Hacking [Request] Robotics Notes PC to Vita Asset Swap

[nahucirujano]

So, Robotics;Notes have been released on PC.

I checked out the PC files (bg.cpk, bgm.cpk, movie.cpk, script.cpk, among others), and they can easily be extracted using CriPakTool or QuickBMS.

Now, about the texts of the game: script.cpk has 308 .scx files.
The Vita version instead has a folder called script which contains those same 308 files but in .scr format.

Does somebody have knownledge about these kind of files? How to edit/replace/repack them?

EDIT: August 5th, 2022

OMG. I can't believe it's here.
They actually did it. Thank you so much <3
[RELEASE] "Robotics;Notes Elite" FULL English Translation Patch for Vita v1.0

 

[KuyaMimikyu]

I'll look into this, I'm no expert in Patching stuff so i'll return here with question, and post frequent updates

edit: so my first road block is there is almost no Archive vpk of Robtics;notes for vita, if one can provide a Gdrive file for it, it would help me alot

 

[FineThenIWill]

I'll see what I can also do about it, I have both copies for seeing the differences.

 

[nahucirujano]

there is almost no Archive vpk of Robtics;notes for vita, if one can provide a Gdrive file for it, it would help me alot

I downloaded the game from NoPayStation.

 

[FineThenIWill]

Looking into it, both file types are similar, in 4 hours I'll try out an experiment to see if my theory works.


It probably would be easier if I had the PS4 version to compare to since console versions are usually more similar to each other than PC releases, though I doubt there's a decrypted version of the PS4 version floating about at this time.

Edit: More inspecting later, it's not THAT similar, but it shares the same SC3 header.

 

[nahucirujano]

Looking into it, both file types are incredibly similar, almost down to the point, in 4 hours I'll try out an experiment to see if my theory works.

Thank you so much <3

 

[FineThenIWill]

Some more insight, the vita version's packed files (inside the cpk's) are all encrypted into some sort of file type, no extension given, just files. Compared to the PC version where most cpk files are unencrypted (take bg.cpk, extract from both and you'll get 2 different outputs). However some have similar outputs such as se.cpk. What this means is I'm not sure if it'll be a simple asset swap for things like images.

Edit: Swapping the files regularly does not work, it just makes the game go into a black screen. Will need to find a way to convert these .scr's to a readable text format.

 

[nahucirujano]

Some more insight, the vita version's packed files (inside the cpk's) are all encrypted into some sort of file type, no extension given, just files.

Did you get the game from NPS? iirc games downloaded from NPS are encrypted and the user needs to decrypt it (with Vitashell on the Vita, or on pc with psvpfsparser).

By the way, froid_san also gave some feedback about these files on a subreddit thread post about this topic.

 

[FineThenIWill]

I saw the comment, just need to get Qt to compile the gui properly, also I got it off NPS, then decrypted using the vita emulator Vita3K (I know psvpfsparser is meant for things like this, but I find vita3K to work really well as I just need to input the pkg and it does the rest for me.)

 

[nahucirujano]

I find vita3K to work really well as I just need to input the pkg and it does the rest for me.

Wow, I didn't know about that feature of vita3k. Interesting

 

[PortableGuy]

You might want to edit that link. It’s legit discussion, but on a subreddit we shouldn’t link to here.

TIL @froid_san was working on Yuno before a hard disk crash. That sucks. Robotic;Notes and Yuno are pretty high on my list of dream translation ports to Vita.

 

[froid_san]

You guys can easily decrypt the encrypted vita files using this tool [Release]Decrypt and launch PSN Store Vita games without plugins | GBAtemp.net - The Independent Video Game Community. Don't forget the game update.

and you could also use this tool GitHub - esperknight/CriPakTools: Tool to list/extract/update contents of CRIWARE's CPK archive format. to easily unpack CPK files and replace a single file on a CPK. So you no need to mess around repacking the whole archive.,

 

[nahucirujano]

You might want to edit that link. It’s legit discussion, but on a subreddit we shouldn’t link to here.

TIL @froid_san was working on Yuno before a hard disk crash. That sucks. Robotic;Notes and Yuno are pretty high on my list of dream translation ports to Vita.

Link removed
Yes, I totally agree on that. Probably the 2 ports I most was hoping for. I know most of us probably can already run them on PC, but the Vita is such a good device for VNs.

 

[FineThenIWill]

Hmm. These were both found at similar addresses.

Spoiler: Disassembly Text

Vita version with .scr's extensions changed to .scx:

PC .scx's extracted from script.cpk (used multiple extractors, same results):

(The GlobalVars and MesSetID functions on the top of this picture were found a couple lines above on the Vita picture)

It's safe to assume the PC version has a different method for calling voices and text since the __Unrecognized instruction is near the same address. Copying the instruction nets a long array of hexadecimals. #label2 for both files call the exact same SetFlag variable. So it is the same file, just using different methods for text.

A hex editor shows the files are quite similar, however the PC version adds a few variables here and there, and obviously some variables themselves are changed.

What to make of this, well at the moment, no clue.

 

[Spazzery]

Link removed
Yes, I totally agree on that. Probably the 2 ports I most was hoping for. I know most of us probably can already run them on PC, but the Vita is such a good device for VNs.

Yu-No on Vita would be so goood!! I hope that and Robotics;Notes will be picked up by somebody at some point. There's also the Steins;Gate spin-off games and other SciADV titles that have a Vita port. The Vita is really good for VNs.

 

[KingOfDelusion]

A bit late to the party but I'm definitely interested in this as well (And possibly helping, if there's anything I can help with). More specifically turning the script into a readable format. And I might as well ask since I couldn't find much about it online but do any of you know how to convert the 3D models from the models.cpk to something usable?

 

[FineThenIWill]

If you have a method of converting both the pc's .scx's (.msb's for the new patch) and the vita's slightly altered .scx's into readable text with a method of recompiling it back to it's original form. It would certainly be useful. I don't have anything useful in terms of the models, the headers are PSV and WIN for each platform respectively. But nothing else useful I could find.

 

[hachi-]

Now there's a cool tool by the Committee of Zero (the people who made a really impressive improvement patch for the PC version) called sc3tools that can extract and modify text from the .scr files in the Scripts folder. However, as it currently is, R;NE on Vita will crash if you use a file modified with it. Though it could definitely be a good starting point to seeing how it could be done.

According to someone I've talked to, it uses the charset for the English Robotics;Notes Elite HD, which is (probably) different from the Vita version's. I was pretty interested in trying to work on this, but I don't know much about how this stuff works, so I can't really do much with it.

 

[Spazzery]

I know in theory how to make an English patch for it and the tools I already have should work on it.

I'd be interested in making a patch for RoboNotes in the future, but I have to finish the game first because I dont wanna spoil myself while working on it .

 

[FineThenIWill]

The main problem with this is that it doesn't seem to play nice with rePatch, I've tried inserting a modified script into rePatch but the game automatically reads the original japanese script file, and when I try deleting the original script file it just crashes the game. Maybe if I spent more time tinkering with it I could get it to work.