W3 Mod Workbench 1.7.0

W3 Mod Workbench 1.7.0

A big one: a standalone Asset Browser, a new 3D renderer, cloth simulation, sounds, Script Bench, the app's own mod packer and compiler (no REDkit needed to build), and translations into 7 languages.

Highlights

• Asset Browser (Ctrl+Shift+A): every game file in one window, with Game files, Mod DLC, Mods and REDkit's r4data. Filter by class, file type, DLC and folder, search with regex, set bookmarks, see what uses a file, and show EasyAssetBrowser categories and tags (thanks Vincent.02).
• New 3D renderer (Direct3D 11): lights the game's materials the way the game does. Hair, skin, eyes, dyes and stubble look right, posing is much faster, and the 3D views recover from graphics device failures.
• Cloth moves as in the game: a port of the PhysX/APEX cloth solver for all 592 .redcloth resources, plus an Apex Cloth tab in the mesh viewer to tune and save settings.
• Sounds: all 90,995 of the game's sounds and voice lines play (Opus, Vorbis, PCM, haptics), with a sound viewer, bank browser and WAV export. Sound events open from anywhere they're named.
• Translations: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese, picked in Settings > Language.
• A new guide (F1): a page for everything the app does, with screenshots. F1 in any window opens its page.

Making mods

• Build without REDkit: the app packs bundles, metadata.store, texture.cache and soundspc.cache itself, byte for byte as wcc_lite does. Pictures are cooked into textures.
• Build always ships compiled scripts (precompiled.rsblob). Also ship the loose scripts is optional. Install copies the build to the mods folder.
• Copy to project from anywhere. The game's files and installed mods are read-only everywhere.
• Material viewer and editor (.w2mi / .w2mg): edit parameters with a live preview on any mesh or entity, and save them to your project.
• CR2W ⇄ JSON: every CR2W version (120 to 164), bulk edits, Resave as version 164 for 196,943 of REDkit's 196,948 older files, and saved recipes you can export as Python or batch scripts (thanks Jaxonic).

Scripting

• Script Bench (Ctrl+Shift+E): your project's scripts, the game's and installed mods' in one tree. Override with a click, compare with the game's, and compile with F7.
• Checks as you type, with completion, snippets, rename (F2), refactors (Ctrl+.), format document, parameter hints, faded unused names and @wrapMethod/@replaceMethod completion.
• Built-in compiler matches wcc_lite: the same passes, errors and warnings, and byte-identical blobs on real mods.
• Compile a folder of scripts without a project: right-click it in the tree > Compile these scripts. The blob is saved beside the folder.
• Find in files is now in Script Bench, with scopes, file filters and regex.
• New tools: Console commands, Quest facts, Scripts log, Key binding helper, Hashes and IDs.

Viewers

• Scenes: laid out like REDkit's scene editor, with a timeline and a 3D preview with voices, lip sync, walks, props, cameras and lights. Read through plays a whole scene.
• Cutscenes: rebuilt like REDkit's editor, with dressed and dyed actors, faces, sound and camera framing that matches REDkit.
• Entities, meshes, textures, cube maps and texture arrays, now closer to REDkit, with properties read from REDkit's source files.
• New viewers: animation sets and rigs, animation events, behaviour trees, job trees, spawn trees, steering graphs, communities, journal, a JSON editor, and a Properties window for every other resource.
• REDkit's strings database can be searched by key name, scene or voiceover (thanks glassfish).

Settings and polish

• Settings redone in sections, with new options: project folder, the game's settings folder, the game's language, editor font and tab width, texture detail and edge smoothing.
• Themed tooltips, icons on every menu, softer list selection, disabled buttons that look disabled, and w3modworkbench:// links that open a file in the Asset Browser (off until you turn them on).
• Privacy: the app collects nothing. EasyAssetBrowser tags (the only thing that goes online) are off until you turn them on. See PRIVACY.md.

Fixes

• A scene at full texture detail could run out of memory (18.5 GB, now about 6 GB).
• Cloth showed the wrong part of its texture, and was flung away when an animation looped.
• File names with accents read and write correctly. Cutscenes that fade in no longer stay black. Dyed clothes no longer show red and blue masks.

Full details are in CHANGELOG.md.