Hello everyone,

I'm working on a personal mod for Final Fantasy IV (3D Remake - PC Steam version) to make Barbariccia a playable character, intending to replace Rydia (due to her existing Black Magic command set).

My current challenge is replacing the character's face portrait image that appears in the menus.

After much investigation, I've discovered:

The face portrait images are packed within the MENU_Common.dat file.

Using QuickBMS with the ff4_ssam.bms script (by Luigi Auriemma), I can successfully extract the contents of MENU_Common.dat.

Among the extracted files is face.NCGR. Despite the .NCGR extension, this file is actually a standard PNG image (renaming it to .png allows it to be opened and edited perfectly). This PNG is a sprite sheet containing multiple character face portraits.

The problem is re-importing/repacking the modified face.NCGR (the PNG) back into MENU_Common.dat.

When I try to use QuickBMS's re-import function with the same ff4_ssam.bms script, the process fails for every file with a consistent signature error:

signature of 4 bytes at offset 0x00000000 doesn't match the one expected by the script:

this one: "PNG" (or "RECN", "RNAN", etc., depending on the actual file type)
expected: "SSAM"

This error occurs even if I try to re-import the files immediately after extraction without making any modifications to the face.NCGR (PNG) file. It seems the script expects the input files for re-importing to already have an "SSAM" signature/wrapper, which is not present on the raw extracted files.

What I need help with:

I'm looking for a way to get the modified face.NCGR (my edited PNG, renamed back to .NCGR) back into the MENU_Common.dat archive to change the in-game menu portrait.

Does anyone:

Know of a modified version of ff4_ssam.bms or a different script that handles re-importation for this "SSAM" archive format ожидаются?
Understand the "SSAM" wrapper structure and how to re-apply it to the raw files before re-importing?

Know of any other tools or methods to successfully repack MENU_Common.dat for FFIV 3D Remake on Steam?

Any clues or assistance to solve this re-importation issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!