08-05-2025, 09:25 AM
I've been working on a Noesis plugin for Dokapon Kingdom: Connect for a while. This is tested with the Steam version.
This should work with all player models, NPCs, enemies, equipment, items, and objects. If you find anything broken, please let me know.
The plugin works with rigged characters as well as static objects. I compared against the models from the Wii version of the game, and the weights/bones/meshes seem to be nearly identical. There are little differences here and there, like n03 (Chance) who now has a t-pose.
The plugin also loads vertex colors and the 2nd UV map, if present. To view vertex colors in Noesis, you may need to look in Tools, Data Viewer, then under Persistent Settings: Other, make sure vertex colors are enabled. For any models with uniform vertex colors where the alpha is not 1, the debug log will print out the transparency there for you. It seems this might be used sometimes as the transparency amount for the mesh.
The 2nd UV map appears to be junk in many cases. As a fair warning, the 2nd UV map for some enemies in particular may cause Noesis to stall or crash if you click on UV2 in the Data Viewer. UV2 in some cases may contain larger values than what Noesis expects. As far as I can tell the data is correct but it seems to be leftover junk data for many characters.
User options:
Several toggle options are near the top of the script. Most of these are just for testing purposes, but ENABLE_UV1 and ENABLE_UV2 might be useful to people who only want to load and export one UV map. If you set ENABLE_UV1 to False and ENABLE_UV2 to True, for example, you can export to dae and obj with just the 2nd UV map in the first slot. Sometimes importers and exporters have limited support for multiple UV maps, so I thought that might be useful. If you export as dae and obj for submissions (make sure to use "Flip UV's"), you can just edit the texture paths in Notepad++.
Textures:
The plugin does not currently load textures automatically for you, but I might look into that in the future. Main textures are stored within the .model file and are .pvr textures. You can find each texture in the file using a hex editor by looking for PVR. One texture ends where the next PVR begins, and the last PVR texture ends when you find TEXT, which is the beginning of the next section in the data. Anyway if you slice the PVR textures out of the .model file and save them as .pvr, you can use PVRTexTool to convert them to .png. I included a .bat file which you can place in the same folder with PVRTexToolCLI to batch convert multiple .pvr textures at once. Additional textures for facial expressions and alt colors are stored in separate .pim and .pil files. These are containers which just hold more .pvr textures. You can convert them the same way. There are some existing texture tools I believe on github and in the Dokapon modding discord, which might also be useful.
Environments: (only partial support, currently)
Some models in the dataField folder are working, but not all. I was not focused on environments while working on this plugin, but if anyone would like to explore that further, please feel free to use what I have as a starting point. Most of the _N models seem to be working, at least, which are the main models for inside towns and building interiors. These are mostly all static models, with variable stride depending on multiple UV maps and vertex colors. Support is probably almost there already, with some edits to the automatic stride detection.
Finally, the extension .model might be common in some other games, so if you're already using a plugin that looks for .model, you may need to remove that plugin before using this one, or change the line in the script near the top where it says handle = ... ".model" to something else, like .model2 (and rename your raw file extensions accordingly). If you do anything like that, just make sure you're working with copies of your files and not editing the original ones in your Steam folder. For reference, I was using Noesis version 4.452 while working on this, and the only .model conflict was another plugin I had added manually for another game.
I'm not sure if I will continue working on this or not, but it's here if anyone wants to do anything with it.
To-do:
- load animations from .motion files (for now, you can use the animations from the Wii version, even drag them into the Noesis preview with these models)
- load mesh names, if any available
- load textures
This should work with all player models, NPCs, enemies, equipment, items, and objects. If you find anything broken, please let me know.
The plugin works with rigged characters as well as static objects. I compared against the models from the Wii version of the game, and the weights/bones/meshes seem to be nearly identical. There are little differences here and there, like n03 (Chance) who now has a t-pose.
The plugin also loads vertex colors and the 2nd UV map, if present. To view vertex colors in Noesis, you may need to look in Tools, Data Viewer, then under Persistent Settings: Other, make sure vertex colors are enabled. For any models with uniform vertex colors where the alpha is not 1, the debug log will print out the transparency there for you. It seems this might be used sometimes as the transparency amount for the mesh.
The 2nd UV map appears to be junk in many cases. As a fair warning, the 2nd UV map for some enemies in particular may cause Noesis to stall or crash if you click on UV2 in the Data Viewer. UV2 in some cases may contain larger values than what Noesis expects. As far as I can tell the data is correct but it seems to be leftover junk data for many characters.
User options:
Several toggle options are near the top of the script. Most of these are just for testing purposes, but ENABLE_UV1 and ENABLE_UV2 might be useful to people who only want to load and export one UV map. If you set ENABLE_UV1 to False and ENABLE_UV2 to True, for example, you can export to dae and obj with just the 2nd UV map in the first slot. Sometimes importers and exporters have limited support for multiple UV maps, so I thought that might be useful. If you export as dae and obj for submissions (make sure to use "Flip UV's"), you can just edit the texture paths in Notepad++.
Textures:
The plugin does not currently load textures automatically for you, but I might look into that in the future. Main textures are stored within the .model file and are .pvr textures. You can find each texture in the file using a hex editor by looking for PVR. One texture ends where the next PVR begins, and the last PVR texture ends when you find TEXT, which is the beginning of the next section in the data. Anyway if you slice the PVR textures out of the .model file and save them as .pvr, you can use PVRTexTool to convert them to .png. I included a .bat file which you can place in the same folder with PVRTexToolCLI to batch convert multiple .pvr textures at once. Additional textures for facial expressions and alt colors are stored in separate .pim and .pil files. These are containers which just hold more .pvr textures. You can convert them the same way. There are some existing texture tools I believe on github and in the Dokapon modding discord, which might also be useful.
Environments: (only partial support, currently)
Some models in the dataField folder are working, but not all. I was not focused on environments while working on this plugin, but if anyone would like to explore that further, please feel free to use what I have as a starting point. Most of the _N models seem to be working, at least, which are the main models for inside towns and building interiors. These are mostly all static models, with variable stride depending on multiple UV maps and vertex colors. Support is probably almost there already, with some edits to the automatic stride detection.
Finally, the extension .model might be common in some other games, so if you're already using a plugin that looks for .model, you may need to remove that plugin before using this one, or change the line in the script near the top where it says handle = ... ".model" to something else, like .model2 (and rename your raw file extensions accordingly). If you do anything like that, just make sure you're working with copies of your files and not editing the original ones in your Steam folder. For reference, I was using Noesis version 4.452 while working on this, and the only .model conflict was another plugin I had added manually for another game.
I'm not sure if I will continue working on this or not, but it's here if anyone wants to do anything with it.
To-do:
- load animations from .motion files (for now, you can use the animations from the Wii version, even drag them into the Noesis preview with these models)
- load mesh names, if any available
- load textures