Rayman 2 - Texture Hacking - Tutorial!

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I did not read the entire thread. I am wondering if anyone has taken the textures from the Dreamcast version, and put them into the N64 version? Having higher res textures like this is possible via emulation, as seen in the Community OoT HD Texture Pack.

If this has not been done, is this possible for a game like Rayman 2? I know the N64 has some weird texture limits of 32x64 or something, so would more extensive hacking be required, or could this be handled by an emulator alone if someone swapped out all the texture files?

Again, sorry for the over-all noobishness of this post. Rayman 2 is my favorite game besides Link to the Past, and I've always preferred the emulated N64 version for it's polish (compared to other ports), camera controls, and nostalgia, so playing it with even better textures would be awesome. If it is as "simple" as dumping and replacing/ renaming texture files, it might be a fun little side project.
 
I'm thinking it's a higher chance it'd work from the PC version since that's got a lot of leftover textures from the N64 version, but in higher quality. I'm however unsure if anyone has been able to hack the N64 textures. Or does any of the N64 emulators have built-in hacking features, like some GameCube ones, perhaps? In that case it'd probably be as simple as moving them over.

Edit: After some quick research there seems to be plugins which allow you to dump the textures (though only ones used on screen, so a full playthrough will be needed) and then to use hi-res version from external source (so the rom doesn't have to be hacked or repackaged in any way).
 
Hmm, we never did get a Dreamcast texture pack for the PC version. I recall us discussing it before when this thread was still pretty hot, I wonder if we could use this texture ripping technique to create a basic texture pack for now.
 
Did the Dreamcast textures ever get ripped though? I also wonder if the PC version will really be able to handle them. I know for sure that you can't change the resolution on any of the textures, as I once did that by mistake and it just messed it up. The only reason for making a Dreamcast texture pack for the PC version then would be quality difference, which I'm not sure if there is any tbh.
About N64 modding, it definitely seems possible and I'm planning on doing a test for the HUD some time soon (since that's one of the biggest texture differences). If it works I might consider doing the entire game, though it would be a lot of work and I'm not sure I've got the time.
 
Don't the texture dimensions have to be powers of two? Or am I getting mixed up with other game engines?
 
Carrot-master said:
I know for sure that you can't change the resolution on any of the textures, as I once did that by mistake and it just messed it up.
Click to expand...
In what way? And yeah, did you change it to another power of two resolution?
 
I can't remember specifically, but I remember it was one of the letters I tried changing and that it for some reason showed parts of a second textures where it would appear. Perhaps I accidentally changed the aspect ratio as well, though I'm not sure since it was a while ago. So you're saying that it is actually possible increasing the resolution then?
 
I'm not sure about the exact resolutions of textures, but with the real hardware there was a limit, but this limit has been surpassed in some games with "HD" textures via various video plugins. Thanks for the replies guys. I'm currently trying to learn to rip N64 models, and I intend on ripping all the levels form this game, since it doesn't seem like anyone has done this, and there are virtually no maps that exist of the stages. It's never as easy as the video tutorials make it seem, cause there are so many different hardware configurations across the board, differing versions of software, etc.
 
So do you guys remember this unused texture that was found on Rayman 3 HD that made Rayman look like tarzan or something like that?
GIXPCsX.png


I wondered how it would look like on him and since it was probably meant to be used on his Rayman 2 model, I decided to mod that texture over the original textures and this is the result:
 
I love the way you jump towards the shrunken Jano. It's like, "You think you know all the nightmares of the Glade? Well check THIS out!" :P
 
Has anybody figured out what can be the maximum resolution of textures on PC version?
Mixer's tool from 1st post even resizes big textures automatically (e.g. from 500% bigger to 250%).
I was thinking that it would be good just to resize all textures with cubic/bspline filter, along with sharpening effect (e.g. in XnView). Faster solution than extracting and importing DC textures.

But it turned during conversion that my resized textures are recognized as 32 bit without alpha channel (I think all of them).
Probably it supposes to be 16 bit, and with alpha channel, am I right? (every original had an alpha channel). Game crashes (after overwriting 1st textures folder) or hangs during loading (after overwriting all). Even cnt explorer (by Szymski) works really slow with these textures… Maybe we meet here also with some archive format limitation.
How to automatically preserve alpha channel for all files after resizing? I saved them all into TGA again, and then converted into GF. (probably alpha channel is not lost after unpacking).
I made the batch conversion of all textures in XnView, and a batch file in bat to convert everything from GF to CNT file (cooperates with Mixer’s tool)

Loading…

yadi.sk

In a matter of DC textures, which can be obtainable currently only with texmod on nullDC (if nothing changed in this matter), it not preserves original filenames, and leaves memory calls as file names. So, in case of applying them to PC, renaming 1500 textures will be difficult (and some DC textures will be extra ones). It's easier to make the whole package for DC version because memory calls during injecting will remain the same. And I don't think that DC textures look much better than resized PC ones with sharpening filter, especially because PC engine limits us to some extent (max resolution?).
And also I don't know on which limits we can encounter during injecting textures on DC, and whether it makes any difference in comparison to possible success modding textures inside DC files (probably hard).
I already checked R2 PC version in a matter of compatibility with texmod and umod, and both - Glide and DX renderers on various render libraries (unmodded, dgVoodoo, nGlide, D3DWine and others) don't want to cooperate. It cooperates with DC version on nullDC (reicast generally runs on Windows but has no any GUI options, and only older versions render Rayman properly, and with fixed effects, in comparison to nullDC).
 
deton24 said:
Has anybody figured out what can be the maximum resolution of textures on PC version?
Mixer's tool from 1st post even resizes big textures automatically (e.g. from 500% bigger to 250%).
I was thinking that it would be good just to resize all textures with cubic/bspline filter, along with sharpening effect (e.g. in XnView). Faster solution than extracting and importing DC textures.

But it turned during conversion that my resized textures are recognized as 32 bit without alpha channel (I think all of them).
Probably it supposes to be 16 bit, and with alpha channel, am I right? (every original had an alpha channel). Game crashes (after overwriting 1st textures folder) or hangs during loading (after overwriting all). Even cnt explorer (by Szymski) works really slow with these textures… Maybe we meet here also with some archive format limitation.
How to automatically preserve alpha channel for all files after resizing? I saved them all into TGA again, and then converted into GF. (probably alpha channel is not lost after unpacking).
I made the batch conversion of all textures in XnView, and a batch file in bat to convert everything from GF to CNT file (cooperates with Mixer’s tool)

Loading…

yadi.sk

In a matter of DC textures, which can be obtainable currently only with texmod on nullDC (if nothing changed in this matter), it not preserves original filenames, and leaves memory calls as file names. So, in case of applying them to PC, renaming 1500 textures will be difficult (and some DC textures will be extra ones). It's easier to make the whole package for DC version because memory calls during injecting will remain the same. And I don't think that DC textures look much better than resized PC ones with sharpening filter, especially because PC engine limits us to some extent (max resolution?).
And also I don't know on which limits we can encounter during injecting textures on DC, and whether it makes any difference in comparison to possible success modding textures inside DC files (probably hard).
I already checked R2 PC version in a matter of compatibility with texmod and umod, and both - Glide and DX renderers on various render libraries (unmodded, dgVoodoo, nGlide, D3DWine and others) don't want to cooperate. It cooperates with DC version on nullDC (reicast generally runs on Windows but has no any GUI options, and only older versions render Rayman properly, and with fixed effects, in comparison to nullDC).
Click to expand...

I can tell you right now that the DreamCast version's textures are lower quality than the PC version's. The reason is because Ubisoft compressed them when they compiled them for DreamCast. As for modding in higher quality textures in the PC version, that's not gonna happen because the game crashes when you put higher or lower quality textures in the game. I tried modding in a higher quality texture that I found on the early demo build of Rayman 2 but the game crashed immediately. The game also doesn't like lower-res textures either unless it's textures that don't use alpha channels like Rayman's shirt. I am saying this from modding experience with this game.
 
I'm new when it comes to all this so I'm not really sure what I'm doing... but when I used XnView to view the textures, they are all .gf files and no image shows up in the program. Does anyone know what I'm supposed to do?

Edit: Also when I run Convert_all.bat, there is a message under each line saying "'gf2.exe' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file."
 
ICUP321 said:
So do you guys remember this unused texture that was found on Rayman 3 HD that made Rayman look like tarzan or something like that?
GIXPCsX.png
Click to expand...

I still have many questions about the original purpose for that texture :P.
 
Haruka said:
ICUP321 said:
So do you guys remember this unused texture that was found on Rayman 3 HD that made Rayman look like tarzan or something like that?
GIXPCsX.png
Click to expand...

I still have many questions about the original purpose for that texture :P.
Click to expand...

Maybe Rayman was planned to have different skins in the beta or it’s just a joke of the developer :lol:.
 
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