Wrench Posted October 5, 2008 Posted October 5, 2008 This is a short tutorial for those people thathave never used the Cat Extrator to 'pull' files from the cats (short for 'catalog' files in the various 3rd Wire Sims. This handy little tool -and probably the single most important mod EVER created for this series- allow you to 'extract' the files you want so you can make changes in them. The cat is basiclly a large zip file of sorts; think of it as something like the Windows .cab files, where vital information and operating data is stored, readily avialble to the operating system, or in our case, the Game Engine . What's I did with mine, is after downloading and unzipping to a temp folder, is move that folder to the root of the /program files main folder. I also gave the fold a unique name, to make it easy to find. Pathway would be something like: C:/Program Files/SF Extractor Tool keeping it simple. What I don't remember, is compatability modes...looking at it just now, it seems to have NO compatability mode checked, and runs with no problems on my XP machine. Those with Vista may have other issues, so you may want to experiment. So, create a new shortcut to the 'sfp1e.exe'. You can either place it on you desktop, or as I did, in a folder on my destktop for my 3W games. Again, Vista users may have to do it slightly differently. Ok, so click on you new shortcut to open the extractor. Your main or start screen should look something like this: You'll see the "Select a Cat File" radio button. That will open the drop down. From there you navigate to you game install. For purposes of this tutuorial, we'll be using Wings Over Europe. Remember: It works the same on all of the 3rd Wire Games!! So, in our example, we're going to extract the A-4E_radar.bmp. A note to all: sometimes it isn't always apparent where a file may be stored. There are several rules of thumb: If it deals with a aircraft, vehicle, weapon it'll be in the objects cat. Decals (in most cases) are also stored here. If it deals with game operations; ie Flight or Mission parameters, those will be found in the cats in the /Flight folder If it deals with a terrain, those will be found in the various terrain cats, located in the various stock terrain folders. Again, some jumping around is sometimes necessary. It happens.. Ok...here we've located out Objects cat... Double click on the highlight cat file to open it. It may take a short time - so just let it do it's thing. When it opens you'll see the listing of all the files 'hidden' inside the Objects.cat. You'll see here that I've already scrolled down to find the "A-4E_radar.bmp" Selcet the file by clicking on it once to highlight it. Or, maybe black light it .. I don't know. But that's how you select the item to be pulled. Then, down on the lower left, you'll see the "Extract File" button. YOu just click once on that, and you'll here a musical tone, and the message "File Extracted" or words to that effect. That's it .. you can now move that radar bmp to whatver cockpit needs it. The extractor will always 'drop' the extracted file into the folder where the cat it was pulled from resides -- this is very important to remember!!!!! So, if you pull the FlightEngine.ini from the FlightData.cat, it will be in the /Flight folder. If you pull the GermanyCA_DATA.ini from the GermanyCE.cat, it'll be in the /GermanyCE terrain folder. If you pull the ZSU-24's data ini from the Objects.cat, it'll be in the /Objects folder. Got that???? AN IMPORTANT REMINDER: The Game Engine is designed to look into the seperate folders FIRST and then into the various cat files. That's why we can have multiple variants of the same aircraft, using the same data ini, and have no conflicts. The greatest thing about this system, is if you screw up an ini edit, you can simple delete and the game reverts back to the stock one, hidden in the cat files Happy Extracting! Wrench kevin stein 2 1
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