MontyModMonster

No joy yet, I'm afraid. The CDPR forum is infested with dickheads and moderators who hold modding in such high esteem they merge all discussion into one useless megathread, and direct people back here. :mad: Anyone know how to get a Twitter hashtag campaign going?

Thanks for the kind words. I've just been doing some work with SparrowPrince, and I really want to get it into the game. Makes sense to do what I can to pool the findings, so we can put our heads together and get it done.

Generally I would agree with you. But CDPR have an unusually good record of responding to their fans, so it's worth a try. Also, they've touted modding as a selling point, and if it takes off like Skyrim modding, it'll certainly boost sales. By giving us an override folder (and if it's not present, it wouldn't take much work to implement), the modding community will be encouraged to develop a lot of quality content before they even ship the Redkit.

That's a good one, cheers. That's a good point - we don't know for sure how to recreate valid XBMs once we've edited the DDS files, so we could get false negative results.

The actual Witcher3Compressor seems fine - it's not doing much but zipping modded files into bundles. The question mark is over the hacky workaround of moving the default bundles into a new folder structure, and generating a new metadata.store. Presumably this step is needed because no-one has figured out how to edit the metadata.store file properly. I'm still keen to try this out, to see if placing the full texture files in bundles works at all. Creating a cache file is a much more difficult proposition. EDIT: Have any of you guys determined textures that are likely to be very easy to immediately identify if successfully modded? Geralt's starting armour, perhaps, or some gui elements?

I stumbled across this mod, which has some interesting info about creating bundle mods. http://nmm.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/25/? So, the plot thickens - the metadata.store file is significant in which bundle files are picked up. What is puzzling, is that bundle files seem to contain some xbm files, but these appear to be tiny thumbnails only. I don't know if packing the proper xbm files in bundle files rather than cache files will work. I do know that bundles and cache files have different structures. I didn't play with modding W2 either, but IIRC, the override was as simple as creating a 'cookedpc' subfolder in the main game folder, and putting modded files in there.

I would also like this. Either a dedicated subforum for requests, or one for technical discussion. Part of the reason that the modding-talk forum has so little tech discussion in it is that it is so overwhelmed by requests, that it hardly appears to be the correct place to discuss the technical stuff. There's techie talk scattered all over the forums, with no clear and suitable place to centralise it.

Hmm... Looking at the folder \The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\content\content0 It seems that in addition to all the cache and bundle files, it also has folders for 'engine', 'levels', and 'movies'. These are also subfolders within the extracted texture.cache, which leads me to believe that they might be overrides. Need to experiment with modding some stuff, then just putting it in the proper subfolders under \content0.

If we can succeed in importing edited xbm files back into the texture.cache files, then we have all sorts of options - the original cache archives in the content folders, or perhaps in the patch0 folder. However, I haven't suceeded in doing that yet, and AFAIK no-one else has. The problem is that the QuickBMS reimport process relies on the way it renamed the files when it exported them. Unfortunately, QuickBMS has problems extracting the textures from the cache files, which is why I had to use those Lua scripts to get them out. So, because QuickBMS didn't extract them, it doesn't seem to know how to put them back. Also, using QuickBMS to reimport back into the cache and bundle files is hacky, and has a major limitation - the modded file cannot be larger than the original. This isn't such an issue for mods that are just modifying strings in xml files, and that is already being done successfully. But for those of us looking at modding textures and models, it's a major drawback. An override mechanism is what we really need.

Thanks. The script saves me time faffing around trying to remember how to manipulate text strings and filenames.

I like your thinking - this is an interesting idea. I'll have a look later on. One question will be whether the files in the DLC folders are loose, or whether they are also bundled up in cache archives, which would leave us with the same problem.

Yes - some broken files don't surprise me, at this stage. They might be fixable by removing the .dds hex header which the lua script is prepending. If you upload the python script for me, I'll sort and reupload to a better file host.

That's a good idea. The override folder is the Holy Grail at this point. Hacking the textures back into the cache is far from ideal, if it will work at all. If we had the override, we could do a ton of great modding without the Redkit. We could really do with raising the profile of the question, to get their attention.

Yes, there's about 13gb of it, and it's a very early dump of unsorted files. I didn't really upload it in a way that's convenient for downloading the whole thing, it's more so that people can have a browse. It's not a great experience, because Mega doesn't seem to handle large folders very well. Also, because the scripts are targeting .dds textures, in some cases they have extracted other file formats (which may include models), slapped a DDS header on them, and renamed them to .dds. These may be fixable. These have the original extension as part of their name, like image.png.dds. At the moment, I'm focussing on figuring out how to get the textures back into the game after we've modded them. In time, I'll upload a better version of the dump, organised into the proper folders, and perhaps split into zip archives for easier downloading.

I've made a few more discoveries. It seems that QuickBMS is capable of putting edited textures back into the cache files, provided they are no larger than the originals. The format of the textures used in the cache archive is DDS, but with the headers stripped out. So, the process seems to be that we edit the extracted dds files, then strip out the hex headers, then use QuickBMS to merge them back into the cache, much like with the .bundle files. Haven't figured out how to make it work just yet.

Good call. Definitely not optimal to have that volume of requests mixed in with the techie talk.

I noticed that many of the .png files you may be looking for are amongst the extracted files I posted. However, the extraction script has converted them into .dds files. They can still be opened if you have a package that can deal with dds files. They might be of interest.

OK, gang. For those modders having trouble extracting the textures, here are the extracted files for you to start playing with (there's a lot of them, it takes a while to load the page.) Bear in mind, this is all still very experimental. The textures could be incomplete or screwed up in some way. I notice that some non-dds files have been extracted as .dds files. These may not be usable. Also, we have no idea yet how to get the textures back into the game. Firstly, they will need to be converted back into Withcher's .xbm format. Secondly, we would either have to repack them back into the texture.cache archives (hacky, and may be infeasible), or figure out the location of an override folder that will pick them up (if one yet exists.) You guys might like to politely spam the CDPR forums and see if someone will give us clue as to the path of the override folder. :wink: If we can figure that out, we can do some good modding before the Redkit finally arrives. In the mean time, these files are here for you to examine and experiment with. Good luck!

@luddeman - I don't see why not. They've made it perfectly clear that they're going to support modding, so this stuff is going to be shared one way or another, and it's not much use for piracy on its own. I'm uploading it as a modder's resource, but I don't know where the Nexus stands on sharing links to it on here. Maybe we could get some clarification from a moderator? @diamok - I haven't found any pngs in the textures.cache. Assets seem to be squirreled away in a very unintuitive way accross the various cache and bundle files . If I come accross them, I'll let you know. ;)

We don't know yet. In W2, it seems that you could edit the textures, then place them in the proper subfolders under the 'CookedPC' folder, and the game would pick them up. This may or may not be the case for W3. I'm sure an override folder will be used, but we're just guessing what it might be called, and it might not be enabled yet, requiring some future patch.

Once you've got the Lua environment set up, it's just a question of downloading those scripts I linked to, and running this command: lua unpack_textures.lua path_to_texture.cache [output_dir]The problem is that the Lua scripts requires zlib and zlib-lua to be installed, and there are no binaries for Windows available. I tried compiling zlib-lua from source, but kept hitting errors. My solution was to use Arch Linux in VirtualBox, because it has all of the required software in its repositories. I installed Lua 5.3, zlib, and zlib-lua, then ran the script, and the textures came tumbling out. The trick is what we do with them now!

Most of the textures are in the textures.cache files, with one in each of the content folders. I've extracted them using these Lua scripts: https://github.com/hhrhhr/Lua-utils-for-Witcher-3 You may have to compile the necessary Lua libraries. It's a pain to setup, but the scripts are easy to use once Lua is set up properly. EDIT: When the textures are extracted, they are named with hashes in place of slashes to indicate the folder structure, like: #environment#landscape#mudbank.dds I'm guessing that there will be an override folder, and modded textures placed in the correct subfolders will be loaded in favour of the ones in the texture.cache file. Just like the way BSAs are overridden in Skyrim. I believe that in Witcher 2 the override folder was named 'CookedPC' , and I'm going to experiment to see if this is still the case.

I find the water looks rather gloopy, or, as Gopher said about Skyrim's water, a bit like dribble(!) It needs a far more convincing ripple and flow. Paging SparrowPrince! (of Skyrim WATER mod fame.)

isn't the game required to use steam? Be careful here guys. It is very easy to remove steam, and in some countries this may be legal, but the Nexus will ban very quickly if people start discussing hacks here.

@rpger30 Try that app I just posted about - all it does is to force the Steam option "Do not keep this game up-to-date", but then PREVENTS Steam from changing it back, and it really works. You can use Steam normally in every way - it just won't update Skyrim until you allow it. I know this won't help you right now, but it will stop the same problem in the future. @a7x5631 What I would really like to see is not going to happen. It's quite feasible that all the game studios could get together and create one online DRM activation solution, that is ultra light weight, completely open source and does its single job only. All users could inspect and trust the code, since openness doesn't compromise security with public key encryption, by design. It could be made far tougher than Steam, which probably most teenagers know how to circumvent in ten minutes. When it eventually gets hacked, just fix and update it for new games - at least a good chunk of revenue will have been saved from piracy for as long as it stood. It's fair to the developers, and a reasonable, tolerable proposal for the users. Have the likes of Steam be purely sales and distribution channels. The reason it won't happen is that big companies really like the idea of gaining some control of the users computer, and being able to monitor, analyze and market to them. It's just too tempting. They'll have done their sums and concluded that the vast majority will go along quietly, and the few who really object are worth it for the opportunities. But we don't have to like it!