Package Plugins and Mods
Entry posted by Josh ·
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Leadwerks 4 supports compressed and encrypted game files in ZIP format, but there are many different custom package formats different games use. The plugin system in Leadwerks 5 allows us to create importers for these different package formats so we can access content directly from commercial games you have installed on your computer. The example below shows how to load a VTF texture from the game Half-Life 2 directly from the game's install files.
First we need to load some plugins to deal with these weird file formats.
--Load VPK package loader plugin local vpkloader = LoadPlugin("Plugins/VPK.dll") --Load VTF texture loader plugin local vtfloader = LoadPlugin("Plugins/VTF.dll")
Next we will load a single VPK package directly from the Half-Life 2 install directory. If you have Steam installed somewhere other than the default path you can change the value of the STEAM_PATH variable to load the package from somewhere else.
--Steam installation path local STEAM_PATH = "C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam" --Load package (Half-Life 2 must be installed) local pkg = LoadPackage(STEAM_PATH.."/steamapps/common/Half-Life 2/hl2/hl2_textures_dir.vpk")
Now we can load content directly from the Half-Life 2 game files. Although the file specified below does not actually exist in the game folder, it will be loaded as if it was because of the VPK package we previously loaded.
--Load texture local tex = LoadTexture("materials/building_template/buildingset040a.vtf")
Here is the result when I run the program:
Now if you wanted to load all the HL2 data files when your game starts, that is easy to do too. If you place this script in the "Scripts/Start" folder all the content will be automatically made available:
local STEAM_PATH = "C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/" local HL2_PATH = STEAM_PATH.."steamapps/common/Half-Life 2/hl2/" local dir = LoadDir(HL2_PATH) local k,v LoadedPackages = {} for k,v in ipairs(dir) do local ext = Lower(ExtractExt(v)) if ext == "vpk" then local pkg = LoadPackage(v) if pkg ~= nil then table.insert(LoadedPackages, pkg) end end end
What is this good for? You can browse and view all the content in your installed games and use some assets as placeholders. Valve is pretty lenient with their IP so if your game is only published on Steam, you could probably use all the Source games textures and models. You could make a mod that replaces the original game engine but requires the game to be installed to run. It would also not be too hard to integrate these features into the new editor so that it can be used as a modding tool for different games and allow you to create new game levels.
You can get the source for this and other plugins on Github.
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