Strike Witches: Silver Wing/Tutorials

The following article is a Tutorial for Strike Witches: Silver Wing.

Simple Texture Replacement

1. Extract the desired textures from their archives via quickbms. If you're not sure where to find a specific texture, find it in game and then check Xenia's log to see what files are being accessed
2. Open the extracted .DDS in your hex editor of choice
3. Note the compression used and if mipmapping is enabled in the DDS header
4. Open the extracted .DDS in your image editor of choice. Photoshop, GIMP or Visual Studio are recommended
5. Edit the texture how you please
6. Save your texture, making sure to use the same compression and mipmapping options from step 3
7. Reinsert the edited texture to the original archive with quickbms (Note - despite what the program recommends, you should use reinsert2 and include ALL files in the archive, even if they weren't modified. Failure to do so will result in the game locking up)
8. Launch the game and enjoy your texture modification!

Space Efficient Simple Texture Replacement

1. Open the packed archive you created in the above steps in a hex editor of your choice
2. Note the number of files (0x10-0x13^(LE)) in the archive
3. Multiply this value by 0x18 (we'll call this X)
4. Navigate to the end of the file listing table (remember that entries are 32 bytes, so mind any potential lines of zeroes that are part of the file table!)
5. Navigate down X bytes
6. Select all zero bytes between here and the start of compressed file data, noting the size of your selection (we'll call this Y)
7. Remove the extra zero bytes,
8. Go back into the file headers table, and subtract Y from each of the offset fields
9. Save your file, and replace the old archive in the game folder with it
10. Done!