[Tutorial] The Walking Dead Season 1 (and older games) Texture Editing Tutorial

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The Walking Dead Season 1 (+older Telltale games) Texture Editing Tutorial

Same tutorial in Google Docs form: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QmCCRsDoHevPdqYq9J_uhm-VLfzhierTen44tnOacbk/ Tutorial archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20230606011720/https://github.com/Telltale-Modding-Group/Telltale-Texture-Tool/wiki/%5BTutorial%5D-The-Walking-Dead-Season-1-%28and-older-games%29-Texture-Editing-Tutorial

This tutorial will explain how to edit textures (.d3dtx files) in older Telltale games. This tutorial will use The Walking Dead Season 1 (2012) as an example. Editing textures for titles older than The Walking Dead Season 1 should work similarly but may have slight differences.

This method does not work for titles released after The Walking Dead Season 1.

If you want to make a texture mod for The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series, you should use Texture Mod Tool.

Required items:

1. The Walking Dead Season 1 (or another game you want to make a mod for)
2. HxD (or a different HEX editor of your choice)
3. Paint.net
4. Telltale Explorer

Step 1 - Extract the texture files

Run Telltale explorer and load the desired .ttarch archive. Telltale archives are usually located inside the "Pack" folder in the root game directory. Most game textures are usually located in a file with "_txmesh" in its name.

For this tutorial, we'll load the files for The Walking Dead Season 1 Episode 1, located at "The Walking Dead\Pack\default\4_WalkingDead101_english_pc_ms.ttarch" path.

After loading the archive, find the texture you want to edit inside the Explorer's window. In this tutorial, we'll be editing Clementine's dress, the texture for which is called "sk56_clementine_body.d3dtx".

After locating the file, you prepare an empty folder for your mod, then click "Save File - < As is (raw dump)", and save the file into the newly created folder. Then click "Save File - < As dds image" and save the .dds image to the same folder.

Do not extract textures as .png, as this method is currently broken and textures will come out incorrectly (as of Telltale Explorer version 1.3.3).

Step 2 - Edit the .dds image

Open Paint.net and load the .dds image you extracted. Make whatever changes you want to the image.

Make sure not to change image size throughout editing.

Step 3 - Save the edited texture as .dds

Open HxD and load the .d3dtx file you extracted. You are going to see something like this:

These are the insides of your file, the code that makes up the image.

Go back to paint.net and save the image as .dds. For this method to work properly the edited .dds must retain the same parameters (compression, mip maps) as the original image.

Compression: Make sure to save your .dds image in the same compression you see in HxD (DXT1, DXT5, etc). If the compression is not clear, you might have to do some trial and error, but generally speaking, DXT5 compression is for images with transparency, and DXT1 does not support transparency.

Mip maps: It may not be 100% clear if the original texture had mip maps or not, but generally speaking UI textures usually do not use mip maps, while textures covering 3d objects usually require them.

Step 4 - Replace the original texture through HEX editing

In older Telltale games textures work as regular .dds files but have a different header. In order to put out texture back into the game, we must replace the texture data inside the original .d3dtx file with our own.

After saving the .dds image in correct size, compression and format, open it up inside the HxD window. Now find the header cut off point in the .dds file and copy all of that data after the header cutoff point in the .d3dtx file (replacing the old data).

For this example, you would need to select and copy everything after the DXT1 line in the .dds file:

Then open the .d3dtx files and select everything after the DXT1 line:

And then paste the data from the .dds file on top of it. If you did everything correctly, the file size should not change. If you get a warning about file size change, then you probably did something incorrectly.

After pasting the data the file will look something like this:

Now click "Save" and the red text will turn black, indicating that the files has been modified. All that's left to do is put the file into the game and check if it works.

Step 5 - Put the file back into the game

For The Walking Dead Season 1 all you need to do to put the texture back into the game is put the edited .d3dtx file into the folder with the .ttarch archive (in this case I put the "sk56_clementine_body.d3dtx" file into "Pack\default" folder). The game will prioritize loading the new files rather than the ones in the game archives. This likely works for older titles as well. Otherwise use standard methods used for modding in those games.

Now run the game and see if the texture has changed.

Close all other applications used to access files located in the game's folders, especially Telltale Explorer, otherwise the game may have trouble loading its resources correctly and you will end up with unexpected errors.

If the edited texture appears pitch black, then it is likely some parameters from the original image (file size, resolution size, compression, mip maps) were not preserved in the edited one due to users error.

It is also likely that some textures or texture types cannot be properly edited using this method.