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Hello there, members of Rock Raiders United! I'm TheMikirog. Who am I? I'm almost 18 years old at the time of writing this. I live in Poland. My English might not be perfect, but I try my dandest. I'm a character designer. I want to pursue my dreams of becoming a creator of an animated series, on TV or YouTube. I have two highly-detailed story ideas that cropped up in my head that I've been working on for nearly 3 years. I along with my friend both animate. I'm also a composer and a voice actor. I like creating stuff, so in my spare time I try to create animations, but because of the busy life of high-school and upcoming finals, I struggle to find a balance between necessary work and satisfying my inner artist. I guess time will tell. How did I end up here? LEGO Rock Raiders was a great game I played a lot when I was younger. Looking back at it, it has some flaws, but a unique charm that cannot be replicated. Maybe I'm nostalgia blind, I don't know. I stumbled upon this forum and I thought "This game has a fanbase years later? For a game that wasn't really popular to begin with? And they're modding? Sign me in!". I was already pretty familiar with modding. I already added some hats and new weapons to Duck Game and now I have yet another target to practice. My proudest work is BombSquad Joyride Modpack (shameless mod promotion), a mod that adds new powerups, maps and characters into an action-packed party game with plasticine visuals. LEGO Rock Raiders is a game that is being kept alive by very talented people, so I decided to join the party. I might do some patches for the game in the future, who knows? I can't wait to see what cool new mods are going to surface and how far I can push myself into editing this game.

Sorry for reviving an old topic, but I have something to share. Because this mod was made before Cafeteria was even launched and after that there wasn't a patch created for this mod, I decided to make one! For those people who just want to avoid some headaches with installing this mod (like I did), this is definitely going to help. I created this patch without permission from Cyrem, but the patch is still credited with his nickname. I didn't even put my name in the description, because I don't care about publicity. I just want other people to not mess around with LLR files if they don't want to. Grab it here and enjoy.

the more reactions we have, the more likely might one day be one of them, which will elevate me to the next plane of being

Welcome! Reviving old topics is totally fine if you have something worth bumping it for, and you certainly do.

that colon pee emote doesn't even have transparency

Here's UV maps of LR2's minifig model, gotten by rigging up Will's LibLR2 DLL to some OBJ exporting code in Unity (lol) and then exporting UV maps with Unwrap3D. Those are at the same size as the in-game textures, aka tiny. Here's larger versions: As you can see, they're kinda messy and asymmetrical, but the worst is the front of the legs... they hardly even tried for symmetry, and each leg is also mirrored: Achu is the only character in the vanilla game with leg printing, so I guess they just never noticed his leg printing was mirrored and squished. Also, here's a transparent legs texture I made (it's just the white legs run through Gimp's color to transparency feature): Which makes it easier to make legs textures in any color (wow LICEcap really did a number on the color wheel here haha): Now, for torsos. It's important to note that the torso model/textures also contain the neck, which is part of the head on real minifigures - don't ask me why they did it that way. Also, while the UV map is intended to have both hands as the same color, if you have a large enough texture you can have them as unique colors, since the UVs for each hand aren't *exactly* in the same place. The smallest texture size you can do this with is 512x512, any lower and they'll blur together. (You might have also noticed that the legs have two tiny UV islands, that you'd hope would let you color the left and right legs independently... Sadly, nope. One is the tops of both legs, the other is the rest of both legs.) Here's a 512x512 torso template I made. The main torso decal area (red) is slightly wider than in vanilla textures - it's more accurate to the UV map, and avoids the side of the texture bleeding into the front of the torso, as happens with vanilla textures. The darker blue is unused space. And here's what it looks like in-game: Oh yeah... And the torso is mapped in such a way that it distorts textures. And here's the whole model with a checkerboard pattern: Good luck making your textures look perfect, haha.

It'd be nice to have "lego-ized" emotes instead of the generic smileys, but other than that I'm completely neutral towards the new system innit.

If you have ever have attempted to mod LEGO: Star Wars The Complete Saga, you may have discovered that the games characters don't have any texture files. Unfortunately, the textures were embedded in the GHG model files themselves. A quick look at the STORMTROOPER_PC.GHG file confirms these suspicions. Sure enough, after the 30 byte header of the GHG file, the header of the first texture file (DirectDraw Surface) begins with its image data following afterwards. Using a hex editor, it is possible to extract and edit each texture from the file. Below is the result of extracting one of the textures. However, editing or extracting textures via this method can be extremely time consuming and difficult for modders who do not know how to use a hex editor. So, in hopes of finding a better way of extracting these textures, I resorted to IDA Pro and Hex-Rays to decompile the games executables in hopes of finding code that might assist me in extracting both the textures and the models. However, IDA quickly ran into trouble. For some reason, IDA was unable to create any code from the data section, I pulled up the PE Sniffer from PE Tools and to my dismay discovered why IDA was unable to read the section. The executables code was being protected by Armadilo. Someone over at TT Games was smart enough to add an anti-decompilier so that we couldn't break into their code. I wasn't going to waste time trying circumvent the protection so I decided to continue my search. Fortunately after digging through the forums, I found a tool that would extract the GHG's into separate DDS and OBJ files. In comparison with NinjaRipper, the tool is much faster and easier to use. However, the textures are not applied to the models so anyone hoping to use these files will need to reapply the textures themselves. Also to my surprise, there are no tools that allow conversion back into GHG. It is my hope that Sluicer creates a tool to convert back or at least releases the source code for the GHG to OBJ software so that someone else may build upon that code to create a OBJ to GHG converter. For now though, I shall remain using NinjaRipper as for it provides a better output than Sluicers tool. Back to model ripping I go!

Are you going to make a Cafeteria patch for this soon?