Replacing Textures in .hack//IMOQ

[Erroneous]

Unlike .hack//G.U. where most of their videos are in a video format stored on the game disc, .hack//Infection Mutation Outbreak and Quarantine has no videos on disc whatsoever (excluding the logos after the PS2 bootup). Even the intro video that plays before the title screen is not a video. So every video including the Epitaph of Twilight being spoken is not a video, the characters talking to Kite are not videos, the Phase introduction videos are not videos. The .hack//IMOQ games simply don't have no videos because everything is being rendered in-game through the .hack game engine.

How the game files works is that there are file formats called .CCS which are assets for models and textures combined. The main game play uses less detailed assets while the videos use higher quality assets. You can view these .CCS files through StudioCCS, but you can't play videos from this program. The way the game stores it's data is that it puts all the .CCS files for both game play and videos in a file called /DATA/DATA.BIN, you can extract contents of this file and it will have a folder called /STR/ which is where the better detail quality "video" .CCS model/textures are stored. All the voice lines spoken and music are stored in another folder outside of the DATA.BIN, from the root directory these are stored in /VOICE/ for Japanese and /VOICE_E/ for English. Only /VOICE/ has the BGM.BIN, or background music files for both languages.

But let's say we use an emulator to emulate the game from the disc, such as PCSX2. Version 1.7+ has a feature built-in called Texture Replacer, and we can replace ANY texture from the game, including the ones used in videos. You simply enable Dump Textures to dump the textures into the PCSX2 emulator directory textures\SLUS-20267\dumps for .hack//Infection, you take the PNG files from this folder that you want to modify in an image editor like Adobe Photoshop, and save the PNG to a separate folder textures\SLUS-20267\replacements for the changes to be ready to be used. Then enable Load Textures to see the changes in your videos from the video player in game from the ALTIMIT desktop.

In this example I am using the US release of .hack//Infection, game ID is SLUS-20267 hence the folder name, and edit Kite's texture from orange to blue very quickly (I could have touched it up better if I gave myself more time). Then loaded the textures and now in-game in the video player we can see Kite with a blue outfit instead. But this works on anything and everything.

Players, NPC's, monsters, weapons, fields, dungeons, chests, statues, monsieur, grunties, water, skybox, etc.. anything and everything can have it's texture replaced whether it's just normal gameplay or videos, you can change it. You can also replace the character portraits too for every character. So you streamers, can replace Kite's portrait for whatever your pfp is, or change Kite's clothes to match more your personal style for your livestream.

Just remember the textures are more of a wrapper, you can replace what you have, you can't add anything new like wings onto Kite. But you can remove things from the game by replacing textures with a transparent texture. For example if you wanted to remove the hud, just replace the blue windows with an empty transparent texture.

Or if you wanted to upscale your game beyond the emulators upscaler, you could also use the texture replace to use upscaled textures from AI assisted upscalers like Vance, icons8, Deep Image, Let's Enhance, Waifu2x, Crea8tiveAI, etc.... or just download an existing texture upscaled pack from Google.

[Vivirin]

Thank you for all the work you are doing on this forum.

I'd love to play IMOQ with these textures. The video you attached already looks so cool. I'll give it a try!