Search by texture

[PsychSoftware]

This is a shameless absolute niche corner case tear-your-hear-out-but-probably-technically-possible feature request that I fully expect to be closed as too low priority to bother with buuuuut... asking for the record:
How are map textures stored? Are they literally packed into the map files and inaccessible short of loading the map, or are they independently referenced? If the latter, functionality to browse the map textures and then perform a search for every map using a given texture could be VERY useful for "I know what this place looks like but I don't know what it's called under the hood" hunting. To whit, The One Cutscene Map I Am Still Trying To Find has, on close inspection, some very distinctive long grass that I don't think I've seen anywhere else in game for over an hour of browsing any common region with grass, and blue camo tent fabric that also seems fairly distinctive. Granted, yes, users would need to appreciate that things like groundcover are likely 2 or 3 or 4 textures blended via yet another texture or vertex map, but anywhere is a start.

[redstrate]

This is a shameless absolute niche corner case tear-your-hear-out-but-probably-technically-possible feature request that I fully expect to be closed as too low priority to bother with buuuuut... asking for the record:

Just to be clear the entire reason this project existed (and continues to exist in spite of other tooling) is to fulfill my stupid niches like this, so you're in welcome company :-D Although a lot of my obscure tooling lives in XIVModTools (so I don't have to maintain the GUI)

How are map textures stored? Are they literally packed into the map files and inaccessible short of loading the map, or are they independently referenced?

So generally it actually works like any other modern game engine, there are two major parts of a scene: BgParts (made up of MDLs), SGBs (prefabs which can then contain models themselves) and Terrain (which makes up landscapes, which are in turn MDLs.) These models (MDLs) reference materials (MTRLs) which then finally, reference textures (TEX, ATEX.) Without knowing any better, I figure this is part of the terrain.

There is a few ways I would go about this, but the first one is probably to just load up the cutscene in-game (assuming it's replayable in the book) and then open Penumbra. You will have to tell Dalamud not to hide itself during cutscenes, of course. It has both a resource logger and a "what's on-screen" tool and it might help you figure it out easier than Novus can for various reasons.

If you can't do that or don't want to, then you may be able to do this in Novus already just not in a super easy way. You need to know what zone is used here, which Novus can load and then you call follow the model trail to the texture - albeit very slowly. I can build some tooling to aid in this, but do you know any more details? Maybe the name of the quest the cutscene is shown in?

[PsychSoftware]

9 launches out of 10 I still just use vanilla client, but as of a couple weeks back I did start poking at Penumbra for Glamourer/Brio so if I can sort out how to get to Dalamud/Penumbra outside the title screen, that's maybe a route.

Meanwhile, looks like the scene is Post-Stormblood: A Prelude in Violet cs#4, "Meanwhile, at a resistance encampment, somewhere in the empire..." which is the whole issue. It's not a location used anywhere else in the game that I can recall, so it's almost certainly zoned weirdly. The look is very 1.0 Coerthas or 3.0 Dravanian Hinterlands, but Dravania lacks the deciduous tree models. Might plausibly be zoned with Vylbrand / Lower LaN for assets, or Gyr Abania for plot adjacency.

All I've seen so far in the Map Editor is opening individual maps. Where would I look to load a zone absent a map?

[redstrate]

All I've seen so far in the Map Editor is opening individual maps. Where would I look to load a zone absent a map?

Ah so you stumbled upon a map that isn't actually a "map", what Map Editor opens are called "TerritoryTypes" which is usually reserved for actual public areas (and dungeons, other duties, etc.) Cutscene maps like zone are specially made and almost never given a TerritoryType ID, and aren't directly openable via Map Editor.

Instead what you'll need to do is pry open LVBs - basically what maps are underneath - and that can be done in Data Explorer. These files will open in a Map Editor-esque interface too. They're located under the bg/ directory, and if you never used the tool before just let it download the path list under the File menu and it will populate. Something you have to do unfortunately is figure out what the LVB path is, I can look into it more tomorrow as I haven't really looked for a specific cutscene map before. Knowing its from post-Stormblood it should be under bg/ex2 though or something like that....

[PsychSoftware]

Explains it a bit. Figured out Penumbra at a basic level and looks like the big rush of loaded assets are from z3e7_t1 and yeah the map lists only have thru like z3e3

[redstrate]

Perfect, so I threw that into the search and think I found it at bg/ex2/05_zon_z3/evt/z3e7/level/z3e7.lvb ("evt" means "event" or cutscene here I guess)

Edit: If we were to have such a tool, I think it would be useful to have the cutscene selection mirror as shown in the book

[PsychSoftware]

cool. had found as far as bg/ex2 by the time I tabbed back, and with only 4 major subdirectories it was hopefully not gonna be tooo long, but each of those has subs and subs and subs.
and I mean I'm not suggesting new features BEYOND this, buuuuuut... I wouldn't say no to more game-parallel mapping tables :)

[PsychSoftware]

that said, is it supposed to be auto-rendering once loaded, or is this looping back around to some of the Windows-side rendering issues that you recently beat out of the map viewer proper?

(without adding another spurious comment, one truly awesome thing about the scene that got my attention now that I am a bit into 1.0 is how it not only homages the 1.0 aesthetic, but the BGM is actually a riff on the 1.0 Mor Dhona theme, at least insofar as Project meteor has patched it all back together)

[redstrate]

Yeah it is supposed to be rendering there :-( I'll have to see why it broke on Windows

[redstrate]

This is what I created which can replace the manual work you just did:

There needs to be a better way to grab the level path though, so you can copy that somewhere else.

Edit: Oh it already works if you CTRL+C in the scene list widget, cool

[PsychSoftware]

oooooo shiny!