San Andreas "Modern" Modding Tools & Some Rant

When I search for some tutorials in Google about modding GTA San Andreas, it's mostly still uses very old tool. Usually it's Indonesian modding community that always uses old modding tools for "compatibility" reason, but in fact old tools were unstable, and of course newer one means more stable (although may need modern system). For todays blog post, I just want to tell you that there are better tools out there that you can use as replacement. Note that this blog post can be considered as rant, depending on your perspective.

First, IMG editor. This is essential tool for modifying the game models and textures. Usually, the blog post tells you to use "IMG Tool v2.0". Excuse me, there's a way better tool for this, and it's Alci's IMG Editor. Compared to IMG Tool v2.0, Alci's IMG Editor is way more superior. Having bigger windows, import/export multiple files, and most importantly, it can create new IMG file from scratch, unlike IMG Tool, where you only restricted to existing IMG file.

Second, TXD tool. This is must-have tool if you plan to modify texture files (creating your own paintjob). Usually, the blog post tells you to use "TXD Workshop", but excuse me, TXD Workshop is somewhat very limited, and last time I tired the 15 years edition, the mipmap generation is buggy. If you interested how it buggy, my image is 4096x4096, compressed to DXT1, then generate 12 levels of mipmaps. It took around 3 minutes in my i5 7th gen laptop, and the result, it fails to generate mipmap for odd-levels (3, 5, 7, ...). This result in "black shade" when the game render the texture. So let me introduce you to Magic.TXD,  modern version of TXD Workshop, easy to use, and it generates mipmap faster and not buggy of course. It also comes with localization popular among the SA modders including Indonesian.

The texture created with TXD Workshop + mipmap. Level 3, 5, 7, and 11 is buggy and game will render that to black (notice shade of black near the headlights). That's why it looks dark for some reason.

The texture create with Magic.TXD. Now everything looks nice and no more black shade.

For this one, it's not really modding tool, but I want to put it anyway. If you're script modder, then you may want to consider MoonLoader, which is "modern version" of CLEO. Do you know that CLEO scrips are actually slow compared to Lua script? or, you hate CLEO scripts and prefer writing in different language? Then you got MoonLoader. One most notable feature is the error handling. CLEO script errors? Goodbye to current game session. MoonLoader script errors? Error is logged then script execution stopped.

As a side note, if you only want to dump TXD texture to PNG or TGA, FFmpeg supports TXD file and can transcode it to supported image formats (but you can't create TXD sadly).