Making Custom Skins, Sounds, and FMVs for AVP tutorial - Aliens versus Predator - Classic

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This tutorial will show you how to add your own textures and sounds to AVP Gold and Classic 2000. It will provide you with the basics you'll need to know to change the game's textures and sounds and to make your own mods. This tutorial will focus on the basics of changing NPC, HUD, or environmental textures and vocal and environmental sounds. You will need a few necessary programs that you can download for free. For textures, you will need AVP Gold Edition, which may be hard to come by.

Posted by Olde on May 13th, 2015 - Basic Players Modelling

Part 1: Skins
This section will show you how to make your own skins for both NPC and HUD models.

Preliminaries

You will need Fastfile Explorer, and Gold Tools to do this.

If you have Gold Edition, install it. If you do not have Gold Edition, locate your AVP Classic 2000 folder. For Steam users, the default location is YourDrive:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Aliens vs. Predator Classic. For GOG users, the default location is YourDrive:\GOG Games\AvP Classic. Copy your AVP Classic folder. Go to YourDrive:\Program Files (x86). Create a new folder here called Fox. Inside the Fox folder, paste your AVP Classic folder. Rename the folder to Aliens versus Predator. Go inside it. Open the "bin" folder. Copy the AvP_Classic.exe. Go one folder back and paste the .exe. Now rename it to avp.exe.

Download the Gold Tools and run the setup. It should automatically install everything to your Fox\Aliens versus Predator folder.

Download the AVP Editing Tools and find the Fastfile Explorer zip folder. Install Fastfile Explorer. Figure out what skin or texture you want to edit. Go to your Aliens versus Predator\fastfile folder and you will see many fastfiles (.ffl). These contain most of the game's texture and sound files and require Fastfile Explorer to be opened. Find the fastfile you wish to edit. The HUD texture fastfiles are Tex34.ffl (alien), Tex35.ffl (marine), and Tex36.ffl (predator). The NPC texture fastfiles are Tex49.ffl-Tex57.ffl. The other files are environmental textures or, in one case, weapon textures.

Finding and Extracting the Texture You Want to Edit

Open up the fastfile you wish to edit in Fastfile Explorer. Take a look at the image that the program displays. Because of how the game applies textures, you may have to do a bit of experimenting to see what each part of the texture file edits.

Each image file is a .RIM file. Either export the file as a .bmp (bitmap) or copy it and paste it into a visual editing program such as Photoshop or GIMP. Now you are free to edit the texture as you please. Make sure you don't change the dimensions of the image and always save it as a .bmp file.Converting Your Texture to .RIM

When you're done editing the texture, you need to convert it back to a .RIM file. Locate the Tools folder in your Fox\Aliens versus Predator folder. Find texconv.exe and run this program. Create a folder somewhere called BMPs. This is where you will be placing your .bmp files. Place your edited texure in the BMPs folder. In texconv.exe, go to Find, then New Files. Change the directory to BMPs. Select the new texture and hit OK. Route the export directory to AVP Classic's graphics folder. Now go to your Aliens versus Predator Classic\graphics folder. The .bmp file, now converted to a .RIM file, should be in there.

*NOTE* If following the above directions doesn't work for you, read the "Bible" in Gold Tools.

Adding Your Texture to the Game

Go back to your AVP Classic\fastfile folder. Find the fastfile you want to edit, copy it, and rename it to something like Tex34ORIGINAL.ffl. This will be your backup copy. Open up the other version in Fastfile Explorer. Go to Edit, Import, then import the new .RIM file you just created. Make sure that it has the same dimensions and name as the .RIM you are replacing. Because the fastfile will automatically save when you close Fastfile Explorer, it's always a good idea to keep a backup copy of the original of the fastfile you're replacing.

Make sure that your new, edited fastfile has the same name as it did before. For example, the name should look like Tex34.ffl, not Tex34Edited.ffl. Now when you play, AVP Classic will load from this different version and apply the new textures to your game.

Part 2: Sounds
This section will show you how to make your own sound mod. You will need Fastfile Explorer and Audacity, both free, to do this.

Getting Started

Install Fastfile Explorer and Audacity. After that, it's time to figure out what sound effects you want. You will need to either find some websites that have sound clips for free download or record your own. You can also use Audacity to record sounds from your PC; that's a little shortcut if you can't find an actual audio clip by itself. Since this guide will be using taunts as a particular example, here are a couple of websites for taunts: Aliens, Predator

Download the sound clips you want. It doesn't really matter what file format you download them in.

Editing Your Sound Clips in Audacity

Open up Audacity. File -> Open -> Select the sound file you wish to edit. With the default settings, you'll be able to see the wavelengths of the sound file you opened. Since you'll probably have extraneous parts before or after the part you want to have, highlight the part of the clip you wish to cut out (either click and drag or Shift+Click) and press Backspace. When you're done trimming the file, highlight all the sound. Go up to Effect, then click Amplify. If it gives you a positive number, click OK. If it gives you a negative number, click Cancel. This is to make sure the audio is at a reasonable volume in-game. Once you've amplified (or kept the same) the audio, follow these steps carefully.

At the bottom left-hand side of Audacity, you should see a figure that says "Project Rate (Hz)." Set this to 9000.
Go to File -> Export.
Select the folder you wish to save the file to.
Underneath the file name, click the drop-down menu next to "Save as Type."
Select "Other uncompressed files."
Underneath Save and Cancel, select "Options."
For Header, select WAV (Microsoft), and for Encoding, select Unsigned 8 bit PCM.
Click Save.

Adding Your Sound Clip to the Game

Okay, so now you have your sound file in the right file format and cropped to the size you want. Now we have to put it in the actual game. This is where you'll need FastFile Explorer. Follow these steps to add your sound file to the game.

Find the fastfile you need to place the sound file in by exploring them. For our example, we're changing the marine taunts, and the fastfile for marine taunts is snd45.ffl. Open up snd45.ffl in Fastfile Explorer. In the upper left-hand side of the screen, open the Npc folder and the MarineVoice subfolder. On the bottom left-hand side of the screen you will see a list of .wav files. These are the sound files for the marine's voice. The first six .wav files are the marine's taunts.

Go to Edit -> Import. Find the sound file you just edited. Rename the file to the name of the taunt you wish to replace. Import the sound file and overwrite the original file in Fastfile Explorer. Play it back in the Explorer to make sure it plays.

Now when you play as the marine, the taunt(s) should be replaced. You can follow the same instructions for any sound effect in the game, as long as you know in which fastfile the sound file is located.

Part 3: Free Skins and Sounds

I've compiled a lot of skin and sound mods for AVP99 and Gold Edition to make a Universal Skins Pack and Universal Sounds Pack. I call them "universal" because all the files are already in the format you need in order for them to work. Just place the new file you want into your fastfile folder (don't overwrite anything, but rename the original file).

Part 4: FMVs

Here's how to create your own custom FMV (which displays on a monitor during the campaign). First, find or make a video you want to be an FMV. Next, you'll need to convert it to an .avi with the dimensions 128x96. This is because of the way the game was coded; it won't work with any larger dimensions. If you don't know how to convert, I suggest getting the free program Freemake Video Converter and selecting the .Avi option, then under custom settings, manually enter the dimensions 128x96.

Once you've converted the video, you'll need to convert the video to .smk format. Get the Editing Tools and open them. Inside is a Smackerw folder. Extract the contents to wherever (but make sure you keep all contents). Inside is a smacker tool called smackerw.exe. Run it. Select your newly converted .avi with the 128x96 dimensions. Choose the Smack tab. Select the folder with the .avi, then choose the Smack option on the right-hand side of the screen. It should create a .smk version of the video.

To get your video to run in the game, you must move it to your FMVs folder. To know which video to replace, you'll have to run the Message__.smk videos with the smacker tool (or the new Rad Video Games tool, but the video when played with the new version might be somewhat scrambled). Rename the video that you're replacing or save it as a backup somewhere. Copy the newly made .smk file you just made into the FMVs folder and rename it to whatever message you're replacing. Then you're done.

Legal

This guide was written solely by me (Olde/Olde72). You can (and should!) use this guide and share it with others. However, you should not distribute it while giving authorial credit to either yourself, someone else, or to nobody at all. You may quote from it at length but please do not post the entirety as a guide on any other forum or site without my express permission. I also reserve the right to remove or modify this guide at any time and/or make it unavailable, with or without providing a reason.

If you have any comments or specific questions, please post below and I will try to respond as quickly as possible. Thanks for reading and enjoy playing!