The .flat format is used to compose/animate sprites, effects, etc. For example in Rance 10 it’s used for the enemy sprites in battle, attack effects and so on.
It is a poorly understood format at present. All that can be done with .flat files with the current tools is CG replacement.
.flat files are stored in a .afa archive ending in “Flat.afa”, e.g. “Rance10Flat.afa”. Run the folliwing command to extract the archive to a directory named “flat”.
alice ar extract --raw -o flat Rance10Flat.afaNote that we have to pass the --raw option to prevent the ar extract command from recursively extracting the .flat files (the .flat extraction performed by ar extract does not preserve all of the information needed to rebuild the file; we want to use the flat extract command instead).
Supposing there is a .flat file named “test.flat” in the current directory, it can be extracted as follows,
alice flat extract -o test.txtex test.flatThis will create a .txtex file “test.txtex” in the current directory, along with several other files with the prefix “test.txtex.”.
The CGs extracted by flat extract are typically in .ajp format. To convert to a .ajp to a .png for editing, run the following command (substituting the file name as appropriate),
alice cg convert -t png test.txtex.0.ajpThen open the file “test.txtex” in a text editor and change the line which refers to that file to instead refer to the converted .png file (thankfully, AliceSoft games are able to read .png files so it’s not necessary to convert back to .ajp).
At this point you can edit the .png file to your liking.
To rebuild the .flat file, run the following command,
alice flat build -o test.flat test.txtexSee here for general information on how to build .afa archives.
It is also possible to use the “BATCHPACK” manifest format to automatically convert .txtex files to .flat files, rather than manually running the flat build command as described above.