Support for HCA 3.0 encoding

[DaRkProaso]

Hi i was wondering if it cound be

possible to make HCA 3.0 compatible for encoding, since it supports decoding, becaose to make a mod for a game released this year is needed

[mos9527]

From what it seems like - HCA 3.0 encoding is not too different from 2.0, which is what the encoder currently supports outputting. Take that with a grain of salt however as I'm not personally involved with the implementation yet.

I should take a look here once I have the time to.

And sidenote, IIRC Criware runtimes could take older versions of HCA without issues - you should probably double check whether it's really necessary to specifiy the version in the first place.

[DaRkProaso]

Ok so it seems not only the HCA version is different, but the acb/awb version is as well different, so even when I repack the HCAs without modifications, it doesn't reproduce any sound either

[mos9527]

ACBs are effectively large UTF tables, and the packer would actually retain as much info as it could - I think it should produce binary perfect ACBs with a load then save it without modifications.
If that's not true - can you provide the HCA in question and maybe the game name as well?

[DaRkProaso]

Game is Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, released last month, and i've attached both HCA i want to replace and the original HCA (the opening intro). the acb/awb folder is located in data/common/sound_asset and are the ones named "anime_stream" (they're are inside the encrypted CPKs. Use viola (https://github.com/skythebro/Viola/releases/tag/v1.4.2) for decrypting and extracting the files if you're gonna try it

HCA.zip

[mos9527]

Ah, I actually meant for a ACB sample. That was a typo.

The provided payload does suggest the HCA weren't encrypted - replacement should work if the ACBs can be parsed by the game's Criware properly. Please do also attach the ACBs this time - sorry for the trouble!

[DaRkProaso]

Oh ok, here's the ACB and the AWB in case you need it (is too large so here's a drive link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e8uHRKB7nlkYp-Ub77agHBS_sVRA3qzR/view?usp=sharing)

ACB.zip

[mos9527]

Seems like vgmstream wasn't able to decode the ACB soundbanks - neither can Codecs,
and there were issues that prevented the ACB from rebuilding from Codecs itself (how'd you get around that?)

4178f97 and f085e3b should allow ACB to be rebuilt, testing shows it can be loaded by Codecs itself again, though this is not validated by any means thus far.

I can't publish a new release just yet, so you'd want to install the pre-release from GitHub directly like so:

pip install -U git+https://github.com/mos9527/PyCriCodecsEx

As a bonus, this is the snippet for decoding the waveforms if you're interested.

from pprint import pformat
from PyCriCodecsEx.acb import ACB, ACBBuilder
from pathlib import Path
src = ACB('anime_stream.acb')
builder = ACBBuilder(src)
waveforms = src.get_waveforms()    
for cue in src.cues:
    print(f'* {cue.CueId:<02X} - {cue.CueName} ({cue.Length:.2f}s) (references AWB IDs {",".join(map(str,cue.Waveforms))})')
    for wav in cue.Waveforms:
        outname = Path(f"outdir/{cue.CueName}_{wav}.wav")
        outname.parent.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
        waveforms[wav].save(outname.as_posix())
        print(f' -> {outname}')
open('anime_stream_rebuild.acb', 'wb').write(builder.build())
open('anime_stream.json','w').write(pformat(src.table))

Re-encoding could be tricky as from the game encoded multiple cues into one large, streaming AWB binary blob, which Codecs doesn't support as of now. I'll let you know once there's some progress there.