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Current news:
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17.May.2008 :: I am offering to edit the UI for your mod |
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I am offering to edit the UI for your mod. Some conditions though:
1.You must know what you want for a new UI and be able to give me instructions as to what you want changed (preferably you should have MSN/ICQ/AIM/Yahoo so you can talk to me directly)
2.You must have texture editing skills to edit the UI textures yourself and must be willing to share the edited textures with me so I can see the whole UI myself
3.You must know how to use edited UI files in your mod (i.e. how to take a UI file and put it into your mod and have the game pick up the UI file, edited textures etc from your mod
4.Your mod must be a serious mod and not a simple "lets mess with ballance" or "lets thrown in a few random units" type mod. Total conversions are accepted, as are mods that significantly replace or extend TW units
5.You must give me credit in your mod for the UI work
6.I will do my best to meet your requests but dont expect miracles. In particular, I am currently unable to add new objects to the UI or change what sort of object it is (e.g. make a movie clip where there is no movie clip currently)
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17.May.2008 :: New SDK extras version is now available |
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No, this does NOT support Kane's Wrath yet.
The only changes in this update are:
1.The tools are now compiled with Visual C++ 2008
and 2.I fixed a bunch of bugs (and missing things) in apt2xml.exe, xml2apt.exe, aptdump.exe and the apt code in cc3tools.dll that came up whilst I was doing some UI editing
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25.March.2008 :: Bad news about Kane's Wrath modding |
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I have taken a look at the Kane's Wrath game files and it looks like the mod support (including the option in the control center for mods, the -modconfig switch for the game executable and the code to read mod.manifest) is not present in the game as shipped. It may be that EA disabled this deliberatly for some reason. But more likely (given the lead time on something like KW) work on KW began before the mod support for C&C3 was finished and the relavent support was not completed for KW by ship time (i.e. coded, tested etc)
Once something further happens from EA on modding for KW (e.g. SDK) I will release an updated version of my C&C3 mod tools.
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24.March.2008 :: SDK Extras and Kane's Wrath |
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As soon as my preorder for Kane's Wrath arrives, I shall endeavor to produce an update to SDK Extras as soon as possible (with any changes required to account for changes in the game or its data files/formats). I will also be posing a guide to all the changes modding wise in the new addon (obviously once the SDK for KW comes out, I will be able to see what else is new e.g. new keywords in the XML files)
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26.February.2008 :: UI editing tutorial |
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Things you will need (all are on my download page):
Mod SDK 5.0
C&C3 UI source files
SDK prerequisites
current version of SDK Extras (with apt2xml.exe and xml2apt.exe)
This tutorial assumes you have the following skills:
Use of the command prompt
Knowledge of XML
Ability to put UI files into a mod (look at what they did with the sample mod in the SDK to see how to do that)
This tutorial will show you how to edit the main menu, move the movie clip element to the top left corner of the screen. Editing other elements can be done in the same way (if you wish to know what to look for to edit a specific element of the UI, let me know and I will tell you which UI file to edit and what to look for/change)
1.Open the C&C3 UI source files and find the mainmenu folder.
2.Extract the mainmenu.apt and mainmenu.const files into a folder. Place the apt2xml.exe, xml2apt.exe and cc3tools.dll files from SDK Extras into the same folder.
3.Open a command prompt and change to the folder containing the files
4.Type apt2xml mainmenu
5.Open the mainmenu.xml that was created.
6.Search for <sprite id="300" >
7.Once you find that, look down at frame 9 of that sprite.
See the PlaceObject tag with a name of MovieLoop. That controls the placement of the movie clip. To move the object, change the tx and ty values. For the main menu and other full-screen UI elements, the screen is treated as being 1024x768 for UI purposes.
8.Once this is done and you have made the edits you want to make, go back to the command prompt and type xml2apt mainmenu.
9.Take the mainmenu.apt that was just generated along with the mainmenu.const and other files from the cnc3ui_files.zip file (including textures etc) and put it into your mod. Then build your mod and see the UI changes take effect.
Some notes:
Do not remove or add items, just edit them. The easiest way to make an object invisible is to set the rotation matrix for the object placement tag to 0,0,0,0 (i.e. rotm00,rotm01,rotm10,rotm11 all zero). Do not edit any of the ActionScript coding. To edit the hit shape for a button (i.e. the shape of the area that the game will recognize when you press the mouse on the button), edit the vertex and triangle tags for that button.
If you want to get inside the UI files to locate a specific item, here is how to do it:
1.Find the UI element you are interested in
2.Grab the .eaf file for that UI element
3.Drag that .eaf file on top of eaf2swf.exe from SDK Extras
4.Open the resulting SWF file with a program that can read SWF files (such as Sothink SWF Decompiler)
5.Look for the object or objects you want to edit.
6.Once you find the object you wish to edit, open up the XML file for your UI element and search for the XML tag with the matching ID. Then edit the appropriate settings.
If anyone has any questions about UI editing (and I dont mean big questions like "how do I make the buttons square"), post them here or talk to me on IM and I will do my best to answer them.
Yes I know the tutorial isn't that good but I suck at writing tutorials. If someone with the needed skills as well as knowledge of Flash wants to help me write a better one, post here or talk to me on IM.
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