Modding Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius

Modding Sunrider is a lot easier than you might expect. Here's an incomplete guide to doing it.

Introduction

What do you do when you've been through Sunrider once? Go through it again and make different choices, of course. After that, though, it probably gets a little stale. I wouldn't know, seeing as I haven't actually rescued/abandoned any diplomats yet, but what I have done is discover how, exactly, one goes about modding much of Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius.

A precaution, though: Going through the game files is obviously going to result in spoilers, and while it isn't listed on the store page, the game does actually contain nudity. So if you don't want to see either of those, don't go through the files.

In addition, you should always make backups. If you don't, verifying the game cache might get you back the old files, but I don't know. You'd have to be kinda stupid not to make backups in the first place, of course.

Anyhow, let's get going.

What You Will Need

- Hands.
- A functioning brain.
- The game (which is free).
- Windows Explorer (or equivalent).
- Editing software for the stuff you want to edit.
- That's it.

Navigation

Whatever you intend to modify, you'll need to know where to be.

First off, you'll need to open Windows Explorer up and navigate to your Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius directory. For most people, this will be in your Steam directory under SteamApps\common\Sunrider. If you have the game installed on a different drive to your main Steam install, you'll need to go there instead.

Now, once you're there, go into the 'game' folder. It should look like this:



It'd be a good idea to bookmark this folder; you'll be using it for everything we cover here. As for the individual subfolders, here's a handy guide.

Background - The game's backgrounds (obviously).
Battle UI - Icons and sprites for the game's battle map (not the attack animations themselves).
cache - I'm not entirely sure what this one is for. For me, the contents were just menu buttons, so it's probably for those.
cg - The special images from the scenes that aren't just backgrounds with sprites over them. OP.avi, the game's intro, is in here as well.
Character - Character sprites. Divided by character in the subfolders.
Font - The game's fonts.
gameplay - All components of the combat animations. Also seemingly miscellaneous things such as the 'BATTLE STATIONS' text.
Map - Stuff from the galaxy map.
Menu - The main menu artwork, as well as things like the First Arrival intro text, Sunrider map, R&D menus and the Game Over screen.
Music - The game's kickass soundtrack.
saves - Your save files. Notepad equates the contents to garbage text, so I'd advise against messing with them.
Skirmish - Special stuff needed for the game's skirmish feature.
sound - Sound effects and generally everything audio-related that isn't under Music.
Space - Art for the warping segments, as well as the picture of Cera and sprites of Legion from the start of First Arrival.
Transitions - The scene transitions.
.rpy and .rpyc Files - Stuff for RenPy, the engine the game is based on. Most of these won't come into play in this guide.

That's about it. Now that you know what's going on, let's do some editing.

Editing Images

Perhaps the easiest thing to do with Sunrider is to modify the images the game displays. For this demonstration, I'll be editing the main menu CG. This process should work exactly the same for the rest of the game's art.

You'll need to be in the games Menu folder for this. Look for menu_default.jpg. It's the one that looks like this.


Ignore menu_hover.jpg unless you're wanting to edit what the menu options look like when you're hovering over them. Trust me, you don't need to do anything with it.

Anyhow, back up menu_default.jpg, open it up in your image editor of choice and do whatever you want to it.

It is completely possible to replace menu_default.jpg with a different image entirely, but make sure you have some menu buttons and that they're in the same place as they are on the original. Otherwise you're going to have a hard time doing anything because the menu'll be invisible. Also, if you want to make these buttons not look like crap when you hover over them, you'll need to edit them in menu_hover.jpg as well.

When you've created your work of art, save it and start the game up.



Congratulations! You now have your own custom title screen.

Note that the version number in the bottom-left isn't hard-coded into the image; it'll appear over the menu regardless of what you do to its region of the screen.

Replacing Sounds

To replace the music, navigate to the game's Music folder. This guide works for voices and sound effects too, though you'll need to be in the sound folder for those.

When you're in the music folder, find the file you want to replace. For me, this is going to be Battle_Against_Time.ogg, a kickass track that's thankfully easy to test. If you just want the game's music for personal use, you can just copy-paste it into another folder no problem, but I'm personally going to be swapping said music out for my own stuff and then immediately changing it back because the game's music is kickass.

To replace an .ogg file, we need another .ogg file, so we'll need to convert our chosen track to the format. For this purpose, I recommend Audacity, although any program that can convert to Ogg Vorbis should be fine.

The method of converting to .ogg varies between programs, but for Audacity, just open up the file, go to File/Export, and export your replacement audio to somewhere you can access it easily. Then just copy-paste your new .ogg file into SteamApps\common\Sunrider\game\Music.

Now comes the important part: By itself, your .ogg file is useless to the game, so you need to trick it into thinking it's playing Battle_Against_Time.ogg. The solution for this is thankfully quite simple; rename your .ogg, whatever it's called, to Battle_Against_Time.

Then boot up the game. If you choose to watch the intro, you'll notice that Sora no Senritsu plays there even if you've replaced Sora_no_Senritsu.ogg. That's because the intro is a pre-recorded video by the name of OP.avi - unless you swap OP.avi out for something that better reflects your changes, it'll always be the same.

Now, I mentioned before that Battle Against Time is a simple track to test. Load up a save game (or start a new game and play for a while) and click on the Skirmish icon on Deck 1. Click on the 'E.Music' (Enemy Music) icon and select Battle Against Time. Then place any old friendly unit and any old enemy unit on the map using the menus on the left and right, start the battle, and end your turn. Your replacement track should play instead of Battle Against Time.

I'd have demonstrated the last part in a video, but Fraps and RenPy have a very unstable working relationship in that RenPy will outright refuse to run with Fraps and also crash Steam half the time to boot. Sorry.

Replacing the Game's Fonts

To replace the game's fonts, navigate to the Fonts folder. There should be eight fonts in here, but for this demonstration, I'll only be replacing segoeui.ttf, which is used for the introductory text at the very beginning of First Arrival.

You can find a number of fonts in C:\Windows\Fonts that should serve you well here if you can't find any online. Personally, I'll be replacing Segoe UI with Playtime With Hot Toddies, the Katawa Shoujo font. If you want to get it yourself, you can find it here[www.fontsquirrel.com].

The procedure is simple: Copy-paste your font over and rename it segoeui.ttf. Make sure you back up the original segoeui.ttf first in case you want to change it back or something goes wrong.

Now boot up the game and play.

Comparison (original on left):

Replacing the Intro

I'm not entirely sure how to replace the intro. I've tried making videos the same length with the same resolution and replacing OP.avi with them, but this only results in the game skipping the OP. I guess if you don't like the OP then removing it is as simple as removing OP.avi, so that's good, but it means I can't tell you how to edit it.

If anyone can figure it out, please leave a comment. I'll credit you and add the info to the guide. Same with anything else I missed out. I'm no expert, after all.

Then again, why would you want to replace something as awesome as this?

Editing Dialogue

Credit to Lisbon for telling me about this one.

To edit dialogue, open up script.rpy under Sunrider/Game. The formatting will be screwy if you use vanilla Notepad, so use Notepad++ or Microsoft Word to open it up.

In addition to editing the game's dialogue, messing with script.rpy also allows you to edit the flow and mood of the story by switching out music and forcing the game to pause, among other things. In other words, you could make an entirely different game just by messing with script.rpy. Then again, it'd probably be easier just to install RenPy, toss the entire thing into the RenPy directory, and edit it with that, but I'm no RenPy expert.

When you back up script.rpy, take it out of the Sunrider directory. Not just Sunrider\game, the Sunrider directory as a whole. Otherwise the game will try to read your backed-up script.rpy and your edited version at the same time, resulting in it giving you an error and refusing to start.

If you did it right, your new line of text should pop up when the old line would've done otherwise.

Credits

Myself - Making the guide
Love in Space - Making the game
Sekai Project - Getting the game on Steam
Solar Empire Commander & Blazing Star - Recommending the game to me
Lisbon - Telling me about script.rpy
Kira Buckland - Asaga's great line delivery
Readers - Assuring me that this wasn't a waste of time (provided I get any)

Tahnks for reading please buy my book at peterchimaera .com i am poor :(

[Ridley12, Knight of God]

Editing the script file will help me fix a few pesky grammar/spelling errors I caught while replaying (or rather, re-reading ) the game.

[n2500]

"What you will need... A functioning brain."
I don't have one of those, what now? :p

[Ashsaber]

Thank you for this. through this guide I decided to replace the Vanguard theme (march of immortals) with something different. Namely Solar Crystal from Super Robot Wars Z3.2, which I feel is a much bbetter fit for what's going down when you use the Vanguard, and a better fit for the Sunrider in General.

Also, the Library file in the game folder is where all the stats are kept. I decided that the first time I tried the game years ago (got to the far harbor battle before dropping it for the time) had left me way too cash strapped I would double the money I earned from every enemy (the line for that is self_money reward, or something like that) and found the game much more enjoyable from doing so.

[Noah_C]

Now I'm going to make Sola speak ascii code.