conanac

Creating custom sticker for Rabbids Go Home game (part 1)

Rate this Entry
Switching gear to this game (from brres work which I will continue next time), I have found that one of the savegame files (by using Waninkoko's savegame extractor), SLT_0_2.SAV is used to store the downloadable stickers (provided by game-maker through WiFi).

In this part 1 of blog series, we are going to focus on how to use GIMP (in my case version 2.6.6) to create the background image required in the sticker. Therefore, this part 1 will explain the steps shown in the first segment of the tutorial video.

Let's start with the information of savegame files. If you use Waninkoko's savegame extractor, you will get the following files (assuming you play for the first profile):
1. BANNER.BIN
2. FILELIST.DAT
3. INDEX.DAT
4. SLT_0_0.SAV
5. SLT_0_2.SAV
6. SLT_1_0.SAV
7. SLT_2_0.SAV
8. SLT_XX_1.SAV
Quite a number of files as you can see. From investigation, it looks like file SLT_0_2.SAV contains slots for storing up-to 24 stickers that can be dowloaded from Rabbids Channel through WiFi. By default it already stores 24 stickers of repeating three pictures of rabbid. And each sticker has a pair of files. One for the picture and one for the background (I guess to make the background transparent). Take a look on those funny default stickers below (three pair of files).







These images are stored as JFIF/JPEG format, and each has 128x128 pixels. The picture file has the maximum size of 0x5000 bytes and the background file has the maximum size of 0x2800 bytes (it only needs two colors, black and white).

So now, how we could create the background image from the picture image that we want by using GIMP? Let's say that we have chosen this Yoshi's image (riding a bike, nice) as our next custom sticker.



I already resize the image to be 128x128, and the boundary of the picture is clear and well-defined with the background color is already in one color (white). So this is a good candidate for the sticker.

So let's open this image file in GIMP, and execute the following steps (check the tutorial video as well):
1. From toolbox frame, choose "Fuzzy Select Tool", and click in the background area to choose the color white as the basis color to define the contiguous region for selection.
2. Go to "Select" menu and choose "Selection Editor"
3. In the pop-up window, click the "Invert the selection" button (at the bottom of this window), you will see switching of black and white color regions
4. Close that pop-up window, by clicking the [x] button at the top left of the window
5. Then go to the "Edit" menu and choose "Fill with FG color", and make sure the foreground color is black. You will see now the picture of Yoshi to have only one color, i.e. black.
6. Now go to the "Select" menu again, and choose "All" to select all parts of the image
7. Next, go to the "Colors" menu, and choose "Invert". You will see the black and white color to switch
8. Then the last step is to save this edited image into a new file (in jpeg format with quality 100%)

Now you have the following image file:



And ready to insert this new sticker (pair of files) into the savegame file, SLT_0_2.SAV. But make sure that the sizes of these files are within the limit of 0x5000 and 0x2800 bytes respectively.

If you dont want to use GIMP, you could use MS Paint, but you need to manually change the color of the picture to be white and the color of the background to be black (pixel by pixel) and save the new image with jpeg format. Since with MS Paint you cannot set the quality of compression (as far as I know), you could see that the picture or background to be less of quality than you want.

In the next blog, I will describe the steps of extracting and inserting stickers from savegame file.

Updated 01-23-2010 at 09:30 AM by conanac

Categories
Application Development

Comments

  1. Vash's Avatar
    Very nice tutorial. Glad to see you're still working on this!