[Tutorial] How to make a Texture Mod (Part 2)
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Welcome to the second part of making a texture mod for The Walking Dead Definitive Edition! Yes, a lot to read and seemingly a lot of steps but it's not hard, trust me. I just detailed each step as much as I could.
The second part of this tutorial is now getting these textures working in-game and getting a mod file ready for distribution.
Before we begin, you need to make sure you install Telltale Script Editor as we will use this to build our mod file. As a plus you can also keep adding to this mod project we create if you want to modify more textures.
In addition, we also recommend you install Load Any Level. This mod makes it easy to iterate and test things in the game much faster if you want to see your changes much quicker. Look under the Usage section on the main page to learn how to boot directly to a level.
Now with that out of the way let's begin.
Open the Telltale Script Editor.
Navigate to File and click New Project. It will ask for you to define where you want your project folder to be. After defining a project path it will then ask you for a project name and who the author is (obviously you!).
Once we have created our project you should see something similar to what is shown below.
The next step now is to open a .ttarch2 archive. Go under File > Open > .TTARCH2 Archive. This will open a file browser, you need to navigate to your games archives folder.
Since we are working with The Walking Dead Definitive Edition we will navigate to the main game directory, and into the Archives folder. In this folder, you will select a .ttarch2 archive with the suffix _txmesh.
A _txmesh archive means that this archive contains textures and meshes. Worth noting that each episode has a different _txmesh archive. If you wish to open multiple _txmesh archives and do a big texture mod your free to do so, but since this is a tutorial we will keep it simple.
In this case, I am selecting the _txmesh archive for TWD Season 2 Episode 1 because it's where I originally extracted this texture from. We do this so that Telltale Script Editor can build the archive and set it to where when the episode is loaded in, the mod archive and the modified files in the archive override the original ones (not replace them, override. Since new archives are treated as patch files).
Once you have opened a _txmesh archive you should see the folder appear in the project hierarchy view.
Open the project directory in File Explorer and navigate to the extracted folder as illustrated below.
Open the folder and then move or copy your modified .d3dtx and paste it into the folder.
Once you have done step 5, return to the application and you should see the texture appear in the project hierarchy view in that folder. The next step now is to build the project into a mod by navigating to Project > Build.
(OPTIONAL READING) Worth noting there is also an option to Build and Run. This isn't required but it's a useful feature of the editor if you want to be able to iterate on this mod fast. It will ask for you to specify where your game executable is and then it will build the project, automatically integrate the mod into the game files, and launch the game for you. It will remember the game executable location every time you do this process in the editor, however closing or restarting the application will require you to select the game executable again.
Assuming you've followed the steps, the editor will build the Mod into a Builds folder with the zip file in it and this is shown in the project hierarchy view.
Once again, this can vary depending on how you wish to go. You can either install the mod manually by opening the zip file and dumping ALL of its contents into the game's Archives directory as illustrated below.
Or, since it's built through the Telltale Script Editor. It's automatically compatible with the Telltale Mod Launcher and you can install the .zip file through the launcher easily.
