Cook, Serve, Hoomans!

In one of her streams Felicia Day said she wishes she could put the faces of her fans on the customers in Cook, Serve, Delicious!, so I made this "mod" that does just that.

I still need more pictures of hoomans (fans), so send them in! They don't need to be photos if you rather just want your avatar or a drawing to be used. In any case don't let your elbows stick out to the side so the picture will fit into one of the available slots. Help from someone who is better with Photoshop/GIMP would also be nice.

Setup

Download the latest release from the releases page and double click cook_serve_hoomans.exe. It should automatically find the installation path of Cook, Serve, Delicious! and patch the game archive. If everything went well you should see something like this:

Just press enter and you are done.

To be on the safe side this patch creates a backup of the game archive (if none exist already). The backup will be placed in the same folder as the game archive (data.win on Windows and game.unx on Linux) and will be called data.win.backup on Windows and game.unx.backup on Linux. If you want to remove the patch simply delete data.win/game.unx and rename the backup file.

In case that didn't work

In case cook_serve_hoomans.exe couldn't automatically find the game archive file you can pass it manually. First find data.win from your Cook, Serve, Delicious! installation. Under Windows data.win can usually be found at one of these or similar locations:

C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\CookServeDelicious\data.win
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\CookServeDelicious\data.win

Under Linux it would be:

~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common/CookServeDelicious/assets/game.unx
~/.steam/steam/SteamApps/common/CookServeDelicious/assets/game.unx

I don't have a Mac so I don't know where it's there and I can't provide a binary for Mac anyway. (I don't use Windows either, but it is easily possible to cross compile a Windows binary under Linux.)

Then simply drag and drop data.win onto cook_serve_hoomans.exe:

If everything went well you should see the same dialog as above. Just press enter and you are done.

Advanced Usage

For advanced users there is a second binary called quick_patch.exe. You can use this to patch data.win with your own customer and/or icon sprites. Just drop data.win, hoomans.png and icons.png all together onto quick_patch.exe. It is important that the files are named like this so the program knows what to do with which file.

If you can handle the shell there are even more binaries: gmdump.exe and gmupdate.exe. Use the first to dump all sprites and sound files from an Game Maker archive into a directory. After you edited those files you can use the second program to update the archive.

Build From Source

(For advanced users and software developers only.)

In case you want to build this patching tool yourself download the source and simply run these commands in the source folder:

make setup
make -j`nproc`

If you want to cross-compile for another platform you can run one of these commands:

make TARGET=linux32
make TARGET=linux64
make TARGET=win32
make TARGET=win64

Always make sure that the folder build/$TARGET exists before you run make. You can do this simply by running make TARGET=$TARGET setup.

Finally you can run the patch by typing:

make patch

How It Works

Cook, Serve, Delicious! uses Game Maker from YoYo Games. At first I didn't bother reverse engineering the archive file format of this game engine, but because the file size of the replacement sprite got bigger than the file size of the original I had to reverse engineer at least a bit so I could rewrite the archive properly (instead of just overwriting the proportion of the archive containing the sprite).

This program understands the overall structure of Game Maker archives and the detailed structure of the TXTR and AUDO sections. These are the last two sections in the archive, so when the TXTR section needs resizing absolute offsets in this section and the following section (AUDO) need to be adjusted. There don't seem to be any offsets to parts of those sections in other places. All I know about this file format is documented in fileformat.md.

I don't know what will happen when there is a game update. Will the updater corrupt the archive, bail because the file isn't what it expects it to be or simply revert the patch? Your guess is as good as mine. In any case this program creates a data.win.backup file which you can use in case the game stops working. Just remove data.win and rename data.win.backup to data.win.

Because Felicia uses Windows and one cannot assume the availability of any sane scripting language (like Python) on an arbitrary Windows installation I wrote this patch as a self contained C program. Cross compiling simple C/C++ programs for Windows under Linux is easy.

However, it is very very cumbersome to cross compile stuff for Mac under Linux (the setup still requires access to a Mac and an Apple developer account), so I can't provide a Mac binary. I could rewrite everything in Python (Mac, just like most Linux distributions, actually comes with Python pre-installed), but I only do this if there is any demand for it.