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It’s been quite a while since the last version of GGS (6.1.1). I thought I’d never continue working on it, but lately I’ve had some spare time and been adding compatibility with the latest WE/PES games, as well as support for the latest PS2 and PC games. Thanks a lot to Mephisto for the encryption routines ;) Some bugs have been fixed, and the way the editor tries to insert new textures when there’s not enough space in the ISO/AFS has been rewritten. I’ve added an option to replace useless files at a time, a pencil that will allow you to perform VERY basic operations with the textures and the possibility of turning grayscale values into transparency ones with just one click. The view alpha mask button (F9) now works with 32bpp textures as well as 8bpp ones, and there’s support for 32bpp PNG files with full alpha channel. I’ve also included a few new AFL files in the “\dat” folder for your viewing pleasure.

2. Is it compatible with the “next-gen” versions of Winning Eleven?

Yes it is. At least it is compatible with the “current next-gen” games in the series (PES6, WE11, PES2008), and the way it manages 32bpp alpha-textures plus the new support for Direct Draw Surface mipmaps should increase its compatibility with the forthcoming games… unless someone decide to put a new encryption routine into them, of course. Note that the AFS files now are called IMG files, but they are actually AFS files.

3. Does the “reduction color bug” still happen?

It may happen from time to time, although not so often as before. In fact, it’s not a bug. Near every texture in the WE/PES games is compressed and has a variable size, so there’s a high chance that the new textures compress worse than the existing ones and therefore don’t fit into the predefined reserved space. There are three ways of solving this problem: rebuilding the AFS so it has enough free space for the new textures (which involves rebuilding the ISO file), trying to find free space available in other files of the AFS (wasted blocks of 2048 bytes each one) or reducing the color usage of the new textures before “pushing” them into the AFS.

By reducing the color usage the textures compress better and can fit anywhere, but this usually results in an unwanted quality loss. The goal would be to find and use any free space available into the AFS when possible (which is better than rebuilding and making it unnecessarily bigger). Previous versions of GGS tried to find free space only within two files (the previous and posterior to the selected one), but now it can search a variable amount of contiguous files that can be specified into the Settings menu. The insertion may take a little longer, but the results are much better.

4. Can I increase the reserved space for a given file of an AFS file?

Yes you can. Click on the “Increase reserved space” button (or choose the analog option from the AFS pop-up menu) and make your selections to increase the reserved space for the files you want. The program will generate a new AFS file that will be saved into the specified folder. Note that you can increase the reserved space for many contiguous files at a time, even if you don’t want them to have the size. This is particularly useful for kit files, where players and goalkeepers files usually require much more space than numbers ones. There is a set of predefined file sizes that should give you enough free space for any kit texture, in case you are determined to make the AFS file bigger and rebuild the ISO. Just choose the game you’re working on and click on the arrow button to load these defaults before clicking on Proceed.

In case you need to increase the reserved space of many files every now and then, you should take a look at the “Deferred Mode” option.

5. What’s that “Replace ALL files like this one with...” option for?

This option may seem useless at first time, but it becomes very handy once you realize that a lot of AFS files (mainly unlicensed kits) are exactly the same and that they’re not used in the game. You can decrease the color usage of the textures included in these files to make them compress better (plain color textures will give optimal results) and therefore reduce their file size to obtain valuable free bytes. I used to do this manually until I realized the computer would probably do it faster (lol). All you have to do is export one of these modified “minimal” files and then import it back into the AFS using this option to obtain a lot of free space. I strongly recommend using this option before changing any other texture in the game.

Take a look at the file named “fake_kits_2048_bytes.bin” included in the “dat” folder and use it with this option over the appropriate files before trying to insert any kit. For example, you may try it over file “kits_5736.bin” from PES6X360 CV.IMG, “kits_7565.bin” from PES2008X360 CV_0.IMG or “kits_7523.bin” from PES2008PC CV_0.IMG.

6. What’s the “Real Time / Deferred Mode” option for?

I’ve included this “Deferred Mode” option for people who don’t mind to increase the AFS/IMG size and need to increase some reserved space often. When this option is checked, the changes you make in the AFS/IMG file (importing files, replacing textures and so on) won’t take effect until you click in the “Apply changes and rebuild” button and choose the name of the new rebuilt AFS/IMG file. The program will work with the modified files in the background so it’ll look like the AFS/IMG file is changing, but it actually isn’t –until you press that button.

You can also click in the “X files changed” button to select a folder where to export the currently modified files. This is useful, for example, if you want to share your work with other people and you need to use bigger files for your textures. Simply export your modified files and tell the people to check the “Deferred Mode” option before trying to import them -obviously they’ll have to click in the “Apply changes and rebuild” button afterwards.

7. Is that a pencil below the palette image? Do you really want me to use GGS instead Photoshop?

Nah I don’t want you to use GGS instead Photoshop, don’t worry. I just thought it would be useful for people like me who need to spend weeks to understand how transparency works in any professional image-editing software and just want to change a pixel or two in a texture. You can cycle between picker-pencil-none pressing the “ºª” key (the one to the left of the “1” in the keyboard) and choose the size of the pencil with keys “1-5”. There’s an option in the Texture menu too. I decided to add this pencil because I can’t stand the players radar permanently in the screen and I wanted to get rid of it without messing with Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Btw the radar was also the main reason for me to start working on a “next-gen” version of GGS, which gives you an idea of how much I hate it...

So if you want to remove the radar (or any other thing in any other 8bpp texture), simply follow these steps: extract the texture, press F9 to view the alpha mask, click on the color-picker button (or press the “ºª” key), pick a fully transparent color (fully white), click on the pencil button (or press the “ºª” key again), choose the pen size (keys “1-5”), paint over the thing you want to remove with the left mouse button (remember you can undo last change pressing Ctrl+Z) and press the “ºª” key once again to unselect the pencil before dragging and dropping the texture back into the AFS file. Easy, isn’t it?

8. And what about the “Turn grayscale into transparency” option in the texture menu?

I’ve added it as a simple way of making transparent textures without having to master Photoshop. Simply make your own grayscale bitmap (32bpp or 8bpp) and use this option to convert the grayscale values into transparency ones, keeping in mind that black = fully opaque color and white = fully transparent color (so the darker the gray is, the more opaque it will be when converted). This may be useful for textures like WE/PES numbers, GTA SA tattoos and the like.

Check out the “Color settings” tab in the “Settings” menu to select the default color for the resulting texture: you can choose to make it black, white, inverse grayscale or don’t change it at all.

9. What is an AFL file and how does it work?

GGS has been supporting AFL files from quite a while now, but it seems they haven’t become very popular out there. I’ll try to explain what they are for briefly. Not so long ago the WE/PES games included file names for each individual graphic file that appeared into an AFS. These file names were useful to locate specific files like “uni_xx.bin”, “param_dat.bin” and so on. One good day the AFS files decided they wouldn’t include file names into their descriptors table anymore, so we were forced to name them as “unnamed_x.bin”, “unknown_x.bin” or whatever. A lot of people started making “AFS maps” to locate specific files into a given AFS file, and here’s where the AFL files come into view.

Basically an AFL file lets you give the name you want to every single file of a given AFS file. Each time you open an AFS file in GGS, the program checks the “\dat” folder to see if there’s any suitable AFL file to load the file names from (it will let you choose which one to use in case there are more than one). Don’t worry about that, the program will decide which AFL’s are “suitable” for you. GGS just uses the AFL file to read the names that will be displayed in the AFS exploring window. You can easily change any file name by making two clicks over the file you want to change, just like you would do in Windows Explorer, and the AFL file will be updated automatically. Note that the AFS file isn’t modified at all.

So the next time you want to make an “AFS map” and help the WE/PES community, please consider making an AFL file too. Export it using the “Create and export AFL file…” option from the AFS pop-up menu, share it and impress the world with your fantastic research work. People will just have to put it into the GGS “\dat” folder. Remember you can use the AFS edit box to search for file names into the AFS, and that pressing “F3” the program will continue the searching further. Simple as that.

10. What if I want to share all my WE/PES kits? Do I have to export them one by one?

No you don’t. The AFS exploring window allows you to select multiple files at a time using the Ctrl and Shift keys, just like Windows Explorer does. If more than one file is selected, GGS will ask you which folder do you want to export them to after clicking on “Export selected file(s) to…”. Also, importing files works very much the same way. You can select multiple files to import at a time using the Ctrl and Shift keys after clicking on “Import file(s) or folder(s) by name…”. In order to import over the right files, you will need to use an AFL that uses the same name for the files you want to import, otherwise the program won’t be able to find them into the AFS.

Furthermore, did you know that you can work with many files at a time in GGS (unless you want to work with an ISO)? Simply open or drag&drop them over the ISO exploring window from Windows Explorer. You can open images this way too. When opening files this way instead working directly with an ISO the files size won’t be limited by any reserved space (obviously), but note that this could force you to rebuild the AFS and the ISO when trying to import them back (obviously too).

11. What’s the “External applications” tab in the Options menu for?

It is for editing the current texture (Ctrl+G), listening to the selected ADX sound (Ctrl+P) or viewing the contents of any selected file (Ctrl+H) without having to export them and open afterwards from other programs each time. I use Paint Shop Pro, WinAmp and HEdit with excellent results, but you may use any other software you like.

12. My textures look messed. What’s up with them?

You’ve probably chosen the wrong interlace/swizzle method to view them. Try a different one and they should look better (different games may use many different interlace/swizzle methods though, so there are chances that GGS doesn’t support them).

13. Ok, my textures look better now, but it seems there are many repeated ones. Why?

They are called “mipmaps”, and basically they are one unique texture stored at different resolutions used to render the object depending on the distance to the camera. This technique consumes more memory but requires less processing power and gives better results than using just one resolution per texture. Previous WE/PES used it roughly in kits, grass and other textures, but since X360 PES6 Konami has been using it properly in Direct Draw Surface files.

GGS supports mipmap textures by allowing you to change every mipmap resolution with just one drag&drop operation over the bigger one. This becomes handy when you have up to nine mipmaps in a texture and don’t want to waste time resizing nine times or opening nine images. Furthermore, even if you’re not dealing with mipmap files, you can change any texture that is exactly ½, ¼, … size of the image that is currently showing in the main GGS window without needing to resize it. For example, if you open a 512x512 image, you will be able to drag&drop over 256x256, 128x128, 64x64, 32x32… textures directly (GGS will resize it for you).

14. What’s up with the flags? I can’t replace one of them without messing the other ones…

Like many other files, WE/PES flags use one shared color palette for every texture in the file, which means that if you try to replace one “full” texture (bitmap data + palette entries) the other ones will look color-messed (unless the new palette is the same as the old one). You could adapt the new texture to the existing palette using any image editor like Paint Shop Pro before trying to insert it or let Game Graphic Studio do it for you: if you drag & drop with the right mouse button over a shared palette texture, GGS will automatically adapt the colors of the new texture to the existing shared palette and insert only its bitmap data, so every other texture will remain the same.

15. Which games is Game Graphic Studio compatible with?

Apart from GGS files, currently Game Graphic Studio includes support for the following PS2 games (note that many textures are missing though):

Winning Eleven / Pro Evolution Soccer series (including PC/PSP/XBOX/X360 versions)

Silent Hill 4
GTA Vice City and San Andreas (-don't know if GTA3 too-)
DragonBall Z Budokai (1, 2 and 3, i think)
Saint Seiya Chapter Sanctuary
Burnout 3
F1 2005
Colin McRae 2005
Mortal Kombat Deception
Resident Evil 4

Guitar Hero 2 (only files extracted with OnReally’s Guitar Hero Explorer)
And also PS2 icon and gamesave files (X-Port and Sharkport)

16. What is a GGS file and how does it work?

In case you want to edit a game not listed in the compatibility list, you can always try the search button and let the program look for PS2 texture files (only TIM2 and PNG in current version) into any file of any game you want. It'll generate a GGS file and let you easily edit every texture found. Don’t worry about where the GGS file is or how to open/work with it, because it’s an automatic process (it’s saved into the “\dat” folder, in case you wonder). I’ve made my own tests before releasing the program and the distribution package includes three GGS files that will let you edit a few graphics of the following games:

Football Kingdom
Tekken 5
7 Sins

17. Are you planning to update Game Graphic Studio in the future?

I really don’t know. It depends on how well Konami implements the editing feature in the forthcoming WE/PES games and how much spare time I have. My first son is born J and I really don’t know if wasting such a big time in having a few licensed kits will be worth the effort. Also I don’t think PES2008 is good enough to spend so many time on it.

Oh well, getting rid of the players radar could help the development of Game Graphic Studio anyway, in case Konami keeps forcing us using it... LOL ;)