Help:Setting up tools

Revision as of 18:15, 1 February 2019 by imported>Leoetlino (→‎Python)

Breath of the Wild uses a very flexible game engine, so many aspects of the game can be configured with files. Since BotW uses a lot of custom formats, special tools are required for editing them.

Common requirements

Python

Many of the tools for these formats require Python 3.6+ (64 bit version) to be installed.

On Linux, Python 3 is surely already installed. Just make sure you have a recent enough version (3.6+). Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian stretch are too old; the latest Ubuntu LTS (18.04) and rolling distros such as Arch and Debian sid have 3.6+ in their repos.

Tools

Yaz0

Many files in the game are compressed with the Yaz0 format. Compressed files generally have the letter s prefixed to their file extension. Use wszst to compress or decompress these files.

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AAMP

AAMP is used for configuration files, such as actor parameters, the world configuration (climate, lighting, ...), etc. Convert them to an editable format (and back) with aamp.

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Unlike most other files, AAMP files are exactly the same on both Wii U and Switch.

BYML

BYML files contain game parameters for actors, map units, etc. Convert them to an editable format (and back) with byml-v2.

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BFRES

BFRES files contain the game's animations, models and textures. Tutorials on how to edit these for Wii U can be found in Fooni's Tutorials.

  • .sbfres files contain models.
  • .Tex1.sbfres files contain textures (Wii U).
  • .Tex2.sbfres files contain mipmaps for textures (Wii U). Since we can't edit these on Wii U yet, they need to be disabled.
  • .Tex.sbfres files contain both textures and mipmaps (Switch). Unlike on Wii U, mipmaps don't cause any problems here.

BFEVFL

BFEVFL is used for in-game events (which includes things like talking to people and also full-blown cutscenes).

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RSTB

ResourceSizeTable.product.rsizetable (known as the RSTB) contains sizes for almost every file in the game (calculated from the non-Yaz0-compressed file sizes). If you edit a file to make its filesize bigger, you'll need to edit this file to prevent errors. The recommended tool for manipulating the RSTB is rstb.

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SARC

SARC archives contain collections of other files and folders, like .zip folders.

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Map units

Map units can be edited directly by modifying the map unit BYMLs or with a graphical tool such as Ice-Spear.

For the first method, refer to #BYML.

For the second method, follow the instructions in the official repo for Ice-Spear builds.

Reverse engineering

To reverse engineer the game executable, it is strongly recommended to have a copy of IDA Pro 7.0+ because the main executable is fairly large and IDA is as of September 2018 the only serious option for analysing such binaries. It is also the only tool with a usable decompiler for AArch64 (Switch).

To get a copy of an IDC for Switch 1.5.0, ping leoetlino.