Hacking ROM Hack Harvest Moon: A New Beginning Model Swap

[TiredInsomniac]

So, I'm currently working on editing HM:AnB to make a gay mod. I've got the text messages for things like the love events figured out because that was surprisingly easy to find (and is easy to edit, too, thankfully) but I know that I'll need to change the character models or something so that I can still have the correct pronouns for other characters without editing every other text file to do that.

So obviously my question would be what files do I edit to do that? I've played the SoS:ToT gay mod hack (which is great btw totally recommend if you somehow don't know about it) so I know something along the lines is theoretically possible, I'm just not sure what I'd need to edit to do that. I saw on a seperate AnB thread that someone has managed to swap models before by editing the model files directly, but I have no idea how/where to find said files and, even then, what to change the names to in order for it to work... If I need to edit the scripts themselves or something else instead, please tell me because I'd love to know! (And potentially not waste my time model swapping if that won't work out how I intend it to lol)

These same questions apply to the first SoS game too, btw, since I'd love to try and tackle that as well. Oh, and if someone could also tell me where to find the text files for that as well, that'd be very much appreciated. :')

 

[Marya]

So, I'm currently working on editing HM:AnB to make a gay mod. I've got the text messages for things like the love events figured out because that was surprisingly easy to find (and is easy to edit, too, thankfully) but I know that I'll need to change the character models or something so that I can still have the correct pronouns for other characters without editing every other text file to do that.

So obviously my question would be what files do I edit to do that? I've played the SoS:ToT gay mod hack (which is great btw totally recommend if you somehow don't know about it) so I know something along the lines is theoretically possible, I'm just not sure what I'd need to edit to do that. I saw on a seperate AnB thread that someone has managed to swap models before by editing the model files directly, but I have no idea how/where to find said files and, even then, what to change the names to in order for it to work... If I need to edit the scripts themselves or something else instead, please tell me because I'd love to know! (And potentially not waste my time model swapping if that won't work out how I intend it to lol)

These same questions apply to the first SoS game too, btw, since I'd love to try and tackle that as well. Oh, and if someone could also tell me where to find the text files for that as well, that'd be very much appreciated. :')

Hello, have you figured it out yet?

 

[chain_unchained]

So I cannot remember for the life of me where I found it, or even if it's still up for download anywhere, but awhile back someone tried to do the same thing for SoS1 to an extent, I don't think it was ever finished but I still have the files. It looks like it included text edits and model swaps for the player, so hopefully this helps!

 

[Lavapulse]

When I did the model-swapping for my Tale of Two Towns mod, it really just came down to brute forcing it for the player models because there weren't any appropriate tools. I figured out which file had the player models (turns out they were all in people_pal_data.bin) and then went line by line through the file with a hex editor, temporarily replacing chunks of data with an equal amount of zeroes (didn't want to offset the other data in the file in case it was address-sensitive) to figure out exactly which addresses affected which models (keeping track of the results along the way), and then literally copied and pasted the hex data associated with one model into the addresses associated with the other model to swap them. I was able to narrow the file down to a few likely locations because I knew how many outfits were in the game, so I knew I was looking for X number of similar, likely consecutive chunks of data, and it was easy enough to tell where the different chunks began within the file. There seemed to be distinct but linked chunks of data that defined the actual model vs. the texture, and the texture seemed to reference some sort of common palette rather than being stored as a complete image. (My guess is either very clever UV mapping with overlapping texture usage or references to a packed sprite map.)

Basically, lots of trial, error, informed guessing, and patience. In retrospect, because there were multiple files within one, it was probably an archive that could have been broken down further to make things a bit easier if I'd known how to identify the archive type.

The 2D portrait textures and UI textures were way easier because .ctpk files are supported by Kukkii (Kuriimu2 is newer, but I've found it to be less helpful) and .arc archives are also supported by the Kuriimu suite and EveryFileExplorer as well as some other stuff.

It didn't work out for ToTT, but Ohana3DS might be helpful to you; it was able to open the newer 3D models added to the game during the 3DS port (the livestock models used for the petting minigame).

As for text, for ToTT, that was mostly in event_mes_data.bin and mes_data.bin ("mes" probably short for "message"), with a couple notable exceptions being hardcoded into the central code.bin file for whatever reason (Natsume didn't even bother translating the hardcoded stuff, which ultimately made it more difficult to track down). When I was looking for text, I compared the American version of the game with the European and Japanese versions, figuring that any files that contained different text data would probably have different file sizes which turned out to be mostly true. The European version especially contained multiple languages which were differentiated by filename (such as "_fr" for the French versions or "_de" for the German), so that make stuff easy enough to identify.