This was my message to nlg about the possibility of texture hacking msc. I will post their reply as soon as I receive one.
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Since I feel I should preface this objectively, I'll just go ahead and put it out there that I'll be asking a lot of questions in this email that may be seen as invasive. Personally, I've been playing MSC since the day it came out and while the textures in game are exactly as they should be, I kinda get tired of seeing the same old same old and so I've been working on texture mods and am going to be asking for help in this message, but on the other hand, I can also completely understand why you might see it as something I shouldn't be doing, tinkering with or breaking the game the why you made it, etc, and I could completely understand if you don't wish to help me texture it, and if that's the case I'm totally fine with it, but I'd at least like to know.
So anyway I've been pretty into texture hacking Mario Kart for a while now, but I've always liked MSC better and because nobody has been able to successfully texture hack it I thought it'd be neat to be the first, so I've been giving it a try recently. But I have to say that I've run into two major problems. So for starters, I would have to imagine that the textures are found in the .rlg and .rlt files for each respective character/stage, but of course deciphering those kinds of files is no easy task, so I just jumped straight into the .ini files to start out with. When I first opened the stage .ini files I was delighted to see that there were many R G B values, including ones for characters, and I thought that it would be smooth sailing from there, that I could just find the link between what each set of values represented and then just enter a new value for what I would want it to be. And it worked, at first at least
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq3VI8KQTXQ . But as you can see all that I managed to change are the crowd and the characters, I can't seem to find any correlations between the R G B values and the actual stage, and it seems that no matter what values I input, if I change the character part at all, all the characters automatically turn black. Which still doesn't really make sense to me considering that all the different stages have different R G B values under their character section, but oh well. So that leads me to believe that the .ini file really has nothing to do with the texture at all, which was to be expected, but if there is some way to make a full texture mod with just that it would be amazing to learn how.
After that didn't work though, I figured no big deal, I'll just move onto the .rlg files and edit those. But those don't seem to want to cooperate, opening those files in wordpad is nothing but a scrambled mess of jibberish, and attempting to open it in my hex editor didn't do me much good either since I don't have any experience with coding so I really can't determine what in the coding correlates to what, even from just a colors standpoint. Some quick Google searching told me that .rlg files are typically associated with regcleaner, but that really has no use for this at all, and I haven't discovered any way of being able to convert the files into another file type that I might be able to open up in different programs to work with (of course I was really praying to just be able to change the file extension and that it would then work in szs modifier or brawlbox, the mkw and ssbb texture hacking programs, but as you know that doesn't work either).
I would have to imagine that you guys created the files with all the coding, as well as plain images that the game reads as textures and just compressed it all down into one file to save space, which is what gives the iso all the .rlg and .rlt files. So considering that that's the case (if I'm right, at least), then is there a way that I would be able to extract the files to see their original contents, modify some of the textures, and then re-compress it down to a .rlg so that the game would be able to load it without freezing? If so that would be really amazing, I would love to be able to tinker around with the images and follow up with you guys on some of the textures I could make!
Either way, thank you for taking the time to read this and for your reply regardless of how you feel about this issue, and thank you for making such a great game that I've been able to enjoy for years, and plan to continue enjoying until you guys are able to come out with an "mscu"!
Sincerely,
Jimmy Houser
P.S. Reading through all the .ini files and seeing the hard print mechanics of the game was a blast, and some of your little liner notes in them just made me laugh out loud!
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