Steven Universe: Attack the Light Graphics Organization?

[Garamonde]

Mugenfighter, if you want the .APK of the game I can PM it to you.

[ZetTheLegendaryHero]

Mugenfighter, if you want the .APK of the game I can PM it to you.

Thanks. I hope my other posts might be of help.

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These sheets seem to be so poorly constructed and rotated that you might be better off just asking grumpy face to give you the preconstructed sprites. Heck that might be the more sane option here. But do what you gotta do guys. I will say that doing nothing won't get you the sprites. I'm not much in ripping or decoding formats, but sometimes I give good advice.

[Garamonde]

Mugenfighter, if you want the .APK of the game I can PM it to you.

Thanks. I hope my other posts might be of help.

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These sheets seem to be so poorly constructed and rotated that you might be better off just asking grumpy face to give you the preconstructed sprites. Heck that might be the more sane option here. But do what you gotta do guys. I will say that doing nothing won't get you the sprites. I'm not much in ripping or decoding formats, but sometimes I give good advice.

Uhm... it seems you don't have PMs enabled??? Might wanna check that in your User CP.

By the way, that honestly never occurred to me, but I don't know if I should be the one to ask... then again how would that be possible because some graphics have 360 rotation (like Pearl's Spear Throw)? Also, I don't know what you mean by "doing nothing" but almost everyone in this thread has tried to do what they can to help figure out these graphics as of late, so I certainly hope you don't mean it like that.

[ZetTheLegendaryHero]

Mugenfighter, if you want the .APK of the game I can PM it to you.

Thanks. I hope my other posts might be of help.

---

These sheets seem to be so poorly constructed and rotated that you might be better off just asking grumpy face to give you the preconstructed sprites. Heck that might be the more sane option here. But do what you gotta do guys. I will say that doing nothing won't get you the sprites. I'm not much in ripping or decoding formats, but sometimes I give good advice.

Uhm... it seems you don't have PMs enabled??? Might wanna check that in your User CP.

By the way, that honestly never occurred to me, but I don't know if I should be the one to ask... then again how would that be possible because some graphics have 360 rotation (like Pearl's Spear Throw)? Also, I don't know what you mean by "doing nothing" but almost everyone in this thread has tried to do what they can to help figure out these graphics as of late, so I certainly hope you don't mean it like that.

I think my pm should be enabled. The rotation in the game and on the sheet are not the related in that sense. By "doing nothing" I meant just keep working on it. Sorry for the mistake.

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You know this is going to sound stupid, but I think I needed the OBB file. I am trying to take a closer look at these files, and I want to make sure that I can try to eliminate anything like a bad dump or something.

[DarkGrievous7145]

ok

now, contacting the devs...
i guess, don't be afraid

You should in theory be safe it's not from a huge conglomerate like Activision-Blizzard, EA, Microsoft, etc...

A lot of game devs are open to these questions...
The ones you have to be careful of are the ones who believe copyright infringement needs to be dealt with using an iron fist.... Generally speaking, the big corporations do this the most.

Now, where you could run int problems is that the game is fairly new, and... the fact it's a Cartoon Network licensed game, which could bind them to certain obligations...

But, probably in most cases you will get, at worse, one of the following:
"I cannot help you" , "I myself don't understand the format", "no"
the extreme case is a C&D/lawsuit, but... it's pretty unlikely...
Now, if you went to CN/Turner and asked, well... then, yeah...

Do as you may, but the worse they can say usually is "no"
developers are usually more reasonable from what I can tell... it's usually the suits that will shoot you down...

good luck!

as for rotation...
I know one way to do this is matrix transforms...
IDK how unity, or the android unity engine handles this, though...
What I' will say, Is I think rotating sprites is better using vectors, as these don't distort nearly as much as a bitmap does, even a HQ bitmap rotation can be less than perfect... I should know, I've rotated bitmap graphics... Some of them really start to look like crap when you rotate them. Ofc, there's also pre-rendering the different angles to do this, but it means more filesize.
That's all I can say there...

[ZetTheLegendaryHero]

ok

now, contacting the devs...
i guess, don't be afraid

You should in theory be safe it's not from a huge conglomerate like Activision-Blizzard, EA, Microsoft, etc...

A lot of game devs are open to these questions...
The ones you have to be careful of are the ones who believe copyright infringement needs to be dealt with using an iron fist.... Generally speaking, the big corporations do this the most.

Now, where you could run int problems is that the game is fairly new, and... the fact it's a Cartoon Network licensed game, which could bind them to certain obligations...

But, probably in most cases you will get, at worse, one of the following:
"I cannot help you" , "I myself don't understand the format", "no"
the extreme case is a C&D/lawsuit, but... it's pretty unlikely...
Now, if you went to CN/Turner and asked, well... then, yeah...

Do as you may, but the worse they can say usually is "no"
developers are usually more reasonable from what I can tell... it's usually the suits that will shoot you down...

good luck!

as for rotation...
I know one way to do this is matrix transforms...
IDK how unity, or the android unity engine handles this, though...
What I' will say, Is I think rotating sprites is better using vectors, as these don't distort nearly as much as a bitmap does, even a HQ bitmap rotation can be less than perfect... I should know, I've rotated bitmap graphics... Some of them really start to look like crap when you rotate them. Ofc, there's also pre-rendering the different angles to do this, but it means more filesize.
That's all I can say there...

Yeah I was just saying that this format sucks. I will say they did not care for anyone to rip them or I dare say use them again in an official game. I am wondering if there is code in the game outside the animation files that fixes the bad rotation of the bitmap images. I am pretty sure that the game rotates and renders the images better. Just loading them would be fine except for they would have to load the images from the sheet as they are, and last I checked game engines tend to keep the shape of the images they load fairly accurately even when rotated. Again just guessing.

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Just out of curiosity I am going to try possibly hacking the graphics and maybe finding out if the sheets actually are rotated or if there is something else going on. Knowing my luck I will never be able to play this game again. Wonderful isn't it.

[ZetTheLegendaryHero]

Another thought popped into my head: What if this is a way to prevent the sheets from being ripped? However, it could just be laziness and poor coding. We may never know.

[ZetTheLegendaryHero]

Interesting it seems there is a lot of stuff in the tex files that dds doesn't have.

[DarkGrievous7145]

this probably wasn't to prevent sprites from being ripped...

now, if i were to guess...these sprites were rendered from vector graphics...
most vector-based sprites have thousands of pieces, and can be many times more complex than their bitmap predecessors

to conserve on filesize and texture memory, the animation data is exported, and the individual pieces are rendered to a sheet, instead of rendering the hundreds, or thousands of frames, that the original sprite is comprised of.

Look-up something called Dragon Bones, it's a flash animation framework that does exactly this.
Also, I plan on uploading some rips from a little game called age of war 2... I exported one of these directly, and there's over 220 frames in just that one sprite. The resulting sheet, that I used Daxar's Sprite Sheet Maker to create, is nearly 10,000 pixels wide! vector animations weren't really intended to be rasterized. So, the solution that some devs came up with is to rasterize their parts, and animate them in a similar manner as they would've been if left in their native format. The side effect is that it isn't user-friendly, and hours, days, weeks, maybe months, maybe years of work would be required to re-assemble the sprites manually!

All that said, this method of saving complex sprites as part sheets, is an optimization technique. If they wanted the sprites to be un-rip-able, there'd be a layer of encryption as well... (and even that doesn't guarantee anything, with some of the hackers these asset-ripping sites have)

[Ploaj]

Bumping for progress.

I couldn't find anything in the sharedassets, but I did find a few things in the randomly named files.

I believe I found the file that corresponds to this texture sheet and figured out how to read a chunks of it.
The pieces locations seem to be mostly correct. Give or take a few pixels.


Finally, I vaguely have the base locations working.

Layering and rotation problems and the likes. I don't know how or where 2d toolkit stores the animations, but it's a start.

And yeah, if they do end up taking a bazillion frames on every animation, then at the very least we may be able to organize the parts better.

[Garamonde]

Yea this game uses lots of smooth rotations. It might be possible to sheet them or something but it may end up being more ideal to just try to separate and sort the parts so they can be used.

Of course, IDK how you'll separate them and put 'em together properly because as we know, tons of unrelated parts are stuffed together.

Regardless, I'm so happy to finally see an update here!

[DarkGrievous7145]

IDK how you'll separate them and put 'em together properly because as we know, tons of unrelated parts are stuffed together.

Carefully and Tediously.
Back before I knew vector-based movieclips in flash games could be rendered as png through adobe flash, I exported the 'shapes' as .svg, then the .svg's as .png, and used screenshots as ref. to slowly re-build the sprite... was REALLY tedious, though, and I never did entire animations this way. I also have only done maybe 20-30 of these still-frames... imagine why?

In the case of this game, though...IDK how feasible this is for anyone, sorted parts are not. The animations are complex, and we so far can't open those res files in any program that entirely supports them, other than the actual game. Flash has decompilers, and the animations can be exported through one as .fla, besides their frames viewed one at a time. (excluding newer technologies involving sprite sheet formats similar to this game... and programmed animations) I suppose this could be done, but the odds against the re-built animations being 1:1 with how they appear in-game are pretty astronomical. Not to say they'll look bad, but it might really trip someone's OCD to know even ONE frame is off by a pixel or one degree of rotation, etc... And regardless, manually putting those back together is a massive project. Could discourage developers/animators from using them.

With all that said, I would still strongly advise cracking the animation format. Looks like Ploaj is having a lot more success with that, though, so that's good.