doubleshadow's X3 ModManager

The place to discuss scripting and game modifications for X³: Reunion.

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doubleshadow
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doubleshadow's X3 ModManager

Post by doubleshadow » Mon, 5. Dec 05, 16:29

X3 ModManager latest version 0.0.5 - released 14.2.2006

Download from www.doubleshadow.wz.cz

Tutorials / How-to's:

You can now find the tutorials on X3 ModManager page on X-wiki.

Old tutorials hosted on this forum:
- How to unpack your game with X3MM (if you want to do that)
- How to make a mod with X3MM

Changes
* fixed bug caused by previous "bug fix" - this time everything should work (I really hope)
* another nasty bug with file extracting (see x3mm changelog). Strangely enough, it seems that no one run across it (myself included).

Description

Updated version of X2 ModManager.
Now it will correctly rename files when compressing to catalogs and decompressing back. It will also compress only certain files. All is fully configurable.

FAQ

Q - When I start the program, I have an error saying:

Code: Select all

Error starting program:
File not found: "some file.dll"
A - You need to download and install the "C runtime and zlib1 library installation". It is available at the same download page where the X3MM is. It might be good to install it into your system directoy (windows\system32 on Win XP) as those files are used by all of my tools.
Last edited by doubleshadow on Wed, 12. Jul 06, 08:10, edited 10 times in total.

doubleshadow
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Post by doubleshadow » Mon, 5. Dec 05, 16:30

0.0.2 - First public version. I tried to remove/fix all the bugs that were in X2MM. I was too lazy to fix them back then... :wink:

Now you can fully decompress your game with just few mouse clicks. I will write tutorial how to do that for newbies.

Enjoy.

EDIT:

Here is the tutorial: How to use X3MM to unpack your game
Last edited by doubleshadow on Tue, 6. Dec 05, 17:35, edited 1 time in total.

OCASPAWN
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Post by OCASPAWN » Mon, 5. Dec 05, 18:39

:P :mrgreen: :x3: gr8 m8 thanks will get it now and play :)

Nightwind
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Post by Nightwind » Mon, 5. Dec 05, 19:34

Thanks mate, you make all of our work that much easier :thumb_up:

Can't wait to give it a whirl.

Tartarus
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Post by Tartarus » Mon, 5. Dec 05, 19:56

doubleshadow wrote:I will write tutorial how to do that for newbies.
THANK YOU!!!

I have never even laid eyes on the coding for games before, and I'm sick of waiting around for things to happen, and seeing everyone else ranting on about their success with your scripty-mod thing whatchamacallit.

My curiosity is all consuming! :P

Besides, I have reason to believe that my game is screwed up on a very fundamental level, and getting to know the code better may help me in solving this problem.

Besides... I want to make my own ships!!! :D
"It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black."
masterk wrote:Dont get too excited about getting an M2/M1 though, the races would have your babies before they sell you one.

argharg
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Post by argharg » Mon, 5. Dec 05, 21:59

woot.. great does it mean we can mix CapShip Rebalance+Cockpit Callback+Minimal HUD ?
:wink:

LightningNova
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Post by LightningNova » Mon, 5. Dec 05, 22:26

argharg wrote:woot.. great does it mean we can mix CapShip Rebalance+Cockpit Callback+Minimal HUD ?
:wink:
...and if so, can someone explain how? I tried it and while I had cockpits on fighters still, the capital ships had no weapons :shock:

Galaxy613
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Post by Galaxy613 » Mon, 5. Dec 05, 22:42

LightningNova wrote:
argharg wrote:woot.. great does it mean we can mix CapShip Rebalance+Cockpit Callback+Minimal HUD ?
:wink:
...and if so, can someone explain how? I tried it and while I had cockpits on fighters still, the capital ships had no weapons :shock:
What do you mean the capital ships have no weapons? :gruebel: Oh and if you are going to make the combined mod yourself you must be aware that if you are going to over write files you will have to ditch one part of the Capital Rebalance mod... the part that gives cap ships better/fixed power plants because that part is in the tShips file which the Cockpit Callback is mainly based on.

So to make it you must unpack in this order:
Capital Rebalance, then Cockpit Callback, then Minimal HUD.

Once you unpacked them into the same directory, just pack the folders into one mod and it *should* work...
10,000 Lightyears of awesomeness

DemaeRamen
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Post by DemaeRamen » Mon, 5. Dec 05, 22:57

That's bonkers!

I'm an ignoramus and within 5 minutes I made my own mod cocktail out of the PBE-Flak edit and the no fog 200km one.

Getting me to do that is like teaching anvils to fly. Well done!
Always welcome! Cheap and filling!

LightningNova
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Post by LightningNova » Tue, 6. Dec 05, 10:35

Galaxy613 wrote:What do you mean the capital ships have no weapons? :gruebel: Oh and if you are going to make the combined mod yourself you must be aware that if you are going to over write files you will have to ditch one part of the Capital Rebalance mod... the part that gives cap ships better/fixed power plants because that part is in the tShips file which the Cockpit Callback is mainly based on.

So to make it you must unpack in this order:
Capital Rebalance, then Cockpit Callback, then Minimal HUD.

Once you unpacked them into the same directory, just pack the folders into one mod and it *should* work...
I spawned an M1, hopped into the cockpit and it had no guns (I went to the wepaons panel and it was empty) - I am sure I did something wrong, I'll try again tonight :) To be honest, I didn't have much time to play with it yesterday.

doubleshadow
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Post by doubleshadow » Tue, 6. Dec 05, 13:23

There's a bug in the X3MM 0.0.2 :o

Yes....

And what's worse, it's a quite critical bug. Kind of. Under certain circumstances the X3MM can crash.

It will happen when you try to overwrite a compressed file in a catalog and the file which is already in the catalog doesn't contain valid time stamp (last modification date). It will also happen when you try to display infromations about such file.

I found this bug when I was playing with files in Cockpit Callback mod.

So better get the new version: http://www.doubleshadow.wz.cz/x3mm/index.php?p=download

stk
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x3ap

Post by stk » Tue, 6. Dec 05, 17:03

hi,
thx for your great tools!

is there any way you could spill the beans on the
exact file data, organization of bytes, etc to pack/unpack
the cats/dats...?

i got so far that i can do the .pck<->xml/txt conversion on single files,
but the xor 0xc8/zlib inflate/deflate does not work with the x2 cat/dat files.


tia
stk

doubleshadow
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Post by doubleshadow » Tue, 6. Dec 05, 17:33

stk wrote:hi,
thx for your great tools!

is there any way you could spill the beans on the
exact file data, organization of bytes, etc to pack/unpack
the cats/dats...?

i got so far that i can do the .pck<->xml/txt conversion on single files,
but the xor 0xc8/zlib inflate/deflate does not work with the x2 cat/dat files.


tia
stk
Then you are hell of a programmer 8)

I had to ask Stone-D to send me his files :oops:

Check your PM.

stk
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Post by stk » Tue, 6. Dec 05, 17:41

thx a bunch ;)

btw, not that good, just stumbled on your old thread with stone-d and changed a few things

Nightwind
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Post by Nightwind » Wed, 7. Dec 05, 01:15

It won't let me unpack the .dat files, infact I have't been able to do anything with the .dat files, any help?

Cheers
~Nightwind

doubleshadow
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Post by doubleshadow » Wed, 7. Dec 05, 09:37

Nightwind wrote:It won't let me unpack the .dat files, infact I have't been able to do anything with the .dat files, any help?

Cheers
~Nightwind
Before I start to explain things - have you read the help? Clicking on the Help in the top menu and selecting the Content...

I agree that "How to open a catalog" is missing from the help but I thought that clicking the big Open button might inspire you :wink:

I will tell you how to do things step by step if you want.

Nightwind
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Post by Nightwind » Wed, 7. Dec 05, 22:51

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, when infact I have spent the last month learning as much about scripting X3 and 3d modeling as I can and have only just begun learning about X3's file structure, unpacking/repacking the various files etc. So I will admit my knowledge of this is limited but I am learning. I understand you must get alot of people who don't even bother to look at the help files but I did, along with aload of other things. And the information explaining the relationship between the .cat and .dat files isn't exactly easy to find... Or atleast it wasn't for me. And information doesn't just get magically implanted in our heads unfortunately.

I think the fact that I said the .dat files and not the .cat files would have been a clue I didn't understand the relationship between them (and yes it is rather obvious now that I know, but then hindsight usually is).

It was just that people kept saying that they had unpacked the .cat and .dat files as if they had unpacked the two sets of files seperatly which was confusing.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, your work is very much appretiated.

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Burianek
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Post by Burianek » Thu, 8. Dec 05, 04:07

I'll admit to being a bit hasty in assuming people haven't read the material before asking questions as well sometimes.
Hazard of being a moderator I guess.
Try not to take that personally (I know you didn't your post was quite polite and appropriate)
The fact is, it's really hard to organize information on a forum.
For people like me, that have read every single post in every thread, it's easy for me to know which info is out there. But it's even hard for me to find occasionally. There's unfortunately no help for that.
So I'm kind of guilty of telling people to go read the material a lot, since I know it's out there. But unfortunately, even though it may be out there, it's certainly not reasonable to expect someone to read every post in the forum before asking a question :)
That's why in general, people should try to be extremely logical and organized with how they post things. Post things in the thread that already discusses the topic rather than making a new post called something like 'I have a question about xyz' when the post called 'Everything there is to know about xyz' is two posts down.
I'm kind of rambling here, but I guess what I'm saying is, people feel free to help me moderate. Feel free to tell other people where to post information if they post it in the wrong place. Feel free to tell them to post their questions in the relevant topics. Feel free to pm me if you have a good thread you think should be linked in the tutorials sticky. etc. etc.
Whew, done rambling for the moment.
"Nature's first green is gold" . . . stay golden.

doubleshadow
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Post by doubleshadow » Thu, 8. Dec 05, 09:42

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 :D
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 :D

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.

Nightwind
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Post by Nightwind » Thu, 8. Dec 05, 20:41

I thought that was the relationship between the .cat and .dat files... But confirmation is also helpful, thank you. :D

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