Modding Support and Trails to Azure Patch 1.0.1

Hello, everyone! It’s been a few weeks since we released Azure, and in that time we’ve been gathering feedback. Having made quite a few changes behind the scenes, we’ve decided to put out a minor update. Since there isn’t too much to be said about the update, this article will be dedicated to talking in more depth about the launcher and its mods. To illustrate this, we’ve even got a simple example mod to show off how this process works. I’ll kick it over to Ribose for the remainder of the article.

So, What are Mods?

The initial goal with Trails from Zero was providing a patch that changed as little of the original game as possible, so you could both use the original assets (in Japanese), and so we could best stay within the gray area that is fan translation of an officially released Japanese PC game.

Two major things made this possible. First, we could redirect English assets to a folder called data_en, while leaving Japanese assets in place. Second, we could have our patch be a DLL that the game already looked for. DINPUT8.dll is a common one, especially for DirectX 9 games with keyboard, mouse, or controller input of this era. It’s commonly requested by a wide variety of games for DirectInput support. A little trick of Windows’s DLL search path could be used to have a specially-designed DLL load right at the game’s start by simply placing it in the same folder. Both of these features are pretty neat, and meant that all we needed was a way to deliver these files to the right places.

The launcher takes mod files, which are ZIP files renamed to .mod to avoid user confusion.

Making Mods

As has been mentioned in the past, all UI and world textures can be replaced in both Zero and Azure. Once you know the files you want to modify, the easiest way for others to install your mod is to make a ZIP file prepared as follows:

1. The files to modify, relative to the game folder.
2. A manifest.json file to tell the launcher how to display it.
3. Place both in a ZIP archive and rename it to .mod

For our example, Addaberry prepared a texture replacement for Azure’s Pom Party minigame to change the Poms to symbols to help colorblind players distinguish them.

This mod requires one texture to be replaced in Azure at the path: data/minigame/m41_0000.itp

Our DLL supports replacing all such UI textures with PNG files (or DDS files for Azure only for better performance), renamed to .itp. So after creating, converting, and naming the file appropriately, place it in the location as needed in your working directory:

At the top level, you’ll then need a manifest.json file formatted like this:

{
    "name": "zipname",
    "description": "description",
    "author": "authorname",
    "version": "#.#",
    "weight": #,
    "game": "GAME"
}

• name: Please put a similar name to that of the mod you will be making. In this case, “PomColorBlind”
• description: Text to describe what it does in words. In this case, “Symbols for differentiating Pom Party icons.”
• author: Text naming the author(s). So, “Addaberry”
• version: Text field for the version column. There isn’t really an enforcement here that it be numbers, but would be most useful to players that way. This mod is “1.0”
• weight: A number specifying where it’ll appear in the list, higher numbers are later in the list. This one doesn’t matter too much as it’ll just sort by name. It’s set to 1.
• game: Either the string “ZERO” or “AZURE”. This field is required for the mod to be recognized by the respective launcher. In this case, it’s “AZURE”

To help the launcher’s performance, I suggest creating all mods with the manifest first, by right-clicking it and creating a ZIP from it, then dragging in content:

Remember to rename the archive to .mod, and share it through your favorite social media.

The Complete Mod

In this case, we’ve provided both m41_0000.itp and m41_0000.itp.bak, for users to revert back to the original color file. While the launcher does not provide a method to uninstall custom mods that replace files, we recommend community members note this when posting mods. It would have been a whole ordeal having the launchers be as smart as something like Steam in installing/uninstalling individual changes, but alas. If all else fails, use the launcher’s “Reinstall” button and select VJ009178.part1.exe (Zero) or BG_setup.rar (Azure) to get a clean install, selecting only the Geofront mods.

Thank you all once more for joining us with Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure!

Azure 1.0.1 Changelog

To install the patch, download the installer again, extract it, and run the launcher. Please note that all past and current save files will continue to function, so long as you keep track of your savedata folder.

Patch

• [Hotfix] Fixed recognition of English movie files (was in build 1.0.0.10523).
• Fixed missing second line of text in menus for rods and bait when fishing.
• Fixed issue with transferring saves from PSP Zero.
• Fixed auto advance always having an effective delay of instant, regardless of setting.
• Added more remapping to support all 75 PS Vita -> PS4 voice ID differences. Fixes misaligned or missing voices in a small number of scenes when using PS4 or Switch additional voices.

English Files

• Fixed typos on arts and quartz notebook pages.
• Corrected numerous text errors and typos.

Launcher

• Fixed issue with launcher erroneously not patching existing installs completely, resulting in MH_ERRORs, wrong tactical bonus strings, or other strange issues.

We strongly recommend clean installs, upgrading the previous build, or upgrading the unmodified Chinese release. There have been a number of other mods, and while we tried our best to program this mod with flexibility, we just can’t account for everything.