Editing textures
The Alien: Isolation Mod Tools have the functionality to import and export textures from the game. Alien: Isolation uses a proprietary "TEX4" texture format, however most of these can be handled as DDS. The tool allows import/export of DDS textures with a variety of DDS versions supported. Some texture files do fail to convert however, and will cause issues. If you come across a broken texture file, please report it using the GitHub Issues tab. A few failures are known (and expected) such as the SDF text files; since these are not DDS images!
Early support for DDS conversion has been implemented into the toolkit, with the ability to import/export some textures as PNG available. This is not possible for all textures just yet due to format issues, however this is a work in progress!
Similarly, preview support is also now available for some textures - select a texture in the editor to see it in the preview pane on the right side!
There are a few tools recommended for use when working with textures from Alien: Isolation.
- Pico Pixel is recommended for viewing exported texture .DDS files.
- DirectXTex compiled binary is recommended for converting to/from DDS formats.
Navigate to "Content Tools" and select "Texture Import/Export". You will be presented with the texture tool, this is a decompiled view all of the game's texture archives. Changing a texture will update it across all maps in the game - as such, if you want to distribute a texture mod, you will need to package up all of the game's texture PAK and BIN files - located in the "DATA/ENV" folder.
In the tool's UI, all textures are shown in a hierarchical view on the left side of the window. Files are grouped into folders which can be expanded by pressing the "+" icon on their left hand side. Folders are represented by a folder icon, and files are represented by a file icon.
Click on a file in the left of the window to see more information about it on the right hand side, and to import/export it.
To export a texture, select it from the list and press "Export" under "File Utilities". Similarly, press "Import" to import a new file.
Some textures support PNG export/import. Select on the types dropdown in the save panel to see if this is the case for the texture you're working with! Typically the rule is that if the preview is working, you'll also have PNG support.