Does anyone know a DAT extracting/packaging program?

[Zaptruder]

Help me!! I have this terrible burning desire to edit various offensive skins in FFXI (chiefly the assault jerkin...) but while I haven't been able to find a DAT reader...

I do recall someone mentioning a JP program that would help people edit the DAT files

If you know, please tell me :O

[Trigara]

I know of a program to view the DAT files, but not edit them

I'll look into that for you..

[Basher]

http://www.ffxionline.com/forums/sho...4&pagenumber=4

Originally posted by disa
If you can't find a good translator site for the tutorials, here are my summary notes of what to do. All of the needed programs can be found at the previous links I've listed.

1) Find the file you want to change and make a couple copies. One as a back up and one to work with. Its best to place the back up in a folder by itself and out of the way to be sure it isn't overwritten.

2) Open up ChangeTex and select your working .dat file and click the DDS Output button. This pulls out the image from the .dat file and creates a .dds file.

3) Open up GraphicsConverter and select your new .dds file. Click the BM button, which converts the image into a bmp file and save.

-OR-

3) Open up the .dds file directly in Photoshop using the .dds plugins. (If you have them installed)

4) Use an image program of your choice to alter your armor/etc. and save the file.
- If you are working from a .bmp file, save as a .bmp.
- If you are working from a .dds file, save as a .dds with the option DTX3 selected and skip step 5.

5) Open GraphicsConverter and choose your saved bmp file. Then go to Format > S3TC Format (My Encode Engine) > DXT3. Save the created .dds file.

6) Open up ChangeTex and select your working .dat file again then press the first button (not the DDS output) and choose your new .dds file. This will replace the old image in the .dat file with your new one.

7) Place the new dat file in the propper folder in the FFXI Rom area. Congrats on creating your new .dat file!

These steps are for just basic outfit changes. I also have steps for cropping sections of outfit and there is even more advanced model editing, but the above steps alone can lead to a multitude of new designs.

Originally posted by Basher
thank you


*edit

helpful links

DDS plugin for photoshop
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/n...ure_tools.html
+ a DDS thumbnail viewer pluging for windows explorer


changetex
http://www.geocities.jp/geo_kuz/ChangeTex_003.zip

[Zaptruder]

Damn Basher! You suck! You keep posting this stuff AFTER I've figured it out! :p

From that same thread, I already asked Dis... but it's hard work editing the textures without the UVMaps... now it would be handy if you could tell me how to find the unwrapped meshes