Snowflake Guide v3 - aa2g/AA2Snowflake GitHub Wiki

Snowflake Guide v3 (v2 available at http://pastebin.com/LNGBZL0K)

Written for AA2Snowflake v2.0

Requirements

AA2Snowflake (https://github.com/aa2g/AA2Snowflake)

ReiEdit (http://www.hongfire.com/forum/showthread.php/430353?p=3565250#post3565250) (Depends on if you need it, read through the whole guide first)

DIY Personality Pack (https://www.mediafire.com/?tznc1c8dyj27j8i) (not a mod, only required for reference in advanced snowflaking)

Introduction

A snowflaked card is a card that has a custom picture and/or contains clothes on the character that can be loaded into the game.

These can range from being just a simple background and clothes swap, to completely autistic with custom-made poses and even a bio if you're that kind of person.

I won't be covering how to make your own poses but I will be covering how to use already ingame ones.

There is a v2 snowflake guide, but I updated it to use AA2Snowflake which removed any need for encrypting/decrypting files.

Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this guide should not be followed as consecutive steps but as mutually exclusive, but it is possible to do them in conjunction and I will write when and how to do it

Preparations:

  1. Install all mods you plan to use (if you haven't already)

You can use wizzard or the faster alternative AA2Install (https://github.com/aa2g/AA2Install)

  1. Make the card

You should also list the mods that you use in the card in the description, but it's optional to list mods which are pretty much a must-have such as HEXAHP/OC/CC

Make sure to make a backup of your card before you start making a snowflake, you don't want to lose all that hard work after a single fuckup.

Part 1: Custom Background

This is how simple it is now:

  1. Launch AA2Snowflake

  2. Select the background type your card has

  3. Load the new background you want for your card (has to be a BMP and 800x1200 size)

  4. Click save

  5. Load your character in AA2Edit and save again.

Now your card has a custom background, if you want to restore the background to what it was originally click Restore or Restore All if you changed multiple backgrounds.

You can do the same process for changing borders (must be 800x1200 TGAs though)

If you want to change the picture in the roster ingame, you can now do that in AA2Snowflake in the image face changer (check out section 3.4)

Part 2: Assigning clothes

You'll obviously need to put clothes on the card you're snowflaking for this step. Load the card into a game save (it's easier to sort through ReiEdit if it's a new class), and change the clothes your card is wearing and click "single" to save those clothes.

Note: If you've already exported the uniform you want to use as a .cloth file (in-game this is achieved by saving a uniform instead of clicking "single" or "all"), you can skip using ReiEdit entirely. Just load the card you want to put clothing on into the Card Replacer tab, click "Load .cloth" on the window that pops up and navigate to your .cloth file (located in your data\save\cloth folder). This will only set the main uniform clothing as it is what's displayed on the snowflaked card, if you want to set clothing for all 4 outfits you have to use ReiEdit.

Take note that the clothes under "Uniform" are the clothes that will appear on the card. If you want the clothes on your card to be different, you can do two sets of snowflakes, one that's correct and one that has the changed clothes. Follow section 3.4 on how to merge them together.

If you want a custom background, now's a good time to follow part 1. Make sure to ignore step 5 and to not restore backgrounds.

1a. Open ReiEdit, load your game save (not the individual card), select the card you just gave clothes to and export it. Make a backup of that just in case.

OR

1b. Open AA2Snowflake, select the Card Replacer tab, open the card, click "Load .cloth" and find the .cloth file you want to be displayed on the card, and save.

  1. Open AA2Snowflake, select the Clothes tab and select the gender of the card you're snowflaking.

  2. Load your newly exported card, and click save. (This can take a minute or two if you moved poses in part 3.1)

  3. Open AA2Edit, and click new character (based on the gender of your card)

  4. Save the card immediately. If you do something else, the clothes will disappear, and you will have to go back to the main menu and try again.

Your card is now snowflaked and has clothes, and now you can restore the changes you made in AA2Snowflake if you wish.

Part 3: Adding custom poses

Some notes:

This is a much more complicated process than both parts 1 and 2 (but this version is much easier than v2 of the guide), so I'll assume you know your way around the program.

This will fuck up your normal poses and fuck up a lot of other stuff, but that's why we have the restore feature.

Your character height determines the camera position on the card New in v2.0: You can now change camera position using .icf files. More in section 3.3.

As of writing, AA2Snowflake only has support for the base 24 personalities New in v2.0: All custom and append personalities are fully supported. They are dynamically loaded, so .XML files are not needed unlike ReiEdit.

3.1: Setting Up

  1. Open AA2Snowflake, go to the Poses tab and in the group where it says "Part 3.1: Move poses to maker", click backup.

DO NOT click move, do not click restore, do not pick up $200, immediately click the backup button. Make a manual backup of jg2e01_00_00.pp in your AA2Edit data folder if you're paranoid.

  1. Click move. It's normal for this to take a minute or two, processing 2GB at a rate of 30mb/s is not very fast.

If you ignored the warning and clicked move without making a backup, you've fucked up your editor for normal use outside of snowflaking, and can only fix it by reinstalling. Dumbass.

While that is all happening, take a look at the poses and eyebrows you want your character to have on the snowflake.

The pictures of female poses and eyebrows are located in the DIY Personality Pack you downloaded as a requirement, while the male ones are here:

http://imgur.com/DRnldtJ,8GmtcC4,bXDG1Tk,LDkVmgC,chlbl7J,ZIpAux7,F5bEJci,BKtOwf4,IeiUgEF,pY81ySZ,KuWJCW5#0 (it's a working link, I got confused too)

New in v2.0: You can also use the in-app pose viewer under the Plugins menu, but quality and user experience is not guaranteed.

3.2: Setting the pose

Note: If your editor starts spamming that it can't load jg2e01_00_00.pp, you can ignore it and still snowflake

Now would be a very good time to back up your poses by clicking "Backup All" in the box for 3.2. Don't do it a second time, you'll only be overwriting the backup with your modifications.

Once the poses have been moved and picked a pose that you want your card to have, setting that pose is a very easy step:

  1. Open AA2Snowflake and go to the poses tab

  2. Select the personality you want to set the pose for.

  3. In the "Part 3.2: Select pose" section, enter the number of the pose and/or eyebrows you picked for the card

  4. Click set

Now this pose is set for all personalities in the maker, to prepare you for the next step:

3.3: Changing the camera angle

Now would be a very good time to back up your camera positions by clicking "Backup All" in the box for 3.3. Don't do it a second time, you'll only be overwriting the backup with your modifications.

This part is the easiest, but takes the longest amount of time. Some might dare to say it's the most fun part.

All you have to do is this:

  1. Load the card (via "New Character")

  2. Fiddle with the values in the boxes

  3. Save the card and have a look at the result

  4. Repeat steps 2-3 until desired result

If you're clueless as to what each value is, here's a very good summary by @aa2gcoder (AKA hardlinker-anon), chuck him a few stars on his projects

X rotation is in degrees
Y rotation is in degrees
Z rotation is in degrees
Zoom is in arbitrary units
FOV is in radians
X translation is in units, axis rotates with Y, Z rotation
Y translation is in units, axis rotates with X, Z rotation
Z translation is in units, axis rotates with X, Y rotation

Zoom - Setting it to 0 effectively places your viewpoint inside her boobs(assuming the default (X, Y, Z) translation) while setting it to 99 makes her occupy ~1/3 of the card.

Translation - Pretty straight forward: X=0 is mid screen horizontally, -1 is slightly to the right, -5 almost out of the frame (only Lively's right elbow is visible). Same for other axes.

There is a difference between Z-axis translation and zoom - zoom is fixed to the camera view while z-translation follows your X, Y rotation. So if X,Y rotations = 0 then zoom and z-translation move along the same axis. If, say, Y rotation = 90° - Z+ translation will move to the right and Z- to the left. The distance is the same as far as I could tell.

Finishing touches

The desired result you exported in the last section is your final card, which is a bit anti-climactic. Still though, wasn't that easier than using aa2decrypt?

Extras

Changing the card face

If you want to just change what's displayed on the card .png without breaking the card data, there's a tab especially for that.

  1. Open AA2Snowflake and go to the Card Replacer tab

  2. Click open, and find the card you want to change

  3. Click the "Replace Card Face" button (picture with a plus in the bottom right) and find the new .png you want to be on the cover of the card

  4. Save

Card Info

When you open a card in the card replacer tab, a window will pop up with info about the card. You can change this and click save for quick editing of values of the card.

One thing that's notable is that the bio textbox allows up to 480 bytes (approximately 480 normal ASCII characters), which is almost double that of ReiEdit's and frontier launcher's limit of 256. This is due to an oversight in how text is saved in Japanese locale, but I've managed to bypass it in AA2Snowflake.

Resolution changer

AA2Snowflake has an experimental AA2Edit card resolution patcher, allowing you to change the resolution of the output card in the maker. Keep a backup of your AA2Edit.exe as it might not work correctly.

  1. Open AA2Snowflake and go to the Patcher tab

  2. Click "Load" and find the AA2Edit.exe you want to patch

If the AA2Edit is compatible with the patcher, it will tell you in the information provided, and it might not be 100% accurate

  1. Select the card size you would like the maker to output in the top left slider

  2. Select the render resolution

This is the resolution that the maker uses to render the cards. Higher resolutions produce higher quality output but has side effects (the text is displayed weirdly). The maker of the original aa2mpatcher recommends that you set this to at least 2x for anything other than the smallest card size.

  1. Click patch.

Make sure you have a backup .exe before this point.