FREE VXI32 Hex EditorSUPER BRIEF TUTORIAL:
This is a rough guide on how to replace a texture, it's not hard at all but alot of steps are taken to get just one texture replaced. I am using an example texture located within the "world.lgp", but the same method applies for ALMOST all other LGPs.
My example uses "silo.tex" located in the "world.lgp". This texture is for the silo(duh) at the chocobo farm as seen on the worldmap.
I use highwind to locate my inital textures since it lists sizes without me having to extract them and doublecheck the size.
I also use XVI32 as my Hex editor. Why you ask? well it's free, and it was the first option to popup on yahoo. It's very barebones, but you don't need anything fancy for the VERY basic edting we will be doing.
BACKUP ANY FILES YOU ARE GONG TO BE CHANGING
Firstly, unzip this package somewhere convienent since oyu will be opening and closing alot of things
Locate "silo.tex" in "world.lgp" with highwind, double click it and you get a small preview with the image size
silo.tex is 32x32, so you pick the 32x32 texture in the ZIP i have provided.
Make a copy of "32x32.tex", and rename it "silo.tex".
Open your new "silo.tex" with XVI32, and locate the sting that says "EXT" in the right-pane.
Make sure that you are in "overwrite" mode in the bottom-right corner, you don't want the filesize to increase
If you not in "overwrite" mode, press your insert key on your keyboard
Now, after directly after "EXT", add "silo", without the .TEX extension, it's not needed
Save your new "silo.tex" and use Aali's LGP tools to overwrite the original in your world.lgp
now load up your game and zoom over too the chocofarm. You should see your texture looking all black and ugly on the silo.
Exit the game and open your APP.log, and look for an error line. Find it? It's telling you that the driver couldn't find "silo_00.png"
Well, Mr. Aali sure made it easy to troubleshoot these issues didn't he! (thanks dude)
Hop online and find any PNG graphic, rename it to "silo_00" and place it in your /textures directory
Load up the game again, and you should see your custom texture all over the silo now
That's really all there is to it. Make sure ANY custom texture you place in your /textures folder has "_00" located after it, or else it will not work. It seems really hard, but honestly i've done the hardest part, which was making easily modifible .TEX loader files. All you have to do is match filenames between 3 different steps. Another thing to note, when replacing textures, stay with multiples of the original. If your starting image is 32x32, use 64x64, or 128x128, etc..... Make sure you use equal multiples or else your texture will stretch/squish and look poorly. Also, you CAN use the wrong size loader texture(start size is 32x32, but you used 32x64). This causes some ugly graphics as well, and Aali's driver won't tell you if you do this, so DON'T DO IT!
Good Luck, i hope this inspires a few more folks to try their hand at texture modding. Keep in mind, this is a crash course on how to do this, there are better ways, faster ways, and a million ways to screw up along the way. It took me almost 2 weeks to get my first custom texture in game! Don't give up!
Big thanks to Aali for making all of this possible!
Lee