There's a particular asset I'm after, which is the OS-upgraded spirit dropships that were used in the map. I know that spirits were dropped in favor of a custom phantom, but I was wondering if the spirit dropship tags from that level were still around?

I know that teh lag mentioned in the silent cartographer release thread that most of the tags from 2012 a50 were backed up, and only a handful or so were lost. Are the spirit dropship tags in question part of the aforementioned group, or are the spirit tags still around and available?

Yourself

Unfortunately not. I've currently got access to over 40gb of CMT tags and other development resources, but we don't have the old Spirit model. You might have some luck decompiling the non-Opensauce version of SPV3 a50 with HEK+, but I have no clue whether that would work or not.

Rename the .yelo extension to .map and you will be able to extract the tags, except for any OS enabled shaders (possibly some other OS tag types)

This is a pretty useful tip, I used to just duplicate .yelos and change the extension to .map to check the dependencies in proton/eschaton/hek+.

You'll still be able to see non-OS types like .bitmap tags, so you can grab anything the OS extended shaders need, like a normal or specular map and then just make a new version of the OS-style shader with the data you rip from the .map extension version.

Warning, when ripping os shaders using hek+ opensauce halo might crash on mapload with the compiled shader.

uhhhhhh HEK+ can just open .yelo files directly guys.


And I probably have old tags for it somewhere, but the easiest thing to do is just rip it and redo the shaders yourself.

But the OS shaders themselves had already gotten released...

As I have mentioned before in other threads, I am aware of the fact that I can get the tags with HEK+ or other extractor tools, and I could manually re-create the shaders by using the OpenSauce real-time editor to look at the .shader_model data, since they are not preserved on extraction.

My reason asking for the source tags first, though, is because I prefer not to use tag extractors at all whenever possible. These tools, as most are aware, act funny and tend to break or corrupt certain assets: in other words, it presents a "lossy" acquisition of assets. Extracting assets tends to irk me more than the average person, and I would rather play it as safe as possible, getting things "directly from the horse's mouth," if you will. I am very "OCD" with tag assets.

I wanted to make sure no one else from the team may have had the assets in their possession first before deciding to resort to extractors. It appears that I will have to go with the latter method anyway, though, but I thank you all for taking the time to answer my question.