Custom Portraits and Custom Music, a How-To hackjob guide

[Sorario Prosperity]

A rather controversial decision on Ghostlight's part was to remove custom portraits, but here's a workaround for now. You'll need the following:

1: The BRA Unpacker, download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/6y88fnp3rujq39b/BRAUnpack.zip

2: A program that can edit DDS graphic files. I used Paint.NET which is a free program.

Onto how Elminage Gothic handles things; if there is a custom file in the directory, it takes priority over the contents of the BRA file. Using this, we can have custom portraits at the expense of ones we might not even use in the first place.

1: Use the BRA unpacker. This will unpack the BRA files into folders. Note that this takes up 1GB of space as it also uncompresses them.

2: Open the S02 folder that is made up. This is where the graphics are contained. You'll need to nagivate down to GR10_* and GR11_ on the list.

3: Among the GR11_* graphics, find an image that fits the race and sex of your waifu character. For this example, we will use the female human GR11_208.dss. You can open these files in Paint.NET.

4: Draw or paste the picture you want into the file. Don't worry too much about the size. As long as it's approximately the same size as the original in terms of height and width you wont have any problems. Save it. An image with a transparent background is recommended. In paint.NET, you have some options when saving. Set it to save as Explicit Alpha to retain antialiasing.

(If you need an image to test out, I used this picture of Youmu Konpaku by Dairi; http://i.imgur.com/2Sczsev.png)

5: Find the GR10_* partner of the image. In this case, it would be GR10_208.dss, paste the face from your image into this and save it like you did in step 4.

(If you don't want a small/large portrait, don't bother making it. You can pick and choose which face/body you have without hassle.)

6: Copy/Paste the modified files into the root Elminage Gothic folder. Once you have done this, open up Elminage, make a character of their sex and race, and find the picture. Select it, and you're done.

Currently, this only overrides pictures, but if someone cracks how to add more pictures, it'll be more than welcome.

Here's mine: http://i.imgur.com/38Zc5xc.png

A note: Later in the game you get to pick any race's graphic during character creation. This greatly expands your options for replacing pics.

The S0* folders can be safely deleted after this if you need extra space.

[Sorario Prosperity]

Custom music!
Thankfully this is much easier to do. Simply convert your personal theme song chosen track to the .ogg format (Audacity can do this), and name it EL3BGM_**.ogg, replacing ** with the appropriate number. After this, place it in the root Elminage folder with the EXE like you would with any modified file.

To find out what track is what number, click here[pastebin.com].

A warning: Be careful when editing the CSV files. When I edit them in Calc, the game crashes when it needs them, but for some reason I can use Notepad just fine.

[Malice]

Would be nice to be able to crack to add additional picture yeh. Right now you gotta replace the pic. I think the reason they removed it was because they didn't know how to port the feature itself. After all, the game port feature doesn't work on the Vita if you played the game on that console instead of PSP.

[Maverynthia]

Originally posted by Maniac:

Would be nice to be able to crack to add additional picture yeh. Right now you gotta replace the pic. I think the reason they removed it was because they didn't know how to port the feature itself. After all, the game port feature doesn't work on the Vita if you played the game on that console instead of PSP.

The could have edited the code to just look for a certain naming scheme like the GR10_### or something. Doesn't seem THAT hard to do.

[Sorario Prosperity]

I actually went through all the .csv files and I found nothing that showed what would've determined what gets what portrait. The only files I haven't opened are the EXE itself and a .dat file, both of which are likely impossible to open since EXEs are well... EXEs and a .dat file could require just about anything.

Originally posted by Maniac:

I think the reason they removed it was because they didn't know how to port the feature itself.

Quite likely, they made outright ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥t excuses as to why they removed it, and I am quite certain that they were lying through their teeth to paying customers. Hell, I couldn't program a Hello World and I at least found a way to replace the music and portraits with minimal damage.

[Malice]

TBH I'm not sure they even gave an actual reason as to why it was removed. But yeh it's most likely that. Though then again the base characters portraits are already really nice. Though I did change mines on my new game to play around with it.

[phadin]

Custom pictures were never included in the PSP or DS version of the game. This was a decision made when they first crafted Gothic, not unique to the PC port. Yes it existed in pervious entries in the Elminage series, but not Elminage Gothic... of any flavor. Could they have added it, perhaps... but they also could have added the newer features and aspects of the DS version and they didn't. They took the original game and made a direct port and translation. They didn't try to muck with the game's programming beyond that.

If they had, it likely would have taken a few more months to add stuff, test and validate it all works, and that it doesn't break anything else (a good possibility).

If you look in some of the data files, for example, there is data for the races that were added to the DS version... yet they were not added here. I think that indicates Starfish had that work incomplete when they first had to publish the game back on PSP... something they completed for the DS release. But again, Ghostlight did a direct port of PSP, so the incomplete data got brought in and is unusable. Since they likely did not have access to the DS version of the program, they decided not to try and shoehorn the incomplete data and work into the PSP port.

[Sorario Prosperity]

Originally posted by phadin:

Custom pictures were never included in the PSP or DS version of the game. This was a decision made when they first crafted Gothic, not unique to the PC port. Yes it existed in pervious entries in the Elminage series, but not Elminage Gothic... of any flavor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzuh6R5lo_s
Yeah, and this guy SOMEHOW managed it on the PSP version.

And they ADMITTED to removing it during the porting. Don't try to BS me.

[Durgha]

Originally posted by phadin:

Custom pictures were never included in the PSP or DS version of the game. This was a decision made when they first crafted Gothic, not unique to the PC port.

This is an objectively untrue statement. Whomever told you that was either misinformed or lying.

Custom portraits shipped with both the PSP and DS versions of the game. One of Gothic's selling points was the return of those large in-combat custom portraits from Elminage 3. The specs for custom pics are clearly stated in the wiki. I have no idea how anyone could've missed that.

Ghostlight admittedly took the feature out. We haven't been informed why. Anything beyond that is speculation.

[Skysect]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/291960/discussions/0/618458030686122814/ it was in DS version . It's the proof :)