Cairn

A Windows workbench for Red Faction modding. Open animated textures, animations and meshes, effects, packfiles, tables, fonts, bitmaps and sounds side by side in tabs, preview them the way the game plays them, edit them, and catch what the game would get wrong before you load them. Built for Alpine Faction 1.0–1.5.

Cairn replaces ATX Workbench and RFA Workbench, and imports their settings on first run.

See the usage guide for how to do things in every module, and the reference for menus, settings, problem codes and format limits.

Formats

Format	View	Edit	Save	Create	Notes
.atx animated texture	✓	✓	✓	✓	Alpine Faction 1.4+; also from a .vbm
.rfa animation clip	✓	✓	✓	✓
.v3c character mesh	✓	✓	✓	✓	New from glTF
.v3m static mesh	✓		Copy	✓	New from glTF
.vfx effect	✓	✓	✓	✓	Older versions convert before editing
.vpp packfile	✓	✓	✓	✓
.tbl table	✓	✓	✓	✓
.vf font	✓	✓	✓
.vbm bitmap	✓	✓	✓	✓
.wav .ogg .aif sound	✓				Convert to WAV or Ogg Vorbis
.dds image	✓			✓	DDS converter (from TGA, PNG, JPG)
.tga .png .jpg image	✓
.rfl level	Details				No 3D preview
.v3d .vcm exporter mesh	✓				Convert to .v3m / .v3c
.rfm .rfc PS2 mesh	✓				Convert to .v3m / .v3c
.peg PS2 texture pack	✓				Convert to .tga (+ .atx for animations)
.vse .vmu PS2 sound	✓				Convert to WAV or Ogg Vorbis

Modules

• Animated textures (ATX): visual and text editing kept in sync, an animated preview following the game's playback rules, frames from disk or packfiles, bulk timing, and VBM import.
• Animations and meshes (RFA, V3C, V3M): engine-exact clip playback, a dope sheet, pose editing with gizmos and IK, clip tools, retargeting (single or batch), .v3c mesh editing, and glTF import/export compatible with REDUX.
• Effects (VFX): playback, an outliner, inspectors, a timeline, gizmos, vertex editing, particle preview, and creation from templates, primitives, meshes, other effects or glTF.
• Packfiles (VPP): instant opening of any packfile, previews of everything inside, add/replace/rename/remove with undo, safe saving, checks against the game's limits, a one-line Info column, and PS2 content conversion.
• Tables (TBL): an editor that knows every stock and Alpine Faction table, with live checks, completion, hover docs, go to definition, find usages, previews of referenced files and compare with stock.
• Fonts (VF): every glyph and sample text drawn as the game draws it, editing of glyphs, metrics and kerning, and PNG image sheet export/import.
• Volition bitmaps (VBM): animated preview, a frame strip with drag, drop and paste, editing with undo, frame export, and conversion to ATX.
• Sounds: waveform and playback for PC and PS2 sounds, and conversion to WAV or Ogg Vorbis.

Every module has live problem checks against what the engine actually does, most with one-click fixes. Cairn also offers per-extension file associations, light and dark themes, and crash recovery.

Requirements

Windows 10 or 11, x64. The portable build needs nothing else; the framework-dependent build needs the .NET 9 Desktop Runtime.

Cairn finds your Red Faction install through Alpine Faction's settings. Set the game folder and extra search folders under Tools › Settings….

Building

Requires the .NET 9 SDK.

dotnet build Cairn.sln -c Release
dotnet test
.\publish.ps1                      # portable single-file build -> dist\
.\publish.ps1 -FrameworkDependent  # needs the .NET 9 Desktop Runtime

Path	Contents
src/	Shared libraries and the Cairn.Shell application
modules/	One folder per module: core library, UI and tests
native/vorbis/	Prebuilt Ogg Vorbis encoder DLL; build.ps1 rebuilds it from Xiph.Org's source
tools/, samples/	Icon and sample generators, and the generated samples

Tests that need the game's files pass without them.

License and credits

MIT; see LICENSE. By Chris "Goober" Parsons. See the changelog for release notes.

Uses AvalonEdit, Tomlyn, NVorbis, BCnEncoder.NET and Xiph.Org's libvorbis and libogg; see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md. Thanks to rafalh, wardd64 and natarii for format research.