Howto: Extracting Textures & Custom Crosshairs

[xerofighter]

As i understand there is a problem of not being able to use all stock textures for mapping, and the complaining about the crosshairs.
I may have a solution for you guys, it's called texmod

What can this program do for ut3
- extraction of Textures for later importing into Unreal editor, including alpha's.
- Injecting Custom Fonts, icons crosshairs, skins. etc
* all this without permanent change.

there will be no more complaining about the crosshairs since you can create your own.
You can now import textures from maps (cooked packages) into unrealeditor


Downsides:
- all the modification (the injection part) will be clientside only
- could potentially be used for getting an advantage over others, but it will
be highly unlikely to be exploited
first of all: there aren't that many textures that affect gameplay, there are no alpha's to be edited that would make walls invisible or something like that
lightmaps are hard to alter, changing it to your advantage will be very difficult
also because maps cycle in online play.
Also which moron would browse through over 2400 loaded textures with every new map



I'll first explain something about the program:
The program was designed for use with Tomb raider legends, people wanted to mod but they were unable to, someone created this little app. it can find and show all loaded textures currently loaded a directx9 application
The program can extract those textures to you harddrive, in .bmp .dds, .png and more.
When you extract it, the program will create a little txt file, texmod.log, it will contain the checksum of the texture (thats how it finds the texture in the memory) and the file location of the extracted texture
With that file you can create a package, that package will contain the checksum and the (edited) texture
when you load that package into the program and run the game through package mode, texmod will monitor the memory the game uses, when it a checksum matches with the one in the package, texmod will write the (edited) texture to memory, changing the orginal texture.
No gamedata is being altered.

You can download Texmod at the following locations:
http://www.tombraiderhub.com/tr7/mod...oad/texmod.zip
http://files.filefront.com/Texmodzip.../fileinfo.html


Now let's extract some textures, startup texmod:



when the game is loaded you will notice, red text in the upperleft corner
Press + and - on your numpad to browse through all the loaded textures
Go to instant action, startup the map in which you want a texture to be extracted. go stand in front of that texture, and start browsing trhough the loaded textures, the texture in front of you will turn green when it's selected.
Now press F11 to save the selected texture to your harddrive
Repeat for other textures
It's better to press and hold the + button until you see the texture in front of you flash green, if that happens, release the + button, and go back until you have the texture selected. it's a lot faster then checking every texture one by one (most of the times over 2500 textures are loaded)

Now that they are extracted you can probably import them into UnrealED



Now for changing textures, the crosshair for example:
Use the same extraction method as above, look for the texture which turns your crosshair green, then save that texture to your harddrive
quit the game and go find the texture, you will probably be suprised to see a white texture with a little green dot onto it, don't be. the crosshairs are located in the image, but they are alpha's.
Next you will need a Program that can handle .bmp's with alpha channels in them, that would be photoshop for example.
load the image into photoshop and deselect every channel, now select the Alpha 1 channel, all the nice 'little' crosshairs will popup


from here you can alter the image in photoshop if you'd like, but i prefer Paint
let's extract the texture to paint.
with only the alpha channel visible, select the image and copy it, now open paint and paste the texture in, make your alterations and copy it.
Now go back to photoshop, select entire alpha channel and press delete
The old alpha is now gone. now paste the new alpha channel into it's place.
Backup the orginal texture (you don't want to be re-extracting the crosshair texture over and over again)
and save the texture

NOTICE: The filename is important, it must contain the checksum, otherwise texmod won't be able to create a tpl package. so keep the orginal filename

when you extracted the texture a file called texmod.log was appended.
it's content will be this:
0xBE5D041C|E:\texmod\Out\UT3.EXE_0xBE5D041C.bmp
(file location may vary)
Left you see the checksum texmod will be looking for and right you will see the location of the edited texture on your harddrive.
the more textures you extract, the more entries you will be seeing in tis file
So why does it do that?
It is possible to create tpl packages with multiple edited textures in them
For example you want to alter the textures of the entire GUI, one way to do it is making packages with each contain 1 edited texture, better would be to haev 1 file with all the neccesary textures in them.
If you only want 1 texture edited and you have a large texmod.log file, create an empty .log file, paste the texture information of that texture from texmod.log to <younameit>.log

Now let's continue with those packages i was talking about
we need to create packages which texmod can load in order to alter the textures ingame. it saves them as .tpl files
To create them following the screenshots below:


when it's saved we can load the package and enjoy the changes:

when sucessfull the result may look like this:


keep in mind to keep the centers of the crosshairs as they are now, otherwise you will end up shooting with an offset

To make it easy for you guys, i made a .zip file, with the texmod.log and the texture of the crosshairs, saves you guys the trouble of extracting it
don't forget to change the file location of the texture in this texmod.log
It currently points to E:\texmod
open up texmod.log in notepad, and change the file location to location of the extracted file from the zip
For example C:\tools\Texmod\Out\(filename).extension
link below
http://rapidshare.com/files/72262480...hairs.zip.html



The program is completly safe to use
For confirmation, see the texmod wikipage on the official Guild Wars Wiki
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Texmod

[STD]

umm.. i followed all the steps and alter the crosshair and made it to a "DOT" but now i keep getting invalid definitions@_@ when i try to load my "package build" X_X

[xerofighter]

ah the building problem in texmod, i guesst hat is what you are talking about?

you probably have used my zip file?
there is an error in that file, the file location points to E:\texmod, you need to alter it to your location of the crosshair texture
so you need to open up the texmod.log in notepad and manually change the file location to the right one.

i updated the guide with this.

[albator]

I've just finished working on my base crosshairs and it works like a charm, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS (didn't know such program existed, will make the wait for an official patch for custom crosshairs less annoying!)

This is what I have now:


This is the result ingame:

[STD]

albator check pm ^__^

[alba]

Found my old account again!


Here's my file for it but I don't know if you can just use it like this or not (I guess so) if not, my location of the program is c:\Programs\Texmod\



Here's an updated screenshot, i'm looking around at the moment but i think everything should be aligned right to the middle



Download

[Seraphina]

so, what i dont get is how u can choose the crosshair.
am i missing an option?
i tried this and got a different crosshair but its not the one i want.

[flak.pt]

Hello. I found an easier way to extract them, using only UED. Now i just need to know how to import and replace lol.

1. Open UnrealED
2. View menu > Browser windows > Generic
3. Scroll down to package UI_HUD
4. Right click on the UI_HUD package and choose "Fully load"
5. Right click on the package and choose "Bulk export"

Manually exporting only 1 texture doesnt work here, but it works if you export the fullpackage

Now, please someone find out how to replace the crosshair texture and publish the upk file. Thanks.

[Denny]

OMG H4X TH4TZ ZO CH34TZ LOLZ!!!!!11111

Just had to jump in and say that before someone else does.

[flak.pt]

Ok it seems that "Fully load" only loads a few textures from the full package, and those are represented with a green square. All the other ones have a red square around them and say "streamed" in their caption. Those cannot be exported this way, and that includes the crosshairs texture

[BioHaZarD]

Thank you Xero!!!! I think my pm had effect on you, thank you very much

[Seraphina]

oh and could someone from epic maybe confirm that this is ok to use?
we are just discussing if it would be called a hack or not and tbh i dont wanna use a hack lol but it just feels so much better with a smaller xhair now

[xerofighter]

Thank you Xero!!!! I think my pm had effect on you, thank you very much

yup i finished the tutorial, you made me realise that it was pretty save to use


LEt me explain why this isn't a hack
Before i posted this method i tested several things which could be used for cheating
first of all:
making walls invisible, i know this can only be done using alpha's, so i started looking for alpha's in the Biohazard map, i only found 3 alpha's
the first one was a small alpha that dealt with a kind of metallic grid
the second one, was the crosshair texture. the third was an alpha containing icons. so there were no textures to make walls invisible

Could it be used to edit lightmaps to remove dark shadows, this could potentially be done, but it will take a lot of effort, if you ever seen a ut3 lightmap, it contains many many small and bigger squars, filled with different colors, identifying the right area you wish to edit will take a fairly long time
Also the result will be likely not to be what you would have expected, a small change in color can cause entire area's to be bright white.
And to do this for all maps, including maps that will be released by mappers in the future, it just isn't worth the effort.
And why do this? you could simply turn the brightness of the game and your monitor to max. it has the same effect, can can be done by everyone without this software. so texmod can't be accused of being a hack in this category

WHat about changing team color this one will be more tricky to accomplish with texmod
Every character is different with different pieces of armor, pants headgear, etc.
How long would it take to find every texture belonging to those pieces, changing them and putting them back, only a fool would do that
You can yet again better adjust the brightness if you want brighter opponents.
The same with changing nromal deathmatch player colors, these are equally diverse.

These are only some of the things i thought about before posting this.

Even the company Arenanet allows players to use this program for their game Guild Wars, that game although a MMO can be used for a lot more things then in UT3, people can increase the size of their radar, use mods to make exploring the continents easy (you get a title when you explore 100%)
Texmod affects this game more then UT3, and yet Guild Wars allows it to be used
(it's listed on their official Wiki pages)

[Seraphina]

i hope epic can confirm this when they find out about it
i only use it public and in pickups at, no officials and i wouldnt want to unless its been ok'ed from "above"

[alba]

as I thought people can't make it all work together so i'll post the texmod.log and bmp so you can make it yourself

download

Follow the steps xero posted!


EDIT: or when i come to think of it, don't use the simple crosshair, if you got the pink crosshair only, it means you're using the simple ones (aka sniper rifle one :P)