Illusion Toolkit 0.5.0

Install

Download Illusion-Toolkit-0.5.0-win-x64.zip (9 MB) and unpack it anywhere.
Run Illusion.exe. On first launch it asks for your Mafia II folder.

Already have a copy? Unpack this one over it — or, if that copy is new enough to look for
updates itself, its launcher has already offered you this one beside the settings gear.

Needs the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime (x64)
and the Visual C++ 2015-2022 x64 redistributable.
Windows offers to fetch the first one if it is missing.

Changelog

Resource editor

• Open any archive in the game in an editor of its own: see what it is made of, open a resource on its page or on the stage, add and remove what an archive contains.
• A car opens as a car: a component tree with its markers, deform parts, levels of detail and faults, in place of the raw frame tree. Switch a car between its near and far level of detail, and edit any level of detail from the tree.
• Car tabs: Tuning (entity-data tables), Prefab, Effects, car physics, and what a component does when it is hit. Author a car's collision by role and shape, and rebuild hit boxes so new geometry takes bullets.
• A car is written back through the aggregate byte for byte; what it could not stitch is reported as a diagnosis.
• Textures open on the stage; the hierarchy opens on the resource rather than on the path to it.
• One dark palette across every window; a Settings window with a rebindable keymap.

Cars

• Clone a car under a new name and register it for single player, substitute a car under another car's name, and export a car for M2O. Each car streams with its own material library and carries its own vehicles.tbl row.
• Build a car from a stock one: own paint rows, own materials and textures, lights and the police beacon, extra rig bones, extra collision shapes, a winter twin rebuilt from the summer copy, and a check that reports bad weights, unskinned or far vertices and broken UVs.
• Take a car's rig and skin through Blender and back; a second push no longer tears a car apart; a push that lands mid-session re-stitches the car.

Map editor

• Carry objects between archives: a door, a chair or a plant brought into a district as one undoable edit, with its textures, item descriptions and prefab entry. Imported scenery brings collision that moves, deletes and duplicates with it.
• Props panel: the stock game's doors, seating, tables, lamps and decor as cards, dragged onto the viewport or placed in front of the camera. Library browser with pictures of characters, wardrobe pieces and cars.
• Loading zones: see them as a layer, click to pick, move and resize by face, create and delete them.
• Interior places: read and write cityshops.bin; furnish and light an interior with imports under a frame. Interiors under shops\ open with their rooms shown.
• Tools menu: Hide triangles (cut an opening in a stock mesh by clicking or boxing triangles), Mirror to winter, Stream map, Clone / Replace / Export car, Loading zones.
• Build opens a list first: each edited archive with a tick and the files that differ from what the game has; "Add archive" packs a working copy changed by hand.
• Winter mirror: a district's edits are mirrored into its _z twin, with each object's winter materials kept.
• Actors: import lights and sounds from another archive; a moved or copied light keeps all four of its positions in step. Draw distance per level of detail in the property panel.
• Navigation gizmo axis views use parallel projection.

Blender bridge

• Materials made in Blender go into the game: diffuse, normal and specular textures, and alpha as a cut-out or a blend. Blended materials are drawn blended in the viewport.
• A skinned mesh can gain vertices; two levels of one object go in one push; a mesh over 65535 vertices is refused rather than written broken.
• New vertices take their hidden channels (colour, extra UVs, skin) from their own material's surface, not the nearest vertex of any material. Bone weights are put on the byte lattice.
• A Blender session ends with its scene: a reload or district unload closes it instead of applying a push to rows that are gone. What a push reports is counted from what reached the scene.

MCP server

• A real tool surface: archives, decoding of actors, frames, collisions, item descriptions and materials, Lua decompilation (4-byte float numbers), stream map editing, textures, tables, effects and hashes.
• Tools that drive the running editors: scene, camera, selection, move, properties, save, build, undo and redo, Blender sessions, and editor_target to point them at the map or the resource editor.
• Tools for everything above: object and actor import, zones, car clone, substitute, export, tuning, materials, lights, collision, winter and check, mesh materials, unused hulls and crash placements.

Fixes

• Build no longer drops XML and Script resources, and declares the memory the shipped archive asked for instead of the payload size.
• An imported object no longer brings textures its own archive does not hold.
• Crash props and meshes without normals are no longer drawn black.
• Deleting a frame off a bone no longer crashes the game; a splitter drag no longer starves the viewport of video memory; resizing the viewport while a district loads no longer ends the program.
• Save drops geometry nothing draws; a re-import shares geometry with the earlier import.
• Every vertex channel and every bone's split seat survive a push; welds are named through the remap table.

Pull requests

• Give the MCP server a real tool surface (39 tools) by @Segfaultd in #1
• feat(mcp): tools that drive the map editor, actor import across archives, light placement by @raighen in #3
• fix(viewport): crash props and meshes without normals are no longer drawn black by @raighen in #8
• feat: carry objects between archives, a Props panel, collision that follows imported scenery by @raighen in #6
• feat(cars): clone, substitute and export cars; a Build keeps XML and the shipped memory requirements by @raighen in #7
• fix: an imported object brings textures its own archive does not hold by @raighen in #9
• feat: push materials made in Blender into the game (diffuse, normal/specular) by @raighen in #4
• feat: alpha from Blender materials, a blended viewport pass, winter mirror for districts by @raighen in #5
• feat(cars): the M2O export streams each car with its own material library by @Segfaultd in #12
• feat: loading zones: see, move, resize, create and delete them by @raighen in #10
• feat: a Tools menu, a Build list, mesh tools and bridge fixes by @raighen in #11
• feat: interior places (cityshops.bin), an archive's materials, imports under a frame by @raighen in #13
• fix: a Blender session ends with its scene; new vertices take hidden channels from their own material by @raighen in #14
• feat: tools for building a car from a stock one (paint, lights, beacon, collision, winter twin, check) by @raighen in #15

New contributors

• @Segfaultd made their first contribution in #1
• @raighen made their first contribution in #3

Full Changelog: v0.4.0...v0.5.0

Illusion Toolkit 0.4.0

Install

Download Illusion-Toolkit-0.4.0-win-x64.zip (7.3 MB) and unpack it anywhere.
Run Illusion.exe. On first launch it asks for your Mafia II folder.

Needs the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime (x64)
and the Visual C++ 2015-2022 x64 redistributable.
Windows offers to fetch the first one if it is missing.

Changelog

Actors

• Objects an actor places now stand where the actor says instead of piling up at the origin.
• Actors that draw nothing (sounds, lights, triggers, items) get a glyph, an Actors section in the tree and a Render actors switch; clicking geometry selects the actor that puts it there.
• Move, rotate and scale an actor, with undo; the .act pack is written back on Save.
• Delete an actor: its record leaves the pack and the geometry it placed goes with it.
• Copy an actor, including the object it places — the copy gets its own object and its own link. Skinned characters are refused with a reason.
• Rotation now matches the game: the pack stores the inverse of the spawn orientation.

City crash

• Add, delete and transform crash placements.
• Crash props are drawn only as far as the game draws them, and no longer materialised all at once.
• Fixed crash props being scattered across the map and unclickable.

Editor

• Settings window with a rebindable keymap.
• Camera split into walk and navigation modes, with Blender's transform keys.
• Update check: new releases are found and installed without leaving the launcher.

Fixes

• The viewport overlay reports the transform it actually applied.
• The camera no longer loses keys the editor window swallowed.

Full Changelog: v0.3.1...v0.4.0

Illusion Toolkit 0.3.1

Install

Download Illusion-Toolkit-0.3.1-win-x64.zip (7.2 MB) and unpack it anywhere.
Run Illusion.exe. On first launch it asks for your Mafia II folder.

Needs the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime (x64)
and the Visual C++ 2015-2022 x64 redistributable.
Windows offers to fetch the first one if it is missing.