TexturePicker

[eXentric]

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The Problem

If you're a user of Rices excellent plugin, you're probably familiar with the problem. "Texture Pack" is really a loose term that refers to an archive file full of images. Though the artwork is astounding, no texture pack to date replaces every single texture in the game. What's more, each texture pack can have the authors own rendition of the same texture. When you start downloading texture packs and extracting them, you quickly find yourself overwriting images and getting mismatched textures in the game.

Some people suggest that texture packs be merged. The authors, however, understandably want to keep their packages separated and leave it to the user to choose. I agree, but until now this has been difficult.


Features

• Handles PNG, JPEG, and BMP textures
• Understands that multiple files may make up a texture (rgb / alpha / etc)
• Shows multiple files as a single texture with x number of associated files
• Alt+Left and Alt+Right switch quickly between the texture pane and the source pane
• Spacebar selects the currently highlighted source
• Displays a preview of the texture (RGB image if available, otherwise first found)
• Texture can be scaled automatically to preview window or manually between 10% and 1000%

Usage

There is currently no installer for TexturePicker, just download and unzip it. It DOES depend on the .Net framework, so please make sure you have this installed before you try to run it.

Before you start TexturePicker, you'll need some texture packs to work with. You can find texture packs on the EMUTALK forums. As you download texture packs, extract them out to their own folder.

For example:

C:\Texture Packs\Mario 64\John Does HUD Pack 1
C:\Texture Packs\Mario 64\Cloudscapes Texture Pack 4
C:\Texture Packs\Mario 64\Cloudscapes Texture Pack 5

When you start TexturePicker you'll be asked for a source folder and a target folder. The source folder is the root of all the texture packages you want to work with. Using our example above, this would be:

C:\Texture Packs\Mario 64

The target folder is where the selected textures will be output. I happen to use Project64 right now, so I would probably set my output path to something like:

C:\Program Files\Project64 1.6\Plugin\hires_texture\SUPER MARIO 64

There are buttons to browse for the folders, so you don't have to type this all in.

After you choose your source and target folders, you'll get a screen like you see at the top of this page. A list of all the textures is displayed on the left and a list of sources for the selected texture is displayed on the right. Clicking on a source will show you a preview of that texture. If a source is checked, that source will be included in the final output.

You can use Alt+Left to set focus to the texture list, Alt+Right to set focus to the source list and the space bar to check the highlighted source. You can very quickly work your way through a long list of textures using these key combinations.

Once you have selected all of your texture sources, click on File -> Export Textures to export all selected sources to your target folder. Then play!


About Texture Picker

TexturePicker is a fairly simple app. I threw it together in about a day using code from other projects I'm working on. All in all, I feel it has some nice features and it does much more then I originally set out to do. I'm releasing it for free and I'm even including source. I'm doing this because quite frankly I don't have the time to maintain it. Hopefully you will find it useful in its current state, and someone else will be able to add on to it if there is a demand. If any features are added, I would greatly appreciate receiving the changes back so I can post them up on SolerSoft.com. When you send me changes, please include notes about the change and your information so I can add you to the credits.


Change Log
1.1 - 05/02/2005

• When looking for files in the source directories, TexturePicker now detects if the author provided Alpha, RGB and Combined files. If so, TexturePicker only uses the Combined file and ignores the other files. (_all files include the same data as _a and _rgb combined)
  
  
• When exporting textures to the output folder, TexturePicker now deletes all files related to a texture before exporting the new one. This gets around a problem where you were using a texture that included separate Alpha and RGB images and you now want to use a texture that has combined images (or visa-versa). Previously, since TexturePicker was not deleting files and simply overwriting them, you could have ended up with two versions of the same texture (one combined, and one split).
  
  It is ALWAYS a good idea to copy your current texture folder to your source folder before you start TexturePicker. That way, you can easily keep the textures you already have if you choose to.
  
  
• When you run TexturePicker you may see the message Unknown texture component 'filename', ignored. Version 1.1 expects that all files be named properly to indicate their contents. Alpha mask files end with _a, RGB files end with _rgb and combined files end with _all. If a texture pack contains an image without one of these endings, it is ignored.
  
  If the image really is part of a texture and you want to include it, simply look at the image and determine what it is. If the image is pure black and white, you probably need to add _a to the end of it (it's probably an Alpha mask). If the image is color, and you find an alpha mask with the same name, add _rgb to the end of it. If the image is color, and you don't find an alpha mask with the same name, add _all to the end of it.
  
  For example, in Cloudscapes texture pack 002, he included SUPER-MARIO-64#192FA726#0#2.png and SUPER-MARIO-64#B452CBBE#0#2.png. These textures probably still work with Rices plugin, but TexturePicker doesn't know how to handle them. If you'll notice, there are no alpha mask images with the same names, and if you view the images in a program like PaintShop Pro, you'll notice they include an alpha mask already. That means they are combined images. They should be renamed to SUPER-MARIO-64#192FA726#0#2_all.png and SUPER-MARIO-64#B452CBBE#0#2_all.png respectively.
  
  
• There is now a progress bar while exporting textures. There still isn't one when loading them up, however, so please be patient if TexturePicker doesn't seem to start right away. Watch your hard drive light for activity.

[Kerber2k]

Nice work!

[eXentric]

Thanks Kerber! When I started with high-res packs a few days ago, I realized they could quickly get outta hand. One evening after downloading new texture packs, I started Mario up to play. When I saw half of the characters in Princes Peaches letter in a nice soft font and the other half all blocky, I knew I had to do something different.

[Glenbo]

wow amazing

[QuickPaw]

Sticky this!! ^_^ Great work!

[_pm_]

Very useful, specially for the Mario64 texture packs.
Thx for writing this soft, keep up the good work!

[eXentric]

Well, I've been using this for a while now and combined several texture packs into my own texture packs. I have my own 'bumpy' pack and a 'cell shade' pack made from the combination of other packages out there (HUD, font, etc). But I did notice one problem while working with the program.

I had purpously set the program to overwrite texture files already in the target folder when you do an export. This is so you can easily update your existing texture folder with new textures when you get them. However, sometimes new textures don't contain the same files and you get a combination of old and new texture. A good example is when one texture author did Alpha Mask / RGB combinations (_a and _rgb) and another artist did both layers in the same file (_all). You'll end up with all three (_a, _rgb and _all).

It's not too bad to go back and look for this, you just find _all files and see if there is also an _a or _rgb there. But it's not what I had intended and I'm not sure exactly what Rices plugin does in this scenario. I need to update the code on export to delete all files with the same base name of a texture your exporting. It will take longer, but it's more accurate. I hope I can find the time to do that this weekend.

Just wanted to make it known.

Regards,

eXe

[Shibb]

props big ups on that man

[ragnor]

wow. I was thinking that it would be awesome if something were created to do just this, for just the reasons that made you create it (I love combining more than one pack, but that's not something everyone is down for). Thanks, man. And I hope this weekend allows you enough free time to bust some major creativity... I'm having a few texture problems, and I hope to use the next version of your prog to sort them out, haha.

[eXentric]

1.1 released!

Please read the change log in the first post. I don't want anyone to loose their data!