add pictures for demons

[pickled-dev]

This one has been gnawing at me for a couple days.

I want to make the demon entry look as it does in the game. But the central figure of the view design is the 3D Model of the demon doing it's idle animation.

This means that if I want to truly replicate the design of the in-game menu I would need a few things.

1. A 3D Renderer running in the web page
2. The model file of the demon
3. The texture file of the demon
4. The animation file of the demon

The first item is probably possible with something like Three.js. But the problems begin at item 2. Atlus uses proprietary file types for all 3 of those pieces of information. The only way to view these files in the way they are represented in-game is to use a tool written by some devoted SMT modders: https://github.com/tge-was-taken/GFD-Studio

There is an SMT modding wiki that I was able to get a some more information on these file types: https://amicitia.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page

Implementing the models with textures and animations would require me to do three things:

1. Find the damn things. I'm not spending $60 on the PC version of a game I already own 2 times over. So I would need to extract the files from one of the versions of the game that has been ripped from a PS3/PS4 disc or a Switch Cartridge.
2. Learn the structure of these files so that I could write some code that read them. Not impossible, but probably extremely difficult given my only documentation would be what the modding community has already discovered.
3. Write something that can display these in a web page by hand. Maybe there's a library that would make this step easier. But even if there was I would need to adapt it to use these unique file types.

This could easily take me dozens of hours of headaches, hairpulling, and sobbing. And, if I do this for Persona 5, I'm gonna wanna do it for every SMT with 3D models. So if the files have changed over the years, I may need to reimplement these methods to account for the changes.

So instead I could just get PNGs of the demons as they appear in game. The problem here is that there really isn't any 2D representation of these demons in a lot of the games. So any game with just 3D models, I would need to take screenshots of every demon, and cut them out of the image in PhotoShop. Which is a fairly quick process, but multiplied by 300 demons for the larger games mean a dozen hours for each game.

But that's probably what I'm going to end up doing anyway.