tonipm99 Posted February 12, 2014 Posted February 12, 2014 Hi people. Today I started messing around with the MenuText.cat files, and when I had it done and added the modified files on the mods folder, and started the game, it freezes after the "Initializing system... Please wait..." screen, and the hole screen goes black. Is it possible to modify such files and succeed? Thanks! Quote
MigBuster Posted February 12, 2014 Posted February 12, 2014 Not good - if you take the files out of the mod folder does the game start okay? Which files did you extract from menutext.cat? Quote
tonipm99 Posted February 12, 2014 Author Posted February 12, 2014 Well, I didn't deleted or removed any files, just used the Thirdwire extractor and then modified the copied files and finally placed them on the Mods folder. After testing with no success, I took the files out of the mods folder and the game is just fine. And I extracted all files (but those wheren't removed as I said earlier). Quote
Gatling20 Posted February 12, 2014 Posted February 12, 2014 The files in MenuText.CAT are all .STR files (except for one TXT file), so I assume it is STR files you have been editing. STR files can be easily edited using a Hex Editor, but you have to understand the structure of the file and it helps be able to add and subtract in hexadecimal. If you get a number even slightly wrong the edited file won't work, and the sim will CTD or freeze, as you have experienced. Using your hex editor, look at the start of a STR file. A simple one is ActivityLevel.STR, which only has four entries: 1A00 0000 0400 0000 5458 545F.... The 0400 is the number of entries in the file. The 1A00 (26 in ordinary decimal numbers) is the length in bytes of the text descriptions of the four entries, including a zero after each one, which you see at the end of the file (Random.Light.Normal.Heavy.). So if you change the length of any of the text descriptions (changing "Heavy" to "Massive", for example, you have to change this number: in this example from 1A (26 decimal) to 1C (28). 5458 545F is the start of the name of the first entry which the sim uses (TXT_MENU_ACTIVITY_LEVEL, in this example): 54 is T, 58 is X, 54 is T etc. Quote
tonipm99 Posted February 12, 2014 Author Posted February 12, 2014 Oh... I did edit the STR files, but with the same text editor I use for editing .ini files. I'm not really smart when it comes to knowing how to edit files, and when I opened any file, I saw the text itself so I guess I messed up everything. My bad. Anyway, thanks for the help. Quote
Gatling20 Posted February 12, 2014 Posted February 12, 2014 No harm done, that is one of the the beauties of SF/WoX - you can mess around with extracted files as much as you like, and if you screw something up all you have to do is delete the edited file and the sim reverts to using the stock file in the CAT file. Quote
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