Loading Screens

Introduction
Loading screens are images that show in-game during area transitions, and can depict anything from characters to locations. While their value is purely aestethic, they can be extracted and modified like any other file.

Modders who want to create their own areas may wish to add their own loading screens. This will be covered later on.

Tools Needed
1. JEFindRes (see Tools page for details)



Extracting and Modifying an existing loading screen
To begin, open JEFindRes (if used for the first time you will have to specify your main Jade Empire directory). In order to find every loading screen in the game, you will have to input a pattern in the "Find Resources by name" tab. The trick here is knowing that pattern. Type "ui_ls_*.txb" without the quotation marks. After a few moments, you will get a list of 54 matches (in unmodded/vanilla). The loading screens we are looking for are those displayed under the " :\...\Jade Empire\data\loadscreens.mod" location. Their file names are pretty self-explanatory and should offer a good description of what they display. Choose what you wish and proceed to extract them using the "Extract selected files" button in the top right side.

Note: Make sure to tick the "Convert TXB -> TGA" option! This will convert the raw .txb loading screen files into .tga format, which can be later edited.

You will now have a .tga which can be opened and edited with pretty much any image editor out there, such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP.

To make the game recognize the changes, simply place your modified .tga inside your Jade Empire override directory (\...\Jade Empire\Override) and the game will use it instead of the original one.

Adding new loading screens
[coming soon]