Doubutsu No Mori E+ Resource Project

[TheMorningFlash15]

Hey there, folks. I'm a new member here, and I'm trying to tackle a pretty ambitious project.

A while back, I started up a play-through of one of my favorite Gamecube games: Animal Crossing. I've always liked the aesthetic of it, even though a lot of it's pretty low-poly and low resolution. I've been playing it for a couple months now, and I wanted to see if anything is available from it for modding purposes and such. Unfortunately, it looks like next to nothing from it is available. The first full villager textures were just posted a few days ago, for Pete's sake.

As such, I guess I'm the latest to open up the Pandora's Box (cube?) of Animal Crossing resource extraction. I eventually plan on getting everything out of the game, but for now I'm going to stick to textures, which is why I'm posting here. Now, I'm not actually using the English version of Animal Crossing- as the title says, I'm instead using an iso for Doubutsu No Mori E+, or Animal Forest E+. It's basically an expanded version of the original game on Gamecube, with new villagers, new furniture, new items, a lot of new stuff. It has all of the original Animal Crossing textures in this file, so I figured it would be easier to take everything from this one, since I get all the original stuff and all the new stuff. Smart, right? Right. I'm not going to post a link to the file I've got, but it's not very hard to find. Just be prepared for a very long download.

Herein lies my dilemma: A lot of the new stuff, like the new villagers and items, is only available through e-reader codes (aka you couldn't access them through normal play). Dolphin dumping wouldn't really be efficient either, since you can only have 15 villagers in a full town, and the game has like 400 of them, including a bunch of islanders. I'd be willing to dolphin dump the textures if I could access some of those villagers (I would think their textures would be in the game files, even though you can't get them in your town normally), but I'm not entirely sure if there are any codes out there that could help.

I'm pretty sure it's at least possible to access the picture files somehow, without dumping from the emulator; I just know it's a lot harder to access them in Animal Crossing than in other games. I'm not entirely sure about texture packs, but this guy did make an HD texture pack for the original version here. I've looked inside his file, but none of the villager textures are accessible (I'm probably just missing some program; I think the textures are already on the models, which are in these LZMA files or something like that).

So far, I've got the game to run in Dolphin, and I've used thakis's trusty Gamecube decoding tools to yaz0 decompress a couple files and create directories. I haven't found a whole lot I can use, though; I've only found a bunch of binary files. Right now I'm stuck with a couple rel.szs files I can't access at the moment. Those seem like a logical thing to explore.

I'd appreciate any and all help I can get. I'm very green at all this, so I hope you guys will be able to point me in the right direction if I get stuck. If you end up looking through the file yourself and find stuff before I do, great! It accomplishes the original goal of what I set out to do, anyway, so it's all the same to me no matter who rips it. I'll start posting what I find inside the files... once I actually find anything.

I know this might be a little late, but I could definitely help out with ripping several villagers from my game, which is the original version. Tangy and Kiki, two of the cat villagers, have already been ripped by some other guy, and I am in the process of extracting Tom, Olivia, Bob, Aura, Cube, and a crap ton of other villagers for the original Texture section.

My method has been to create multiple towns with multiple villagers, so that you can easily get every villager without hacking or waiting for one villager to move out/in, and then Dolphin-dumping them. It should be noted, however, that there can only be one town per memory file, meaning you will need to erase a town before you start on a new one. Hopefully this was helpful at all. By far, the easiest to rip is the furnature and other items, because each item has a specific code that can be told to Tom Nook to obtain. You can only do this for three items each day, however, so choose wisely.

EDIT: Also, you may already be aware, but Dolphin Dump extracts EVERYTHING. If you want to narrow your search, try searching through the dump folder by the image dimensions. Animal Crossing's engine uses textures in multiples of 8, such as 8, 16, 24, 32, etc., with multiple resolutions. The maximum resolution value for each texture is 128. For instance, say you want to extract eye textures from a Cat villager. All villager eye textures are 32x16 in resolution, so you would want to search "32x" in the search bar and scroll down to the texture you want.