Extracting all assets from an NScripter archive

MKultra · Unread post by **MKultra** » March 31st, 2007, 5:31 am

Hello hello everyone,
I'm mku - not long ago, after many months of cajolling and the promise of an english patch link a friend talked me into getting Tsukihime. I would not consider myself a connoisseur of VNs. I have played one or two in my life, never having payed for one (abandonware) but my friend insisted that Tsuki was fantastic. The two of use share a common bond in our love of stories and writing them so I thought it would be a reasonable bet. I was rather impressed, Tsukihime swept me up with whirling speed and suddenly all of these characters I had been hearing about from what seemed like the beginning of time suddenly had context and I grew to love them as well, and it has created a torrent of ideas and partial ideals. Most importantly though: Hisui and Akiha are enchanting! <3 <3 <3

I digress though.
My real purpose for posting is to ask how to extract all assets from the game packages. Everything down to character and BG art. The reason for this is an insatiable desire to completely pick apart Tsukihime because unlike my friend, I have a fanatical love of game construction and all the technical nuts and bolts therein. I downloaded insani's dev tools and played with them but didn't get quite what I was looking for. Can anyone point me to a wonder tool, or better yet a description of the appropriate ( dauntingly complex is prefered!

) process ?

Message · Unread post by **Message** » March 31st, 2007, 6:03 am

Hi MKultra, we are very glad you enjoyed out translation. Personally I am a fan of exceptionally well-written stories as well, so please allow me to plug two other VN titles that you might enjoy equally: First of all there's Planetarian (short but very cheap compared to Tsukihime), a piece of very high quality made by Key, creators of Kanon, AIR, etc. You can find the demo here. And secondly you really need to read Adagio. It's only five minutes long but it truly is a song amongst stories. Free download yay~.

Anyway, to answer your question, I'm afraid that extracting NScripter resources is very, very easy. Use NSAOut to extract our arc.nsa, use SARDec to extract the original arc.sar. Both tools are on the insani NScripter dev page. That's all. >_>

MKultra · Unread post by **MKultra** » April 1st, 2007, 12:24 am

Yes, I did play with those. I must not have been doing something right however because it did not the desired effect. NSAout extracted some things, most noteably the gallery thumbnails and a bit of Ciel-Sensei assests but not everything which is what I was after. Sardec appeared to do nothing. Is there perhaps some kind of switch case I am missing?

Message · Unread post by **Message** » April 1st, 2007, 7:18 am

NSAout will decrypt arc.nsa, which is the file we added in Tsukihime English. So it makes sense that it's just the gallery, menus, etc. SARDec extracts arc.sar, which is the file copied from the Tsukihime CD. This file contains all the actual CGs. SARDec requires you to add a command line parameter telling it which file to extract (don't ask me why, NScripter only supports one arc.sar), so the easiest way to do it is to drag arc.sar onto sardec.exe.

At least you might think so. However, if you do this, chances are the arc.sar contents will end up in your Windows profile directory. So you'd have to go to c:\Documents and Settings\yourprofile and look for directories named ICON, IMAGE and WAVE, and move them to wherever you want them. (Less ugly way of using SARDec is to go to a command prompt, go to the applicable directory and type "sardec arc.sar".)

Edit: Ok, so it's not all as simple as it could've been. Ah well, all the better for you I guess. >___>;;

MKultra · Unread post by **MKultra** » April 2nd, 2007, 12:29 am

Heh. One of the first ideas that occured to me is "maybe it needs a command parameter" but I dismissed that thinking "well that would be dumb. there is only one arc.sar" >.<

Thanks for the help. Not quite as challenging as I hoped, but easy has it's benefits too.

Unread post by **puKKa** » April 2nd, 2007, 12:38 am

[quote="MKultra"]Heh. One of the first ideas that occured to me is "maybe it needs a command parameter" but I dismissed that thinking "well that would be dumb. there is only one arc.sar" >._<

Message · Unread post by **Message** » April 2nd, 2007, 4:37 am

*Ahem*

Unread post by **puKKa** » April 2nd, 2007, 8:54 am

Message wrote:*Ahem*

What? I f I own the game that shouldnt really be a problem would it? -_-;

Message · Unread post by **Message** » April 2nd, 2007, 12:41 pm

No warez talk period. Whether you own the game or not.

Unread post by **puKKa** » April 2nd, 2007, 12:51 pm

bl????

Chronowraith · Unread post by **Chronowraith** » April 20th, 2007, 4:44 am

hmm... whenever I try to extract the sar it terminates with an error message that only says it forced the runtime to terminate the program... any ideas?

Message · Unread post by **Message** » April 24th, 2007, 5:27 am

I can't say I've ever encountered this problem... What OS?

Chronowraith · Unread post by **Chronowraith** » April 24th, 2007, 6:19 am

Windows XP Pro with latest security patches....

Message · Unread post by **Message** » April 24th, 2007, 9:39 am

I have no idea. But you could always use Susie with an NScripter plugin, google should be able to locate those.

Atvaark · Unread post by **Atvaark** » April 25th, 2007, 4:19 am

chronowraith...that avatar you use...it has to be the cutest Kosmos i've ever seen...did you get it from a picture? can you link it?
sorry about the off topic thing.
so you have trouble extracting huh? i think i had an error like that when i extracted tsukihime. i just restarted windows and tried in safe mode. worked for me.

Chronowraith · Unread post by **Chronowraith** » April 26th, 2007, 12:32 am

Atvaark wrote:chronowraith...that avatar you use...it has to be the cutest Kosmos i've ever seen...did you get it from a picture? can you link it?
sorry about the off topic thing.
so you have trouble extracting huh? i think i had an error like that when i extracted tsukihime. i just restarted windows and tried in safe mode. worked for me.

I tried to run it in safe-mode and got the same errors... I'll try the SUSE thing and if I have issues I may ask for help here.

also:
http://timestudios.hopto.org/images/Kos-Mos003.gif

the original image which I DID NOT draw. I simply modified it for my avatar a few years back and uh..well... it's still hanging around

p

Message · Unread post by **Message** » April 26th, 2007, 5:44 am

Look out, that's Susie, not SUSE. Susie is a Japanese, plugin-based resource extractor for games. It has an English interface, but you need to enable it. Just browse through the options menu and you'll find it.

Chronowraith · Unread post by **Chronowraith** » April 26th, 2007, 8:04 am

Message wrote:Look out, that's Susie, not SUSE. Susie is a Japanese, plugin-based resource extractor for games. It has an English interface, but you need to enable it. Just browse through the options menu and you'll find it.

^^; my bad... sorry, just not gotten enough sleep lately since my university seems to think giving us a ton of tests and projects the last few weeks of the term is a good idea... thanks for the correction.

Euphemism · Unread post by **Euphemism** » May 18th, 2007, 6:00 pm

Does Susie work with Fate/Stay Night, which I think uses a separate engine from Tsukihime?
I suppose what I'm really asking is, how would one go about extracting text from FSN?