PsychoTherapy - Psychonauts HD remaster mod with better textures and other improvements

[v00d00m4n]

You may remember me by PsychoPad, PsychoWide and unofficial gog and retail patches for PsychoNauts.
This time im going to bring you improved textures for most of game objects.

At the moment this thread is more like placeholder and recuitment thread for people who want to join me and help making this mod.
I just started working on it, but its based on my progress with PsychoWide, which already had some High res textures for loading screens... and now i have uncompressed tga sources for most of textures used in game and im going to make them even better. The most notticable improvement will be with textures that have alpha channels, their edges going to be smoother now, other improvements will be with textures that had bad texture compression artifacts, and probably textures that will benefit from enlargmen will have higher resolution and if its possible, normal maps will be created for objects and surfaces that doesnt have them, but im not sure that this thing will really work.

How is that possible? Thanks to DF releasing most of source files with latest patch, not sure if this was done with purpose or was a mistake, but this will help to improve game a lot. You may nottice that at the moment game cant use these textures, but hack method i "invented" for PsychoWide will make this possible. However textures require some conversion and in some cases enlargment and detailisation work to make some visible improvements, and that what im already doing right now. I will probably merge this with other of my PsychoNauts patches, included not announced few.

If you guys want to help with texture mod, contact me please. The most needed help is ability to re-draw catroonish textures with original texture as reference and very close to original look and style. Its not typical "realistic" game, so usage of free texture banks (which the usual method for making high res mods for games like GTA) will not work for Psychonauts.

Release date: when its done.

Originally posted by Voodooman:

A little progress with uMod texture injection. Just to show some difference:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=125352220 low res vanilla
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=125353989 2x high res source + x2 S-spline enlargment

Update:

Double fine configured steam to remove all textures from Psychonauts folder, i just notticed that they wiped out my mod from my own HDD. Im dissapointed, frutrated and dont feel motivated to start this mod again from scratch, source textures and about 30% of textures reworked reworked by was removed all at once :-(

http://steamcommunity.com/app/3830/discussions/0/864959088168368559/#c864969481854037950

Update 13.12.2015:

GUYS!!!!! I FOUND BACKUP OF HD TEXTURES AGAIN!

But i still dont have time to dump everu texture and find its hash.

I REQUEST YOUR ASSISTANCE !

Command line utility that can list, extract, and repack (even files of bigger size) files from level and main file archive IS VERY NEEDED! I dont have time and barely remember anything about file formats to code such tool myself, future of this mod depends on existance of this tool, if you can code one, or know someone who can, please contant me (write in comment on my page about reason before adding me to friends) so i can give more detailed requirements for tool that i need for future automated installation and deinstallation of mod.

None of existing tools supports texture import back into game, and without it i cant continue this mod (several HD textures i imported to game with uMod injection was just for showcase, its really very time consuming to replace every texture in game like that, so a tool for importing files into native archives is a must).

Alternative idea: make a heuristic (version independant) memory patcher injected via version.dll (just please dont do it via any of render, input or audio api proxy dlls), that will return "no texture present" value whenever game tries to load texture from archives, so that it can be redirected to load texture from folder (on some textures simple path\name corruption hex edit of archives worked for me, but not for every one of them, so trick may require extra manual redirection), preferably uncompressed TGA one, not the dds with same name.

[Fonald]

Interesting. Cant wait!

[alex_anisimov]

Get on with it!

[v00d00m4n]

A little progress with uMod texture injection. Just to show some difference:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=125352220 low res vanilla
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=125353989 2x high res source + x2 S-spline enlargment

[alex_anisimov]

Someone please find DFNathan or DFJustin and ask if DoubleFine is ever going to implement these beautiful textures for Windows version by themselves.

[Cake Sale]

Wow this is awesome. Keep up the work man, it's people like you that make the world turn. I just wanted to take this time to thank you for PsychoPad, it definitely helped me out while playing with a controller. Peace brother.

[BHODAN BUBINGUS]

Wow, can't wait for these. Keep up the good work! Have you contacted Nathan And Justin about this project?

[v00d00m4n]

Making this mod is harder than i expected. Method that worked for loading screens (hex editing pak or exe files, to re-route game to different path and use external files instead of packed), does not work for most of textures in game because their path cant be spoofed that easy.
Since Psychonauts at the moment cant use textures overrides from folder and keep using textures from pak file, as temporary and a bit clunky solution i decided to make a uMOd package (aka openTexMod, new improved version of texmod).
But the problem with it - need to know offset of every texture in memory and for this i need to dump every texture and then compare 1 by 1 with textures from game folder and make a table with offsets for certain texture names... thats real pain in ass and going to be slow.

So, i need your help guys - i need you to dump textures and compare them with textures from folder to help me compose table of offsets.
Another and much better kind of help would be is someone could code (or of DF will share the one they use) a proper Pak unpacker\repacker, so i can put high res textures in pak file.

Maybe anyone knows good Image comparision tool that can compare TGA files in 2 folders and then generate a table like "Dump\0xXXXXXXXX.tga = Textures\Raz.tga" ???

[Joe Kerr]

Modders rock! Hopefully you find some help and we don't need to wait a ridiculous amount of time for a unofficial patch

[ewino]

Voodooman, What do you currently need?
About the PAK files - will this help? - http://quickandeasysoftware.net/software/psychonauts-explorer
About the image comparison tool, does it need to match exact files? If so, I can write a small script that does just that...
I'd be happy to help, contact me via Steam.

[Strimplo]

So... any word?

[Buster Bluth]

hope you guys will work further on this mod!

[v00d00m4n]

When its done...

Nah, sorry psychonatus explorer is not good, it cant even unpack a lot of textures and definetly cant pack them back.

[MustardJeep]

Nice didn't know anyone was doing something like this.

If it helps I've gotten good results pulling the texture pack using a ripper. All formatted to DDS.

Is there a particular upscale your aiming for?

[v00d00m4n]

what ripper?

[MustardJeep]

3D Ripper DX[www.deep-shadows.com]

The models it outputs are rubbish to dense packed to be worth anything without severe cleaning in a 3D model program, but 99% to 100% of the textures come out perfect. About five seconds per Level/Area and it's the whole magilla player skins, npc skins, props textures, 2d sprites, backdrop billboards, skydome...everything.

P.S. Just went looking at the Psychonauts Explorer source code.....looks like it is written in pascal? Anyway I'll look into the source code and see if it can be upgraded a bit. I'll let you know on it in a couple of days if it is go or no go.

P.P.S. Wow the Psychonauts Explorer is just a file dumper that's kinda lame and last update was five years ago. Still one of the authors threads on the file system is still up on the lucasarts board so at least thre is something in the way of notes.