Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
38 lines (36 loc) · 3.35 KB

SzsPatching.md

File metadata and controls

38 lines (36 loc) · 3.35 KB
Raw

Templates

[Note that this is slightly outdated and not 100% accurate, still describes pretty much the szs patching process]

To keep the code simple this tool uses templates and patches to edit layouts. A template tells the program how to apply a background image to an SZS, while a layout patch can change specific properties of existing UI elements. Both are Json files.
All the default templates are hardcoded but as of V 3.0 you can place a file called ExtraTemplates.json in the same folder of the executable to load more templates.
Version 3.2 added support for layout patches, put them in the "Layouts" folder. All extra templates must be in the same file, while each layout patch is a single file, this is because an SZS can have only one template that is selected automatically but it can have multiple layout patches because the user can choose which one apply. Compatibilty is automatically checked when an SZS is loaded.
This file explains how does patching work and how to build a custom template.

Layout patching

It's easy to think that adding a background is just a matter of replacing the bg image, and it's the way we would do it if there was already a background picture, but unfortunately in most layouts there isn't, so we need to add one by ourselves. These are the steps the injector follows when creating a theme :

  1. Inject an image in the BNTX. We don't fully understand the BNTX format so we can't add a new image yet, for now we need to replace an image that's already in there
  2. Patch the layout that renders the background : this process adds an entry in the texture list for the texture we replaced, adds a new material and a new image pane for the background.
  3. Patch all the layouts that use the image we replaced to use another similar image
  4. If the user selected a custom layout patch apply it.

So our patch format must store all the information needed for this process.

The templates (also referred as patch templates)

Here we take a look at the values in the format. For reference you can download the default patches as a json from this repo (These are hardcoded, you don't need them in your own json).
First the Metadata :
FirmName, TemplateName, szsName and TitleId are the strings shown when the SZS is loaded, they're not used in the patching process
FnameIdentifier and FnameNotIdentifier are arrays of strings used to identify the loaded SZS, your patch gets selected only if the SZS contains ALL the files in FnameIdentifier and NONE of the files in FnameNotIdentifier. FnameIdentifier implicitly includes MainLayoutName and SecondaryLayouts
MainLayoutName is the name of the layout file that renders the background.
MaintextureName is the name of the texture that will be replaced.
PatchIdentifier is the name of the pane that will be added, it is used to identify the patch so it should be unique for each patch. It must be shorter than 24 chars
targetPanels is an array of strings of all the panes that should be removed from the main layout (so panes that already render the background), you need at least one because it's also used to detect where to place the new background pane.
SecondaryLayouts contains the names of the layouts that use the texture that was replaced, you can find them from the advanced tab of the program. SecondaryTexReplace is the name of the texture that will replace MaintextureName