Spyro Texture Hacks

CrystalFissure · May 16, 2015 9:21 AM

Hey everyone! I thought I'd post this here because many may not be aware of what's going on right now. To be put simply, I've been editing the textures from Spyro 1-3, and using the Spyro World Viewer, I'm able to instantaneously load these changes. Here are a few videos so far to show you how it works. I have a Winter Tundra / Summer Forest crossover that will go up in a few days too. Apologies if this is considered self-promotion but I've been a lurker for years and feel like the folks here would be really interested in this.

I've also been talking to renowned Spyro hacker "LXShadow", and it looks like we may be able to get this stuff in-game. That would be insane.

Stormy · May 16, 2015 1:01 PM

Very cool! A friend showed me your Molten Spring video last week before it was posted here. It's amazing how textures used outside their original context can make such beautiful levels.

No worries on the self-promotion; YouTube accounts and such are perfectly okay to post.

CrystalFissure · May 16, 2015 1:05 PM

Stormy wrote:

Very cool! A friend showed me your Molten Spring video last week before it was posted here. It's amazing how textures used outside their original context can make such beautiful levels.
No worries on the self-promotion; YouTube accounts and such are perfectly okay to post.

Ah, excellent. Glad you're okay with it. Out of curiosity, who showed you? I likely know the commenter as I reply to all my comments on videos. I'll post a few more things, such as the Dragonfly Eggs. As it's a topic hardly mentioned anywhere on Spyro forums.

Stormy · May 18, 2015 11:19 PM

I don't know his Youtube name unfortunately. I'm pretty sure he's changed accounts a few times since I was last subscribed.

What do you mean by the dragonfly eggs?

CrystalFissure · May 19, 2015 3:46 AM

Stormy wrote:

What do you mean by the dragonfly eggs?

I posted some videos here: http://www.spyroforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=14666

CrystalFissure · Jun 11, 2015 3:09 PM

Thought I'd update you guys a bit. We've actually got the textures IN-GAME now. Yes, you can play and download these texture packs I've made. Here are some videos showing it off. I'm sure this will excite a lot of you!

Yes it's a bit spammy so I apologise, but I think they're well worth your time. A new one, "Sunset Alps" should be up in 3 hours. spyro sparx gnasty

Last edited by CrystalFissure (Jun 11, 2015 3:11 PM)

CrystalFissure · Jul 08, 2015 5:42 AM

We've came really far with this, honestly. Here's another texture hack done by me:

And here are some more done by others!

CrystalFissure · Jul 10, 2015 2:41 AM

Made another new one. It's a bit of a shame that Spyro doesn't actually get that much attention on this forum compared to years ago, but it's understandable. I'd love to see what some of you could come up with. Here's "Morning Tundra"!

Last edited by CrystalFissure (Jul 10, 2015 3:08 AM)

Sheep · Jul 10, 2015 6:20 AM

I'm working on a pack for Glimmer... difficult to make my completely new textures look right tongue

CrystalFissure · Jul 10, 2015 7:44 AM

Sheep wrote:

I'm working on a pack for Glimmer... difficult to make my completely new textures look right

Can't wait! I was a huge fan of the Rusken 3D demo and thought the textures looked great with that N64/PS1 vibe. Just remember to drop the amount of colours within the palettes so things don't glitch out too much. Do you have any image previews?

Sheep · Jul 10, 2015 8:19 AM

You need not wait long...

I present you the Ruins of the Glimmer Empire!

( I tweaked the sky a bit, and switched out the ornament texture seen on the little platform in the first screenshot here, after I made these screenshots)
Link: http://host-a.net/u/Greenblizzard/Glimm … exPack.zip
It's not dramatically different in a theme and color perspective, but pretty much everything except the dirt texture, the original stone block texture and cave ceiling is changed to some greater or lesser extent(a lot is completely new). Some of the textures lost a bit of color detail through the long process of saving, editing, saving, editing and so on, but I guess it looks alright.

Feel free to make a video of it if you want. Otherwise, I'll do it, but that won't be for a couple of weeks hmm

Last edited by Sheep (Jul 10, 2015 8:26 AM)

CrystalFissure · Jul 10, 2015 10:57 AM

Sheep wrote:

Feel free to make a video of it if you want. Otherwise, I'll do it, but that won't be for a couple of weeks

Holy crap. What you've done there is truly amazing. It's simple, yet it gives off an amazing vibe. Honestly your textures are just as good as the Insomniac ones, if better! If it's okay, I will make a video on this in the next few days. And full credit will be given to you of course. I'll make sure to reitterate how you made it, otherwise people may assume I did it. But yeah, this is awesome. I just fixed the water glitch in my new level; here's a preview:

Can't wait to see what else you can come up with! Speaking of, do you have any more plans? Or suggestions for level concepts? It's hard to come up with ideas sometimes.

Sheep · Jul 10, 2015 11:21 AM

Thanks smile

Ooh, that is looking nice! Reminds me of Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and red-tinted Australian bush or whatever tongue What was the water glitch?

I don't really have any plans at the moment... But maybe Fireworks Factory could be turned into a more European-esque castle. With gray stone walls, and tiles on the roofs.

Edit:
More ideas:
An ice version of Crystal Islands if that hasn't been made. Or a warmer Frozen Altars, possibly with beast makers textures. Or a hell version of Honey Speedway, where the honey is replaced with blood. A glacier themed Sgt. Byrd's Base. A non-Spooky Swamp with happier, brighter colors. An Artisans themed Enchanted Towers. Cloud Spires with a touch of Dark Passage.

Last edited by Sheep (Jul 10, 2015 3:46 PM)

Paranoia · Jul 10, 2015 4:57 PM

These are really neat! You guys have a lot of talent for this kind of thing.

If you're looking for more ideas I think that using the textures from Charmed Ridge would be cool. Maybe in Sunny Villa or Enchanted Towers.

CrystalFissure · Jul 11, 2015 3:03 AM

Sheep wrote:

Thanks
Ooh, that is looking nice! Reminds me of Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and red-tinted Australian bush or whatever What was the water glitch?
I don't really have any plans at the moment... But maybe Fireworks Factory could be turned into a more European-esque castle. With gray stone walls, and tiles on the roofs.
Edit:
More ideas:
An ice version of Crystal Islands if that hasn't been made. Or a warmer Frozen Altars, possibly with beast makers textures. Or a hell version of Honey Speedway, where the honey is replaced with blood. A glacier themed Sgt. Byrd's Base. A non-Spooky Swamp with happier, brighter colors. An Artisans themed Enchanted Towers. Cloud Spires with a touch of Dark Passage.

The water glitch involves loading the water textures. They're almost always glitched and require you to delete all of them before loading. The LQ textures didn't work properly at first if you selected "load textures", instead you have to click "load all". I'd download the newer version of SpyroEdit to get the latest version, as it helps with some of those issues. Speaking of your level, what level were you actually using to take these textures? You have a bunch from Skelos Badlands, and it's classified as "Unknown Level" when it should be "Glimmer". Did you try changing the title screen textures?

Anyway, those are some brilliant ideas. I'll try and come up with something soon. The biggest issue is lighting and how that overall affects everything. Hopefully I could get something good going with Crystal Islands, as it's already quite dark and stuff.

Good ideas from you too, Paranoia. Really wanna do something with Charmed Ridge soon.

Sheep · Jul 11, 2015 7:18 AM

CrystalFissure wrote:

Speaking of your level, what level were you actually using to take these textures? You have a bunch from Skelos Badlands, and it's classified as "Unknown Level" when it should be "Glimmer". Did you try changing the title screen textures?

Hmm... what? Well, it's "Unknown Level" because that's what SpyroEdit named the folder when I first saved the textures. I was in Glimmer on an old savestate, which I just loaded, without entering the level through a portal. Or could it be that Glimmer, the first time you visit it, to some extent is defined as it's own level, one in which to hide the 'Exit Level' option on the pause menu? Because I think this was the savestate I used to do the Glimmer portal glitch. I can't find any reference to Skelos Badlands in the textures folder... (unless you recognize some palette names or something) but I did switch to different savestates just to see whether any of the tiles would be visible in other levels if I loaded the textures again.
... Or is this simply a PAL/NTSC issue? That could probably explain everything. Because I've only ever got the NTSC version of both Spyro 2 and 3 to not freeze in ePSXe when entering most levels.

I'll try to find a PAL version and make sure the textures are the same... O.o (and fix it if they're not)

Edit:
Apart from the folder name, the textures seem to work fine with PAL.

Last edited by Sheep (Jul 11, 2015 7:45 AM)

CrystalFissure · Jul 11, 2015 2:12 PM

Sheep wrote:

CrystalFissure wrote:
Speaking of your level, what level were you actually using to take these textures? You have a bunch from Skelos Badlands, and it's classified as "Unknown Level" when it should be "Glimmer". Did you try changing the title screen textures?
Hmm... what? Well, it's "Unknown Level" because that's what SpyroEdit named the folder when I first saved the textures. I was in Glimmer on an old savestate, which I just loaded, without entering the level through a portal. Or could it be that Glimmer, the first time you visit it, to some extent is defined as it's own level, one in which to hide the 'Exit Level' option on the pause menu? Because I think this was the savestate I used to do the Glimmer portal glitch. I can't find any reference to Skelos Badlands in the textures folder... (unless you recognize some palette names or something) but I did switch to different savestates just to see whether any of the tiles would be visible in other levels if I loaded the textures again.
... Or is this simply a PAL/NTSC issue? That could probably explain everything. Because I've only ever got the NTSC version of both Spyro 2 and 3 to not freeze in ePSXe when entering most levels.
I'll try to find a PAL version and make sure the textures are the same... O.o (and fix it if they're not)
Edit:
Apart from the folder name, the textures seem to work fine with PAL.

Whoops, I must have merged my "Unknown Level" folder into yours by accident! My bad. I ran the NTSC version and it appeared perfectly. If I ran PAL, you'd have to convert it to Glimmer I'm pretty sure. Because LXShadow is British, I think he prefers those versions and made the program with that in mind. For Spyro 3, there are no issues at all. It does make me wonder if you could theoretically change the textures in the opening screen! May try that out tomorrow.

Anyway, keep up the great work. Will make a video using your texture hack in the next few days or so.

BTW if anyone wants to check out my new Spyro hub, go to https://voat.co/v/spyro/. Voat is like a Reddit alternative. Feel free to post Spyro content (all of you!).

Sheep · Jul 11, 2015 3:15 PM

Ah, an easy mistake to make tongue Did it once myself.
I've been fiddling a bit with the source code of SpyroEdit, today and yesterday. It's my first time really using C++, but I managed to make it do things like randomly(in a controlled manner) distort the vertex positions of the terrain, and save/load the vertex positions together with the color data in the Colour.clr file, in order to make the vertex distortion a part of the "texturepack". I did the distortion thing in the opening cutscene, so I'm pretty sure it's possible to re-texture it as well. Right now I'm trying to import the .clr file into a GameMaker program to see if I then can edit it in an orderly manner. Would be fun to not only change the textures, but also remodel things. Sadly, SpyroEdit currently only changes the visible polygons, not the "physical" collision model, so it would only be yet another aesthetic thing, unless someone figures out where and how the collision data is located.

Edit:
Got the vertex coordinates into GM... sort of. All of the model segments have some sort of random-looking offsets, so it's not really useable yet... And I have absolutely no idea whether this offset is the result of an error in how I get the segment coordinates, or if I need another set of values(I doubt it, though), or if I just have to calculate some mysterious(as in, I don't know how) opposite offset based on the values I already have neutral

▼Hidden text

Last edited by Sheep (Jul 12, 2015 12:40 AM)

CrystalFissure · Jul 12, 2015 2:55 AM

Excellent work, Sheep. If you're aware of Kly_Men_COmpany, he's working on many Spyro related hacks and created the world viewer, which has all the necessary OBJ files you'd need in order to view. He actually used Game Maker (I'm pretty sure) to get it working. Guessing you've seen Spyro World Viewer?

Here's what Kly recently sent me:
So, I modified SpyroEdit plug-in to allow run-time code tracing, wrote my-own assembler/disassembler for MIPS and coded IN-GAME cheat for my freeze-hacks.

Basically, he's really good at what he does, and wants to change polygons too to fix some of the glitches within Spyro polygon mapping. See this for example:

The vertex lighting can actually be edited within a program like 3DS Max, by the way. The issue comes with getting the content back into the game. This is why Kly eventually would like to get the game "out of" the PS1 and onto it's own thing. Like a compiler of sorts. That way we'd have more than 2MB of VRAM, which is what causes most of the memory issues within Spyro 1-3.

Here's a video of DessertMonkeyJK playing around with the Spyro World Viewer models:

BTW, when I promote your texture hack, what do you want me to refer to you as? Rubbberrabbbit2 or Greenblizzard?

Sheep · Jul 12, 2015 7:14 AM

CrystalFissure wrote:

If you're aware of Kly_Men_COmpany, he's working on many Spyro related hacks and created the world viewer, which has all the necessary OBJ files you'd need in order to view. He actually used Game Maker (I'm pretty sure) to get it working. Guessing you've seen Spyro World Viewer?

Yup, I've seen the world viewer, and am amazed by Kly smile But I've not successfully used it myself... I don't think I was able to extract the required files from the game xD I also didn't realize that it saved the model split up into all it's segments(which I now saw from DessertMonkeyJK's videos that it indeed does). So maybe it can help me, then! tongue While what I'm doing isn't anything new, it certainly helps me understand how the things work!

Here's what Kly recently sent me:
So, I modified SpyroEdit plug-in to allow run-time code tracing, wrote my-own assembler/disassembler for MIPS and coded IN-GAME cheat for my freeze-hacks.
Basically, he's really good at what he does, and wants to change polygons too to fix some of the glitches within Spyro polygon mapping. See this for example:
[*image was here*]
The vertex lighting can actually be edited within a program like 3DS Max, by the way. The issue comes with getting the content back into the game. This is why Kly eventually would like to get the game "out of" the PS1 and onto it's own thing. Like a compiler of sorts. That way we'd have more than 2MB of VRAM, which is what causes most of the memory issues within Spyro 1-3.

Whoa... decompiling/recompiling the whole game sounds difficult, so I'm even more amazed if that's within his ability yikes While I'm not an expert on it either, 'assembler/disassembler for MIPS' sounds like he now maybe can write code that could be used by the game itself, rather than just manipulating the game's memory, which I believe is what SpyroEdit does. But don't quote me on it... I really don't know!

BTW, when I promote your texture hack, what do you want me to refer to you as? Rubbberrabbbit2 or Greenblizzard?

RubbberRabbbit2 is fine, that's who I am on youtube, I'm Greenblizzard mainly in the GameMaker community.

Edit:
Fixed the offset issue! By looking at the source of Spyro World Viewer, I realized that I had swapped the x and y segment coordinates(or rather, they were already swapped in the level, and I had to swap them back). So simple! The problem was it just looked so almost right that the thought never struck me.
( Thank you Kly!! big_smile )

▼Hidden text

Last edited by Sheep (Jul 12, 2015 3:27 PM)

Paranoia · Jul 12, 2015 3:17 PM

This is a little off topic, but this is just something I found pretty interesting. The coordinates you have there are really similar to how real world elevation data is compiled from LiDAR (essentially a plane flies over, shines a laser at the surface of the earth, and collects the return data). The data comes in as a point cloud which you can then convert the to continuous data as a Digital Elevation Model. I guess placing polygons at each vertex to create a level essentially serves that same purpose in creating a continuous surface, but it a completely different way...makes me wonder if newer games with super high resolution environments use the same method, because that would be a lot of points, and would need a lot of processing power.

LiDAR point cloud:

▼Hidden text

Either way, carry on. tongue I don't claim to know much about Spyro editing or coding, I just thought it would be fun to mention this since it's stuff I've worked with. Looking forward to see what else you guys come up with!

Sheep · Jul 13, 2015 12:02 AM

Haha, that does look really similar smile
I guess newer games use a combination of that, and things like bump map textures to make a big flat surface much more detailed.
Today's progress on my project: Faces and colors!

I ended up mostly playing minecraft, so I didn't get a lot done, and tomorrow I'm leaving for a week's holiday. But after that I'm going to add the rest of the data, and start making some editing functions smile
(Sorry for kinda using the thread as a progress log on something not directly texture hack related <_< (For now at least... changing the texture index of the polygon faces should be quite easy!))

Seeing the level like this makes me want 3D printed miniatures of every single level yikes

CrystalFissure · Jul 13, 2015 2:49 AM

Nah don't worry! This thread SHOULD be big and detailed. There's barely any Spyro discussion here these days, only "general posts". So any new work on the series is a good thing, that's for sure.

Love the progress so far. What is your endgame for this? I doubt it will be able to go back into the game, but I'm curious as to what the end result will be. Do you plan on making it playable within a GameMaker game or something like that? Anyway, enjoy the holiday, and keep me updated on your progress when you get back!

Sheep · Jul 13, 2015 9:40 AM

CrystalFissure wrote:

Love the progress so far. What is your endgame for this? I doubt it will be able to go back into the game, but I'm curious as to what the end result will be. Do you plan on making it playable within a GameMaker game or something like that? Anyway, enjoy the holiday, and keep me updated on your progress when you get back!

Unless I lose my interest in the project, I guess my endgame would just be a level model editor where you can move around level segments(confirmed), vertices, change vertex colors, rotate and switch out(confirmed) textures, and, if it turns out to be possible, change the number of vertices and faces in a segment, or build up level segments from nothing preexisting, and then load it all back into the game(or rather, the game memory, while playing, which is what SpyroEdit does) with SpyroEdit, where it affects the visual model only(unless there is some breakthrough on the collision data front). I don't really see much point in making the original levels playable in GameMaker, but maybe edited or completely new ones tongue

Anyway, proof of concept:
This change was done in my GameMaker program. Again, this is purely visual, Spyro still only collides where the polygons always have been.

Only segment position so far, as that's all I have time for at the moment.

Edit:
Texture index swap:

Last edited by Sheep (Jul 13, 2015 11:04 AM)

CrystalFissure · Jul 13, 2015 11:17 AM

Wow, that is incredible. Would love to see where this could go. I'd say your biggest issue is memory. The 2MB of VRAM makes stuff so annoying. If Kly keeps working on his stuff, problems like that may be removed. I'd say it would be good if people could eventually work together. Kly could release the run-time code tracing and MIPS assembler/disassembler, and then people could work off that. But yeah, keep up the good work when you get back.

EDIT: Wait a sec, I think you've already mentioned this, but how did you get it back into the game? Yes it's only visual so far, but it's still an amazing effort. Especially given potential memory restraints.

Last edited by CrystalFissure (Jul 13, 2015 11:19 AM)

#1 May 16, 2015 9:21 AM

Spyro Texture Hacks

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