I wrote to ElgarL about an unrelated matter a few weeks ago and he indicated that he had moved on to modding Minecraft. He will be missed and I hope he decides to come back to NWN.
In the mean time, I had decided to try out an idea I've been kicking around. I'll state at the outset that it
failed but maybe someone with more experience in hex editing knows where I might have gone wrong.
Looking at the
strings from NWMain.exe, I can see that while the suffixes for weapon vfx are hardcoded (_fxacid, _fxholy, etc.), iprp_visualfx (the .2da) is not. My definition of hardcoded means the string for (whatever) is actually
contained in the nwmain.exe (or nwtoolset.exe, etc.). If it's not in the string dump, it's not hardcoded. That's a little misleading but you get the idea. For instance, the iprp_visualfx.2da isn't hardcoded by my definition but it is invoked in itempropdef.2da, whose loading is.
Anyway, thanks to AD's description it was really easy for me to understand the problem though, of course, it didn't work for me either. So I figured I'd crack open a Hex editor. I noticed the following:
The names of the suffixes that it looks for are a total of 8 bytes (
A) unless the name runs long (
B) in which case there are 4 bytes of padding between the suffix and the next entry. My idea was, if I can shorten the long suffixes, I might be able to squeeze in one extra weapons vfx suffix to search for, like so (
C):
If you look at the above you'll see I shortened _fxsonic to _fxsonc and a couple of others to get the extra space. Unfortunately, it didn't pan out like I hoped and the edited executable displayed the weapon vfx fine until it came to my shortened entries and, starting at _fxsonc, wouldn't display any suffix after that point, though _fxneg and _fxholy worked because they came before the first of my edits.
Maybe something like that is possible but I was just doing it wrong? One extra VFX is probably not going to rock the world but if the idea works, there are other things in the executable's strings I'd like to apply it to.
BTW, I saw a modification either on the NWVault or on here where someone had edited the toolset.exe (I believe) to make the combo box window wider so viewing CEP appearance names was easier. That sort of thing seems promising in lots of different ways- does anyone have a link to that? I forgot where it was posted/uploaded.
Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 03 août 2011 - 07:16 .
