Cracking the .sd files

**Casuir** · 03-13-2007, 23:24

That would be the cause of yer problems then, theres a timestamp problem with that file which causes a crash with battle mode.

Btw, is there enough space in the tga's for the 9 new faction icons or can they be resized?

**roy_d_merkel** · 03-14-2007, 01:09

still doing testing, but what I am doing right now is to create a whole new tga file which contains my small faction icon, and my COA.

Then I currently add that tga file to shared.sd, and strategy.sd, as well as adding new variables:

FACTION_LOGO_WALES, and
SMALL_FACTION_LOGO_WALES

into the files that reference the tga file that was added.

This way I don't have to edit any of the factory tgas, and theoretically the only limit to the number of COAs I can add is the physical limits of the number of files and variables in the .sd files.

as for resizing, I have been wanting to do tests on that, I think now that my hand isn't bothering me as much, I can actually do those tests for you

(right now I suspect that the game will resize for you, but I need to do more testing, what I was going to do was take the file that contains my COA and faction icon, and double its height and width, resizing the images to match, I'll tell you the results when I know them -- I'm hoping to know by tonight, I wanted to test if I've fixed the battle error yet).

Update: deleting descr_geography_new.txt and descr_geography_new.db appears to fix the problems with battles crashing for me...

**Lusted** · 03-14-2007, 11:22

So how would you go about making a new .tga with new faction COA and faction icons on it, and referencing it in the .sd?

**alpaca** · 03-14-2007, 15:46

Yeah, creating a new tga would also be my favourite approach if the game supports it (we could even make a generic version and call it mod_strat.tga and mod_shared.tga or maybe use the same image for both). I think maximum size is 512*512 though - or at least most of the vanilla files have that size.

@Lusted: Right now by writing a converter tool or heavy uncomfortable hex-editing.

**roy_d_merkel** · 03-14-2007, 17:27

I need to make some images for a full tutorial, but here is what I did for my wales faction in wales mod.

1. downloaded the wales coat of arms from online (wikipedia).
2. edited the coat of arms to turn the white background into a transparancy
3. saved this as wales_coa.xcf (gimps format)
4. used that file to produce: faction_symbols/wales.tga, menu/symbols/fe_buttons*/symbol*_wales.tga and menu/symbols/fe_faction_units/wales.tga
5. created a new 128x128 tga file, and put the coa of there in both big form and small form (one to represent the mini symbol, and one to represent the big symbol) -- walesCoa.tga
6. copied this tga file into c:\Programs Files\SEGA\Medieval II Total War\data\ui\southern_european\interface
7. using my code (for which I have a download link on one of my posts, I ran):

./addFileToSd shared.sd walesCoa.tga

./addFileToSd strategy.sd walesCoa.tga

./addVariableToSd shared.sd SMALL_FACTION_LOGO_WALES 3 96 119 89 127

./addVariableToSd.exe strategy.sd FACTION_LOGO_WALES 5 31 93 28 98

tell me what you think, roy.

**alpaca** · 03-14-2007, 17:51

Well I think too many console commands for the average modder

Anyways, waiting for your new version because I'm too lazy to install cygwin again.

By the way, I can confirm that our first byte seems to be a boolean flag of whether the game should use the alpha channel or not with this pic (mapping with the sign function: 0 is 0, all else is 1)

**Lusted** · 03-14-2007, 19:51

Yeah, creating a new tga would also be my favourite approach if the game supports it (we could even make a generic version and call it mod_strat.tga and mod_shared.tga or maybe use the same image for both). I think maximum size is 512*512 though - or at least most of the vanilla files have that size.

We can fit the 9 faction symbols needed(big and small) in a file that size. Having a generic one with instructions on how to edit it would be good.

Roy, i'll give that a try at some point.