In New in this and I need some advice.

[Angelic Gamer Gal]

Hello everyone, first I want to introduce myself, like my handle says I am a gamer Girl, I been gaming almost all my life, first console gaming, PC both regular titles and MMO and also Mobile Games.
Through out my gaming journey I have experienced great joy and also sadness specially when my favorite characters get taken away because the games shutdown (mobile and MMO's mostly) happened many times already and as crazy as it may sound it has started to take a toll on my mental health so I made up my mind and set a goal of securing all my favorite characters models so I can keep them with me even if the game is gone.

And who knows maybe eventually make my own game in which I can put them all (of course it will be a personal project, not for commercial use) and I decided to start with a game called E.T.E Chronicle.
I used an app called Cx File Explorer and looked at all the folders in there but I just can't seem to identify which files belong to the actual character models data.

Can someone please give me some pointers here ?
Like I said I'm very new in this so I've read very little about this topic, little I know is that in some cases models can be extracted directly from the game files and others need some program specific for the game engine ( Unity or Unreal) and also programs like Ninja Ripper.

In this game's case I decided to start by what seem the easiest way which is going directly to the game files but like I said I don't even know what I am looking for lol.

All help and pointers will be greatly appreciated

[RiffRaff1138]

According to what I can find, it seems ETE was made in Unity. There's probably a folder in the game's directory called "(some form of the game's name)_Data", containing a lot of .assets and/or .resS files. If that's the case, then it is indeed Unity, and you should hopefully be able to open these with some version of Asset Studio. This is the original, but more recent games' assets might not display correctly in it, or even open at all. The Zhang Jiequan version or the Plugin version might be a better bet.

If you use File>Load folder, you can navigate to the game's Data folder to load all of its assets at once. Or, if you find an archive that looks like it might contain only the character models, you can just load that one alone with File>Load file and save some time. If there's a subfolder in the Data folder called StreamingAssets, there might be an archive in there that contains just the character models. Whatever the case, once everything is loaded, click the Asset List tab, and Filter Type to meshes and textures. Character models in these games tend to be split up into multiple meshes.

If you want to export the model with animation rigging, right-click on a mesh and click "Go to scene hierarchy". This should take you back to the Scene Hierarchy tab. Click the checkbox next to that model in the scene list, and any other pieces that there may be for that character's model, and go to Model>Export selected objects (merge). This will export all of the selected pieces together as a single .fbx model. Remember to un-check them afterward before exporting another model. If you don't need it rigged, or you're fine re-rigging it yourself, you can right-click each piece and and "Export selected assets" from the Asset List as .obj models.

I don't play ETE, so I don't know what its files or data structure look like. I'm just going off of general experience with Unity games. If you can't figure your own way from here and have more questions, feel free to ask.