Driver Madness

Okay, I know I'm a n00b when I've just realized that opening a file that contains images with Notepad will show letters and characters forming the shapes of the pictures inside that file, weird Here's the file Frontend.TSD that's in the "Data" folder of Driver, open with notepad and you can see the Driver logo, Tanner's picture from the main menu, etc...

I've also tried opening Grand Theft Auto's texture files (txd) with notepad and got similar results.
Also, inside Frontend.TSD with notepad you can read stuff like bkgrnd1a.BMP showing that there are pictures in it. I've tried extracting with Winrar, 7-Zip and some texture editors for GTA but none worked. I looked up the TSD extention in google but it's all "tree structure documents" and stuff.
So do you guys know if there's any program that would work to extract the images from the Frontend.TSD file, and maybe pack it back again? It would be awesome to edit the menus from Driver
Thanks

Cool

TSD files have been fully decoded already, no need to worry about that. Jeff's been super busy lately with college and all of his projects are pretty much on standby. The only thing left with TSD files is finding out where the palettes are, since they're 8-bit images. Unfortunately, instead of the palettes being inside of the TSD file like they should be, they're hard-coded into the EXE...a real pain in the ass. Other than that, TSD files are 100% completed. They're just not top priority at the moment.

oh alright thanks for the reply, I knew you guys would have dealt with that file already. And shame about that palettes thing, why don't the game developers just make it all winrar files with everything there ready to be modded? :­P

k9Underdogg wrote:oh alright thanks for the reply, I knew you guys would have dealt with that file already. And shame about that palettes thing, why don't the game developers just make it all winrar files with everything there ready to be modded? :­P

Because modding is evil! EVIL!

This reminds me that the author of the Driver civcar edition mod has pretended that he had modified the frontend with customs cars pics. I have downloaded the mod but no frontend in the data folder. I do not know why it is not included.

Hi everybody!

I'm sorry for bumping this topic, but actually there ARE color palettes inside the file frontend.tsd - at least in the file on my PC
The three palettes are stored at 0x12 - 0xC1D. The first four bytes of each palette aren't a color, maybe some kind of an id.

Here's a proof that the images can be extraced correctly with these palettes:

Nice work Herbert! I remember Jeff telling me that while there are palettes inside of the TSD file (as you have confirmed), the game does not use them. The game does not care for those palettes, and will load ones that are in the EXE. I wish things weren't so complicated

I think I have to disagree
Replacing one of the palettes inside frontend.tsd gives me this result:


The only thing that seems to be hard-coded in the EXE is the mapping that tells the game which palette is used for which bitmap.

Great find!!! *_* you rock

I think what Mark remembers me telling him is that the TSD file has an index into that palette list for each image, but that index is not used. The game sets the palette index for each image in the executable I believe, which is behavior from an older TSD format. So it's exactly like you said. Also I'm curious as to how you extracted those images. Did you write some sort of program or just copy data out from the TSD into other files? We could always use more good modding tool makers around here, as I tend to disappear and reappear quite sporadically .

Well then, this is why I shouldn't trust my bad memory! Thanks for clearing that up, Jeff. And herbert, that looks awesome! We need a modding tool

Oh, that's neat!

My man, that is absolutely fabulous, I've been so waiting to see that! Hopefully you will not give up and make a fully functional tool that will extract and reimport textures properly

At the moment I can only provide an exporter: Usage: Just drag&drop the file frontend.tsd onto the program.


...working on the importer...

awesome job with the extractor!!!