Hacking Custom Textures in vWii?

[Suicune123]

I'm playing Kirby's Return to Dream Land on vWii, which has Homebrew installed. I've seen that in the Dolphin Emulator, you can load custom textures in any game. Now, I wasn't going to ask this with only Dolphin as my only source, but I remembered that Chadderz (I think?) can replace the textures of MK8 courses. Now, the Wii is far more hacked than vWii, and Chadderz is already replacing textures on Wii U, so is this possible in vWii? I know Riivolution can do something like this, but if I am correct, you need a specific XML or something...

Okay, that probably sounds really bad. I just want to know how to replace textures in any Wii game on vWii, preferably Kirby's Return to Dream Land.

 

[Goku Junior]

I'm playing Kirby's Return to Dream Land on vWii, which has Homebrew installed. I've seen that in the Dolphin Emulator, you can load custom textures in any game. Now, I wasn't going to ask this with only Dolphin as my only source, but I remembered that Chadderz (I think?) can replace the textures of MK8 courses. Now, the Wii is far more hacked than vWii, and Chadderz is already replacing textures on Wii U, so is this possible in vWii? I know Riivolution can do something like this, but if I am correct, you need a specific XML or something...

Okay, that probably sounds really bad. I just want to know how to replace textures in any Wii game on vWii, preferably Kirby's Return to Dream Land.

I don't know if Kirby got custom textures, but I know some games like Project M can get modified, well, now that Riivolution works in vWii, I think if Wii loaded custom textures, vWii can load custom textures too.

 

[Suicune123]

I don't know if Kirby got custom textures, but I know some games like Project M can get modified, well, now that Riivolution works in vWii, I think if Wii loaded custom textures, vWii can load custom textures too.

I have a lot of textures my friends ripped from Dolphin, so I have some custom textures. I can't use Dolphin, though, so I asked about vWii.

 

[NWPlayer123]

There's no specific application, you'll need to use riivolution or some ISO loader to be able to do it, and even then you need to find which file uses the textures and patch it in. Kirby's Return to Dreamland's format is editable though, I was working on it the other day. It's some variant of the Wii LZ compression.

 

[Suicune123]

There's no specific application, you'll need to use riivolution or some ISO loader to be able to do it, and even then you need to find which file uses the textures and patch it in. Kirby's Return to Dreamland's format is editable though, I was working on it the other day. It's some variant of the Wii LZ compression.

I have an XML for Riivolution to use Kirby's Return to Dreamland, so that's good. May I ask how I would go about finding which files uses the textures I want to patch in?

While this may be a bit... random, may I ask what you were working on with Kirby's Return to Dreamland?

 

[NWPlayer123]

I was just messing around, adding the formats to my Python library, nothing in particular. As for finding out which files a texture belongs to, it should be somewhat obvious looking at the filesystem if you've worked with the engine before (used in skyward sword, MKW, and countless other games). Like all the layouts are in lyt, which is what brlyt files are used for. hbm is standard in most (all?) games, for the home button menu, the main ones you want are effect and g3d(with g3d being the models for most objects and effect being most of the particle effects). I'm going to assume you're familiar with the engine's formats (brres, brlan, brlyt, brfnt, etc). If not, http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Main_Page is a good place to read up.

 

[Suicune123]

I was just messing around, adding the formats to my Python library, nothing in particular. As for finding out which files a texture belongs to, it should be somewhat obvious looking at the filesystem if you've worked with the engine before (used in skyward sword, MKW, and countless other games). Like all the layouts are in lyt, which is what brlyt files are used for. hbm is standard in most (all?) games, for the home button menu, the main ones you want are effect and g3d(with g3d being the models for most objects and effect being most of the particle effects). I'm going to assume you're familiar with the engine's formats (brres, brlan, brlyt, brfnt, etc). If not, http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Main_Page is a good place to read up.

Thank you! Yeah, most of the stuff I'm looking for is in g3d from past experiences, as I've messed with the character models multiple times. Also, yeah, I'm familiar with all of the formats, as they're used pretty commonly. However, the thing I'm most curious about (and why I need help) is how do I view the filesystem from the game? I've tried looking around, but I can't find anything. I don't need any programs to edit directly or anything, but I just need some program or some way to view the filesystem from the game, such as some Wii Disc Browser or something, I dunno.

I'll go look on WiiBrew again, thanks for the help!

 

[NWPlayer123]

Well, since you need a disc to use Riivolution, then you can either rip it using CleanRip (though if you're using a FAT32 SD card make sure to split it up into multiple parts, like 3GB and then the leftovers and then do "copy /b *.part0.iso+*.part1.iso+*.part2.iso SUKE01.iso" (b for batch adding them)) or just download an ISO/WBFS (you can literally just google "Kirby's Return to Dreamland torrent" and find a good link instantly, I can't provide an actual link tho) since you own the game and technically can obtain backups. I would suggest the cleanrip option because it's way faster then downloading/torrenting.
Then you can add it to the list in dolphin and right click > properties > filesystem and extract all the files, or Wiiscrubber works too, but is really terrible IMO.

 

[Suicune123]

Well, since you need a disc to use Riivolution, then you can either rip it using CleanRip (though if you're using a FAT32 SD card make sure to split it up into multiple parts, like 3GB and then the leftovers and then do "copy /b *.part0.iso+*.part1.iso+*.part2.iso SUKE01.iso" (b for batch adding them)) or just download an ISO/WBFS (you can literally just google "Kirby's Return to Dreamland torrent" and find a good link instantly, I can't provide an actual link tho) since you own the game and technically can obtain backups. I would suggest the cleanrip option because it's way faster then downloading/torrenting.
Then you can add it to the list in dolphin and right click > properties > filesystem and extract all the files, or Wiiscrubber works too, but is really terrible IMO.

Ooh, okay! Now, a question. When doing this, do I need to be able to actually run Kirby's Return to Dream Land? My computer is horrible, and can't even run GameCube games at a decent speed, so... yeah. Or, is it just a thing where I need the ISO, open Dolphin, then I can extract all the files without actually having to open/play the game?

 

[NWPlayer123]

Yeah, you can just extract it, you don't need to run it or anything, all an ISO is is all the filedata stuffed into one giant blob, and then Dolphin creates individual files for each one and writes the data, extracting them all.

 

[Suicune123]

Yeah, you can just extract it, you don't need to run it or anything, all an ISO is is all the filedata stuffed into one giant blob, and then Dolphin creates individual files for each one and writes the data, extracting them all.

Aah, thank you for everything! You've been really helpful with this, haha. I'll go try it out now!