MGS4 Dirty Tools 0.6

The poll asked for it, I'm providing it...

MGS4 Dirty Tools V0.6 - The BIG HUD Update.

GENERAL

• Added universal start button at the top of the application with checkbox for jumping to selected level in the Level Select and Quick Launching
• The EZ Updater now looks to see if there's an update on startup - If there is, it'll alert you and let you download it there and then.
• Added an About button with credits, info, disclaimers, etc.

Level Select

• Added the ability to tag level names, so if you know the name of a level, you can tag it with a name and search for it later on.

CAMO

• Attempted to give the Camo interface a bit of a tidy up. Let me know what you think!

TEXTURES:

• Added tabs for each of the texture libraries
• Added a grid view so all textures can be viewed via thumbnails rather than having to purely rely on the preview window to the side. Should make finding textures easier :)
• You can now overwrite multiple similar (same) textures at once. This will open in a dialogue box to give you the choice as to whether or not you overwrite one, or every instance of that texture.
• Further fixes to NPOT textures and how they get read / interpreted. Still experimental. Let me know if you find any bugs.. There's a lot of textures and never enough time to find all the issues)

HUD EDITOR (NEW)

This has been a real labour of love. I hope you enjoy it!

LIFE Bars
A selection of health bars inspired by previous Metal Gear Solid games have been included.

• MGS2 : The classic MGS2 inspired health bar with no stress / psyche labeling.

• MGS2 with O2 : Same as MGS2 but with the psyche bar and LIFE/PSYCHE labels

• MGS3 : Inspired by MGS3's health bar

• Peace Walker Boss : Inspired by the Peace Walker Boss health bar

• Peace Walker : Inspired by MGS: Peace Walker (Standard health bar)

• Portable Ops : Inspired by MGS: Portable Ops

• Slim : A slender mix inspired by MGS3 and Peace Walker Boss

• Add a 2 way gradient to your LIFE and PSYCHE bar

• Rotate Name and LIFE bar in 90° steps (Will expand in future to allow for free rotation)

Placement
You can put just about any HUD element anywhere by clicking / dragging on a screen preview or by selecting elements and selections with the arrow keys.

• Freely edit the position and scale of your HUD elements, either as a collective entity (i.e. life bar), or get real granular with the sections selector.
• Use the GRID and ALIGNMENT tools to snap HUD elements with accuracy.

Animations

• Custom Item / Weapon Selector Animations: Change the way the Items / Weapons selection window animates - Choose different list / row directions, gaps between items / weapons and the way they animate (arcing, straight line, etc)
• Change the animation speed on a per element basis (EXPERIMENTAL)

Edit Text

• Freely rename a variety of HUD words such as OLD SNAKE, STRESS, COMBAT HIGH, ALERT + More.

Recolour

• Freely recolour and tint many HUD elements, including its opacity.
• Select from a list of pre-sets, or make your own.
• Per-element colour editing for the life bar, item / weapon boxes, radar, Solid Eye, menus and more.
• Own colours for individual parts, and colours for flashes and alerts.

HUD Element Removal
Yep. You read that right. Select an element or selection and hit delete to completely hide it from the HUD.
Don't care about your camo index level? Delete it.
Couldn't give a monkeys about the amount of time remaining on the alert? Delete it.
DELETE DELETE DELETE!

TPS Aiming Reticle

• Tweak its size, position, opacity and tint.
• Add your own reticle picture.
• Change the reticle's moving kick.
• Select whether or not you want to keep the reticle while moving.
• DELETE IT FOR THE ULTIMATE EXPERIENCE!

Add your own custom HUD image
Yeah. Your own image.
Apparently there was a free element and texture which went unused, so you can add your own image to the HUD. What ever you want. This is EXPERIMENTAL so if you find any bugs, let me know.

Export / Importing
Made a cool HUD? You can Export it and share it with everyone using the Export / Import buttons.

HUD Gallery
Easily see what HUDs you've made with the HUD Gallery.

Restore
Restore original puts the whole HUD back. It will keep a dated copy of your settings.

Also a bunch of other little QoL stuff that you'll probably stumble upon.

No doubt there will be bugs (I'm aware of a few but they're quite minor), so PLEASE let me know what you find!

Can't wait to see what you do with this - if you release anything (or catastrophically break stuff), tag me in and let me know!

Cheers and enjoy :)

MGS4 Dirty Tools V0.5b

MGS4 Dirty Tools V0.5b !!

The 'b' stands for "Big Beautiful Bug Fixes",, It also stands for "Bloody heck you added more to a subrelease?!"

Thank you to everyone for submitting bug reports both here on GitHub, YouTube and Discord! You're all MVPs!

TEXTURES

• Added NPOT (Non-Power of Two) texture support.
  I'm declaring this as EXPERIMENTAL as it's new, but testing has been promising so adding to this bug fix. Please let me know if you hit any bugs!
• Performance Optimisations:
  Should stop the constant requirement to reindex all of the textures every time you make a change (i.e. tagging, importing, etc).
  Also should just be faster overall - Let me know what you think!
• Added the ability to finally view more than 6000 textures at a time (with minimal RAM impact based on my testing) - View ALL of the textures!
• You can now import over multiple same instances of a texture at once, or overwrite just a single texture instance.

AUDIO

• Added a light audio player - 30 SECOND PREVIEWS BE GONE!
• You can now roundtrip audio files to and from Audacity for ease of editing
• Some under the hood optimisations - Shouldn't have to wait quite so long to flick tabs, etc.
• Multi Channel audio has been properly implemented (fixed) - You can now export and import 5.1 audio!
• Subtitles have been added to audio files with subtitle's outputting on the music player complete with its timing - Not all audio files currently have subtitles. Will be looking to add subtitle editing down the line.

I will be making further optimisations and improvements in future releases.

MGS4 Dirty Tools V0.5a

This has been a headache.. updates should speed up again from hereon out...

MGS4 Dirty Tools V0.5a !!

The 'a' stands for "I'm probably going to have to fix a lot of things in some sub releases!"

3D Model Export / Import:

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS EXPERIMENTAL SO BUGS ARE LIKELY TO OCCUR - THIS IS AN ONGOING DEVELOPMENT.

• Export / Import in .glb format
• Direct Blender Support: Quickly open up models in Blender: Make edits, and bring it back in-game in one go! (Note: you will need to add/change your textures in MGS4DT - Will see if I can make make it so that textures from blender get imported at a later date)
• Yes. It also lets you play around with rigged meshes. Have fun.
• (EXPERIMENTAL) Scan the game and find out which models are loaded in memory and in view
  (Note: This is a new feature so bugs are likely present. Feedback is appreciated)
  _ A plethora of easy search tags - search by size, amount of bones and more.
  _ (EXPERIMENTAL) Shader Swapper - Accidently applied the texture to the wrong material? Use this and switch it out.

I will upload a dedicated video on how to use this tool, but for now go and experiment! Break stuff!

Current Limitation: Imported meshes can throw up an error.
A safety rail has been added to prevent game crashes, but you will still see your mesh in MGS4DT and you may find that it has not been added to the game.
If this happens, try optimising the mesh via manual poly removal or decimation and import again.
Ensure your meshes are weighted to bones, and that meshes are named mesh_[x], rather than something like MyMesh, ikjhds;fkjahds, etc.

TEXTURES:

You can also see how textures affect certain models
(experimental/non-comprehensive - Can also be achieved using the model viewer)

CAMO

• As requested (and much needed.. Why didn't I add this earlier), Camo effect explainers have been added.

- The automatic Swatch generator should work now... Sorry about that!

EZ Updater

Polished up the 'Check for Updates' button - should now be able to update directly from the application!

Also a bunch of other little QoL stuff that you'll probably stumble upon.

I was hoping to get around to some more requested bug fixes and features, but these features have been my primary focus.
Expect bug fixes and further developments to roll out over the coming days as I find out more!

Can't wait to see what you do with this - if you release anything (or catastrophically break stuff), tag me in!

Cheers :)

MGS4 Dirty Tools V0.4

Thank you for all the suggestions and bug requests - Keep it up!
I am listening; I am implementing; I want this to be the best it can be.

CAMO

• Custom Normal Maps!! As requested.
• Camo ID missing - Now have a 'Fix Names' button that should fix it if it's not done automatically.
• In-Game Camo effects should be working properly now.

TEXTURE

• Fixed an export issue exporting / importing textures that weren't 1:1 ratio (i.e 512x1024). Thanks @ProudPerroquet for the bug req!

SOUND

• iPod "Healing Frequencies" In-Game Effects (Experimental) - Snake can now gets (de)motivated by the vibes of your tunes. We're building in modifiers for iPod tracks akin to MGS3's Healing Frequencies As suggested by @MineMine7

• iPod - Importing tracks is easier than ever now! Click and drag one (or more) music files over to add them in. They can be dragged straight to an album if you know you want it to specifically go there too! Suggested by @TheSaiyanAndroidian11

• Sound Effects (and their individual parts) can be exported and replaced. This is an experimental feature for now as track lengths are limited to their original lengths. You can import longer sounds, but they will cut off.

• Sound Effects now also have tags so you can quickly find and catalogue your findings.

VIDEO

• Just a basic forwarder and importer for the game's video files. Inspired by @TheSaiyanAndroidian11

• A bunch of additional fixes and optimisations.

Let me know what else you want to see!

Enjoy!

MGS4 Dirty Tools V0.3B

This is the big one. Custom iPod Soundtracks.
They work.
They bloody work!!!

• All soundtrack unlock without requirements (I.e finding in level)

• Export textures in a variety of formats (DDS and TGA as requested)

• Improvements to the way the custom soundtrack and texture importer / exporter looks which should make navigation that much easier.

• Textures can be attributed with tags so you can quickly find them again (can create related texture libraries for example)

• Import custom songs in bulk

• A bunch of small tweaks and improvements

Naturally, if you have any bugs or suggestions, pop me a DM, YouTube Comment, Carrier Pigeon... Owl mail?

Cheers,
Sean / ShakeCan / TrimTheFat :)

Enjoy!

MGS4 Dirty Tools V0.2

MGS4DT v0.2 - Release Number the Second!

The first release blew up, and I'm eternally thankful and grateful for all the feedback, heart warming comments and ideas :)

What's New:

• Replace iPod songs with your own custom tunes
• Import / Export iPod Playlists with your chums
• Export and Import in-game textures
• General tidy up

Heads up
I noticed when I was testing that my custom camos lost their names. This may have just been me being a plonker. They still work, you may just need to reattach a name to them.
Make sure you hit apply before moving onto the next one!
Also, I didn't get around to figuring out the Windows Defender / Anti Virus False Positive yet.. I'll put a bit more focus on that soon.

UPDATE: There's a bug with the custom music where it may break the iPod Functionality altogether. I'm currently working on a fix for this.
Use it with caution!

Go play and explore!

I'm going to bed.

MGS4 Dirty Tools V0.3A

Quickly uploading this.

Will update patch notes later proper like!

• All soundtrack unlock without requirements (I.e finding in level) classing as experimental but has worked during testing 100% of the time.

• export textures in a variety of formats (DDS and TGA as requested)

• improvements to the way the custom soundtrack and texture importer / exporter looks which should make navigation that much easier.

• textures can be attributed with tags so you can quickly find them again (can create related texture libraries for example)

• import custom songs in bulk

• a bunch of small tweaks and improvements

Cheers,
Sean / ShakeCan / TrimTheFat :)

Enjoy!

V0.1 MGS4DT - Dirty Tools

VERSION 0.1

Thanks for using MGS4:DT (Dirty Tools)

Features are pretty slim on the ground at the moment, however it will let you do the following:

1. Jump straight into the game without having to use the Unity Launcher frontend
2. Level / Cutscene select - Before you ask, Yes... You can cheese the game and get achievements by jumping to the last cutscene and running it through. Don't do that for pity sake!
   (note: these have only been categorised by their file names, one day I may go through and catalogue them all properly. If anyone wants to help out on this, I'd be more than appreciative. I'd be sure to give credit for your assistance)
3. Custom Camos - A mostly complete camo studio! You can use your own custom image files for your own camos, alongside other neat tweaks i.e. camo index, adjust accent colour, shininess, etc etc.

https://youtu.be/q_2K5uBGFng