Cheat Engine

[Nza]

Hi everyone,

I'm at the forefront of a community trying to unlock EA Madden NFL 06 PC's textures so we can edit them - fix uniforms, add faces, change accessories etc. EASports for some reason don't let users do it for Madden even though every other PC game they make allows it easily enough.

Right now, we have the ability to extract the textures from their archives but we can't seem to figure out what format they're in - we tried DDS, JPG, PNG, TGA, BMP, GIF - you name it.

Anyway, I recently stumpled across CE's ability to save all current loaded textures to disk, and this worked on Madden successfully. It saved everything we want to edit and more - faces, helmet maps, uniforms, gloves, bands etc.

Of course, this doesn't help us edit them then repack the archives with the edited textures, but I feel if CE can extract and cycle through these textures in memory, surely it could also provide more information about them? For instance, what format they were before they were loaded into memory? what was the original filename of texture X etc?

If CE can't do this, can anyone recommend a way I might be able to find out more info about the textures being loaded into direct X? Thanks for any help.

[Dark Byte]

directx mess is a dll that gets injected in the game. It hooks the directx api.
Right now it doesn't keep track of the files used to create it, but just the texture surfaces. and Uses a d3dx call to savetexturetofile

it should probably be possible to find out what format is used to store the texture by looking at the texture surface, but file access is a different thing. (e.g perhaps they compressed/encoded the files)

It IS possible though to let dxmess modify/replace textures (not a function currently, but easily added, problem of course is finding the texture to replace because that is done by comparing the memory of the texture to a known texture, they don't have names,usually)

[Nza]

Yeah, we kinda need a more permanent method than replacing the texture in real time every time you load the game. The main purpose of this was really just to get a better understanding of the textures so we can finally figure out what format they are.

I don't have a great understanding of DX but I imagine it would have functions that load other image types? and then you could somehow see what functions were used when it loaded a texture or similair? Just knowing what image type DX initially treated the texture as would be great.

I'm not sure if this is common or not, but I noticed using this hook that, when you cycle through the textures on screen, it only shows textures that have actually been on screen - so it seems Madden doesn't preload textures, but rather does them real time. Would this suggest there is little to no conversion being done? If so, that could point to some sort of DDS or DX texture format.