Custom-tailoring elements of my mod?

Couple questions here...

#1: Is it possible to have my mod start at night? I've tried a couple things, but can't seem to find exactly what creates mod starting times.

#2: Is it possible to ditch the selection of pre-made characters in the "pick character" menu option, and replace them with my own?

Sorry if I'm the millionth new guy to ask these questions, but I could use some help. Thanks.

 

Actually you may have asked two of the few questions I've never been asked! Hmmm, I wonder...very interesting questions. I have no idea on the answers, but I can look.

 

1. You can change the starting hour of your game by editing GameInit.mes, which can be found in that monster Arcanum.dat file in the mes folder.

2. To change the selection of pregenerated characters, you have to edit MainMenu.mes, which is in the Arcanum4.dat file if you are patched or in Arcanum3.dat, if unpatched, in the mes folder in both cases.

Hope this helps.

 

I'd totally be willing to muck around in the dat'ed arcanum files, but I'm sorta scared to do so, because I'm not entirely sure how to re-compress selected files that I have undatted...

 

Well, you need to get a copy of the Troika dbmaker utility, which you should be able to get from here at T-A (once DarkUnderlord gets finished renovating) or from a few other places like Dimensions of Arcanum in their Tinkerer's Workshop at: http://www.rpgplanet.com/arcanum/tinker ... erer.shtml

It might also be helpful to get a copy of Arcanun so that you can extract single files from dat files and you should be able to get it at the same place. NOTE: If it doesn't work after you install it and tells you it needs zlib.dll, just search your hard drive for that file and you will probably find a copy of it. Then copy it to the same folder where you put Arcanun and it will work fine from then on.

The reason I'm telling you about both of these is that they require different approaches. For the GameInit.mes file, you can simply extract it, edit it and place it in your Sierra/Arcanum/data/mes folder and it should work from there. No recompressing needed on that one. On the MainMenu.mes file, you will need to extract the file and edit it. Then you have to either put it back into Arcanum.dat or create a patch file. I'm not certain that a patch file will work for something like the main menu. Others will probably argue with this, but the only really effective way I have found to work with dat files in terms of creating them is to uncompress them completely and use dbmaker.exe to recreate them.

There is another utility called DATBuilder, but for some reason I can't get it to work right for me. Anything it builds, dbmaker says is corrupt and Arcanun won't open either, so it doesn't make standard dat files, plus some of the functions in it won't work for me like they should. I'm not sure if it's something about my system or the program, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of a doubt. So you could also try using that program. It does have a graphical interface, which is a big plus.

Overall, dat files just seem scary, but they aren't that mysterious once you get the tools to look at and work with them properly.