But there is a repacker, see the post for it here. As for the extractor, that post is here.
That might be a little tricky. You might be able to use a similar process I will explain for the PAPA files. More on that later.
I'll try my best to explain this, but I recommend you read through this thread on Reddit where I was figuring out how to do this.
But there is a repacker, see the post for it here. As for the extractor, that post is here.
That might be a little tricky. You might be able to use a similar process I will explain for the PAPA files. More on that later.
I'll try my best to explain this, but I recommend you read through this thread on Reddit where I was figuring out how to do this.
So basically, you start with the xbb unpacker you should already have from Xentax. This will leave you with many files. Acquire a program called EditPad Pro, pick a random PAPA file to edit, make a backup of it (you'll need it for later), and open it in EditPad Pro. Notice it displays in hex by default. Find the tab for this file on the top-left, right click>Hexadecimal>Off (text file). You are now viewing the file as a text document. Notice there are still null bits inbetween each character.
In the menu at the top, navigate to Convert>Text Encoding. Notice that the encoding is currently "Windows 1252: Western European." Change it to "Unicode, UTF-16 Little Endian."
You will now see that all the text in the PAPA file (I'm using one from Msg.xbb in this example) is easily readable and searchable - no more spaces inbetween characters. At this time, make your changes to the file. Add text, remove text, do whatever. Just be careful you don't remove any special characters before each MES tag (they look like Japanese symbols), as these are used to properly format the text in-game. Once you've made your changes, go back to Convert>Text Encoding, and change the encoding back to Windows 1252.
Now we need to open the newly edited file in HEX - you can use EditPad Pro for this, or another hex editor. You should see two new bytes in the first 2 places in the header, right next to the word PAPA - FF FE. Delete these bytes. If you don't see them, try re-opening them or opening them in another editor. Sometimes it doesn't update immediately.
Now find yourself a diff tool. For simplicity's sake I will refer to http://www.diffnow.com/. Upload the backup of the original file you should have from earlier, and the file you just finished editing. We will compare them to ensure nothing else in the PAPA file was "damaged."
If everything went well, you should see that nothing is missing, and the structure of the PAPA file has not been compromised. This diff should show you that the only thing that has changed is the text or word you edited or removed.
So that's how to edit a PAPA file. I think it would be easy to write a program that does this for you. All it would have to do is change the encoding to/from UTF-16 LE while deleting the extra 2 bits. It would be up to the user to leave the other extra characters alone.
Now, as far as ADDING new files to a .xbb, I don't know, but if I were you, here's what I would try:
Open a .xbb, like Msg.xbb, in EditPad Pro. Convert it to UTF-16 like you did above. Scroll all the way down to the LAST entry (or tag) for the last PAPA file. Copy any special formatting and characters with it, such that you have two copies of it now, including special formatting characters. Rename the entry, do whatever, save it, convert it back to Western 1252, delete FF FE, and check it against the original with diffnow.com. I don't really know if that would work for adding new files to the .xbb, but I suppose it's a brute-force way to try doing it manually. If it works - great! If not, well, I'm not sure how it can be done - this is only my best guess. It's more of a hypothesis, because I haven't been able to try it myself yet. But at least you should now be able to easily edit PAPA files, so that's nice.
Let me know if I need to clarify anything.
EDIT: Eh... Okay, so about that part where I suggested a way to add things to the .xbb... I crossed it out because the .xbb structure doesn't look like how I thought it would. You can still try, but I just got the chance to look at it myself and I can't guarantee that will work. I can't make much sense of it, actually. There's a lot of random Japaense/Chinese characters that are probably used for formatting, but I wouldn't know what to do with any of them. So sorry, I don't think adding more to it can be done
But editing the pp-files should be pretty solid. About to test it actually. I'll edit this post with my results.
EDIT2: YEEEEEESSSS!!!!
As you can probably tell, based on my excitement, editing the PAPA files directly does work in-game. In fact, if you wanted to save yourself some time and effort, you can actually edit a .xbb file, using the same process as described above, without extracting/decompressing it! I only changed one line for testing purposes, but no other lines of data in the .xbb got damaged or missplaced. So my changes are visible ingame and nothing else is broken. I'm quite happy
Warboble NPC? Yea, should work through a selfwritten Script (written in Squirrel Lang.).
Hmm... Well, I don't see anything wrong what you've done. All of my successful changes have been on the dialogs for the villagers. I think that maybe the game expects to find a string with 6 characters, and because there are now 4 characters, there is an error. Here's what I recommend: try changing "Rachel" to something with 6 letters (so maybe try "Test " with 2 spaces or "Testtt"). You may also notice that EditPad Pro is highlighting this line (and a few others) with a blue line. I think these blue lines are some sort of headers to the pp-files (or in other words, they are different from normal game text), so maybe they are more fragile and cannot be changed so easily. I think the strings need to be of a specific size.I tried it many times now with Harvest Moon 3D - A New Beginning.
Opened the xbb-file directly with EditPad Pro and converted it to UTF-16 little Endian.
I changed the Name "Rachel" to "Test" (MES_PLAYER_DEFAULT_NAME_GIRL) to make some tests.
I converted the format back to Windows-1252, saved the file and opened it again with a HEX EDITOR.
I removed the "FF FE" at the beginning of the file and put the Msg.xbb to my SD Card (for NTR_CFW).
The Game doesn't load because the Msg.xbb is "corrupted", I guess.
The original and the changed file are almost the same (just the one changed part is different because of changing).
I don't think that simply editing the strings (make them longer/shorter) will work on this way.
Here's the PAPA-File where's the part in it (unchanged).
I've uploaded both files for you.
You can check it. You'll see, I don't have made any errors, I hope
I don't think the save file has been picked apart yet. But it's easy to set what the character looks like by changing a few things in the scripts. You can essentially pick any body part you want - I've even been able to swap the Boy and Girl avatars. So you can't do it in the save file, but it is very easy to do if you were to start a new game with changes in the game scripts.
Well, you can change your appearance in-game, but there are some gender-specific parts that you can never change, such as the face (the girl one has long eyelashes). The save data only stores what gender you picked and the body parts your character currently has. You can change the body parts that the character gets created with by swapping the scripts that handle it. So you can tell the script to make a girl avatar with a boy face and a boy body, making it look like a boy (no long eyelashes), but be treated as a girl for everything else.
Yes it will! Once an Avatar has been created, the save file will keep every part of it, including the face, even if it is for the opposite gender. So the save file will work, even on a non-modified ROM or cartridge. The only thing that would be a little weird would be the icon of the avatar on the save file slot, but you can very easily change that texture out on a modded ROM.
NOW, I got something "new" to work ingame!
I've created a .arc (darc)-file which contains the Images of a new NPC (includes the bclyt and anim for a new NPC)!
At first, all animations and bclyt-files of NPCs are almost the same (you have to edit them anyways).
Here's a screenshot
And yes, it works ingame
I've uploaded both, the original "BustUp_Gardner.arc" and the new "BustUp_GBATEMP.arc".
Yes, I gave him the Name "GBATEMP" to prove that's one made by me
Right now, I "replaced" a NPC with GBATEMP in xbb-files.Awesome work! How were you able to get the game to recognize it while a character is talking? In other words, how were you able to use <FACE_GBATEMP> (if you named it that) in Msg.xbb?
Also, I'm getting to the point where I'd like to add my own pp-files to the .xbb, so I can have my own custom lines of speaking dialogue/text in the game. As in, I want to be able to call MES_EV_MY_EVENT_01 from a .nut script, and have that point to some existing pp-file inside Msg.xbb with speaking text in it.
With this NPC image you've added - did you add to any .xbb files to do this? If you did that would be awesome. But once again, excellent work
I wonder... What if you didn't have to add any new files, but instead re-used ones that aren't used by the game?
Yeah, I'd love to be able to do that too. It would make both of our lives easier. It makes me wonder though - that 3ds_xbb_extractor.exe tool - it creates a "_loadingOrder" file, which you need in order to use 3ds_xbb_repacker.exe. What's inside that loadingOrder file? The person who made the program says you can't change the number of files, but that loadingOrder file has to keep track of how many pp-files there are, right? It doesn't look easily modifiable though. I think we'll have to ask other people (like the people who help make these kinds of tools) for help on adding more content to the .xbb's.
Have you had any trouble getting the game to load when a .xbb file gets too big? I'm having that problem right now. An .xbb I'm trying to load is literally 3KB larger than the original, and the game will boot to a black screen if I try to load it up. Have you had this problem yet? I don't know if it is a file size issue or if I messed up the formatting somewhere, and I really don't have a way to check :/
//Offset Table Format
0x00 4 File StartOffset
0x04 4 File Lenght
0x08 4 FileName StartOffset
0x0c 4 InformationIDWhich extractor/repacker did you use?
I'll look into this later
hmm... will check it when I'm on PC
Which tool did you use? Possibly the repacker may be buggy.
Would be cool if you find any interesting things so we could find out how it works
