I made an announcement sometime back about Nova Chrysalia being in beta testing - but it just recently hit 1.0 and has finally been released officially - It can both be found on NexusMods as of today and has been available in the Discord channel for months now.

If you care about XIII series modding I'd suggest you join the Discord channel here: https://discord.gg/pc9PdpKsRc

And.. Yes, this is relevant to Aerith. MJB and I worked some things out and it's been ported to PC and fully works as it did on consoles. Go to the Discord channel if you're interested in similar developments\research\mod releases.

Originally posted by MJB:

Originally posted by Krisan Thyme:

I might need to hit you up on this and ask you how you managed to do this, if you don't mind?

Sure. You can PM me.

Cool, thanks. I'll toss ya a message through Steam, can get back to me whenever you have the time, no rush.

Originally posted by MJB:

I would think the bigger problem would be the physics of the models. Would those be similar between the PS3/PC systems? Typically I've found that if you can find an existing shader in the destination XIII game that takes similar textures maps to the original (or you coerce the map into what it expects), you can get it to render fairly well. That is what was done for porting the LR models into the base XIII game (over on NexusMods[www.nexusmods.com]).

Hold the phone, you're the first person I've ever seen to succeed at doing this. (Mind you, that is in large part because almost no one has ever tried. And I did have some success backporting an LR model or two to XIII-2, but eh) I might need to hit you up on this and ask you how you managed to do this, if you don't mind?

If it's any consolation, I haven't vanished. I have been busy with life though, as well as other projects since. And while I personally have a lot of experience reverse engineering file formats that contain stuff like databases, tables, scripts, whatever else.. when it comes to 3D shit I unfortunately have to admit it's a bit out of my scope. I still have tried though, and even had *some* luck with backporting geometry from LR into XIII-2 (which doesn't sound exciting, but it is an important step to understanding how this shit works and what changed between games), but with how ridiculously shader-bound the models are, it was often a struggle to even get the damn things to render much less be functional.

I wouldn't completely discount the possibility of other ports having data they're not suppose to, though.. Many times different builds of the same game will have stuff they're not suppose to have, purely because some guy forgot to exclude stuff that's either not used, or simply isn't suppose to be there anymore. It's always worth checking out. I wouldn't get your hopes up though, and frankly it sounds like those builds may never even be released? First I've heard of them at any rate.

But yeah, if I had some help I'd be happy to work on this stuff some more again. But interest just seems too low, and life goes on.

Originally posted by oxitran:

Originally posted by Krisan Thyme:

Long story short, the Aerith Garb model isn't in the PC release. A lot of the data for it was culled for this release actually, though the rest of that was never the problem. It's really easy to reconstruct the item data and its properties, the problem is solely the model alone. The consoles use a different revision of the model format than the PC releases do, they're also in a different endian to make it a tad more annoying too.

In order to get the Aerith Garb, the model format needs to be fully reverse engineered.. And I never made much headway on that personally, unfortunately. I was hoping someone else would, but everyone who cares about this series enough and has the skillset for it, has never made much progress either.. and after all these years it's ever more unlikely anyone ever will.

Thanks for the reply, This should put an end to the questions for now. Kinda weird that the Aerith Garb was the one garb from the dlc that they didn't include in the PC release or just straight up culled it. I wonder what the story behind that could have been.

I think the only thing that could change things as they stand now would be if the Virtuos ports of the trilogy adds anything new in terms of the Garb. But we might never even get to see those ports due to Microsoft dropping support for the Windows 10 store in favour of Steam which already has the games, and the Xbox One having the trilogy on back compat. Unless Sony wants to shell out a chunk of cash to get Square to push the trilogy over the line to port it to PS4 then it won't happen. (The updates from SteamDB show the test builds for Virtuos were from 2019, so they would have been working on PS4, but would still run fine on PS5, but again another issue that went against these ports).

As for the big endian/little endian issue, aren't their ways to convert between the two?

Endian difference is just annoying, not a real hurdle per'se. Any method of (accurate) conversion would still require reverse engineering the format though, which is where the real problem lies. And with probably close to six revisions of it, maybe even nine, it's a particularly big pain in the arse. Each game and each platform it released on had the format slightly changed - primarily due to how the XIII series render shaders, each platform kind of needed this adjusted for the hardware's benefit. It's kind of stupid in some ways, but honestly.. that's nothing new to me. There's a reason there's never really been anyone else to mod for this series.

But as for why it was missing? Well, you can blame maybe.. three things for that. The Aerith Garb was originally a limited-time DLC deal in Japan, and when we got it I think it was pre-order related or something equally exclusive.. Sadly later when SE started selling it on PSN and such, people (particularly in Japan apparently) cried foul over their lack of exclusivity on it all of a sudden. As a result it was not long before SE pulled it from PSN and.. well.. that's it, no one could get it unless they already had it from that point on.

Second issue is the PC release of XIII-2. Early after its release, people were posting cheat engine stuff that unlocked the console exclusive outfits.. some of those were *licensed* outfits that SE probably didn't renew the rights to use. I personally tried to tell people *not* to be posting about that stuff, especially not on official forums, and very much especially not right on release. I told people to wait. Because if you quietly wait long enough, their eyes won't be glued to you anymore and you can just enjoy the content in peace.. But no, people didn't listen. What happened? XIII-2 got its one and only patch! What did the patch do? It removed those outfits from the game files! Woo-Hoo!

The other reason, might be *my* fault. After that happened, I assumed the damage to already be done and for none of it to matter anymore. So not long after that patch, I made my own mod that patched the stuff they removed back into the game, and even unlock it in a legitimate way. It's possible this contributed to them removing the Aerith garb from LR's files, but it seems more likely to me the previous two are the *real* reason it was removed, and what I did may only have compounded the issue further. Either way, nothing else in LR was exclusive like that garb was, and nothing was licensed like with XIII-2, so they didn't need to remove anything else.

It's a shitty situation, but there's been virtually no one else besides me whose actively tried to mod these games, much less *reverse engineer* the file formats. There's only like.. two other people I know of, maybe three actually. Two of them helped a lot when I was first modding, but they themselves didn't really want to release anything publicly, they were content with just tinkering quietly in peace.. Unfortunately they never got a lot of credit for their discoveries, but I did always include them in my readmes just the same to denote their aid on research and development just the same. The other person has literally only just materialized in the last year, working on a randomizer for the first game. And uh.. that's it. Four people including myself. And while there's some talent between us to do some cool things if we try, we all have lives and are focused kinda on our own things when we have worked on the games. Finding someone with the skillset, interest, and time to reverse these model formats.. sigh, believe me, I've tried to find the help we need, no one seems to care. You have no idea the stuff I would have done (or still would do!) if we could just crack it once and for all.

Originally posted by oxitran:

Originally posted by gordonfreeman01:

There are sites allowing to download PS3 DLC packages straight off official Sony servers (they can't be used on unmodded consoles without a proper license from the store but the package can be extracted). If it is for comparing the files, though I can't link to the site here, it is entirely possible to compare the existing PC vs equivalent PS3 DLC files. If this would be helpful please PM me.

I'm pretty sure that Krisan Thyme already looked into all this years ago [forum.xentax.com].
And as far as I can tell with the fact that be have this [www.patreon.com]means that somewhere along the line he figured this all out and was able to convert the dlc over to the pc release. I have no idea why the Aerith garb wasn't able to be done. I have asked him that, but he seems to be MIA at the moment.

Long story short, the Aerith Garb model isn't in the PC release. A lot of the data for it was culled for this release actually, though the rest of that was never the problem. It's really easy to reconstruct the item data and its properties, the problem is solely the model alone. The consoles use a different revision of the model format than the PC releases do, they're also in a different endian to make it a tad more annoying too.

In order to get the Aerith Garb, the model format needs to be fully reverse engineered.. And I never made much headway on that personally, unfortunately. I was hoping someone else would, but everyone who cares about this series enough and has the skillset for it, has never made much progress either.. and after all these years it's ever more unlikely anyone ever will.

Originally posted by Stoltverd:

I disagree. It's not easily available as it was before.
Patreon is not designed to serve as a forum or file share system.
A new visitor is greeted by pay buttons and in the case they decide to scroll down they are greeted by an unorganized stream of posts. I know it's organized by time of posting, but for someone that enters the site looking for FFV mods, it's not organized.
To aggravate matters, there are posts that do not contain mods (because it's a patreon), making the search more difficult.

I agree it's still easy. You have just like 30 posts I believe, but to say it's as easy as before is wrong.
Not only that but it's obscure.
Most people searching for mods do a google search or look at guides in steam.
Before discovering this group I believed there were no mods for FFV because there was no guide and all links to files were dead in the internet. I found there were because I'm like a mule and decided I would find any link so I used webarchive.
Most links in the old guide still work btw... Just some were dead.

Dude, it is not that difficult to navigate. And the mods are sorted by Game on my Patreon page. You can filter it specifically to show you what you want.
Check: https://www.patreon.com/krisanthyme/posts

The sort buttons are right there at the top. And even on the main page, all you have to do is -scroll down- to see the posts that are available for free.

It's not that big of a deal. I'm sorry if you aren't satisfied, I don't know what you want from me. The guides weren't being maintained (someone else was responsible for it, not me) and they're still accessible for free on my page. I'm not stopping anyone from mirroring my work either, so long as credit is given of course. And other people are responsible for their own work, not me.

This is a non-issue as far as I am concerned.

Despite what some seem to desire, I'll never mark anything I work on as discontinued or otherwise "done" because I consider modding a hobby, and as a hobby I am ever as likely to return to one project as I am the next. Things slowed to a halt with this game because I was working more or less alone, with only Scarlet supporting me from the sidelines and a few others researching things on and off from the shadows. Unfortunately that research dried up more and more as time went on, interest waned, and it was basically left to just me to figure out everything - which was becoming ever more daunting, thus I took a much needed break and went on to mod other games.

I've actually done little things in private with XIII-2 since the last release here, just tinkering when bored and what not. Scarlet herself can attest to seeing me boot up the game and hear me ramble a bit about this or that. Bless her and her kindness for listening to a crazed old fool like me go on and on about inane discoveries and oddities in a game she has like long put to pasture now.

Originally posted by J@son:

My question is, by reverting to v1.0 do we lose anything meaningful from the game or it's just internal versioning for removing these additional pieces of content?

Version 1.1 did nothing other than remove files from the game, that's it. Sometimes I wonder if I should have obfuscated the fact it was a reversion and instead called it something else, since this question has come up so often now. To put it simply though, I am extremely "pro-content" and detest losing any type of content in a game whatsoever. Thus I would never deign to have anyone lose one thing for another - it would always be an all or nothing deal for me, if at all possible.

The original guides weren't being up-kept, people were constantly complaining about issues with dead links, and Steam was continually filtering links to google drive and\or mega. The stuff is still free, it's all easily available as it was before, and furthermore.. I wanted to have a centralized place for all my stuff. I don't see what's "questionable" about it honestly, but if it somehow offends someone I'm sorry.

Originally posted by Serafie1999AD:

The Thirteenth Ark is protected with a password. What is the password for the rar archive?

It is no longer password protected, redownload it.