[XBTF] Question: Where to find equipment images?

[Cursed Ghost]

Hi all

So I'm in the process of building my self an X universe resource, since its more convenient having all that info at hand, plus it can be difficult these days to find good resources particularly for the older games in the series. here is a screen shot of one of the pages I'm working on.



however as you can see I'm missing the images for each of the pieces of equipment, now I've had a poke about inside the games files but wasn't able to find them, so what I'm wondering is does anyone know where in the game files the images for each of the bits of equipment are, and what software i need to view them?

[Cycrow]

They are not images, but videos, and they are all in the main video file.

any video editing software should be able to extract one of the frames to use as an image

[Cursed Ghost]

They are not images, but videos, and they are all in the main video file.

any video editing software should be able to extract one of the frames to use as an image

are you sure because i don't see any video files ? here is what i see when i open 01.CAT with X3 Editor 2



looking in the v folder which i assume is short for vids i see a bunch of files with a .pbd extension which seem to extract to .bod but .bod files are not videos as far as i can tell, here is what i find when i searched the .bod extension

The bod files contain 3D graphic data about spacecraft used in the game

As for the files with the .img extension if they are supposed to be compressed archives then they must be using some unknown encoding because 7 zip cant open them nor am i able to mouth them with WinCDEmu so think I'm going to need some more specific instructions here.

[Hemmingfish]

It's in the mov folder. Extracting 00044 will pull out a whole bunch of .dat files. The items are in 00001.dat, you can open it with video editing software or even just windows media player. It's just one huge video with timestamps for each thing defined in one of the t files.

Edit:
Actually it looks like you don't need to extract anything at all. The files look like they're already extracted.

[Cycrow]

yeah the .dat file is just a normal video file with a dat extension. You can simply rename it to load into a video program

[Cursed Ghost]

It's in the mov folder. Extracting 00044 will pull out a whole bunch of .dat files. The items are in 00001.dat, you can open it with video editing software or even just windows media player. It's just one huge video with timestamps for each thing defined in one of the t files.

Edit:
Actually it looks like you don't need to extract anything at all. The files look like they're already extracted.

Apparently not, I already tried looking in the mov folder and still can't find what I'm looking for, 00001.dat, 00002.dat 00003.dat opened fine in video pad but weren't what I'm looking for.

00001.dat was the video that plays when you communicate to another ship, 00002.dat seems to be the end credits, 00003.dat seems to the video that plays when you close communications as for the rest they wouldn’t open

So I tried opening the rest in VLC and

00010.dat, 00011.dat, 00012.dat, 00013.dat, 00014.dat, 00015.dat, 00020.dat, 00021.dat, 00022.dat, 00023.dat, 00024.dat, 00025.dat, 00026.dat, 00027.dat, 00028.dat, 00030.dat, 00031.dat

Appeared to be the games music,

00032.dat, 00033.dat appears to be the music that plays when the game is loading,

000144.dat appears to be various in game audio like your ships computer

000224.dat seems to be the audio for the games intro

So that covers all 24 dat files in the mov folder, so clearly what I'm looking for is somewhere else.

also just to be clear in case you missed it the page I'm currently working on is for the first game X - Beyond the Frontier not X3 Terran Conflict, I'll get to the other games in the series later once once I'm finished with the earlier ones, sorry if there is any confusion but i would have though it would of been obvious from the screen shot in my opening post.

[Cycrow]

all of the videos are in the same file, played one after the other, the wares start around 20 mins in 0001.dat

[jlehtone]

it can be difficult these days to find good resources particularly for the older games in the series

Indeed. Although, Klarix's site is nice: https://klarix.de/xbtf/en/XFrSet3.html

[Cursed Ghost]

all of the videos are in the same file, played one after the other, the wares start around 20 mins in 0001.dat

If you are talking about

C:\Program Files\EGOSOFT\X - Beyond the Frontier\mov\00001.dat

Then it's not I made a copy of the file renamed it to mpg and then played the full thing, and what I'm looking for isn’t there and just to prove the point here is a screen shot from videopad.



if you are talking about

C:\Program Files\EGOSOFT\X - Beyond the Frontier\01.DAT

then I'm unable to open it, when i try with video pad i just get an error, and when i try with VLC all i get is a blank screen no video or audio, and then after about 60 seconds play back stops even though it should be about 26 minutes in length

Indeed. Although, Klarix's site is nice: https://klarix.de/xbtf/en/XFrSet3.html

indeed https://www.hadez.org/projects/game_mod ... index.html is another useful one, i did find one other but its all in Russian

[UnknownObject]

Hello!
Kwon created an X-BTF editor, it may be helpful.

[Cursed Ghost]

Hello!
Kwon created an X-BTF editor, it may be helpful.

hi

I took a look at the X-BTF editor, but I'm having issues, do you know if there is a language setting somewhere so i can get this in English ?

[Kwon]

A question is absolutely unclear!
There on Russian only buttons of help.
All parameters in English and pictures are accessible. Where problem!

I am sorry, I use machine translation only.

[Cursed Ghost]

I was wondering if the X-BTF editor had a setting somewhere to change the language to English, since it makes the application hard to use when you don’t know what anything does.

For example



That’s what pops up when you hit the viewer button, the trouble is I can't read it, help text like that is not much use if it's not in a language I can understand, and what ever language that is, google translate doesn't seem to be able to translate it into English, hence issues.

As it happens after randomly pressing buttons for a while I noticed the XModels3DViewer appear in the X-BTF v.2.2 Editor folder which allowed me to open the games model files so I was able to take the screen shots I needed, so I'm almost finished with that page, just need to add the price information now.

[UnknownObject]

I was wondering if the X-BTF editor had a setting somewhere to change the language to English, since it makes the application hard to use when you don’t know what anything does.

For example



That’s what pops up when you hit the viewer button, the trouble is I can't read it, help text like that is not much use if it's not in a language I can understand, and what ever language that is, google translate doesn't seem to be able to translate it into English, hence issues.

As it happens after randomly pressing buttons for a while I noticed the XModels3DViewer appear in the X-BTF v.2.2 Editor folder which allowed me to open the games model files so I was able to take the screen shots I needed, so I'm almost finished with that page, just need to add the price information now.

Sorry, there is no English translation.
Try installing a Russian language pack and going to Control Panel --> Regional and Language Options --> select the Russian language for non-Unicode programs. Then take a screenshot, use an OCR tool and translate it online.

There is also a tool for encoding issues. It can transform that gibberish into a normally decoded text.

[UnknownObject]

Do you need the source code yet?
If not, I'll remove the link (by request of the author).

[dawnrunner]

Cursed Ghost, did you ever find what you were looking for? I just recently spent some time modding similar video files for the later games that contains the "images", and would be happy to help point you in the right direction.

This is the type of thing you're looking for, right?