yea I might be able to work something out with that and AddDirectory

maybe

it's hard for me to tell how either of them work

man there's only like 2 spds in p5r that are in paks but I do want full support

[true bronze]

They should both be documented but even then I understand if it's a bit confusing

Basically AddDirectory is like adding a new FEmulator\PAK folder, you probably don't want to use that since pak emulator will then attempt to treat everything in whatever folder you give as paks (and I assume the folder would have some spds which might cause problems)
AddFile adds a single file into a pak. So you'd give it the path to your spd as the file, the route is the route to the pak, and inPakPath should be fairly self-explanatory (if it was init_free.bin\init\thing.spd I think it'd be \init\thing.spd)

[lethal orbit]

ah ok the route part had me confused

[minor barn]

@lethal orbit You're working on the SPR/SPD emulator, right?

I wanted to suggest a feature

Based on your existing SPD Patcher

Being able to set the size of each sprite inside the texture

Because we have a very specific bug with textures:
Generally in the bottom of the screen there's gonna be a guide of what button does what, for example Shift to Sprint, M to open Messages, Tab to open Menu, etc
The texts for these buttons are in textures
These texts are in certain positions inside that texture, and the sprites are set for that position
If you patch a texture where a text of a button is on a different place, you have to change the sprite's position
But if you do that, The text for the button witll be in the correct position but the button itself gonna be in a completely different place

[true bronze]

I think this is already planned. When we were initially discussing it I suggested a way to let you define the position, size, etc. of a sprite using a sprt file (which you can export from Amicitia)
You can look at what I've replied to for how I planned it'd work. I assume it's something that's still happening

[minor barn]

You can reproduce that if you grab an UI texture from one language and use it on another language (like grab a texture from idk french and put in on english)

small exemple of it happenning

[minor barn]

hmmm, I see

I was just curious to see if it would help about that bug

Bc like, what I have to do now is mess with like scale and stuff until I think it's okay

Which is pretty tedious, where I go like:
Change stuff
Save
Load game
test
Doesn't work?
Change stuff
save
load game
test
rinse and repeat

[lethal orbit]

Yea that's something that I already implemented

[minor barn]

Oooh, great!

[lethal orbit]

finally was able to extract the spd from the pak, now I just need the pak emulator to read it

[minor barn]

Also, do you know about the offset setting for sprites, right?

[lethal orbit]

what do you mean?

I know that each spd sprite entry has position and length coordinates if that's what you're referring to

[lethal orbit]

do you have a non english spd I can test?

[minor barn]

I can grab in a couple of minutes

[minor barn]

There's two fields in a SPD sprite that are always 0 that defines an offset for it to be rendered on screen
One of X and for Y

So if you define the X offset as 30, it would be rendered 30 pixels to the right

[lethal orbit]

ah

these ones I assume?

[minor barn]

Yes

[lethal orbit]

huh. I didn't know that

[minor barn]

COMBINE/CMBFILE.PAK in English

COMBINE/CMBFILE.PAK in Spanish

[lethal orbit]

gaming

[minor barn]

epic

[lethal orbit]

I'm just gonna go with this for spds in paks...

[minor barn]

oh btw that's for the Velvet Room

[lethal orbit]

they're both unmodified?

[minor barn]

yes

[lethal orbit]

so what am I looking for?

completely forgot about this lmao. gonna try and implement this too

[minor barn]

Go to Velvet Room, on like compendium, you're gonna see something like this

The name for "Bloquear" is in the correct place but the button "N" is completely elsewhere

[lethal orbit]

does the button prompt get moved if you change the language? if it does then that smells like hardcoding

[minor barn]

It does

[lethal orbit]

[minor barn]

mfw they have a sprite file but they hardcode the sprites either way

[solar stratus]

true

[lethal orbit]

Spd Emulator should be about done, so here it is for testing!

[true bronze]

Awesome work
Are you planning on looking into sprs later on or are they more different than I originally thought?

[lethal orbit]

not sure, I still need a template 💀

i peeked at amicitia's spr parsing code and it does seem kinda different

I might try making a template from that

if it's remotely similar though it shouldn't be too hard to adapt the spd merging code for it

[true bronze]

Ok, cool. Good luck with that when you try it, hopefully it's easy 🤞

I think I'll make an announcement about this (probably just verified modders) in the hopes that you get some testers

[lethal orbit]

[lethal orbit]

I'm gonna ping @frigid remnant specifically since her texture fixes mod is the first one that comes to mind that changes a bunch of spds (hi keku, would love if you gave it a try )

[minor barn]

A thing that would help wth it is replacing specific sprites

although that's gonna be pretty hard to make

oh no wait, I just saw how it works

that might help us like a lot

[minor barn]

@lethal orbit Is there any specifics to how I should export the DDS textures?

[minor barn]

I'm testing the mod and the game doesn't wanna load my saves lol

[minor barn]

technically this is the setup, right?

ok i had to put the folder name in all lowercase for some reason but it worked

[minor barn]

ok I just put in the wrong place lol

[minor barn]

Ok how do I deal when the file inside the pak is named like spd/velvet_list_01.spd?

i created a folder called spd inside the pak folder and put my sprite there

it kinda works, something changes, but it doesn't show my sprite there

[minor barn]

Ok none that needs pak emulation that I made is working

Despite the logs saying otherwise

[lethal orbit]

Did you put a blank spd file in the pak emulator folder?

[minor barn]

yes

I have this on PAK

and this on SPD

[lethal orbit]

[lethal orbit]

can you try the example mod I uploaded?

[minor barn]

yes

it does work actually, no problem

maybe it's like I exported the DDS?

[lethal orbit]

probably not

it should import the dds properly as long as the header is the same as other dds

can I test out your mod?

wait wtf...

oh I was using switch UI which has lower res lmao

it does still work for me though

I'll probably have to rewrite part of the emulator though since the way I have it set up it won't detect changes and will always use the cache

at least I think?

all I know is that sometimes cache will be used even though changes were made

[minor barn]

Do you still want my mod to test?

this is the File Emulator folder for it

[lethal orbit]

works for me

[minor barn]

huh

Did you change anything in the mod or no?

[lethal orbit]

nope

not sure why it's not working for you...

especially since non pak stuff does work

[minor barn]

it was cache

deleted cache and it worked

[lethal orbit]

ah

yea not sure what to do about that...

it's fine for mod users but it can be annoying for mod creators

[true bronze]

You'll probably need to change the last write time of the file in your code if you haven't. Like I've done with bf merging stuff
https://github.com/Sewer56/p5rpc.modloader/blob/705cdff3f5c1ab7173b976250c48fe121d0d5c35/p5rpc.modloader/Merging/BfMerger.cs#L97

(I tried to look at your fork to check but you haven't pushed anything, that's kinda scary lol. I pray that your local copy doesn't explode)

[lethal orbit]

I made a branch on my fork

[true bronze]

Oh

(I always go straight to main lol)

I see you already are doing that then, weird...

[lethal orbit]

thing is with your bf merging stuff you just check the .flow, for me I can have multiple files of different types

at least I assume

[true bronze]

Do your sources include every file?

Yeah I do

[lethal orbit]

I think it's just the paths to the spd

[true bronze]

The problem is you'd need to get the last write time of every file you use otherwise changing one won't cause an update

[lethal orbit]

yea

is it worth just not caching

[true bronze]

If you can you really should...

Oh, so the routes you're getting aren't file paths, they're paths to the directory?

[lethal orbit]

uhhh

lemme double check actually

oh wait I think I do get the files too

the tuple passed in contains a DirectoryFilesGroup

[true bronze]

Ok, well if you're not using that you probably should, at least to work out the real last write time

[lethal orbit]

ok I think i actually am checking each file... innerFiles should be the list of files from the DirectoryFilesGroup

yea

[true bronze]

Weird

Maybe it's a bug with the cacheing (not your stuff, the actual cache code)

[lethal orbit]

I think it actually works for non paked spds

[true bronze]

Does it consistently not work or is it only sometimes?

[lethal orbit]

I just realized for paked spds when I write the new last write i do it for the dummy spd in the pak emulator folder 🫠

however fixing that doesn't seem to fix the issue...

[lethal orbit]

for paked spds it doesn't seem to work at all

for non paked it seems to work consistently with brief testing

[true bronze]

I'm pretty sure that's right. You change the last write time of the dummy one so pak emulator knows that it's changed, otherwise it'll keep using the cached pak

[lethal orbit]

oh

so maybe I should do both then?

[true bronze]

Wdym by both? What's the other?

[lethal orbit]

both the dummy spd and the modded files

[true bronze]

Oh, I don't think you should need to change it for the modded files (I assume you mean the dds and/or spdspr) it should just be the actual spd file (which is a dummy)

[lethal orbit]

I assume you mean the dds and/or spdspr
yea. that's what I was doing for the non paked spds. I got that from the bf but on second look you were also doing it for the dummy bf since you used a dummy for both paked and non paked

[true bronze]

Yeah, I don't think you really need to do anything for the loose ones

Even if you're unnecessarily changing it for the source files though it shouldn't cause the cache to not update (if anything I'd think it would update when it shouldn't)
Idk what the problem is but I'd say just step through in a debugger and hopefully work out something from that

[lethal orbit]

[true bronze]

Good luck

[lethal orbit]

figured it out...

when creating the list of files to be passed in to the CachePakedSpds function, I was populating the list with just the filenames instead of the filepaths

fixed paked spd cache invalidation

[minor barn]

Man

I think you just solved our buttons problem

[minor barn]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/633068385722302496/1154783522503004241/image.png

sort of

that's more on the game than your mod tho

[minor barn]

Ok whole texture replacement broke a bit

[minor barn]

adn the game freezes for like 1 or 2 seconds before loading the menu, where I'm replacing the texture

[lethal orbit]

Are your textures compressed? I think the mod you sent me had textures uncompressed

Also if you turn on dumping in the spd emulator mod it'll dump the new spd to your game directory so you could see what it looks like

[minor barn]

It's not compressed

it should be?

where the dump goes?

[lethal orbit]

game directory

[lethal orbit]

dunno how much it affects performance but it'll at least drastically reduce filesize

[minor barn]

Huh, nothing on the game directory

only thing I noitice different is a folder called PatternCache

[lethal orbit]

did you turn on dumping in the spd emulator mod?

[minor barn]

Yes

[lethal orbit]

maybe it's somewhere else then? idk this is where it dumps for me

try clearing the cache and running the game

[minor barn]

ok now it worked

[minor barn]

ok, what...

ok, so, I wanna replace texture p5camp-12.dds

if I can still count right, it's texture 11, right?

if I put the filename as tex_11, it replaces p5camp_10.dds
if I put the filename as text_12, it replaces pscamp_13,dds

I found out, it was texture 8

[lethal orbit]

yea it's texture id, not index

do you have my fork of personaeditor?

[minor barn]

I think so

[lethal orbit]

it should show the sprite and texture ids

[frigid remnant]

sorry I haven't responded to this before now
been lowkey retired from Modding lately as i've been putting full time into Freelance Editing but I can take a look at that once i've got my two new videos that i'm gonna upload on my channel
TL;DR: will check it out in 4 days to a week maybe? something like that

[cedar shuttle]

I noticed the PR tied to Cache behaviour, I merged it and pushed it out as a release.

Anyway should be live.

[lethal orbit]

merged latest pr into my branch

[true bronze]

Very random...

Yeah, I don't see why not

Oh, ok. I assumed you were referring tops_model.bin since it was just talked about in #p4-modding-chat

Ohh, that's the other light lol

There's too many of you

Sorry

[inner sky]

bustup params too maybe

[true bronze]

Anyway, if someone makes a list of files (I assume just binary files) that people want merging for, that'd be helpful

[inner sky]

the real light

[inner sky]

for p5r:
FTD0 (.ctd, .ttd, etc)
bustup_params (assist and regular)
shdpersona/shdpersonaenemy pdd

i think

[minor barn]

There's a editor made by ShrineFox that supports FTD

I'm gonna try to write support for more type of FTDs on it

[dark tree]

worth noting that shdpersona and enemy are the same exact format

although for enemy atlus did massive trolling

they have the p5 file. then they went "fuck the format", and just randomly added another pdd file at the end of the existing one

like, straight up file header and everything instead of just adding more blocks

[minor barn]

alr done

[lethal orbit]

wrote a python script that makes it easy to edit and mod in individual textures from sprites. It should make dds/spdspr pairs ready to be used with the spd emulator. feel free to mess around with it https://github.com/Secre-C/SpdDisassembler

I have no idea if this is the right place for this but it's spd related so I'll put it here for now

[true bronze]

I think putting it here's fair

[mortal yarrow]

i was literally about to ask this to be made for persona editor lol

i was hoping someone could add texture atlas-ing support to persona editor so you can edit specific bits of larger textures

that's what i was referring to in #modders-chat

[scenic sand]

#1062319573472383006 would also be a good place to put it

[mortal yarrow]

@lethal orbit how much of the code do you think could be applied to tmx files?

[lethal orbit]

no idea

[mortal yarrow]

rip

[lethal orbit]

if I ever stop procrastinating on looking into p4g/p3p spr files then maybe I'll find out

[mortal yarrow]

please do 😭

there's so many cool tmx mods but they're always incompatible with each other

like i love the new P3P P5 skill icons

but the items aren't colored

[true bronze]

You mean sprs right?

[mortal yarrow]

nah the tmx files itself

[true bronze]

Not like raw tmxs

[mortal yarrow]

like

if it's a massive sheet

[true bronze]

Really? There are sprites that aren't in sprs?

[mortal yarrow]

sorry lemme explain

if it's a massive sheet like c_main_01

which a lot of mods modify

all of them are incompatible with each other

[true bronze]

Yeah, that's an spr isn't it?

[mortal yarrow]

even if they modify one tiny part like naoto's bananas

[mortal yarrow]

yeah i guess lol

they're contained inside of sprs

[true bronze]

Then yeah, that'd just be an spr support thing

[mortal yarrow]

i'm only mentioning persona editor because it already features that bounding box stuff

[true bronze]

Sorry, it's just by saying tmxs I think actual tmx files on their own (which I'm pretty sure would be pointless)

[mortal yarrow]

i meant like

splitting the tmx into it's individual pictures, based on the bounding boxes in persona editor

then being able to modify each small element

[true bronze]

Yeah, that's an spr

Same thing as spds basically

[mortal yarrow]

yeah

[true bronze]

(At least in terms of what they do)

[lethal orbit]

if imagemagick works with tmx's then that part would already be taken care of

[mortal yarrow]

actually i'm pretty sure it does but you need to install some addon

it's in their list of supported files lol

[lethal orbit]

ah

but yea the bulk of the work is figuring out spr

which has already technically been done but as far as I'm aware there isn't a template for them

[mortal yarrow]

template as in hex template?

or like outlines?

because i'm pretty sure swine made a fork of persona editor that has fixed outlines for sprs

[lethal orbit]

for 010 editor

[mortal yarrow]

ah

nah sadly not

only a tmx template lol

[tight vector]

Not to add any more to people's plates (this is just an idea and would be extremely low priority), but it would be cool if Reloaded II notified you prior to launch if you had any mods installed that conflicted; meaning that they contained files that weren't mergeable.

Someone suggested it and figured I'd just put it out there.

[true bronze]

That would be interesting but it's something that would have to be added directly to Reloaded (or at least some new stuff would have to be added to Reloaded)
Currently there's no way a mod could do that

Maybe something to think about for Reloaded 3, I think some kind of plugin system was suggested (and never worked on) at some point for Reloaded 2. This kinda thing sounds like something that'd fit in with that

Probably something that won't happen for a long time though. Sounds like it'd be pretty complex (and not that important)

[tight vector]

Interesting, ty

[crisp abyss]

I think this proves I'm a genius

[minor barn]

What about messaging API for Reloaded?

Like at least a way for mods to show dialogs?

[minor barn]

it doesn`t draw the most attention to it...

unless you write with BIG FLASHY TEXT LIKE THIS

##OR LIKE THIS

epic markdown fail

[mortal yarrow]

epic markdown win

[solemn geyser]

How do you do that ?

oh, like this

[lethal orbit]

[honest charm]

how did you get that so smol

[mortal yarrow]

three hashtags

[dark tree]

[inner sky]

[true bronze]

Rudiger was talking about something in Reloaded, not in-game. If it were directly in Reloaded it'd have to be something new
You could add something in game that'd tell you but you'd have to actually launch the game to see it

[mortal yarrow]

maybe not text but like

would it be hard to add an outline to the package in reloaded when two mods modify the same file / archive?

like a UI change? not a text change?

[true bronze]

Again, something that would need to be added as some kind of feature to Reloaded

There's nothing that could be done in Reloaded (the desktop app) without some kind of changes to it

The best we can do is in game or as the game boots

[empty galleon]

I know a lot of games with mod support have the message ingame (although those games also tend to not have a client equivalent to R2)
if it's not too much work I think it would be good to have explicitly in-game. it makes sense to me to have the mod conflict check when you start the game for a multitude of reasons

[minor barn]

I still think that a dialog that warns you as the game boots is a good option, even if you just throw an error to force a dialog to show up

[cedar shuttle]

The problem is, as Swine said, that R2 is game agnostic. There's no logic that's tied into any specific game or mod.

It's not possible to implement this, unless you make changes to the launcher itself.

[cedar shuttle]

Nothing more to add to this.

I will be accepting mod specific logic into R3's launcher directly.

Reason for that is R3 will be built with NativeAOT, and C# NAOT plugins take up too much RAM for my liking.

However, strict rules will be imposed on any mod specific logic; including:

• All mod options must be available via standard Configure dialog (if you want to add custom settings page for game; that bridges settings from essential mods).

• Mod specific integration should not modify any files on disk (mods must work without launcher integration).

• Mod specific logic only runs if that mod is enabled (either directly or transitively [as dependency]).

• Minimal impact on performance and binary size (EXE size).

  • (Consider the fact some logic needs to be ran every time a mod is enabled/disabled)

Ideally I'd like to show hints about e.g. file conflicts as badges that dynamically pop up on the right side of each mod in the mod list.

So you can find the conflicts if you hover over the badge etc.

Though we're at least half a year away I'd say before I even get to doing any of that.

[lethal orbit]

wrote a p3p/p4g template based on the amicitia repo code

I'll probably work on adding spr support to the emulator next week though

[devout crystal]

[dusk crow]

yoooooo

[lethal orbit]

Oh yea I also need to write docs which I'm really not looking forward to

[lethal orbit]

it's not :/

[mortal yarrow]

weird

last time i tried to work with it spit out some error about needing to install a specific addon for it

[amber gale]

for spd merging, what file path should i use if the file inside the pak is named like spd/image.spd

in my case itd be cmbfile.pak/spd/p5_velvet_list_01

right now actually making the /spd/ be a folder in both pak and spd directories just make the game crash on boot

[minor barn]

it is like that

if you're replacing a sprite, you need to export the .spdspr for it

[amber gale]

im using the dissasembler so im sure the sprite itself is fine

[lethal orbit]

You only need the spdspr if you're changing the bounds of the sprite

[lethal orbit]

Does reloaded throw an exception or does the game just close

[minor barn]

mine at one point just kept closing until I exported it, even without chaging anything

[amber gale]

exception

the game boots up afterwards with no mods enabled (as far as i can tell)

[lethal orbit]

Can you send a log then?

[lethal orbit]

can you also send the mod? just the necessary files to test this should work

looking at the log though it seems like it's the pak emulator failing

[lethal orbit]

do you have an example I could test?

[amber gale]

sure give me a sec

i havent tested it with no other mods yet though so it could be a conflict with something else? i doubted that at first since this file emu hasnt been officially released yet, theres no way any of the mods im using could also be using it

[lethal orbit]

yea I get the same crash

oh I figured out why. in the spd folder you had the directory as COMBINE\CMBFILE.PAK\p5_velvet_list_01.spd\spd\ instead of COMBINE\CMBFILE.PAK\spd\p5_velvet_list_01.spd\

fixed

[amber gale]

omg youre right thats such a dumb oversight

i checked the path like 4 times too lol

so sorry to bother you w this

[lethal orbit]

no worries took me a bit to realize as well

[honest charm]

orichalcum

[minor barn]

Orichalculus

[honest charm]

what’s funny is that i have no recollection of writing this lmao

[lethal orbit]

p4g spr merging

[true bronze]

I assume bin means spr lol

[lethal orbit]

🫠

[true bronze]

🙃

[lethal orbit]

not sure what to do about adding new spr sprites though since they're index based not id based

[true bronze]

Add dummy ones up to the index they specify (if you need to) maybe

[lethal orbit]

yea ig

[true bronze]

I don't think there's really another way, that's how I did it with flowscript procedures with forced indexes (obviously not the same thing but a similar idea)

[dusk crow]

that's hypeee

damn means soon enough all the major filetypes that needed merging support will have them; pak, bf, bmd (only sorta iirc since there isn't standalone bmd merging, you have to do a workaround with bf emulator but still) and now spr/spd

[lethal orbit]

wip spr merging support. works the same as the spd emulator, the only difference being that the sprite entry files are.sprt, and need to be named spr_xx.sprt with xx being the sprites index

I still need to write actual docs

[true bronze]

Writing documentation is the worst

[lethal orbit]

works in p3p too forgor to test last night

[cedar shuttle]

Get GPT to help

It's good for these things if you know how to utilize well.

[true bronze]

Probably a good idea, I've rarely really used gpt. I guess this would be a situation that it'd be good at

[cedar shuttle]

If you look at the Reloaded.Memory docs: https://reloaded-project.github.io/Reloaded.Memory/Extensions/ArrayExtensions/

for 9.X.X

Like 80% of it was done by GPT; I just gave it

• Public API
• Page Template
• Aand tests

To go off of.

[frigid remnant]

ok so i'm ready to make P5R Texture Fixes use this, but since theres no docs yet, can you point me to any previous messages that may help me, or just walk me through what i gotta do? would be much appreciated

[true bronze]

pins

[frigid remnant]

ah thanks, all i saw was the downloads so i guess thats on me

[lethal orbit]

feel free to ask for help if you need it

[lethal orbit]

https://github.com/Secre-C/PersonaSpriteTools renamed the spdDisassembler repo, added some more scripts and added spr support for disassembly

[frigid remnant]

ok so uh
i forgot to install P5R lol

would anyone here be willing to test this new version of Texture Fixes while P5R downloads

[mortal yarrow]

lol so i tried to open a PSP SPR file and it seems to be infinitely generating .sprt files lol

[lethal orbit]

uhhh

can you send the file you're trying to open?

[mortal yarrow]

there's some error logs at the top

Error:
An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest (tmx_to_png.deps.json) was not found:
package: 'Microsoft.Win32.SystemEvents', version: '4.6.0'
path: 'runtimes/win/lib/netcoreapp3.0/Microsoft.Win32.SystemEvents.dll'

[lethal orbit]

this spr file has 687 entries lmao

[mortal yarrow]

oh it does?

fuck sorry lol

[lethal orbit]

as for this, i guess make sure you have .NET 7.0?

[mortal yarrow]

i assume i pick option 4 for P3P PSP anyways yeah?

weird, could've sworn i did

[lethal orbit]

only for pc. psp uses 1 I'll update the repo

[lethal orbit]

you probably do and it's a me issue, I just want to make sure

[mortal yarrow]

it appears that i did not >.>

wonder if that explains the weird issues i was having with the new aemulus fork

[mortal yarrow]

also i assume vita uses 2?

[lethal orbit]

also one

[mortal yarrow]

or would vita also use 1

yeah yeah

alright

[lethal orbit]

the pc versions of the game upscaled the textures and are scaled down in the spr, hence the discrepancy

[mortal yarrow]

ohhh

yeah that makes sense

[lethal orbit]

updated

[mortal yarrow]

eventually ill figure out how to work out that scaling stuff in the spr, that way i can port the HD textures to P3P PSP

[mortal yarrow]

thanks!

[lethal orbit]

maybe one of these days I'll make an spd reassembler so it's more useful for the non pc games

[frigid remnant]

ok so I think I did a stupid and just put it into the custom folders I have for the customizable config and stuff rather than an FEmulator folder. now im not sure how this'll work with the mod folder lookin like this

with the crihook stuff going on to make the configure menu work it seperates the P5REssentials folder into multiple ones i can turn on and off but how can integrate that with FEmulator

[devout crystal]

FEmulator doesn't use crifs probing path stuff, gotta dl femulator for building and use AddDirectory

Should be able to just add to current lines for probing paths, folder setup is just a little different

[frigid remnant]

ah boy i had no idea what i was doing in the first place setting this up

probably gonna need help again i am very stupid with visual studio

[devout crystal]

Probing path is "Naoto"/asdjaiodj/folders
Add Directory is "Naoto"/whatever.bin/files

Assuming spr and spd merging is compatible with that (Id assume it is?)

[lethal orbit]

I don't think it explicitly needs to? most of the code is copypasted from bf/pak emulator

[frigid remnant]

well i never found a need to implement PAK emulator into Texture Fixes so im not sure if it works with this setup

[devout crystal]

you can add to your existing stuff

[frigid remnant]

and also i did test it inside the custom folders, the sprites that is. they didnt work thats why i came in here

[lethal orbit]

anyway femulator itself doesn't add files to the game, that's still in p5ressentials

[devout crystal]

Like straight up another line under your function lol

example

[frigid remnant]

listen i dont know what that means i was like given a template basically and told how to make this work i got no clue what i'm doing

[devout crystal]

Uh

Fair enough

[frigid remnant]

i will try to understand

[devout crystal]

Idr the exact line

[frigid remnant]

but it is hard and i am also tired atm so maybe i should pick this back up tommorow

[hoary cypress]

There is one issue that i need to report. Maybe it's just me but it's better than sorry.

So according to this ss, it seems that reloaded doesn't manage to merge TBL well. CBT was above higher than my mod which means CBT got overwritten. As you can see, the items are having wrong icon and if you try to view it in the item menu, it crashes.

So what I checked is that I found out that CBT ITEM.TBL outfit section has way more bytes than the vanilla ITEM.TBL outfit section. This leads to crash. I assumed that it should have merged but it didn't. I managed to fix it by copying the data from CBT ITEM.TBL Outfit section to mine. And Voila, it didn't crash anymore.

[hoary cypress]

I see i see. But if this introduces a new issue, im glad to report it

[dark tree]

so it seems we found a bug with tbl merging in essentials @cedar shuttle

essentially, if tbl merging is ever needed, and one of the new TBLs have more entries than original tbl, merging dies

[hoary cypress]

So glad that DC verified it

Does this also cause the DAT error can't be found issue thing?

[dark tree]

ive no idea what that is

but im getting reports that Custom Bonus Tweaks EXIST is not working when another mod modifies tbl

which is obviously not something that should be happening

[hoary cypress]

Hmmm I see I see. To explain it further, some people have EMXXX.DAT file can't be found even with CBT and other mod on.

Only by enabling simple exist Nuke solves it

Which I don't understand how and why

[dark tree]

you mean the motionse files?

[hoary cypress]

Yeah

[dark tree]

you can include dummy ones I guess?

[hoary cypress]

Oh it has way more than that, lemme show you ss

[dark tree]

every enemy has motionse enabled by default

scarltz patch removes it from all enemies

which kills sound effects

(like evoker sound in p3mc battle)

[dark tree]

yes thats the motionse file

just include a default/dummy one for the new enemies you added

[hoary cypress]

Ahh so that's why

[dark tree]

hang on

i can help with this easily

[hoary cypress]

You can? Sweet

[dark tree]

i have an idea

make a dummy one

copy it for every enemy id in the game

then delete the ones for enemies that exist

so your mod only has for enemies that dont

[hoary cypress]

That's one way to solve it. Alright cool

[dark tree]

here

dummy motionse for every enemy id that doesnt have one

from id 0 to id 999

[hoary cypress]

Thank you. I'll get it done asap

[cedar shuttle]

Like more sections? Or more entries in a section?

I know that more entries with a section should work (I think there was a test for it)

But more full sections was never something I looked into

[dark tree]

more entries in a section

i.e. outfit section in ITEM.TBL has 250 items in original (made up number) and then my mod has, say, 300 items there

someone's mod edits a different section

and then those 50 new entries dont get merged

[cedar shuttle]

That sounds like a bug alright

Chances are I won't be able to verify/check it this week (I'm away from home, and generally hanging out)

But you can bully Swine about it.

I do know though that this was one of the cases I explicitly handled when I wrote the original code

And I know this has worked at least for some setups before.

hmmmmm

on a fun note....

There are unit tests for this

So you could get out of your comfort zone and try something new :p @dark tree

People tell me you should try something new for once, haha

[hoary cypress]

DC got bullied instead cause of me

[lethal orbit]

Finally we can drag DC into reloaded hell

not actually hell but it's a steep learning curve no offense to sewer he's the goat

[cedar shuttle]

No super special stuff involved there.

For them it's

• Find & copy existing test
• Figure out how to copy file during build
• Replicate the issue
• Debug the issue

Typical programming, just in different language.

[dark tree]

[lethal orbit]

still testing

[true bronze]

Is there anything in particular that needs testing or just the whole thing?

[lethal orbit]

the whole thing

tbf I have no idea how much testing is enough

There haven't really been any issues related to the merging itself so far

[true bronze]

It's never enough lol, just keep doing it until it seems like everything's fine then release it and find out there's a major bug

[lethal orbit]

I still need to write docs

[true bronze]

Also, does the api have a way to add files (like bf and pak emulator)?

[lethal orbit]

I basically copypasted the bf emulator api

[true bronze]

cool

On testing, do we know who's actually testing this (if anyone)?

Ideally anyone who's doing testing (presumably people making da mods) would say if everything's going well, then once everyone who wants to test has done that say it's probably good to go

[minor barn]

tbl emulator?

[true bronze]

???

[minor barn]

merge I meant

[true bronze]

It's been a thing for quite a while (literally since release for p5r)

yes

[minor barn]

oh, if its the whole thing, I've been testing the spr emulator for some time

I actually have a new thing to put in, lemme test

I just need to remember how to use it lol

[minor barn]

ok it crashed but i think its how im exporting my image

Fun(?) thing I discovered about SPR emu:
I have a mod that replaces a file
Below that mod is a mod that emulates a SPR in the same file
because of that, Reloaded ignores the file replacement for the first mod and uses the base one from the game

Also, I dont even need to have a sprite or a texture for that to happen, I just had the folder structure

[true bronze]

Yeah, that's how all the emulators work. Something emulated will completely override full copies of the file

It's something that could probably be worked around, it's just not worth the effort. People can just update their mods to support the emulators

[minor barn]

ok now things are not being emulated at all

[lethal orbit]

did you get it working? if not can you send mod?

[true bronze]

I was trying to use this but a get an error when it's running png_to_tmx.exe. Any ideas?

An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest (tmx_to_png.deps.json) was not found:
package: 'Microsoft.Win32.SystemEvents', version: '4.6.0'
path: 'runtimes/win/lib/netcoreapp3.0/Microsoft.Win32.SystemEvents.dll'

(Yes I have dotnet 7)

Maybe a file is missing from what you uploaded to github?

[lethal orbit]

Not sure

[lethal orbit]

Seems like it's the same exact exception bonq had

[true bronze]

Oh, ok

Could you check, if you download what's on github (instead of using what you presumably already have locally) does it work?

[lethal orbit]

Pretty sure whatever's on GitHub is what's on my machine

In bed rn though so I'll check when I wake up

[true bronze]

Thanks, no rush

[scenic sand]

are these correct, im just kinda copypasting like you said

[lethal orbit]

oh I think some stuff were caught by gitignore?

oh it's because I generated a python gitignore and it catches some c# library dlls

@true bronze updated the tmxtopng converter. Ended up writing my own because the other one didn't work in paths that had spaces

[true bronze]

Thanks, it works fine for me now

[true bronze]

Should be, I think there is something extra you need for messages though. If I'm not wrong then you'll find out when you get to that point (I think it's outformat or something like that)

[minor barn]

Yes I'm just modifying your example bc there's the only one that works

everything else worked, except the file for the calendar file

[lethal orbit]

something's wrong with your texture

specifically tex_1.dds

I compressed the dds and it fixed the crash

[minor barn]

I was suspecting it

what compression did you use?

[lethal orbit]

I used dniwe's bddsm.bat https://github.com/DniweTamp/cool-batches

[minor barn]

oh, gimp is screaming about missing names for something...

[scenic sand]

i can probably just...strip out the library and enum overrides, right

[true bronze]

It'd be nice if you left them in some form since messagescript libraries are a thing, that's probably a bit different though. If you don't it's not really going to be a big deal

Unlike flowsdcript, messagescript still works fine if you'd renamed something but then use ethe unnamed version so library overrides like that shouldn't really matter

Actually now that I've said that I take the first statement back, just leave them out it'll be fine

[scenic sand]

yeah i wasnt sure if there was something unhinged i should leave the door open for and wasnt sure if enums were even a thing for messages anyway

[true bronze]

You should leave the compiler args thing in though in case someone needs to use different encodings

I'm not sure if enums are a thing for them either

[minor barn]

GIMP BC3 compression worked there but something got borked with the transparency

oh I see now

ok got it

[scenic sand]

third question: i dont know what a bmd header is supposed to look like

[true bronze]

I'm pretty sure it starts with MSG1

If you open one up in a hex editor you'll see

Checking the header really isn't that important tbh (plus I didn't properly check it, I just check for the magic and trust the rest is fine lol)

It'd probably be more important in something like pak emulator where you probably need that info to emulate the file.
Bf (and BMD) don't really emulate it in that sense, they just build it with script compiler

[scenic sand]

i c

hmm

[true bronze]

Try little endian

[scenic sand]

tried that

i probably just dont know 010 that well tbh lol

[true bronze]

Weird, I'm fairly sure it should be MSG1...

Like I said it's really not important though. You really could just not bother checking

Maybe it's different in the other games

[scenic sand]

well these are modded p5r bmds i pulled up just to quickly check

i could grab a p4g mod real quick to compare ig, if i really wanted

...meh, ill make it future mes problem

[dusk crow]

thought i'd try and see if i could update the title.bin of title screen fixes and truehd reloaded to work with spr merging (FOR MY OWN PERSONAL USE MIND since i didn't make those mods myself) and uhhh

doesn't appear to be working correctly for me

[lethal orbit]

can I take a look at your files?

[dusk crow]

here you go

[lethal orbit]

did you use the sprdisassembler?

[dusk crow]

yes

[lethal orbit]

it's probably an issue with the sprdisassembler rather than the emulator. just means you'll have to use the full size images instead of having the disassembler cut them out

[mortal yarrow]

lol

that’s how those files look on PSP if you don’t downscale them lol

[lethal orbit]

actually it seems to work fine if I just take the entire disassembled spr and copypaste the files so it might be something else...

[dusk crow]

the files sprdisassembler gave me looked ok was the thing so i think it's something in spdemulator that's going wrong

but hey using the full tex_X.tmx files works ok so that's good enough for me until the mods get updated officially

i can now have the better logo from truehd and still keep the "mod loader enabled" message from title screen fixes with the normal mods instead of making a seperate manually merged mod :D

[lethal orbit]

you should still use spr_ naming, even if you're using the full textures

just don't include any .sprt files

[lethal orbit]

I think it's something with your tmx? I literally converted to png and back to tmx and it fixed it lmao

[dusk crow]

bruh

i converted it with tmxconverter which usually i don't have any problems with so i'd be confused if that was causing problems

[lethal orbit]

I'm pretty sure that's what I'm using too lmao

[dusk crow]

https://tenor.com/view/skeleton-gif-26826812

moment

[lethal orbit]

the portable logo does still get slightly cut off though

[honest charm]

POATABL

[dusk crow]

Yeah I noticed that when I was trying to use the pngs and sprts from sprdisassembler (I didn't realize it needed tmx files); wound showing the vanilla logo fine but it got cutoff too

Weirdly using the tex_0.tmx file works perfectly fine for me tho no issues at all so uhhh idk 🙃

[lethal orbit]

I think it's just that the texture itself is too big

the logo from reloadedhd works fine

btw @true bronze what changes did you want to make to personaeditor before I accepted to your pr? perhaps I can make those changes if you want

[devout crystal]

poatabl

[dusk crow]

weird, checking title screen fixes's p3p_logo.spr in persona editor it looks fine to me

[lethal orbit]

actually I may have used my own .sprt file, lemme double check

that's a different texture than I have...

but yea I'm pretty sure I'm using the one you sent

[dusk crow]

they look like the same one to me (title screen fixes's that is) so uhh idk

[lethal orbit]

I think the .sprt you sent may have been taken from the vanilla spr instead of pixelguins spr then...

or something of the sort because the one you sent was different from the one I generated from title screen fixes

[dusk crow]

huh

tried setting it up for spr_X.tmx/spr_X.sprt files again and now it works fine 🙃

soooo maybe i did screw it up somehow? not sure how though considering im pretty sure at one point i tried without using the sprts at all (which SHOULDN'T have caused them to crop in nearly as much as they did)

well it works 100% properly now sooo uhh good enough for me lol

[lethal orbit]

[true bronze]

Sorry, I forgot about that. Basically I changed a few things like adding the X Flip and Y Flip and removing the rotation stuff (or something like that).
I think I'd basically just separate out the spd editor and spr editor into two different things (since seemingly they share the same code, at least for the UI). So I'd put what I have there into an "spr editor" and whatever you've got stays in "spd editor".
Or at least something along those lines, hopefully that makes at least some sense 😄

[lethal orbit]

are there any changes you made that should apply to spds too?

[true bronze]

I don't think so

I only was working with sprs when I made those changes, if anything I changed is the same between the two it'd be a coincidence

[lethal orbit]

btw I found a bug with spr scaling where changing scale from 2 to 1 won't show any change in the editor until you select another texture

[true bronze]

Oh, fun

I vaguley remember having some problem like that but I thought I fixed it 🫠

[lethal orbit]

merged your pr into a branch and did what you suggested

[true bronze]

nice, thanks

[lethal orbit]

https://github.com/Secre-C/PersonaEditor/releases/tag/v1.8.0

[true bronze]

Is adding new sprites something that you've done yet? I'm trying to do so but it isn't being added

[lethal orbit]

for the femulator?

[true bronze]

yeah

[lethal orbit]

yea you can add new sprites. all you need to do is add the new spdspr/sprt entries (make sure the ids are set in the file) and a texture(s) with the new sprite ids

[true bronze]

Oh wait, I have a png, not a tmx

I copied it straight from spr dissassembler lol

Umm I think the spr's' been corrupted...
Amicitia dies when I open it

What do I need to set in the sprt? It doesn't have an id field

[lethal orbit]

sprt doesn't have id so the emulator will use the name to determine the index

[true bronze]

Ok, well then I think I've done everything right. Here's the corrupted spr it spits out

[lethal orbit]

Personaeditor opens it fine...

[true bronze]

Hmm, ok

Well the game doesn't seem happy about it, unless I've just messed up my code to display it (very possible)

I wonder why it dies in Amcitia

[lethal orbit]

one thing I did notice though is that the height/width is scaled down by .5 instead of .25, but that's probably not the issue

not sure why amicitia doesn't like it though... the spr seems fine

does it just crash?

[true bronze]

I'm trying to make one manually but amicitia is refusing to save my changes 😔

Does what crash? Amicitia or the game?

[lethal orbit]

game

[true bronze]

No, it wasn't crashing before

Either it showed nothing or glitchy black squares

[lethal orbit]

seems like amicitia dies with all sprs generated by the emulator

the only thing I can think of is maybe lack of 0x10 alignment?

[true bronze]

Well the sprt must be messed up a bit, I got it sort of working with a manually made one. (That should be the outfit icon from p4g)

[lethal orbit]

looks like that might be cause of this?

[true bronze]

Ok, so is that the sprt or the actual image?

[lethal orbit]

sprt

[true bronze]

k, I'll try fixing that

[lethal orbit]

here's a version of the spr template that can parse sprts

[true bronze]

Nice, thanks

Oh, I realised why the size was wrong. That sprt is from p4g so it's scaled by 2 instead of 4 🫠

Well I've got it working with a manually made one, now to see if it'll work with the emulator

Yep, that was all it was

mb, the emulator works fine

[scarlet bolt]

You're going to the shadow realm now, Jimbo

[devout crystal]

Swine is that

[true bronze]

Yes...

[minor barn]

since when p3p has a separate thing for costumes?

[true bronze]

since I made it have one (wip obviously)

#1124040609087365130

[lethal orbit]

btw does it still die in amicitia?

I think all sprs built by the emu do, but I'm not sure if that's worth fixing. I think amicitia requires certain alignment for textures? that's the only difference I see between emulated and vanilla files

unrelated, but I've been thinking about several ways mods using spd emulation can be made incompatible, and I'd like some input on how to reduce that.

firstly, I'm wondering if it's worth keeping texture replacement (using tex_xx) as a feature... I can't think of a scenario where it's a better solution than just replacing all sprites (still using just a full texture, but instead using spr_xx-xx). it only hurts compatibility and messes up priority (spr_xx texture edits will always override tex_xx texture edits).

Another avenue for incompatibility is spr_xx textures not needing an accompanying sprite entry file. If a lower priority mod uses the spd disassembler to replace a sprite and a sprite entry, and a higher priority mod replaces that sprite in a full size texture (without a .spdspr/sprt, there will be a mismatch between the sprite entries coordinates and the sprites location in the texture. The solution to this would be to always require an accompanying sprite entry file for each sprite that a spr_xx texture replaces.

[true bronze]

I think it'd be fine to remove both of those things, the alternatives really aren't that much harder to do as mod creators

Especially with your disassembler, you can basically just copy-paste the sprt/spdspr file and name the texture appropriately (in the case that someone was actually replacing every sprite in a texture)

[lethal orbit]

yea

[lethal orbit]

I'll make some changes to the personaspritetools scripts to make things easier after I make these changes

[scenic sand]

maybe i should...be noting the workflow of this thing down somewhere instead of just trusting my brain to Get It™️ after looking at it enough times lolol

[lethal orbit]

sprite tools now separate texture and sprite entry files into different folders for each texture id

[lethal orbit]

made both of the changes I mentioned here, those being:

removed support for texture replacement.
spr_xx texture files now require an accompanying sprite entry file (.spdspr/.sprt)

tbh removing features does leave a bad taste in my mouth so I'm curious to know what the other people making mods with this think.

[minor barn]

I think I have a use case for replacing both textures and sprites at the same time

Like that button problem I have

Replacing only the sprite for it helps to make it look good in-game

And sometimes the texture have other UI stuff (Like in a shop for example) that, maybe with the script, it would be a little bothersome to put the replacements on

Like, I was thinking my workflow would be like:
Designer from the translation team send me the whole texture translated
I put it in the game using the SPD emulator
A button's text is looking a bit weird, it's being cut off
I get the PSD of the texture and I export only the text for that button in that texture
I replace that sprite for the text of that button and use the spdspr file to fine tune the parameters for it

[lethal orbit]

You can do all that without replacing vanilla textures

And yea it does make replacing most sprites in a texture a bit more annoying (hopefully the sprite disassembly/extraction make that easier), but I'd like to encourage best practices to avoid people being lazy and making their mods incompatible

[lethal orbit]

ok maybe texture replacement might be necessary...

I can manually make this a file name so i wonder why it's giving me an error...

ok it might not be the length of the filename

[lethal orbit]

...it might be the length of the filename

If it wasn't obvious, I'm trying to have the sprite extractor export textures with the filename including all the sprites... I guess some texture just have too many sprites not in a row and it makes the filename huge...

[mortal yarrow]

oh please get the actual file name to work

i would hate to have to rename a hundred tmx files just because of the old sprite merging

[lethal orbit]

were you just replacing textures before?

[lethal orbit]

apparently windows has a max filepath length

I guess for now I'll name the textures that are too long something else

[mortal yarrow]

no i mean for hardware ports

like if i wanted to port a P3P PC texture to P3P PSP i’d have to rename tex_00.tmx to c_main_01.tmx

[lethal orbit]

wait why?

[mortal yarrow]

because of how aemulus merging works

[lethal orbit]

ah

[mortal yarrow]

the texture name has to match for it to be merged into the spr

and with the new PC merging it’s some generic name

meaning i’d have to go in and rename every tmx file

[lethal orbit]

if you just need the textures then you can just use amicitia or personaeditor

[mortal yarrow]

what?

if the mod is setup for the new spr merging

how would i grab the textures with amicitia?

id still need to rename all the files, that’s my main point

[lethal orbit]

You wouldn't be able to adapt the new spr merging to use with aemulus anyway, the most you can do is port the entire spr

[mortal yarrow]

🫠

i literally just said i had to rename the tmx but alright

how would i even port the entire spr if the file isn't even an spr

unless renaming the tmx and converting it wouldn't actually do it?

does someone have an example mod with spr merging set up that i could test with?

[lethal orbit]

All you'd have to do is turn on dumping in the spd emulator, run the game with the mod enabled, then get the dumped spr from Femulator-dumps in the game directory and scale down the textures

[mortal yarrow]

run the game.... with the mod enabled.....

yeah.......

[true bronze]

just ask someone to do it for you

[mortal yarrow]

true lol

i'm just being dramatic

[true bronze]

It's the kinda thing that'd literally take a minute at most

[lethal orbit]

Or use the spr patcher in my personaspritetools repo

i forgot it existed lmao

[mortal yarrow]

i found the mod package that moddaman sent

how would the patching work?

i'm assuming i just like

drag and drop a tmx file in the window? or an spr?

does not appear to be that >.>

so it's sys.argv which means drag and drop ontop of the script, but which files

i tried dragging and dropping the sprt and tmx and nothing

[lethal orbit]

you'll need to open it in cmd

[mortal yarrow]

oh?

i did that lol

unless i did it wrong perhaps?

[lethal orbit]

you need to give it the original spr as well

[mortal yarrow]

ohhhh that's my bad

alright i gotcha

original spr > spr path in that order?

[lethal orbit]

yea

this time without my name

[mortal yarrow]

oh wait original spr as in spr containing files or the spr in the mod package?

[lethal orbit]

the vanilla spr

[mortal yarrow]

so spr from the game files, unaltered?

[lethal orbit]

yea

[mortal yarrow]

damn

wonder if it'll die if i try and insert a PSP res spr and a PC res tmx lol

[lethal orbit]

it shouldn't die, but it won't look right in game

[mortal yarrow]

oh i know

im just trying to get the tmx so i can convert it for PSP

ill still be quartering / halving the resolution and exporting as 8 bit

i think it worked?

it did not

[lethal orbit]

what happened?

[mortal yarrow]

gave me this

[lethal orbit]

looks right...

[mortal yarrow]

spr file is the same

unless it generated somewhere else?

[lethal orbit]

it outputs <filename>_out.spr

[mortal yarrow]

ohhhh

yeah that broke

like not good at all

check it lol

says the resolution is 65280 x 0 lol

[lethal orbit]

patched sprs break in amicitia for some reason, opens fine in personaeditor and should work fine in game

[honest charm]

that's my favorite resolution

65280x0

[mortal yarrow]

yeah ill stll be resizing

[honest charm]

my next gaming monitor is gonna be 65280x0 :3

[mortal yarrow]

little jank but i think i get it

[lethal orbit]

even with fixed scale it's still not right though

[mortal yarrow]

yeah y'all went over that

i know it's broken lol

[lethal orbit]

🫠

[mortal yarrow]

not actually going to port it

it was just the only example i could find with spr merging set up

was just trying to understand the whole process of it all

not gonna lie

i just opened it in persona editor and all it did was just like

put the new tmx in the spr

no name change, meaning id still have to do that

[lethal orbit]

you can't really use aemulus merging for these, better to just include the entire spr, with a lower priority so other mods can merge with them

[mortal yarrow]

yeah that's what i don't really understand

how would i include the entire spr

if the spr that was just generated wouldn't work in game

because this

this ain't gonna work

[lethal orbit]

why not? the texture name is not important

[mortal yarrow]

unless i'm supposed to just:

patch it
externalize the tmx
optimize the tmx
replace the original tmx

?

[lethal orbit]

i guess? it's the lowest effort way to do it

not replace the original tmx

downscale the added tmx

[mortal yarrow]

why not lol

but there's two tmx files in an spr that's only supposed to have one

[lethal orbit]

because the modified sprites don't point to the old tmx anymore

[mortal yarrow]

don't i need to remove the original tmx at least?

oh wait what

wait wait wait

[lethal orbit]

no

[mortal yarrow]

i did not know that

the sprt files will instead point to the new tmx?

[lethal orbit]

yea

[mortal yarrow]

ohhhhhh

see i did not know that lol

right so

if i were to externalize this texture, optimize it, replace it back

then place the spr back in my title.bin

it'd just work?

i gotta try that now

[lethal orbit]

lemme know how that goes

[mortal yarrow]

ok well

the texture is uh

off center like before

but it is replaced

so i'm gonna call that a success lol

damn that's actually pretty interesting

[lethal orbit]

https://github.com/Secre-C/PersonaSpriteTools
updated the extractor to output textures with the sprite ids in the filenames. If there are too many sprites then it'll use the old naming scheme

[mortal yarrow]

now if only someone would make a patcher for the new flowscript merging

thank you for helping me get all of this worked out btw

i appreciate it

[scenic sand]

couldnt one just dump the emulated files for that too

[mortal yarrow]

i sorta get it now? it feels a little jank in my brain still

[mortal yarrow]

yes! but i don't want to be a burden :DDDDDD

nah i'm messing around

i can totally just ask someone to dump it for me

[lethal orbit]

shouldn't be too hard to convert bf files for aemulus merging

[mortal yarrow]

yeah i've actually done it before

[lethal orbit]

there's some formatting changes but it's mostly the same

[mortal yarrow]

it's a little rough honestly

just need to add the new import messages

[lethal orbit]

yea

[mortal yarrow]

move the files around a bit

rename all functions that are renamed from stock if they exist

i actually did that with swine's "visible rankup ready mod" so i have that working on hardware

i just miss the days when you could drag and drop that stuff into the right folder and it'd just work on vita

also uh

is it normal for the textures to not align anymore?

is it part of spr merging?

new texture, old texture

i'm assuming the sprt will fix that?

it does not

this time with the true HD logo

also i remembered to actually quarter the resolution this time instead of halving it, so it should've been scaled properly

not sure how to get the large preview like you did

but that shouldn't be happening?

[lethal orbit]

you have to enlarge the window

[lethal orbit]

for people using the sprdisassembler it cuts the sprite out of the original texture and adjusts the .sprt accordingly, so yea it's normal

I have no idea why this is happening though

[mortal yarrow]

damn so i guess i'm screwed huh

i'm not even sure why it's repeating honestly, that's the confusing thing

oh wait

i know why

no wait we're good

sorry uh

atlus games die when you have textures that aren't divisible by a power of two

i thought it was that

my texture file is 256x96 which is fine

[lethal orbit]

the spr/spd disassembler makes the dimensions of each sprite texture be 2^n or 2^n + 2^(n-1) because of that

[mortal yarrow]

yeah yeah

good on that then lol

no idea then

[lethal orbit]

[mortal yarrow]

that was my only idea haha

you want the spr file it outputted?

[lethal orbit]

sure

[mortal yarrow]

i tried it with the true hd files from that moddaman zip

lemme try the title fixes one again

happens with title fixes

[mortal yarrow]

yeah i cannot get it worked out for the life of me 🫠

alright well i can sort of confirm that it's nothing to do with the sprt file

as i just exported the exteranlized tmx as 8bit tmx with 1/4th the resolution

same issue

seems like it's just a problem with the size of the tmx, and it not being standard

meaning ill have to go in and manually resize all tmx files considering they'll be trimmed

[scenic sand]

i think i remember reading while i was forking aemulus that uh.
you can go past the limit natively, but only from windows 10 onward and you need to do a registry edit

hold on

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maximum-file-path-limitation?tabs=registry#enable-long-paths-in-windows-10-version-1607-and-later this thing

also that is a monstrosity of a filename besides

[scenic sand]

i went and pulled up a vanilla q2 bmd just out of curiosity, and it does actually say MSG1

[minor barn]

Endianess maybe

[scenic sand]

it...might be endianness after all--? ninja
if i highlight the MSG1/1GSM and then set the bmds to opposite endianness then this specific part of the inspector lines up, but the msg1 in the p5r bmd is still backwards

[minor barn]

Yeah, the msg1 is not a text

It's just a number where the bytes happen to write MSG1

[scenic sand]

im still putting off writing a proper check until i actually...need to do so, so for now bmdchecker.isbmdorempty just always returns true lol

[scenic sand]

...wouldnt be that hard though i think, but id rather do it not at 3am god i have the sleep schedule of all time

[scenic sand]

well anyway bmdchecker.hasbmdheader looks like this now

kinda feel like i should put swines name on this since most of this code is copypasted from bf emulator with bf wordswapped for bmd

[true bronze]

Array.Reverse is pretty wasteful, you could really just change the indices you're using (header[11] == 'M' && ...). I also may be wrong but I'd expect it doesn't change the array, instead it'd return a new one that's reversed (that's generally how functions like those work)

[true bronze]

If you want you can just put both our names on it. I don't really mind either way though, ultimately you're the one actually doing the work now

[scenic sand]

I also may be wrong but I'd expect it doesn't change the array, instead it'd return a new one that's reversed (that's generally how functions like those work)
i looked at some sample code in official windows documentation and it did look like it properly changes the array
though yeah it probably is better for performance to like...not, i was just kinda lazy and have uni homework i should be doing instead so i just quickly hacked out the first thing i thought of

[true bronze]

Just letting you know because it's the kinda thing Sewer would almost certainly make you change lol

[scenic sand]

understandable lol

anyway there we go

[lethal orbit]

Ok I found a better solution than just axing features. I slightly reworked how the emulator works. instead of modifying sprite entries directly, the emulator now holds the modified sprite entries separately, and merges them into the original spr/spd right before writing the file. this allows the following:

bringing texture replacement back, and reducing the unpredictable behavior by reverting every modified sprite that previously pointed to the texture. (still not recommended to use unless you're replacing all sprites in a texture, but at least you won't get overwritten by lower priority mods)

re-allowing spr_xx.dds sprite patching without accompanying sprite entry files (.spdspr and .sprt). If a spr_ texture doesn't have an accompanying sprite entry file, the original one will be used. This comes with one drawback, that being that spdspr files now need to be named spr_{id}.spdspr

also since it's something I've seen people do, don't add leading 0's to the id in the file name (so do spr_1.sprt instead of spr_01.sprt)

[lethal orbit]

btw I was right about why the spr dies in amicitia. Amicitia requires at least 0x10 bytes of padding between each texture, and they have to be 0x10 aligned

neither personaeditor nor the game seem to care so It's probably an issue with amicitia...

ok with the padding amicitia is fine but peditor won't open the spr

[lethal orbit]

added padding after the pointer list and before the sprite entries. Still opens in persona editor and seems to fix the crashing in amicitia

[cedar shuttle]

Don't tell me you've gave up already

before even getting started

[dark tree]

im very busy

😩

[cedar shuttle]

:v

[scenic sand]

:v

[empty galleon]

hi, just wanted to ask something quickly. if I have mod A that has init.bin (not using bin merging) and mod B below it that edits init.bin (using bin merging), how is that interaction handled? will reloaded load the init.bin from mod A and then modify that archive with the files from mod B? or will reloaded use the stock init.bin when merging mod B, ignoring mod A? or etc?

someone was telling me that they believe Aemulus and reloaded handles it differently but that they weren't confident about it

reason I'm asking is because some P3P PC mods are not updated for bin merging, I think on purpose. HD audio SFX only seems to be effective when replacing the whole bin itself, bc remaking the mod with bin merging just leads to the poor sound quality returning. (thanks ATLUS)

so I'm wondering what happens if you combine HD audio SFX with another mod that edits init.bin with merging

(speaking of this, if you edit the voice lines in model archives for P3P and then use bin merging, it destroys the audio quality even more)

[dusk crow]

i think i remember swine or someone else saying this but IIRC basically any mod that uses merging automatically takes priority over that file versus any non-merging mod, which is to say that init.bin in your example would only merge with the vanilla game files and ignore any mod's replacement of init.bin

[empty galleon]

that's a little unfortunate for P3P

it's like literally just bc P3P's audio sucks ass too 😭

[true bronze]

Yeah, that's the case. If there's something using merging it'll completely ignore anything that isn't. Like I've said before it's something that could be worked around but it really isn't worth the effort, people should just update their mods

[dark tree]

absolutely, it offers better compatibility all around that way anyway

[true bronze]

I do remember hearing about this during development. Did anyone ever work out why that was the case? Seems very strange

[empty galleon]

I have no clue whatsoever

😭

[dark tree]

I think the audio loading code in p3p might just be fucked/bugged, audio files (adx) are 1:1 byte identical with PSP and they sound way worse lmao

[empty galleon]

yeah

but then it has me wondering, why does having it in an archive make it sound fine lol

I recognize this is a pretty niche case because it's P3P, famously a very lazy release lol, but I figured I'd ask

really the better question is if there's a way to fix whatever fucked up the P3P audio loading, but I can't imagine something like that is trivial at all

[devout crystal]

nothing, the error with model pacs was because the new cursed ass .vag version preapp invented for p3ppc. They shoved two vag inside one vag for each language, for whatever reason loading the externally makes the quality shit itself but no other audio does that outside the .vag inside model pacs.

init_free doesn't have that issue

well init but point remains

[empty galleon]

the model pac bit was a separate thing, the main thing is the init SFX sounding just as bad as the base game when bin merged but better when not bin merged. not sure if that's something that's addressable with persona essentials or reloaded tho lol

[devout crystal]

wait huh

I was using hd sfx with bin merging support and it sounded fine

time to retest ig

they really fucked with how they read the audio files if thats the case

[empty galleon]

I mean we know that one already lol

given they shipped it in this state for some reason 😭

[devout crystal]

Yeah but I did testing specifically to see if it was just model pacs so im wondering how its different now..........

[empty galleon]

all I really did was go fight some baby tier shadows, drop a morning star on them, and then listen to the crunchy sound that plays when they die 😭

[empty galleon]

after a bit (a decent amount) of testing, yeah bin merging seems to revert the audio quality to vanilla P3P PC levels, while having the archive in there (no bin merging) makes it sound better for some inexplicable reason lol (listen for the shadow death noise)

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1094430925280006208/1166994514989305876/Persona_3_Portable_REV__2644_61fps_1.00_2023-10-26_02-56-40.mp4?ex=654c8356&is=653a0e56&hm=e9b12cae88659b75aa0d9570a426db7a5d08b9babe2b15b28faa7ea08df85082&

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1094430925280006208/1166994570756755476/Persona_3_Portable_Rev_2644_61Fps_1.01_2023-10-24_20-37-15.mp4?ex=654c8363&is=653a0e63&hm=48bc117ac52ad35c0d38e67d5c45d4547c71df225e2d2cff0d42cae71e16909c&

I figured I should bring this up so we all know it's an issue, but realistically idk how many people truly care about P3P PC anyways, so again, I would get it if no one is interested in looking at this haha

[mortal yarrow]

lol so HD audio sfx doesn't do shit on psp

got it

[empty galleon]

as far as I can tell, all HD audio SFX does is package init.bin from the P3P PC files because the raw audio sounds fine, it's just whatever the hell the game does that fucks the audio playback

idk if this is really a big issue for PSP anyways since it never had the audio issues, but seeing as PC sounds awful unmodded....

[vital narwhal]

hows spr merging comin along

[scenic sand]

so do i necessarily need a baseMsg parameter for a MessagescriptCompiler.TryCompileWithImports method, the way FlowscriptCompiler.TryCompileWithImports has a baseFlow param for the first .flow passed to the builder that calls it, or could i theoretically just treat the first .msg the same as the rest
since baseFlow seems to be necessary due to flows being full-on code, whilst msgs are...labels and text

[lethal orbit]

it's pretty much done, and has been in testing for a while. I think it's safe to release whenever I finally get around to writing docs

[devout crystal]

I wanted to test but you never responded to ping

[lethal orbit]

what ping

[vital narwhal]

download for testing?

[simple timber]

file emulation framework module -

PersonaEssentials -

SecreC.

Ok I found a better solution than just axing features. I slightly reworked how the emulator works. instead of modifying sprite entries directly, the emulator now holds the modified sprite entries separately, and merges them into the original spr/spd right before writing the file. this allows the following:

bringing texture replacement back, and reducing the unpredictable behavior by reverting every modified sprite that previously pointed to the texture. (still not recommended to use unless you're replacing all sprites in a texture, but at least you won't get overwritten by lower priority mods)

re-allowing spr_xx.dds sprite patching without accompanying sprite entry files (.spdspr and .sprt). If a spr_ texture doesn't have an accompanying sprite entry file, the original one will be used. This comes with one drawback, that being that spdspr files now need to be named spr_{id}.spdspr

Jump

[Go to message!](#1083541081880268920 message)

SPD.File.Emulator.7z

Download

SecreC.

fixed paked spd cache invalidation

Jump

[Go to message!](#1083541081880268920 message)

p5rpc.modloader.7z

Download

[lethal orbit]

thanks nqn

[vital narwhal]

how to

[scenic sand]

extract to reloaded mods folder, then refactor your mods (instructions in pins)

[vital narwhal]

ok

[vital narwhal]

like this?
<modid>\FEmulator\SPD\b_p_k01x2.spr\data_e.cpk\battle\panel\btlpanel.bin\

[scenic sand]

whu

why do you have a bin file in your spd folder?

[vital narwhal]

the bin is where the spd is stored (its a folder not a file)

[scenic sand]

make a folder called FEmulator/PAK/btlanel.bin, put a dummy spr in it (right click in file explorer to make an empty txt file, then rename it b_p_k01x2.spr) (im going to assume the spr isnt in a subfolder of the bin, im mainly familiar with p5r so i dont know what btlpanel.bin normally looks like)
then make a folder called FEmulator/SPD/b_p_k01x2.spr, put your dds and spdspr/sprt files inside that

[vital narwhal]

heres what the bin looks like

[scenic sand]

yeah then just do the thing i said

[vital narwhal]

ok

[scenic sand]

try the full path to the bin, for the dummy file
FEmulator/PAK/battle/panel/btlpanel.bin/b_p_k01x2.spr

[vital narwhal]

ok

[vital narwhal]

OH

I think its trying to look for the spr in the cpk not the bin file

i think i fixd

[lethal orbit]

https://github.com/Secre-C/FileEmulationFramework/blob/main/docs/emulators/spd.md wip docs

[vital narwhal]

oh thx

[true bronze]

You don't necessarily have to do it that way, do it however you want. You would definitely need to work with the original bmd at some point though since you need the original messages as well as anything added or changed.

[scenic sand]

if im understanding bfemulator right, baseFlow is the first .flow for that file passed to the emulator while baseBfStream is the original bf innit
i still have the filestream param though its ofc renamed baseBmdStream, and i think i know how to use it, i just wanted to be sure the whole thing wouldnt break down if i axed the baseMsg param (since i wasnt altogether sure it was doing much other than making me overthink)

[true bronze]

Oh, ok. I thought baseFlow was the original bf lol, it's been a minute.
In that case yeah, you'd probably be fine without a baseMsg

[scenic sand]

i wasnt sure, thats why i was asking you
i presume it was bc baseBfStream is imported separately later on if its not null, and when bfBuilder calls TryCompileWithImports (the only place that calls it) _flowFiles[0] is whats passed to baseFlow, but the name throws me

[mortal yarrow]

has bmd merging been looked into yet?

[scenic sand]

ive been on that for a while, trying to make test cases currently

my internet is having a time apparently

[mortal yarrow]

i think discord is dying actually

some messages are just failing to send randomly

[dusk crow]

yeah it's been a bit more unstable than usual lol

(hitting a 13,000ms peak in latency an hour ago is crazy)

[honest charm]

someone tripped on the server cord methinks

[scenic sand]

this is a bit embarassing but where do i find the dumps folder

[lethal orbit]

in the game's exe directory

[scenic sand]

thanks

i mean
i dont see it but i only just turned on dumps and the game crashed immediately for unrelated reasons but now i know

[dark tree]

dw, I've never seen this mysterious dumps folder either despite having dumps turned on in pak emulator and bf emulator and stuff

but i also tend to break stuff in the weirdest edge case scenario type of ways, so

[scenic sand]

well.

(thought id turn it on for paks and bmds to make sure they were compiling correctly, but given im getting immediate exceptions i think thats the least of my worries atm)

[lethal orbit]

what exception are you getting?

[lethal orbit]

also you need to delete cache after turning dumps on

[scenic sand]

oh

[scenic sand]

...oh, i didnt instantiate an array

[lethal orbit]

updated spd emu again, hopefully the last functionality change .

• texture replacement under the hood now acts as sprite patching but affects every sprite used by the texture (so it doesn't actually replace the texture anymore lmao)

• you can exclude sprites from this by adding a tilda ~ after the texture id and using the same naming convention for sprites (for example: To replace all sprites in texture id 4 except for sprite id 15-20, and 24, you'd name the texture tex_4~15-20_24.dds )

[mortal yarrow]

just curious, is "double" merging possible?