Textures with lettering

Part of the game’s English text is not strings but images: the logo, the splash screen, signs, instrument panels. To translate them, we had to find every such texture among thousands of resources, repaint the lettering and deliver it to the game without distributing whole game archives.

Search: inventory and OCR

Textures are stored as DDS inside the GSC containers of scenes and menus, which in turn live in four DAT archives (GAME, RAIDERS, TEMPLE, CRUSADE). The inventory went like this:

1. Unpack the DAT files (QuickBMS + ttgames.bms, see setup.md).
2. Find every DDS in GSC containers and standalone files: 819 files, 12,133 occurrences, 5,939 unique images (by SHA-256).
3. Recognize the text on each one: the built-in Windows OCR (Windows.Media.Ocr, English language) for 5,936 textures. For 77 candidates, a second OCR pass with upscaling; for 174, three rotations of the image (signs are sometimes rotated).
4. Review the candidates by eye and compile the list.

The result is an HTML gallery searchable by ID, path and recognized text. It is generated from the game files, so it is not stored in git; the tooling is in tools/textures/ (export_game_textures.py, ocr_texture_catalog.ps1, build_texture_catalog.py). BIK videos, fonts and text tables are not part of the inventory: they are separate resource types.

What was translated

ID	What it is	Where to see it in the game
T2525	The «Індіана Джонс» (Indiana Jones) logo	Main menu (7 TITLES_* containers)
T2526	The subtitle «Оригінальні пригоди» (The Original Adventures)	Main menu
T2743	TT Games / LucasArts splash screen	Before the main menu
T2748	The same, variant with the rating badge	Before the main menu, depending on region
T1407	Bank signs in Venice	The Last Crusade, chapter 1, facades and cutscenes
T1030	Another variant of the same signs	Intro of chapter 1 and finale of chapter 3 of The Last Crusade
T0573	Electrical instrument panel	The Last Crusade, chapter 2 “Castle Rescue”
T1941	The “ABC” board → «АБВ»	Custom character editor, the rename option
T2522	College illustration	Menu and transition illustrations (PICTURES_3_PC.GSC)

Deliberately not translated: the ESRB rating badge (an organization’s mark), demo screens and console warnings (not shown in the Steam version), a decorative poster in the airship scene and a handwritten note in Shanghai (no unambiguously legible text).

How the lettering was drawn

Every texture was exported to a PNG of the same size with transparency. The author repainted only the lettering in Affinity, without moving any other elements: the scene takes its coordinates from the GSC, so the canvas cannot be cropped or scaled. The Ukrainian layer is kept separately as assets/textures/<id>-ukrainian.png together with an .af project. There are no original DDS files in the repository.

When building the DDS:

• the size, format (DXT1/DXT5), header and all mip levels are preserved;
• 4×4 blocks the lettering does not touch are copied from the original without recompression, so the rest of the atlas stays byte-for-byte as it was;
• changed blocks are encoded by our own encoder (ua/formats/bc_color.py), and every mip level is verified by decoding it.

How textures get into the game

Before version 0.1.7 the translation required replacing whole GSC files (the package weighed 182 MB). Now the plugin substitutes the image at read time:

1. The game reads a resource from the DAT into a buffer.
2. The plugin searches the buffer for the DDS signature.
3. It compares width, height, FourCC and the number of mip levels.
4. It computes the SHA-256 of the pixels — the data after the 128-byte DDS header.
5. If the hash matches a known original, it copies the Ukrainian DDS of the same size in its place. All other bytes of the resource stay unchanged.

The hash does not cover the header because the engine modifies the DDS flags in memory without touching the image: with a whole-file hash, unchanged images were not recognized. The UAP entry key is UKRAINIAN/TEXTURES/<pixel SHA-256>.DDS, so a single entry covers every copy of the image across scenes (9 images → 21 containers).

If another mod has already changed the pixels of this texture, the hash does not match and the plugin leaves it alone. The mechanism needs the whole DDS in a single buffer; in practice that is how the engine reads it.

Checks

Check	Result
The same C++ replacement code on the original GSC files	21/21 byte-identical to the verified graphics release
Repeated replacement on an already translated buffer	bytes do not change
Pixels changed by another mod	replacement is skipped
Changed header flags with the same pixels	replacement works
Missing or corrupted UAP	the game’s functions stay original

The logo, the subtitle, the main menu and the «АБВ» board in the character editor were inspected live. The splash screen replacement is confirmed by the loading log. The Venice signs, the castle panel and the college illustration were verified byte-for-byte at the container level; a separate live look at these scenes is among the things to do during a full playthrough.

The full evidence is in the author’s research archive.