Welcome to Cairn: the "one app" for Red Faction modding.

Q: What is Cairn?
A: Cairn is a GUI-based editing suite for Red Faction, and supports viewing, analyzing, and tweaking most common game formats. It also supports many format conversion flows, with more to be added in the future.

Q: What is Cairn not?
A: Cairn is not a level editor, graphics editing software, or a 3d modeling/skeletal animation tool. Cairn exists to augment and complement your existing tools, not to replace them. You will definitely still need to use tools like RED, Photoshop, and Blender - what Cairn does is give you a "one stop shop" for viewing, analyzing, sorting, troubleshooting, and tweaking asset and data files for use in Red Faction.

Q: What are some feature highlights?
A: This is by no means a complete list, but:
- Create, preview, troubleshoot, and tweak ATX texture files
- Create, preview, troubleshoot, tweak, and retarget RFA animation files
- Preview and edit V3C/V3M meshes, with glTF and OBJ import/export
- Create, preview, troubleshoot, and tweak VFX animated mesh files
- Create, browse, and edit VPP packfiles, and browse Alpine Faction cache packs
- Create, edit, and troubleshoot TBL files with syntax highlighting, cross-file dependency mapping, and asset previews
- Preview, troubleshoot, analyze, and edit VF font files
- Create, preview, and edit VBM textures, and convert them to ATX
- Preview levels (RFL) and group files (RFG) in 3D, and convert levels to glTF, OBJ, V3M, or RFG group files for the level editor
- Preview and convert sounds and XM music to WAV or Ogg Vorbis, and convert images to DDS
- Preview and convert legacy and PS2 RF data files such as PEG texture packfiles, VSE and VMU sounds, V3D/VCM exporter meshes, and RFM and RFC meshes
- Browse, extract, preview, and convert Red Faction II packfiles, levels, meshes, animations, and effects
- Browse, extract, preview, and convert Red Faction for N-Gage archives, models, characters, and levels

Q: Do you have an overview of what's new in Cairn v1.2.0?
A:
Red Faction for N-Gage support (read-only, convertible)
- Open Fathammer X-Forge N-Gage game archives (.cfl) to browse, preview, extract and convert contents.
- Models and characters (.xff): preview them with their textures, and convert models to .v3m and characters to .v3c with their walk animation. Both also convert to glTF and OBJ.
- Levels (.xff): preview them in 3D with their objects, and convert them to glTF, OBJ, .v3m, or .rfg group files that build in RED. Each area becomes its own room, with doorways joining the rooms together.
- Enemies, items, weapons, vehicles, spawn points and triggers are mapped to their Red Faction counterparts.
- N-Gage textures (.pcx) are converted to .tga, and the scale (2.35 by default) can be adjusted.

Meshes & animations
- Static meshes (.v3m) can now be edited like character meshes: submesh names, materials and textures, LODs, collision spheres and prop points.
- New viewport display options: Wireframe, Edges on the mesh, and a Statistics panel (vertices, triangles, textures, bones, spheres, prop points).
- Red Faction II characters now convert as a single submesh, with a texture atlas when they use too many textures. This fixes first-person weapons, the mech suit and others showing up mostly missing in game.
- New check for a .v3c with more than one submesh, with a one-click fix that merges them, so older converted characters can be repaired.

Levels & groups
- New View menu in the 3D preview: faces, faces with edges, or edges only (wireframe), plus a Statistics panel (faces, triangles, vertices, edges, rooms/brushes, textures, objects).

Packfiles
- Alpine Faction cache packfiles (.cache) open read-only to browse, preview and extract.
- Facts and checks for N-Gage files.

Sounds
- FastTracker 2 music (.xm, any XM file, including the N-Gage songs): play it, see its details, and convert it to WAV or Ogg Vorbis.

Workflow
- Tabs no longer go out of reach: the tab strip scrolls (or wraps onto several rows), with a list of all open tabs.
- Right-click a tab to Close, Close Others, Close Tabs to the Right, or Close All.
- Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown to switch tabs.
- PCX images preview anywhere a TGA does, and convert to DDS or PNG.
- Text files in older Windows encodings now show accented letters and smart quotes correctly.

Cairn is a perpetual work-in-progress and will be improved and added to as needed to provide maximum value to RF developers and creators. If you have ideas, please drop by the Cairn thread in #workshop-projects on the RF Community Discord

More information:
- Github repo: [Link]
- Usage guide: [Link]

This file hasn't been reviewed yet. Tell us what you think!

Name	Date Added	Downloads	Quick Links
Cairn v1.2.0 (newest)	11/14/2026	1	[Download]
Cairn v1.1.0	10/28/2026	29	[Download]
Cairn v1.0.0	10/08/2026	29	[Download]

(Old revisions are provided for historical reference purposes. They may be incomplete, or have bugs or other issues.)