The magic of .strings.bin files, and how the relate to both the game and .txt files

[Spur]

You're a man after my heart. Keep it up - isn't that last listing just descr_regions.txt revisited, in that exact same order? Maybe move them about a bit, there and repeat and compare.

[GodsPetMonkey]

isn't that last listing just descr_regions.txt revisited, in that exact same order?

That's what I was thinking - but here's the real question - why?

And it's clearly not isolated behaviour, it does it for both the regions and for climates. Presumably it does it for others as well (more testing may be required).

Sadly, it doesn't answer the question that I set out to answer in the first place - what on earth does it take to add new provinces to the campaign. I would guess there is something new to imperial_campaign_regions_and_settlement_names.txt that we just don't know about (or the game is nice and broken).

[alpaca]

Nice. I found out about this, too (well not for the climates, I tried the same thing with the settlement names file), but since CA is going to release an unpacker soon enough I didn't bother following it further.
I think that the files are still read from the pack, the game probably references them by ID and not by name, but then again I might be wrong and they put some part of it into the exe.

[orangejulius]

the .bin file structure is also used with the Diablo 1 and 2 games...by using -direct -txt in the shortcut to the game....the game will automatically create .bin files as long as you have created the correct folder directory...example(data/global/excel/)

from here you would insert your modded text files....then when running the game...the game would automatically use your text files and overwrite the bin files.

the phrozen keep has many tutorials on this.....i have tried using some of their extraction tools,but, i am not knowledgable enough to get them to work with the pack files to extract the text/bin files

if you open the pack files with excel....along with the other garbage...you can find most of the files that are located in the pack along with their file structures

[GodsPetMonkey]

I think that the files are still read from the pack.

That's what I thought too, hence renaming the file in the pack so that it couldn't - this does work, I accidently tried to run the battle editor without changing it back and the game had a whingefess about not being able to find any regions.

Anyway, a quick sumary to show where crashes were happening (the only real way to tell them apart) -

File in Pack = Campaign starts fine
File in pack + .txt file = .bin created, game crashes when clicking on start campaign
File in Pack + .bin file = Campaign starts fine, changes have no effect though
File in pack renamed = Crash when clicking on "Grand Campaign"
File in pack renamed + .txt file = .bin created, game crashes when clicking start campaign
File in pack renamed + .bin file = Game crashes when clicking start campaign

Judging by the crash behaviour then, I would conclude that the external files will overide the pack when the .txt file is present, otherwise the pack takes precedence. However, the .bin that is generated is broken, so it's a moot point for now anyway.