Very useful info file Lionheart! You really explored well. Too bad I haven't had much time to, since getting ready for the trip I'm leaving for tomorrow.
I will help in letting you know that the PAC folder contains all of the ingame MOVIES (not CUTSCENES), such as all of the TV monitor displays, all of the artistic and 'flashback' parts of cutscenes to fill in information, all of the 'how to' videos that show you various basic gameplay moves and 'what this mission is' videos which show up when you select a VR or Alternative mission. These are readily playable in Windows Media Player, but I'm not sure how to convert PAC to another format else (or vise versa).
I will also let you know that it is crucial to save newly made texture files as DDS rather than TGA. I'm not sure why this is, because TGA looks like it contains the alpha transparencies for hair and such, and also the 'shine effect'. Or atleast, I'm not sure what is this they add to textures, to Snake for instance, he will have his face shading or something on a seperate area. in TGA you can see this if you make a new layer, move the original layer to the top, and then colour the background with red or something, u will see a 'negative' photo effect there, but I'm not sure what that is.
Anyway, when I saw some weirdness with my saved TGA file, I did a test and just extracted Snake's MGS1 costume textures in both TGA and DDS, and I didn't even TOUCH them, and then i put them BACK in the archive file to see the difference. The first thing I can note is that the filesize of the archive INCREASED even though I didn't add any new information to the textures, so I thought that was weird. The 2nd thing is important to note too. Take a look:
http://img86.imageshack.us/my.php?image ... atsdp5.jpg
Saving as TGA for some reason causes various problems. Strange coloured seams and lines in the hair, a slight overall discolouration of the whole texture, and slightly blurrier. While the example on the right is exactly like how it looks by default, so you want it that way.
Again, I'm not sure what that extra shading is in some of these character textures. I will have to find out more about this when I come back.
I'm excited that all models are viewable now! I can't wait to play around with this.
If you want to know, Turfster, what more I want to see happen in future versions (again, at your convenience. Life happens =P ), it would be the following:
-I wish to be able to create HIGHER RES textures than what the game currently allows. this would probably have to mean larger texture maps as well. Are these editable yet?
-and to be able to have a Asymmetrical texture on a mostly symmetrical character. You know for instance, a character may have only one instance of their arm texture cause it just repeats it for the other side? Well what if I want to do something different for one side than the other side, for instance, random cuts and wounds? I think this requires editing of the texture map too, because it has to map for one arm and then another arm, rather than one texture for both arms.
-I wish to edit and replace models back into the game,
-and to view and edit their animations
-I want the script to be editable one day, so for instance, we could make Olga playable in a new designed mission, or Snake could be desquised as an enemy - an edited Snake model with the enemy AI even though his own attack and movement animations apply, and he'll have custom voice clips that can be supplied, meaning the appropriate DAT file has to be editable (I think its VOX dat).
-if we can access DAT files that would be great cause then we could take a look at MGS3 as well.
There's plenty that can be looked at, and I appreciate everything thats been done so far, so please don't doubt that! In fact I still have much to play with of whats been done so far, but now I'm away for 2 weeks, so I won't be much help in that time, so I thought I should post first and let you know some of my ideas and confusion.
Thanks everyone!