Compressing doesn't work with Hades 2 v1

[greganderson]

tl;dr

I think something changed when Hades 2 went into full release a couple days ago because going through the process as outlined in the readme doesn't work. Details below...

Details

I started by extracting with this command:

deppth.exe ex .\Hecate.pkg

I made no changes to the images as I wanted to see if I could just go through the process. I tried packaging up with this:

deppth.exe pk -s Hecate -t Hecate_new.pkg

It fails with this error:

OSError: cannot write more than 33554432 bytes at once

When it fails with that error, I noticed the buffer it's trying to write is almost exactly 64 MB (instead of the 32 MB requirement from the error message). Just for fun I tried commenting out the check:

    # deppth/sggpio.py:467
    if len(b) > CHUNK_SIZE:
      raise OSError(f'cannot write more than {CHUNK_SIZE} bytes at once')

And it finished, but the resulting file was double the size of the original. It doesn't work with the game and deppth can't decompress it. It reports this error:

  File "C:\path\deppth\deppth\compression.py", line 181, in decompress
    return lz4.block.decompress(chunk, uncompressed_size=chunk_size).ljust(chunk_size, b'\x00')
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
_block.LZ4BlockError: Decompression failed: corrupt input or insufficient space in destination buffer. Error code: 5161997

---

At this point I'm not sure what else to do. I stepped through the code as much as I could, but I'm not an expert in this area and I'm not sure where things are going wrong. Nothing stood out as wrong, and I can only guess something changed with the Hades 2 release. With that said, I don't know where to go to see what changes they would have made that would play a part here. Any ideas on what I could try next?

[PonyWarrior]

Hello, quaerus has dropped development of deppth years ago unfortunately. He only came back briefly at the start of early access to make a release with fixes for Hades 2, which are the issues you are encountering. You can obtain this release from the modding discord's #readme-dev-h1 channel along with the texture packing script. (FYI it is bad practice to modify the base game packages, and it is instead best practice to make a mod and a custom package.)

https://discord.gg/KuMbyrN

[Fr4nsson]

As a workaround until the issue is fixed you can convert pngs to dds before packing.

Grab texconv from here
https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXTex/releases

Converting png to dds before packing
.\texconv.exe -r .\Hecate\textures\atlases\*.png -f BC7_UNORM -y -m 1 -o .\Hecate\textures\atlases

Delete the pngs, and then pack as normal, it should succeed.

[xiaoxiao921]

The maximum chunk size is still 32MB, so what you need to do is what Fr4nsson said, i've pushed some commits on the SGG-Modding fork that make the error message better and now package texconv and tell the user what to do in the case it happens. Added also an extra arg -codec bc7 for converting textures more easily

[greganderson]

Was that enough for you to successfully replace the textures? I was able to convert them with the texconv tool successfully, but the game saw data corruption and wasn't happy. I was going to post about it in the discord channel, but I haven't gotten around to putting in necessary details.

[xiaoxiao921]

This is because the game protects the integrity of those files, which we solved by making custom packages and using h2m to replace textures with them, i'll push at some point an update to h2m that remove the integrity check but just know that these mods are not distributable and using a custom package is heavily encouraged

[greganderson]

I wondered if this would be the case, but just to make sure I understand, the compression was just fine, it's just that a signature somewhere needs to be regenerated/ignored. Is that right? And it sounds like I need to make it into a proper mod instead of just packaging it up and replacing the pkg's. My thought was to see if I could just get it to work at all, then go through and do it the proper way and hopefully streamline the process into a full mod, but it sounds like I need to do the patch route from the start.

Also I tried looking around for h2m but didn't see what it was. Unless it was a mod for COD, but I assumed it wasn't that.

[xiaoxiao921]

They checksum the content folder yes, you can find the file containing the list of hash they compare against at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Hades II\Content\Packages\1080p\checksums.txt

• H2M is Hell2Modding, our mod loader for Hades 2: https://github.com/SGG-Modding/Hell2Modding/
• We support installation of mods through r2modman mod manager that you can download here https://github.com/ebkr/r2modmanPlus/releases/tag/v3.2.8
• Our fork of deppth is also under the SGG-Modding org at https://github.com/SGG-Modding/deppth
• Example mod that ship custom packages with assets: https://github.com/excellent-ae/zannc-KeepsakePort