weapon modding questions

[nate kane]

couple of questions about some basic modding

1) if i go in and change english.dat and english2.dat, is there anyway to lengthen the names of the weapons? is there a maximum length of characters that weapons names can be?

2) is there an editor out there that will modify the weight of items? if not, can anyone give me some tips on how do change the directly with a hex editor?

thanks for the help!

[Zombie]

couple of questions about some basic modding

1) if i go in and change english.dat and english2.dat, is there anyway to lengthen the names of the weapons? is there a maximum length of characters that weapons names can be?

Sure, names can be as long as you want in English.dat & English2.dat. Just keep in mind that if you make a name really long some of the characters may run-on into a different field such as in the UFOPaedia entry, the buy/sell/purchasing/manufacturing and research screens.

 

2) is there an editor out there that will modify the weight of items? if not, can anyone give me some tips on how do change the directly with a hex editor?

thanks for the help!

Not really sure about editors, but you can edit offset [043] which is weight. Take a look at the OBDATA.DAT page at the X-COM wiki for more info.

 

- Zombie

[nate kane]

thanks zombie for the help.

 

ive been trying to get into changing the graphics for some of the weapons and ive run into some problems. i cant get pckview to work, so ive been using bomb blokes pck2gif, and when i run the program for bigobs, the colors are all screwed up. what can i do to fix this? also in bb's tutorial he mentions if i see green background, im using the wrong viewer. i get the green background in paint, whats the optimal editor for these files?

thanks again!

[Zombie]

PckView is a little fickle so you have to play around with it to get it to work. Though in your case, it may not be worth it anyway.

 

I don't really have that much experience with BB's image editing stuff to be honest. You might be better off sending him a PM so he can respond to you directly. NKF also has experience with BB's image utilities and he's around these parts too. Those two know more about images and X-COM image formats than anyone else.

 

- Zombie

[NKF]

My only real advice is that PCKView should only ever be used for exporting images. Its importer doesn't quite work. BB's tools are your best bet as you only need something that can import and export the images, and the tools do just that.

 

Once you've extracted the images, any image editor should do. MS-Edit, GIMP, Photoshop - use what ever image manipulation utility you're comfortable with.

 

- NKF

[Zombie]

Once you've extracted the images, any image editor should do. MS-Edit, GIMP, Photoshop - use what ever image manipulation utility you're comfortable with.

You mean MS Paint, correct? MS-Edit isn't an image manipulator, though sometimes I wish it were.

 

- Zombie

[nate kane]

thanks everyone for all the help so far. still having a problem with editing the pck files due to my inexperience. ive gotten them converted to gif using bomb blokes pck2gif utility, and ive been trying to edit them with ms paint, cause thats all i know how to use, and i dont even know much about that. in bb's manual on his tools, he says "These use transparency, so if the background appears green - You're using the wrong sort of viewer." im getting a green background, so id assume that paint is the worng viewer. does anyone know what the right viewer/editor would be? also, i have no clue how to work with transparencies, im not even sure if paint handle that. if anyone could post a crash course in working with transparencies in gif files, id really appreciate it.

thanks!

[NKF]

You mean MS Paint, correct? MS-Edit isn't an image manipulator, though sometimes I wish it were.

 

- Zombie

 

Tells you which of the two I use more!

 

I suppose it can be used as a very specialized image editor by editing them the hard way. That is, if you knew how to work the RLE format for the pck files. It can easily easily edit the raw images such as the backgrounds.

 

- NKF

[Bomb Bloke]

PCKView does not allow you to import images to the BigObs archive file. It's bugged, and stuffs up the image dimensions. I gather it works fine for the other files. Dunno, never tried it as anything other then a viewer.

 

My tools are the only ones I know of that work for that purpose. They export to/import from GIF files.

 

MS Paint can load GIF, but it doesn't handle transparency, and it tends to mangle GIF images when you go to save... for some reason (under XP, at least - might have full support under Vista for all I know. I mean, the image format's been around for over twenty years now, you'd think they'd have some grasp of it).

 

Paint.NET is free and works fine.

[Munkeylord]

is pckview the dos version or the windows program.....i cant remember but i never had an issue with the dos version of importing and exporting graphics. i found it easiest to work with a .bmp format. since all the graphics are 256 color it might be a good idea to go download a different paint software that doesnt suck. like gimp.