Snowflake Guide 2.0

here's the list of things you'll need to make your special snowflake cards:

JG2Importer/reiedit
AA2Decrypt
AA2Card Editor
Notepad++ (or something else that allows you to edit .lst files)
Personality DIY guide (not required per-se, but has pictures that will help you edit the poses on the card
[AA2][Translation][English UI and Card Personalities][v11.1][hgg] (for the english natures on cards, if you prefer the
hongfire version use that instead)

in a very short explanation, first you'll work to make the card look the way you want, then you'll use AA2 Card Editor to
put that as the face of the card



introduction:

there's 3 things that make a card a "snowflake", these are a customized background/removed borders, a customized pose, and
clothes on the face of the card (and on the actual save inside the card file). the first one is really easy to do and all it
involves is getting a background and replacing some files. the third one is even easier than that, and requires about the
same thing. (it has a catch though, i'll go into that in it's own section)

the second one however, giving a card a custom pose, is much more difficult to grasp at first, and requires replacing
several files and messing with complicated filenames and such, the bulk of this guide will be doing that.

i'll leave that explanation for last, mainly since if you're going to do it, you may as well go all the way and do all three
things together to give your card a nice pose, clothing, and background.


Preparations:

1. install all your patches and mods, all of the ones you plan to use
get the following files, depending on what you plan to do

2. look into the AA2 Data folder for:
jg2p01_00_00 (if you're going to edit poses)

3. look into the AA2 Maker Data folder for
jg2e00_00_00 (if you're going to edit poses)
jg2e01_00_00 (if you're going to edit poses) (if you're going to put clothes on the card face)
jg2e06_00_00 (if you're going to edit poses) (if you're going to modify the card background, border, and nature title)

copy them and extract using AA2Decrypt, make a backup of the ones from the Maker since you'll be modifying them extensively.


--here's a quick explanation of what each of these files contain.

-p01 contains all the poses from the game, the actual game, while e01 contains the poses used by the maker. (so as you can figure, we'll later move files between these two)

-e00 has the file that decides which pose goes with which nature.

-e01 holds the poses that are used in the maker, we'll give this file more poses

-e06 has all the card effects, meaning backgrounds, the borders, the nature that goes in the top-left corner, and for some
reason, the BG of the maker.

-lastly, e01 ALSO has two cards inside (def00 and def01), these are the girl and boy that appear by default when you open a
"new character" it's only at this moment that a character appears fully clothed, and we'll use that to put clothes in our
characters later on.

now, let's get to it.



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step 0: Make the card you want
------------------------------


this is the start. go into the editor and create a character. this will be the card on which you'll add the stuff. if you're
going to snowflake a bunch of cards i recommend making them all in advance.



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Part 1: Giving your card a custom Background and more
-----------------------------------------------------


Open the decrypted jg2e06_00_00 file, in here you'll see several files, some BMP and others TGA, grouped by their name, i'll
explain what each group is. "XX" will stand for the numbers that differentiate cards within a group

sp_04_03_XX : these are the small backgrounds in the class roster in the AA2 game, i don't recommend touching them since
they tell you the sexuality at a glance while playing, you can change them if you want though, how after i explain every
group.

sp_04_02_XX : these are the colored rectangle that appears in the card face, on the edge. you'll notice there's one more
file here than in the previous group, that's because rainbow cards have their own silver border.

sp_04_01_XX : these are the actual background of the card, 6 files again because of the five sexualities and rainbow
background

sp_04_00_XX : now here's a lot of files, these are a card's nature, you know "quiet, joyful, dignified, etc"


Now the part you care about: replacing stuff...

1- look in the folder for what you want to replace (say, a hetero card background)
2- make a file of the same type (BMP or TGA) and the same pixel size, you know, the file you want to use as a replacement
3- name it exactly the same as the file you want to replace (the above mentioned hetero BG is "sp_04_01_00" and it's a .BMP, name your replacement like that and make it the same filetype)
4- dump it in the decrypted jg2e06_00_00 folder
5- once you've replaced all the files you want to replace, reencrypt jg2e06_00_00 (you do this by grabbing the folder, and
dragging it into AA2Decrypt program)
6- drop the new jg2e06_00_00.pp back into the AA2Make Data folder

Now next time you save a card that matches the files you replaced it will have the customized stuff instead of the normal
stuff.

You can change more than just backgrounds of course, for example if you want a hetero card to have the purple border of

bisexual cards, just rename the bisexual border to replace the name of the hetero border, you can do the same with natures

to have a card that says one thing but is actually another nature. This might appear useless or annoying but is actually

important to know if you're going to give cards custom poses later on.



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Part 2: Giving your card face some clothes
------------------------------------------


Go into the game and load up your card/cards, then assign clothes to them like you would normally, i don't think i have to
explain to you how to do that right?

I'll do it anyways because i just can't trust you.


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2.1: assigning clothes to a card/character

1- click the notebook while at night in your room
2- load in a character
3- click the character, then click the uniform button at the bottom.
4- edit the character's uniforms to your heart's content (warning, whatever clothes you have put on the first tab "Uniform"
are what will appear on the card's face)
5- once you've set up all the clothes, click the single button. this will make this character wear those clothes.
6- save (MOST IMPORTANT THING HERE... BESIDES THE CLOTHES YOU KNOW)


Now, to put those clothes on the actual card face


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2.2: putting those clothes on the card Face

0. now here's an important little thing. this only works for characters that are medium size and weight, doing it on tall or small characters will give you an invisible body and no clothes. if this is the case you have two options: make the character regular size for just the face of the card (check section 3.2.4), or having to mess with the custom poses (the whole section 3)

1- open Reiedit and load the game save, click the card you just gave clothes to, and export it, keep a backup for safety.
2- name it def01 if it's a female, def00 if it's a male
3- move the card into the decrypted jg2e01_00_00 file, it will ask if you want to overwrite, do so.
4- reencrypt jg2e01_00_00 (you do this by grabbing the folder, and dragging it into AA2Decrypt program)
5- grab the newly made jg2e01_00_00.pp file, and drop it in AA2Make 's data folder, overwrite.
6- open the maker, go into character creation of the same sex as the card you just replaced, and select "new character"
7- you'll see your character pop up, fully clothed. SAVE IT IMMEDIATELY. clicking anything else will make the clothes
disappear
7.1- if you clicked somewhere else and the clothes disappeared, first of all, dumbass, second, click "new character" again,
then save

And that should be it, the card you saved will have clothes, now you can post it on 4chan without having people yell
"MINNA!" at you, thanks for helping combat shitposting.
Do note, if you had made a custom background that would apply to this card (say your card is hetero and you have a custom BG
for hetero cards in place) the card will appear with both clothes AND the custom BG



-------------------------------------------------
Part 3: Ultimate snowflaking: Adding custom poses
-------------------------------------------------


-quick intro
first, i'm going to assume you've read the previous two parts and know your way around them well enough, so i'm going to
give you a quick brief of the problems that adding custom poses cause.

first of all, it will mess the poses in the maker, this can be fixed though, but you'll need notepad++ to edit an .lst file.

second, your character height determines the camera position on the card, no way to change this. so small characters will
have the camera over their heads, while large ones will have it under their waist.

third, the nature you pick determines where the camera is from left to right, so say you make the pose of all natures one
that points a finger, saving the card as a frisky might have it aiming at you with the finger, while saving it as a joyful
has her pointing to the right

fourth, editing poses for a custom personality or append one is a chore, so you'll work only on the original 24, and later
use a program to put the face of the card onto a card with the functionality you want

fifth, because of the above two, you'll also be moving a bunch of the nature names around to have the card say what you want
on it's face.

so you can consider this section a whole sub-guide, this is gonna take several parts.


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3.1: Setting Up


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3.1.1: make a backup of the original card

1- make a back up of the card, this will be used at the end, make sure it's somewhere where you won't delete or move or
anything by mistake. and that it already has the clothes in it's data (part 2.1, then extract the card with reiedit if you hadn't already)


-------------------------
3.1.2: Get the Nature files

1- unzip "[AA2][Translation][English UI and Card Personalities]"
2- look for the file that contains the nature files here, save them somewhere else, rename them if you want so you can find
the nature you want faster
3- do the same for the append patches for cadet, caring, schemer, robo, and any nature you plan to make a card of*
4- keep them all nice and tidy in their own separate folder. i personally named mine "sp_04_00_XX NATURE" so that i don't
have to do much renaming when moving the files later.

*location of these files is the jg2p05_a21_01 folder for Cadet, jg2p05_a22_01 for Caring, and jg2p05_s04_01 for schemer, the
actual file you're looking for follows the same pattern of sp_04_00_XX as the other natures. here's a list of each number
and the nature it is.

00 = Lively
01 = Delicate
02 = Cheerful
03 = Quiet
04 = Playful
05 = Frisky
06 = Kind
07 = Joyful
08 = Ordinary
09 = Irritated
10 = Harsh
11 = Sweet
12 = Creepy
13 = Reserved
14 = Dignified
15 = Aloof
16 = Smart
17 = Genuine
18 = Mature
19 = Lazy
20 = Manly
21 = Gentle
22 = Positive
23 = Otaku
24 = Savage
25 = Cadet
26 = Caring
27 = Schemer

for the robo and other custom personalities, just dig through the files until you find the file, as said it also follows the same naming pattern

-----------------------
3.1.3: selecting a Pose

1- look at the personality DIY guide, it has a list of poses, find the pose you want your card to have, remember the number
of said pose (for male poses, go here:
http://imgur.com/DRnldtJ,8GmtcC4,bXDG1Tk,LDkVmgC,chlbl7J,ZIpAux7,F5bEJci,BKtOwf4,IeiUgEF,pY81ySZ,KuWJCW5#0 )
2- same goes for eyebrows, eye position isn't too important currently due to the variable camera i mentioned earlier
do not mess with the mouth numbers, mouth seems to glitch through a character.


------------------------------------
3.1.4: Moving the poses to the maker

1- Open the jg2p01_00_00 folder and look for the .xa files, their names start with "HAK" and "HSK"
2- replace the names so that it says "HAE" instead of "HAK", and "HSE"instead of "HSK"
3- move ALL files from jg2p01_00_00 into jg2e01_00_00, overwrite anytime it asks (yes, i mean ALL the files, every. single.
one.)
4- use AA2Decrypt to re-encrypt the jg2e01_00_00 folder
5- move the new jg2e01_00_00.pp into the maker data folder and overwrite.
6- Open the jg2e00_00_00 folder
7- open jg2e_00_01_00_00.lst with notepad++

you'll see a lot of rows of numbers, these numbers control the poses and such in the maker. you'll also see a column that is
only japanese symbols (or if your notepad can't read them, it'd be weird letters and signs instead) these are the nature
symbols, i'll use them as guide to tell you which number to edit.

8- edit the first column of numbers to the right of the symbols, change the whole row to have the number 51
9- save the file

and you're done setting up! what comes next is what you'll have to change for every snowflake we make


---------------
3.2: Snowflakes!


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3.2.1: having the pose you want appear on the maker

in the step 3.1.3 i told you to select a pose number and eyebrow number, we're going to use those now

1- open jg2e_00_01_00_00.lst with notepad++
2- look for the third row after the japanese symbol, this is the pose number. replace the whole column with the pose number
you chose (this will make that pose appear for every nature)
3- the column directly to the right is the eyebrows column, followed by the eye column, edit these if you want to change
them.
4- once done, save the notepad file, then reencrypt the jg2e00_00_00 file, and dump it in AA2Make data folder
*special note, if you had the maker opened when you did this, you'll need to go back to the window that asks if you want to
make a male or a female, until then the changes you made will not apply


---------------------------------
3.2.2: picking your favorite look

now here's the part that takes a while, picking which nature best fits the pose you want on the card, as i mentioned earlier
different things affect how the card looks, for example the first nature will have her finger pointing towards you, the
second nature will have her pointing 3/4 of the way towards the right, the third nature has her pointing fully right, and so
and so. if you want the camera to be situated above your character make your character small-sized, if you want the camera
under your char, make it tall-sized.

1- Open the original file (remember you still have the backup somewhere else, the character should already have clothes if
you're doing a full snowflake)
2- check all the natures by saving and checking the resulting card, until you find the pose and the direction you want.
3- take note of the nature your card is now


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3.2.3: Changing the nature symbol to what we want (and background if you haven't yet)

chances are, the nature on the snowflake isn't the nature on your original card, so what we're going to do is replace that
corner picture with the one of the nature we actually want. We also can take this chance to add custom backgrounds if you
hadn't yet because you were waiting to see the pose on the card you don't have to close the maker while doing this by the
way

1- open the jg2e06_00_00 folder and the folder where you saved all the nature symbols
2- in the nature symbol folder, find the nature you want your card to have.
3- rename that nature so that it matches the nature you want to replace (your card says joyful but you want it to say
frisky, you rename the frisky file to have the exact same name as the joyful file)
4- move the renamed nature into the jg2e06_00_00 folder and overwrite
5- if you haven't yet, do the custom background stuff now too.
6- once done, reencrypt and dump in AA2MAKE
7- go back to the maker, and save the character again

it should now have a custom pose, custom background aaand... is naked. the clothes data is STILL on the card however, so all
you have to do is the part two of the guide and your card will have it's clothes; if you move or replace the jg2e01_00_00
and jg2e00_00_00 files back with the originals though you'll lose the custom pose next time you save, same thing goes for
the custom background if you alter the files, this should be obvious enough by this point.


----------------------------------------
3.2.4: My card lies! make it stop lying!

congratulations! the final step! also calm down!

rignt now your snowflake card must be looking pretty swell, but if you tried loading it into the game the nature it says it
has on the card isn't the actual nature on the character. this because we just changed the appearance of it so now we're
going to have the curtains match the drapes.

1- Open AA2CardEditor
2- click open, and load the backup you made at the beginning, that i told you to save (it should have the clothes data

already)
3- click the "replace card face" button, look for the snowflake card and select it.
4- save

there, we're done, now your card has the functionality you wanted, while being fully snowflaked, now you can post it in
4chan without people yelling Minna like dumbnuts.