Item Swapping WIP

Here I will post progress on attempting to crack the item placement in the game in order to hopefully create an arrange mod. If anyone wants to help then please do!

Here's what I know so far:

The files within "nativePC\arc\itemv" are for the inventory only. Editing & swapping any of these files loads up the model of the item but does not change the original value.

The files within "nativePC\arc\model\item" are used in-game. Editing & swapping these files then requires the uncompressed files within the respective arc file to be in the "nativePC\model\item" folder as well as the arc file weirdly. What I have achieved so far is the model shape has changed in game but it still keeps the original texture which looks rubbish. I believe though that this can be fixed so that if an arrange mode was to be achieved then the new items would be seen in-game as well as the inventory.

Looking into the "nativePC\arc\room\stXX" folders, this I think is the most likely place that an item location is defined in each rXXX.arc file. Within the arc file, usually you can find the following folders: "effect, model, motion, room, scheduler, scr & sound".

I believe effect, model, motion, scr and sound can be taken out of the equation leaving room and scheduler. I'm not 100% on this yet but I'll explain why the two remaining folders are of interest.

Firstly the scheduler folder has a item folder within with a file called "itemrXXX.sdl". As far as I can see every room has one of these files.

Secondly the room folders has 8-10 sub folders in it called "adr, aev, cch, cci, ems, fsp, rtp, sbc, shd & sst". It has already been figured out that adr & ems files contain door and enemy information respectively so they can be discarded. Now I say most rooms have all 9 files in them however there are atleast 2 rooms I can see that do no have the "rtp" file, interestingly these two rooms have no items in them. The "jill sandwich trap" room and the corridor room which leads to the crow gallery and outside to the courtyard. So maybe the rtp file contains the defined item locations...

In order to know what to look for in any of the files all the item numbers need to be known. I have an item list which has two numbers allocated to them, one with the numbers in the files so "i082p.arc" for example and the other I believe is are hex numbers (thanks to Mister T for the list).

Item list values:



So from here I have looked in the R105 folder, this room is the dining room ground floor (I have most of the rXXX numbers for the rooms in the mansion if anyone wants me to include them here). The dining room has 4 items in it: an ink ribbon, wooden emblem, the shield key & the blue gemstone once pushed from the statue above. On this logic I have been searching the item numbers (either 3F, 54, 55 & 59 or 47, 68,69 & 73) using a hex editor in the rtp, cci & sdl files but can't see a particular pattern just yet. Knowing the exact file that I need to edit could well be the key to cracking this though and I'm still yet to figure this out.

Using the xml export in the arctool on a file or two has also been attempted but no joy as of yet.

So this is where I'm currently at, as far as I can tell there are two solutions. One finding the exact code which defines what item in what location or a way to edit the item value numbers so that one particular item in a particular place can be swapped with another. Ideally the first solution is the most desirable as it would mean we can dictate to the game what items are in what room but I'd still welcome the second solution.

I'm no expert at hacking code as you can probably tell but I'm quite stubborn so I'm determined to get this code cracked, with some help hopefully if anyone can. I welcome any feedback, ideas, encouragement, whatever really.

Thanks for taking the time to read. Now where's the master of unlocking?