My last contribution to SceneGate: Texim docs

Introduction

Texim is a C# library, created by PleoNex (leader of SceneGate), to work with images. It allows developers to transform custom formats into editable bitmap formats (.png, .jpg, .tiff…) and vice versa (importing a modified image to a custom format).

This is quite used in our fan-translation projects, where we need to export the game images (which are usually compressed and obfuscated) to editable formats.

Learning curve

Being a newcomer of reverse engineering meant that I didn’t have a solid foundation. I didn’t know basic concepts as color encodings, sprites or image compressions.

This meant a lot of questioning and too much time spent on trial-and-error situations.

Getting started guide

After finishing my 2025 goals for the JUS project, I created a “getting started guide” for Texim. This tutorial will teach you the basics of the library through a practical example of a custom image format.

Check it out here.

Next steps

My next goal will be to complete the fundamental documentation of the project. A basic introduction of the key concepts and what provides Texim for them.

For example: what are Sprites, what properties they usually have and how can we transform any custom sprite format to a one or more .png files.

Our only concern is that Texim has only been tested with NDS games, not even with 3DS images. That’s why we still consider it a proof of concept and we haven’t migrated it to Yarhl (the main framework of the team). So, it’s quite possible that the documentation that I write will become useless in the future.

But well, isn’t the point of all these just having fun?