Dark Eldar Wargear RSH

[Jaylo101]

I'm trying to recolour the Archon's wargear in the campaign, but unfortunately the WTP is totally unusable as it is mostly unfinished so i tried to extract the DDS from the "dark_eldar_archon_wargear_01.rsh" file using the texture tool but no DDS seems to be extracting from it, any ideas why?

[IBBoard]

Not a clue - I'll have to look in to it. Every file I've encountered so far has been extracted by the Texture Tool. Does it give you any errors at all?

[Jaylo101]

No errors, the tool does everything as normal but no DDS is extracted. Also it does the same thing with the "warboss_upgrades01.rsh" file, which is the SS wargear for the Warboss.

[IBBoard]

Very odd. I'll take a look at them with the IChunkyViewer as well in case that shows any obvious differences.

[Jaylo101]

I've just had a look at the files with the IChunkyViewer, although its the first time i've used it, i've noticed that the RSHs are coming up as an unknown image type!

[IBBoard]

That'd sound like a possible cause I can't remember quite what method it uses for pulling out the images, but not knowing the image type wouldn't help!

[Jaylo101]

Would there be any way to change the "Image Type: Unknown" to "DXT1 DDS" using IChunkyVieiwer?

[IBBoard]

Yes and no. What you should be able to do is export the chunk, edit it using a hex-editor and then re-import it. It's not guaranteed to work, though, as the image may be DXT1, 3 or 5.

[edit] That is, assuming I actually released the IChunkyViewer with editing - I sometimes forget which features of which apps were still "work in progress"

[Jaylo101]

Unfortunately i don't know how to hex edit.

[IBBoard]

It's a bit tricky and can be prone to breaking files if you're not careful (although that shouldn't matter too much in this case because you just delete and re-extract the file). I've just been fighting a couple of tools to get them to work, but it's lunch now. I'll see if anything look obvious this afternoon.

Thanks for finding the bad files, though. I think the last ones we couldn't handle were a couple of DXT3 files in Dark Crusade.

[IBBoard]

I think I'm getting a fix in for it now. It looks like DC introduced DXT5 textures, and this is probably a DXT3.

The reason it doesn't error is because of bad code that says "if it's a TGA save as a TGA, else if it's a DXT1 or DXT5 then save as a DDS" and silently ignores any other values for the number. Since this isn't a recognised image type value it just silently pretended to save it.

I'll see how it goes and give you a shout when I've got a working version.

[IBBoard]

Yep, looks like it's DXT3 images. I've not got a clue why they used them - AFAIK they don't generally offer an improvement over DXT5 and are the same file size - but if I treat those files as DXT3 then they extract and view okay.

I do almost all of my work in Linux using MonoDevelop at the moment, so I'm just fighting my virtual Windows machine to test the files out - it isn't being cooperative! Hopefully I'll have it sorted later tonight. If not it'll have to be Tuesday.

Thanks again for catching the files.

[Jaylo101]

Thanks IBBoard, i appreciate your effort.

[IBBoard]

Okay, it seems to be working now. I'm just making sure that everything is properly licensed etc and that I haven't lost anything moving between the virtual Windows machine and my physical machine and then I'll release a new version of the Texture Tool and the IChunkyViewer.

[IBBoard]

Okay, the new Dawn of War Texture Tool has been released.

Not only should the new version handle the DXT3 images but it should also do better TGA -> DDS conversion using Squish (something closer to the quality of nVidia's Photoshop plugin, but without the need for either an expensive or a pirated copy of Photoshop)