Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Armareon on September 04, 2007, 10:41:24 am
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Help ! I need to know how to mod weapons using Vp viewer . I would appreciate any help offered . Thanks.
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Just use the VP Viewer to extract the table files - browse through the contents of the VP file, find the needed table files, select them, right-click and select 'Extract to Dir' - into another directory. For example to '/yourmod/data/tables'. And then use normal text editing tools like notepad for editing the files.
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Wanderer pretty much just told all there is. You open root.vp, select tables, right click on weapons, select extract to DATA directory and edit it in notepad/microsoft word/whatever. The wiki has a page on it too! http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Weapons.tbl (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Weapons.tbl)
Good luck! It's really fun!
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Just a small warning for those using more advanced writing softwares (wordpad, ms word, etc.). Game wants the table files to be in unformatted state. So using standard text editors (notepad, notepad++, araneae, crimson edit, etc.) is the safest way.
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I've saved the table file , but when I reopen the root files to check the weapons , there seems to be no change . Could someone please tell me where I went wrong ? I extracted it to the Data Folder in my Freespace 2 folder . Thanks.
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The files in the root_fs2.vp do not change. The new files that you have edited will override them. That is assuming you have saved them to a directory within your freespace 2 install directory and selected that directory using the launchers MOD feature.
Also make sure windows (assuming you use it) shows you the real file extensions. You can check it quite easily. Go to My Computer and select 'Tools' from the top bar and from there 'Folder settings..' (or something similar.. i don't have English version of windows myself). Select 'Show' or 'View' from the new popup windows top bar and search for option named 'hide known file extensions' make sure the box in front of that line is unchecked. Either do this globally or to at least in the directories where you save the table etc. files (all freespace related directories).
In general saving modifications to the main data directory is a very, very bad thing as these may interfere with any mod you might later on try. So always place the edited files into their own, separate, mod directory. So if you have installed the freespace to C:\FreeSpace2 you would save the edited files into C:\FreeSpace2\mymod\data\tables and then select the 'mymod' using the launcher. If you would like to use mediavps with your newly created mod you should then also use the multimod feature. That is create a text file named mod.ini into the C:\FreeSpace2\mymod\ directory and make it point to the mediavps directory.
Example of mod.ini assuming you have placed the mediavps into C:\FreeSpace2\mediavps directory.
[multimod]
secondarylist = mediavps; For more information... http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/FAQ/installingmods.html
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Thanks . Allow me to clarify please . I would have to create a new folder within the Freespace 2 Files entitiled my mod , and the mod will override the previous table . Is that an accurate summary ?
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Basically, yes. The files in the mod directory will override files from the main freespace directory or from the various vp files with which they have identical names. And you would have still have to select the mod from the launcher.
It would be best to follow the similar directory structure within the mod directory as the main freespace 2 directory has. That is all effects in retail freespace are in \data\effects so all mod related new effects should go to \mymod\data\effects. Similarly all table files in retail are in \data\tables directory so table files for the mod should go to \mymod\data\tables. And as you probably have noticed the files within the VP files (which are more or less just container files) follow the exact same directory structure and the files in the mod directory will override individual files from within these files as well.
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Thank you again for your assistance .