Nightwind wrote:I think there has been a misunderstanding, after spending an hour looking up the information etc, i think I understand how the .cat and .dat files relate to eachother. And now i realize may question may have been a dumb one...
However your reply wasn't very helpful, as most of it was merely an insinuation that I hadn't even bothered to try
Before I start I have to tell you that when I was reading your post I confused
insinuation with
insultation. I wrote down a looong post and just before I hit
Submit I've noticed that the word is not
insultation, so I checked my dictionary to find out what it means... That's a lesson about misunderstanding between different cultures
And now i realize may question may have been a dumb one...
Yes I really thought that it's a dumb question because it was like when someone tell you that he cannot paint in PaintBrush or write in Notepad
However your reply wasn't very helpful, as most of it was merely an insinuation that I hadn't even bothered to try
Yes pheraps it was, but even if I would answered step by step how to open a catalog, it wouldn't help you with your
true qustion about relation between cat and dat files.
Your question was "I cannot open catalogs" (that's how I took it) - and I told you. If you found my reply as "not to the point" then you have to blame yourself for not asking correctly. If you wanted to know what's the relationship between cat and dat files, why didn't you asked so?
You are right that I have to reply to a lot of questions. Some of them are dumb, some are not.
I doesn't care too much whether the qustion is dumb or not, what do I care is how complicated is the answer compared to the "skill" of the poster. If the question require a complicated (and thus long) answer, I'm trying to find some less time consuming alternatives. Of course that in this case I asked you wheter you checked the manual. Call on Microsoft help line (for a fee I'll bet) and try to ask "I don't see anythiing on my monitor". The first thing they will ask you (after verifying that you have legal Windows of course...) will be if your computer is plugged into power. Finding that inapropriate? Pheraps, but that's how it works.
Some questions are not stupid at all but they are complicated to answer. You can hardly explain to someone how to add a gun to a ship in a simple answer. Mainly if I know that he is a newbie. Although I will tell him the necessary steps, it will probably not help him much, as you must have knowledge of various aspects of modding to be able to do that. I can hardly teach everyone all these things and yet have some time for my own work.
As Burianek said, it is all matter of organizing the informations. We need more tutorials about basic modding tasks. I tried to write one of them (how to unpack your game with x3mm). I will also try to write some others but I'm not the only guy here who "knows the stuff". If you think you know something, then write it down and let Burianek know so he can add it to the stickies. Then we can redirect the people to there instead to still write the same again.
EDIT:
I realized that you maybe still don't know the real relation between the cat and dat files, so I will tell you
The cat file is an index file. It only contains names of files and their size. Nothing more. That's why the cat's are so small.
The dat file is where all the data are stored. Data of all the "files" stored in the catalog are stored sequentioally one after another.
So you need both files to access the data but the cat is the "master". That's why everybody is always using terms "catalog" or "cat file", but rarely "dat file".
That's it.