New developments, yet another thing to do.

Time for another blog post I think, a progress report if you will.

Having just finished up Operation 005-A's items, I think I can pretty happily say that things are coming along nicely with the item guides I'm working on. Admittedly, I wish I were a little further ahead than am, but it took quite a while for me to get into a good workflow and to work out how things should be organized and displayed (also I got utterly floored by covid for 2 weeks last month and basically just did like one token edit a day during that period, which was fun.)

Aside from that, one thing I wanted to bring up again was my desire to see certain assets from the game datamined for use in articles, for stuff like info icons or to have better pictures included on articles (such as the various wonder logos or images from the in-game art gallery a lot of which are just very lousy image crops.)

Well, a programmer I am not, let alone a dataminer, however it did occur to me that I do have a pretty good computer, and that the emulator CEMU has a texture dump feature. 10 minutes later I have a folder full of 11000 .tga texture files, and good news: As it would turn out it's pretty easy to get nearly every important and relevant image file from the game this way, and oh boy do I have new plans.

Take for example those pesky Unite Morph icons, those certainly went through an evolution on this wiki, from hastly rendered crops to sloppy screenshot traces. Well, now I have this handy little image containing the internal texture files for each Unite Morph Icon, and uh, it took a little bit of effort to figure out how to properly convert them to the correct colors, but the result I would say was the creation of the absolutely definitive Unite Morph Icons for use on this wiki:
Unite HandUnite SwordUnite SwordUnite GunUnite GunUnite WhipUnite WhipUnite Hammer
Unite ClawUnite ClawUnite BombUnite DrillUnite BowgunUnify NaginataUnify BoomerangUnite Goggles
(at least until the colors of some of the harder to read ones are changed again)

And of course, Unite Morph Icons are far from all you can easily get from texture dumps:

• Bottle-Cap icons
• Award and medal rank icons
• Enemy file images
• Head icons for every character in the game
• A multitude of other character images including
  • Profile photos
  • Weapon images
  • Logo Images
  • Rank up portraits
  • recruitment portraits
• Original Vignette images
• Art Gallery images
• Icons for every item in the game
• Original logos for every organization in the game
• Level preview images
• Various interesting menu elements, like the secret character previews, the difficulty select images,
• All the little tutorial illustrations in one handy file
• Some interface elements like fonts or controller icons, that might be of good use
• Other interesting textures which might make for good cosmetic additions to the wiki

The only bust was the ID Card images, which would have been nice to see as simple and clean image files, but they're actually assembled out of multiple images with text overlayed, meaning they would have to be manually recreated, which would be perfectly feasibly if not for the fact that most ID cards have some information obscured on them in cutscene, so there's nothing to go off of.

All that said though, it will take time to get the emulator to actually dump every texture I'm looking for and then to find them (it's not like you start the game and "wonder-red-logo.jpg" is already there in the folder looking at you), and when that's done I'll be looking at over a half a thousand images to properly crop out of their source files, organize, upload, categorize, and implement, which is definitely going to be an entire new step toward improving the Wiki.

Not the kind of thing you do as a break from the hard work.

Although I did just replace the Unite Morph Icons again, my current task will still be to complete all the item and collectible guide pages, but making use of these dumped textures has been added straight to #2 on my list of plans, which are:

1. Create articles for every item in the game, including a 100% comprehensive list of every collectible in the game which will include images of their locations. This process will also include performing cleanup on various character pages as I go.
2. Make use of icons and images extracted from the game, with the aim of creating infoicon style images for far too many things to list here, as well as replacing various images that are just cropped screenshots of the game with the actual image used in game.
3. improve the main wiki page, create a navigation box to find everything
4. Create fully detailed articles for every enemy in the game, including an in-depth strategy section for every enemy EXCEPT for bosses (see bellow). This will also include high quality animations of every attack for demonstration purposes.
5. Using the documentation of all the enemies and items, I'll then create a walkthrough of every level in the game (which will be where boss strategy is covered), which will include all items, all mission score tables, all enemy setups. I would also like to create fully detailed level maps, but that may require additional help or resources
6. Cosmetic improvements to the wiki
7. Try my best at creating a general tutorial or beginners guide
8. Try my best to document external information about the game, like pre-release and promotional stuff.

And as always, I'm planning to apply for admin/bureaucrat role on the Wiki officially after I've mostly finalized the item guides, as the resulting editing privileges would definitely be necessary to achieve any really cosmetic changes, as well as getting some actual community features on this wiki enabled already.

Anyway, that's all for now!