NoMansSky:Editing NMS Textures

 

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Introduction

No Man's Sky uses the .DDS format to store its texture files and they all are located in the TEXTURES folder from the unpacked game assets. Conveniently, they are more or less organized in directories mimic the directories of MODELS folder. This way if you find a 3D model, you can quite easily find the texture and vice versa.

Format itself stores one or more textures, with or without alpha layer. This format is quite well known but still require some plug-in to be read and write by most paint programs. In this tutorial, I will explain how to display thumbnails of .DDS files in your explorer and how to edit them in Paint.net and in Photoshop.

Texture Previews

Even if .DDS is a part of DirectX, created by Microsoft, Windows doesn't support the .DDS file format preview in its explorer.
Hopefully some other company did the job and the best way so far is to use Paint.net paired with the FileTypeDDS extension.

All you have to do is :

• install paint.net
• decompress FiletypeDDS zip file
• copy-paste extracted folders into the paint.net directory to overwrite the default one
• open any folder containing some NMS .DDS file
• right click a .DDS file and choose "open with"
• Select Paint.net
• Close any texture folder

Starting from now on, opening any texture folder will disaply all the .DDS files as thumbnails !

Paint.net (by Casebolt)

Paint.net is a free Open source photo editing software that you can get here.

To open and read .DDS files, you will need this specific addon by Nick aka Dtzxporter.
Then follow the included readme file to install it. It's just a matter of copying 2 files.

Now, to edit a .DDS file :

• Open Paint.net and go to File menu\Open\and choose your .DDS file (or Ctrl+0)
• You can now edit the file as any other image format
• To save your finished .DDS, choose File Menu\Save as\Select .DDS file type as output type and hit Save (or Ctrl+Shift+S then select the .DDS type and Save)

Photoshop

Photoshop is the renown picture editing program from Adobe and all existing versions are paid ones.

Anyway, if you do have Photoshop, all you need to read/write .DDS file is the Intel Texture Works plug-in. All you have to do to install it is copying the .8bi plug-in with the other .8bi plug-ins (Often in Plug-ins\File Formats inside your Photoshop folder).

Now to edit a .DDS file :

• open Photoshop or directly the .DDS if you associated Photoshop with .DDS files
• if the texture has an alpha layer or one or several mimaps, a new window will ask which you want to import.

The alpha layer is mandatory so if you're asked about it, always check the checkbox.

For mip-maps, it will create a layer per mip-map that you will need to delete so I suggest to not import them. You can generate them at save time if you really want and if you forgot, game will work even without them.

• When you have finished to edit your texture, go to File Menu\Save As and choose Intel texture Works .DDS as the file format.
  

A new window will open with .DDS specific settings :

Save DDS window

Settings are as follow :

• Texture Type : NMS only deals with 2 of them : Color (if there's no alpha layer, for fully opaque textures) or Color + Alpha for textures with an alpha channel.
• Compression : you might always choose the first method proposed. this means BC1 Linear for textures without alpha channels and BC3 Linear for textures with alpha channel.
• Pre-compress Normal Maps Operation : could help in the only case you are editing normal maps and some of your channels are flipped. Not your common case.
• Mip-Maps : This option offers to auto generate a given number of mip-maps. If you want to generate the mip maps you discarded or deleted at opening, just choose the same amount that were initialy in the file here.

• Finaly hit OK to save your file. Your last step is to rename the file from .dds into .DDS because .dds files are not recognized by the game.

Cached Textures

If ater replacing a texture, you can't see it ingame or get weird stripes where the texture should be, it's probably because you edited one of the NMS cached textures.
Indeed to speed up some texture access, NMS stores headers and footers of some of the textures in a cache file.
But when you edited your texture, you changed its properties and header and footer of your new file don't match the ones in the cache file, resulting in corrupted display.
The cache file is named CACHE.SQS and is in the TEXTURES folder but editing it is quite complex so the easiest solution is to use a workaround.

The working solution is quite simple :

• Rename your texture, like LASER.DDS becomes LASER2.DDS.
• Find the MATERIAL.MBIN file calling the original texture file and change the name of the texture to LASER2.DDS too

Doing that way, you are calling a texture that is not listed as cached and that will appear properly in game.
It sadly also needs to edit (and release) 2 files instead of one for a new mod, but that's a minor drawback. Template:NMSPageClose