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Quintessence

software and article by Ben Lincoln

Quintessence is a utility for viewing and extracting the vector quantized textures from the Dreamcast versions of Soul Reaver, including the demo.

It is very similar in purpose and functionality to the Soul Reaver PC Texture Utility I also wrote, except that it cannot replace existing textures, and obviously that it works with the textures.vq file from the Dreamcast version of the game.

Although the Dreamcast textures are 16-bit (ARGB1555, to be specific) like the PC version (I had been hoping for 32-bit), some of them (Raziel's and Kain's, for example) are much higher resolution. This makes them more useful for hobby use than the low-res PC version textures.

Instructions:

• Obtain the textures.vq file from the Dreamcast version of the game (no tutorial available yet).
• Use Quintessence to open textures.vq
• If you want to export all the textures as PNGs, go to the Export menu and choose All Texture Sets.
• If you want to view individual textures, select a set number in the drop-down box and click "Go".
• To export the individual texture you're viewing, go to the Export menu and choose Current Texture Set.

There are some very helpful troubleshooting instructions in the readme file that is included.

Most or all of the unused textures that are in the PC version are included in the Dreamcast version. There are also quite a few duplicate textures.

Like all of the software I've written, this application requires at least version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, which is available from Windows Update or the Microsoft website.

For those with an interest in writing their own software, the source code for this application is available in the Source Code Collections article.

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Quintessence	78 KiB	1.1	2012-02-12	Ben Lincoln

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
Quintessence	80 KiB	1.0	2006-07-08	Ben Lincoln

Related Articles:
Source Code Collections
Only Skin Deep
ModelEx
Soul Reaver PC Texture Utility

Last updated: 18 February 2012

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