Hello - as a proof-of-concept, I tried porting the Morbid Mogblade from FFXIV, and adding a basic particle effect to it. The .DAT files are
available here.
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My process for creating the mod was:
Used "FFXIV TexTools" to export the Morbid Mogblade model as .obj & textures as .dds (DXT1)
Used Blender to split the .obj file into specular/matte models, and create a simplified model for the particle effect.
Wrote some code that converts the resources into FFXI types, configures the particle effect, and overwrites an in-game item.
In the FFXI client, unequip and equip the item to reload the model
Here's a link to that code. It's not robust at the moment (the .obj parser is particularly bad), but it was able to create this mod without any need for hex-editing.
If you'd like to try running the code, I'd recommend using IntelliJ IDEA (since it's kotlin). The MogbladeMod is currently configured to overwrite "Bronze Sword" (but also generates backups, and contains a utility to restore from the backups). For example, you could experiment with the `ColorInitializer` to change the color of the particle.
As always, please feel free to ask any questions.
Some notes about the code:
If you like the sword, but not the particle effect, then simply removing this line is sufficient.
It uses "Bronze Sword" as a base, since it has the appropriate sound-effects & I had a couple in my inventory.
I plan to port/rewrite the tools I used for the Firetongue mod, including the one that translates from Skeleton-mesh to Particle-mesh
If you're curious about the internals of the tool, I'd recommend cross-referencing with Xim's source code. A lot of this was just copied over, and is the "write" counterpart to Xim's "read" functionality.
Missing Particle/Routine functionality is easy to implement (as long as it is understood in Xim)
Ideally, there'd be a GUI, but that's a long ways away.
Some notes about porting from FFXIV:
The port will never be 1:1, but for rigid models (attached to only a single joint), it's not too bad. FFXIV models use normal/specular textures, which FFXI doesn't support, so there's some workarounds with the diffuse texture & specular material settings.
I think FFXIV models have various LoDs, so it should be possible to use one of the simpler models in order to reduce triangle-count (but I couldn't figure out how to export them from TexTools)
Similarly, TexTools supports exporting the various mipmap levels, so those can be used to reduce texture size
For skinned models (ie: armor), I imagine it's not feasible to port, but I haven't looked into how FFXIV implements them.
