Black With Red Bits gun collection

[Mottainai]

Black With Red Bits gun collection, v2

This is a pack of weapon reskins with an overall 'black with red accents' theme. This is visual only and shouldn't affect gameplay mods. Nothing hugely special here, but a nice change in many cases, I think.

Version 2 adds some new weapons and tweaks the Kobra, Tek Z-10 and Grenade Launcher.

TO USE - copy all the files to your \Steam\steamapps\common\saints row the third directory. If you are confident updating .asm_pc files yourself, it's perfectly possible to pick and choose the files you want to use and update the .asm_pc accordingly - you know how to do this (if not, read around and teach yourself! I did...). To remove, simply delete the files you copied in.

WARNINGS: this relies on items_containers.asm_pc and will affect any other mods that use it. As ever, back up whatever is precious to you before installing/using.

The pack will change the following guns in the following way:

(Note: green outlines are new or tweaked versions for Version 2)

Known problems:
- other people's guns use the standard texture unless you have that gun equipped; this is because those textures are part of another archive entirely and would require a lot more fuss (and work on my part). This might be addressed in future.
- the writing on various weapons is mirrored on the other side; this is unfixable, sadly, without making completely new skinmeshes, the tools for which do not exist
- the stock on the laser rifle is still white - I don't know why.
- there's a silver bit on the trigger guard of the Shepherd - I don't know why.

Credits/thanks:
- Volition, THQ, Valve: for obvious reasons
- IdolNinja, 50PercentJoe and particularly Gameqube, (and probably several other SR Mods forum posters I've forgotten): for posts I learned useful things from
- Gibbed: for the modding utilities
- scanti: for the texture tools
- Perfume, Capsule, Chihiro Onitsuka, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Dire Straits, Igor Stravinsky, Eliza Carthy, The Doors, June Tabor and Meiko Kaji: for musical support

Enjoy. Comments and criticism welcome.

 

[Strogglet]

This sure does look great, I love the new look of the laser weapons and the KOBRA, as well as the Shepherd.

I already use the "Tacticool" pack, but don't mind using the ones for the lasers and KOBRA.

Nice one!

 

[gameqube]

Black With Red Bits gun collection, v1

This is a pack of weapon reskins with an overall 'black with red accents' theme. This is visual only and shouldn't affect gameplay mods. Nothing hugely special here, but a nice change in many cases, I think.

Known problems:
- other people's guns use the standard texture unless you have that gun equipped
- the stock on the laser rifle is still white - I don't know why
- there's a silver bit on the trigger guard of the Shepherd (as you can see above) - I don't know why

Nice collection!

The white stock issue on the Stag rifle is dumbfounding. I had a look at it and saw the texture modified and tried a few things myself, and it stays white. My guess is there was no texture allocation done to that part of the weapon, by error.

As for the first issue, we all have this issue with our weapon mods, and this is simply because there is a low res texture for the weapons and nobody until now bothered to modify the low res textures as well. I suppose of the reasons is that they are all packed together in the same file:

preload_items.vpp_pc -> items_preload_containers.str2_pc -> almost 140 .DDS files in there.

We must modify the files for our weapons, then pack this together again in items_preload_containers.str2_pc etc

Of course, this makes cohabitation of different weapon mods a bit tedious since this is all in the same .str2_pc file. Unless there is a simpler way of dealing with this issue. I must admit I did not really try anything up to now.

 

[50percentJoe]

Wow, I love what you did with the Stag rifles, very Mass Effect-ish.

 

[Mottainai]

Thanks people. Working on new RPG, Nocturne, Baseball bat, Sniper Rifle, Togo-13; also tweaking the Z10 (the _s file is misaligned) and GL (too washed out, now I think about it). I will update the first post when done.

Gameqube: I'll try messing with that file in the future, once I'm happy with this lot; good to know where to find all this stuff, thank you.

 

[gameqube]

Thanks people. Working on new RPG, Nocturne, Baseball bat, Sniper Rifle, Togo-13; also tweaking the Z10 (the _s file is misaligned) and GL (too washed out, now I think about it). I will update the first post when done.

Gameqube: I'll try messing with that file in the future, once I'm happy with this lot; good to know where to find all this stuff, thank you.

No problem, and regarding the Togo-13, you probably noticed but there are some bad alignment problems of all the texture files. It was apparent just by opening all the texture as layers and scaling them so they would be the same size and then comparing.

So I did some tests and found not a single one of them was optimally aligned to the model.

I began by blanking out the _s and _glo files, to work with just the diffuse(_d) and normal(_n). I could see then the very bad alignment of the normal, and the slight misalignment of the diffuse. On the picture, at the top you see only the diffuse (recolored) original, and on bottom the diffuse as I fixed it. Still not perfect, but better. At the right, the original (recolored) diffuse and normal. I do colorize the diffuse extremely pale like that when I want to see discrepancies between diffuse and normal. At the end, after all the realignments, I compared the final result (using the original coloring) and must say the differences are very subtle! I figure a part of it comes from the fact that dark colorings tend to mask a lot of the discrepancies.
My offsets for the files, I believe, were (all on the x axis only):
-4 for the diffuse(_d)
-12 for the normal(_n) [and a strip of the normal texture is also misaligned vertically, its pretty obvious once you realign(offset) the file]
-16 for the specular(_s)
-8 for the glow

Using the file below, I tried to center the 'center' part of the knobs on the scope, as well as the lens of the scope. Those (and the muzzle opening) seemed the easiest features to check for alignment problems of the diffuse texture to the model.

 

[Mottainai]

Version 2 released, now with Nocturne, both sniper rifles and the RPG; first post edited accordingly. Enjoy.

Gameqube, I must admit I've not tried your Togo-13 reskin ingame, but I assume that you've used the textures according to the offsets you listed above. I tried realigning the Togo-13 textures according to those figures and found they didn't quite match up. The normal was much improved but the specular was quite noticeably out of whack, which was most visible on the spinning Ultor logo. I've found the best way to avoid this is to operate primarily on the diffuse, save it out as a .dds and close the original. Then I reopen the new .dds, resize it to match the original specular and use it as a specular. Things seem to align nicely then. The original speculars seem to have much higher contrast than the matching diffuse, which is logical if the specular does what I think it does (govern what is shiny and what isn't). Your mileage may vary, but I always find models in games tend to be too shiny anyway, so to my eye it's actually better not to boost contrast on the new speculars.

 

[gameqube]

The original speculars seem to have much higher contrast than the matching diffuse, which is logical if the specular does what I think it does (govern what is shiny and what isn't). Your mileage may vary, but I always find models in games tend to be too shiny anyway, so to my eye it's actually better not to boost contrast on the new speculars.

Hi,

yes, I tend to tone down the speculars as well, because the shininess they create does not work too well with the look I am giving to my decker mods. But I still like to include some slight shiny aspect when I can.

Nice additions, particularly the Nocturne. I like the way you decorated the blade, very nice look.

 

[Potatots]

Hi. I really like this mod. I not a fan of Joe's texture mod, and this one saved me from having boring-looking weapons.
Anywho, I have noticed a bug: The lvl 4 gang rifle (krukov?) has a box clip and a grenade launcher. The box clip is still the military-green color, not the black that I'm guessing it should be.
Not a huge problem, but it's kinda offsetting to me.

I can post screens if you need me to.

 

[Mottainai]

I really like this mod.

Why thankyou.

The box clip is still the military-green color, not the black that I'm guessing it should be.
Not a huge problem, but it's kinda offsetting to me.

That's not actually a bug, it's as I intended it to be - my thinking was that actual ammo boxes are green, so it makes a bit more sense to me to leave it that way. Maybe a black/dark grey camo scheme might work, though. What did you have in mind?