Kotor Tool - v1.0.2210.16738 (2006-1-19 12:38)

[Fred Tetra]

It may be possible to add columns, but would Kotor know what to do with them? Can you give me an example of where this would be used?

[Drakron]

I belive so.

As I pointed out before, robes and armor look for Model and Tex for what meshes to use and what texture to apply to that mesh.

[Ellderon]

Not to mention the featgain and powergain, which is essential for creating new classes...

With columns we might go a big step further...

[Shimaon]

Originally posted by Fred Tetra
As for copying and pasting rows, do you mostly need to paste one row's values over another existing one's or do you want to make a copy of it into a new row. I could code both, but picking one would get you the feature sooner

Er, both?
I honestly don't know. Both are equally useful to me, heh.

Shimaon

[Fred Tetra]

A couple of things:

1. Please don't post the entire stack trace to the forums; it wastes space and doesn't mean much of anything to most people reading it. In fact, only the Exception Text section is useful. If you have errors like this, send me that text via email or PM. You may consider deleting your post to keep the thread clean.

2. I reposted the latest version. The one you downloaded did have that problem, which has been fixed.

3. As a bonus, taking a cue from something gameunlimited said in another post, you can now open/view ERF files located in your modules directory. Another minor bonus is that you can now have more than one hex editor open at a time. Not everyone might find it handy, but, hey, if you can, why not?

Fred

[gameunlimited]

first of all, thanks for the great tool!

I have a question regarding this new version though. you said "you can now open/view ERF files located in your modules directory". I tried to do that but it can't seem to work for me. What I mean by it doesnt work is that the file does not expand to list the files inside it like. Am I doing something wrong?

[Fred Tetra]

I thought I had it working correctly, but it was only detecting ERF files with a .erf extension in the Modules directory. Module files which have an extension of .mod and are ERFs inside are now properly detected. I tested it by copying the lastbattle.mod file into the Modules directory and it does show up and its contents can be viewed correctly. Sorry for the hassle.

Fred

[gameunlimited]

oh, i think i did it wrong last time. I was opening it not under the ERFs but under the category RIMs --> Modules. It works perfectly if i open it under the new module category that you put under the ERF . thanks again!

now i have a suggestion for the next version of kotor tool, if you are making it that is. if possible, i would love to see a feature that allows you to combine files into a mod, rim, and/or erf file.

*feels guilty for asking too much from fred*

[gameunlimited]

hmm... this might be just the case in my comp, or only with this specific file, but i get the "arithmetic operation resulted in an overflow" message (i think this is a the windows xp error message). this happens only when i try to open the Survival Battle mod file (if you want to try it, it is in my website). kotor tools work perfectly for the other mod files such as the lastbattle mod file. i thought you might want to know about this.

[Fred Tetra]

Originally posted by gameunlimited
hmm... this might be just the case in my comp, or only with this specific file, but i get the "arithmetic operation resulted in an overflow" message (i think this is a the windows xp error message). this happens only when i try to open the Survival Battle mod file (if you want to try it, it is in my website). kotor tools work perfectly for the other mod files such as the lastbattle mod file. i thought you might want to know about this.

The problem is your file. There is a resource that has it's resource type id set to an illegal value (-1) when it should be 3003 (0x0bbb), as it is a PTH (Path info) resource. I have a fixed version of the file, if you need it, though it would seem that KotOR must not be using that ID, if the mod works. Depends on if the intended paths are working.

[gameunlimited]

Yup, you are right. It turned out that the ERF editor that I used to compile the mod file does not recognize the pth file, thus tagging it as unknown instead. Had to edit the ERF editor resources type itself, now it is working great. The file is readable using your tool now

[Fred Tetra]

New version of Kotor Tool released - v1.0.1502.18035 (2004-2-12 9:53 am EST)

See first post for details...

[gameunlimited]

Very nice !!!!

Thanks for adding the ERF Builder support!! Really appreciated.

[Fred Tetra]

Ask and ye shall receive...

Assuming I can and want to do it

[Fred Tetra]

FYI - There's a bug in the internal GFF parser that prevents some data from begin displayed. This bug has been fixed for the next release.

Also, for those who are programming-minded, I have further developed the class that handles GFFs so that I can now access the elements of the file in an object oriented fashion. For example, to get at a file's 2nd Room's Environmental Audio setting, I can do things like:

audio = gff.GetNodeValue("Rooms(2).EnvAudio")

and

gff.SetNodeValue("Rooms(2).EnvAudio", 77)

This internal access abstraction will make it far easier to write GUI based editors for GFFs than worrying about byte offsets and pointers.

Currently I am working on the portion of the code that builds a GFF from the internal data representation of the (potentially modified) file. Once this is complete, GUI editors are next.

Fred

[Sunslayer]

Do you think it would be much trouble to add in a model and animation viewer? That would be really useful for viewing textures without launching the game again.... I guess you'd have to figure out the different between a NWN MDL file and a KOTOR MDL file, which would probably make the rest easy.

[gameunlimited]

I have some features suggestions for future versions:

1. Search function for the 2da editor

2. Conversation editor. It is the .dlg file. I understand that we can open the file using the GFF editor, but what I mean is an editor that will display the conversation sort of like tree with branches, just like how NWN does it. Also, if possible, it should look up the dialog text itself from the dialog.tlk file.

Sorry to bother you again by asking for more feature, just ignore it if you do not have the time, if it is impossible to do, or even simply do not want. Just a suggestion, thanks

[Fred Tetra]

Originally posted by chay80
The newest version (released on 2/12) won't work at all now.

When I click on the kotor_tool exe, the program will not start even though I see the program on the task bar. Clicking on the taskbar results in nothing.

The only thing changed in my system from earlier when the older version was working is I reinstalled a DVD player prog. When I d/l'd the new version it overwrote the previous one, also.

Version 1.0.1490.35 does work currently but 1.0.1502.18035 does not.

Thanks for all the time and effort you put into this toolset.

1. move your settings.xml file someplace else (if you care about it) other than the Kotor Tool directory

2. run Kotor Tool ; does it tell you that it has attempted to figure out your paths for you?

If you (or anyone else) needs a prior version, I keep and archive of them. Just send an email to the address in the readme.txt file.

[Fred Tetra]

Originally posted by Sunslayer
Do you think it would be much trouble to add in a model and animation viewer? That would be really useful for viewing textures without launching the game again.... I guess you'd have to figure out the different between a NWN MDL file and a KOTOR MDL file, which would probably make the rest easy.

Yes. Much trouble. Both you and Bneezy need to peruse the other threads so you'll believe me and others when we say "it isn't easy" I understand that not everyone is a programmer or 3D modeler, but realize that things such as 3D models are quite complex in their format. As such, it isn't as easy as opening a save game file in a hex editor and looking for a byte pattern that looks has the same values as the amount of credits you have or your Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, etc. and adjusting them until you're sure what they do. When it comes to models that include skeletal structures and up to 160 different action animations, you're lucky if changing a few bytes here and there doesn't simply cause the program to not run. At best, the model will just look totally funky in them game.

Please don't think I'm ragging on you; I just hope to dispel notions like "well, it has .mdl on the end, so it must be the same format" that I've seen others have (erroneously). As soon as someone (or some team) figures out the format of these files, we can start down the road to develop tools to manipulate them.

Fred

[Fred Tetra]

Originally posted by gameunlimited
I have some features suggestions for future versions:

1. Search function for the 2da editor

2. Conversation editor. It is the .dlg file. I understand that we can open the file using the GFF editor, but what I mean is an editor that will display the conversation sort of like tree with branches, just like how NWN does it. Also, if possible, it should look up the dialog text itself from the dialog.tlk file.

Sorry to bother you again by asking for more feature, just ignore it if you do not have the time, if it is impossible to do, or even simply do not want. Just a suggestion, thanks

It's never a bother to hear what folks would like to have in Kotor Tool.

Re:
#1 - I'll put it on the to-do list. Do you want it to highlight the cells as each succesive find is done, like in a text editor, or do you have something else in mind?

#2 - Since it is a GFF file and I am working on the GFF (re)writer portion of the GFF class in Kotor Tool, I'm not that far away from being able to write editors for various "flavors" of GFF-based files. Area (.ARE) files have the most votes so far, however.

[Weiser_Cain]

Oh' if you're taking request, I'd like a item creation function that creates items from existing items without overwriting the original.
And a way to give and equip the item on npc's and in shops.

[gameunlimited]

Originally posted by Fred Tetra
It's never a bother to hear what folks would like to have in Kotor Tool.

Re:
#1 - I'll put it on the to-do list. Do you want it to highlight the cells as each succesive find is done, like in a text editor, or do you have something else in mind?

Just like text editor is good.

Originally posted by Fred Tetra
It's never a bother to hear what folks would like to have in Kotor Tool.

Re:

#2 - Since it is a GFF file and I am working on the GFF (re)writer portion of the GFF class in Kotor Tool, I'm not that far away from being able to write editors for various "flavors" of GFF-based files. Area (.ARE) files have the most votes so far, however.

Glad to hear that I might be able to help with the format of those various "flavors" if you happen to need it.

Edit: NVM about helping with the format. I just looked up the bioware site and it has full documentation of it, heh

[Shimaon]

Hey Fred, sorry to bother ya, but do you think you could give us a list of features you're working on and features you plan to work on?

Shimaon

[Sunslayer]

How about a find option in the main window? Just like you get in a text editor. And if it's not in the 2DA editor, how about there, too?

[T7nowhere]

Hey Fred, I have a suggestion for a future version of Kotor tool.
I find when Im useing Kotor tool sometimes It can take a while to scan through all the different files and file type's. So I often will load NWN Explorer to find out where an elusive file is. I would prefer to use your program than to have them both open ,also some of KotOR's files will crash NWN explorer.

Suggestion: Is for there to be subtrees that orginize the Games file types into there respective Catagorys. Useing a similar method as NWN explorer. This feature would greatly enhance the usabilty of your awesome Tool.

Thanx.

[Fred Tetra]

Originally posted by T7nowhere
Hey Fred, I have a suggestion for a future version of Kotor tool.
I find when Im useing Kotor tool sometimes It can take a while to scan through all the different files and file type's. So I often will load NWN Explorer to find out where an elusive file is. I would prefer to use your program than to have them both open ,also some of KotOR's files will crash NWN explorer.

Suggestion: Is for there to be subtrees that orginize the Games file types into there respective Catagorys. Useing a similar method as NWN explorer. This feature would greatly enhance the usabilty of your awesome Tool.

Thanx.

I had considered doing it that way, and still may, but MS's TreeView control isn't the fastest to manage in code. If folks don't mind waiting for the items to be sorted out then have a tree built accordingly, it could probably be add to the list of future features.

[Fred Tetra]

Originally posted by Sunslayer
How about a find option in the main window? Just like you get in a text editor. And if it's not in the 2DA editor, how about there, too?

While a 'find' feature for the main tree might seem like an easy task, it requires that all tree nodes be realized to work. What you may not know is that when you "open" a "+" node, many times I am building the leaves underneath just before you see them. In this way, you don't have to wait for the whole tree to be built (and it does take a while, especially for the RIMs section, since you have to open, scan, and build for each one. Perhaps I could have it do the full build only if you choose to find.... hmmm.....

As for the 2DA editor, I've got a find feature for that in mind, too.

[Fred Tetra]

Features planned...

- Complete GFF Writer function to provide infrastructure for GFF editing.

- Area editor (.are)

- Save editor (maybe)

- 2DA find function

- Resource categorization on Tree View

- Full tree find function

- BIF builder

- RIM builder

- Auto update notification ("A new version is available...")

Fred's request list:

- A Teletubby skin and 2DA fileset so I can use it with Master Vandar (sp?) as the main PC

- Postcards/stamps/coins from foreign countries

- More chocolate

[Shimaon]

With the GFF Editor will you have some sort of item creation wizard?

[Fred Tetra]

GFF's are dealt with at three levels, the first two of which the user does not see. The first is the reading and writing of the data in the file to and from an internal representation, and the second is dealing with that data in a logical fashion that doesn't care about how it exists on disk. This second level knows how to add a structure to a list, how to find the value of a variable that exists in a list, etc., but doesn't know (or care) how that data was organized on the hard drive)

The third level is the one the user sees. Since there are many game data structures that use GFF to hold their information, each would have its own editor. These editors don't have to be concerned with reading and writing of disk files, so coding them is easier. They just have to be written to manage and display the data that is pertinent to the specific content of the file type in question, be it an Area or Creature file.

[Fred Tetra]

Just an update on the GFF effort -

I discovered that there are at least two field types that are not found in BioWare's GFF specifications. These two new types are used (for example, but not exclusively) to represent the Position and Orientation of items in the CameraList list.

Also, these types are not supported by the GffEditor program. If you try to open and save a file containing these types, they will be ignored and the file will be smaller when you're done. Perhaps quite obvious is the fact that you can't edit attributes of that use those types in their representation. An example of one of these files would be m02ae.git.

[tk102]

I noticed Field Type 17 during my investigations into savegame editing. It seemed like it always pointed to 12 bytes of NULL in the Field Data table. In the savegame editor I'm working on, I made the assumption this would always be the case whenever the editor writes a savegame. I haven't found a case yet where the edited/unedited savegame miscompares due to Field type 17 data.

What other field type have you seen?

[Fred Tetra]

I found that in my files, that type 17 is used to hold a tuple of floats (single precision). Type 16 is 16 bytes long, an appears to be used to hold 4 floats (single precision).

[tk102]

And so it shall be defined!

Type 16 - Float16[4]
Type 17 - Float16[3]

[Fred Tetra]

Well, after spending a few hours analyzing the results of a test that I did.

In the test, KT reads in almost 7400 GFF files from the RIMs, turns them into internal data structures, then re-writes them for size comparison (usually a good indicator that your code isn't working if the sizes differ).

About 0.3% (27 of 7391 files) differed in size. 15 of those are .utm (store) files. They appear to have been written by a different version of the internal toolset, as the field indice array has duplicate entries! The duplicates are ignored, as nothing references them, and my code doesn't read them because of this, so my output files are more compact, holding only meaningful data.

The other files are a couple of .dlg's and the rest are .git's. I'm going to check these out next and see if they're OK. The hard part is that I can't just do a binary compare between the files since I use a different algorithm for writing the data out than BioWare did. This means that all of the data is there, just in a diferent order.

[tk102]

Fred, those are exactly the issues I was facing too including the size checking, the duplicity of entries, and the order of rebuild. For example, in the partytable.res file, the CExoLocStrings are stored first in the field table, before the primary structure's first field.

And hex editing would've driven me bonkers if not for the latest version of Hex Workshop ythat allows the overlaying of structures onto the hex data. It sounds like you've just about conquered all the issues since you're able to describe them... that was the hardest part for me.

[Fred Tetra]

I just looked into Hex Workshop; it would have been nice to have had something like that instead of Hex Editor 2.0 from HHD software (although it is freeware).

Since my last post, I discovered more of the same type of issue that I found in the UTMs in the GITs. I'll spare you the details here, but email if you want them for you own edification.

What this means to everyone else who couldn't care less about the nitty gritty code details is that I can now start on the GUI for some editors. I had considered a savegame editor (and I may still do one) but you've got that covered well enough for now. I was going to add ability to adjust the global variables in the saves in addition to the features you already have done.

[Ellderon]

Good to know you're making solid progress!

I agree that a savegame editor is not even near a top priority..Better take care of the area editing..that will give the comunity a kick!

[Fred Tetra]

I've decided to work on the Creature (.utc) editor first. After determining that doing the Area editor would require some really good design decisions, I figured that I'd rather make my mistakes on something simpler. Not that dealing with GFFs of any sort is easy (just ask tk102!), but there is less to deal with (from what I can tell) in Creature files. Area definitions would benefit from a graphically-based object positioner and lots of other non-text-entry type GUI elements that I don't feel like dealing with until I feel comfortable with the GFF class implementation and interface methods.

People interested in testing possibly buggy versions of KT can email me saying so. You'll get to see where it is going before the next real release, which might be some time off, given the increased difficulty in building the next level of functionality into KT.

[Fred Tetra]

Here's some screenshots from the new UTC (Creature) editor. Right now it can open any .utc from the tree view, allow you to adjust many of the parameters (not all, yet) and save the adjusted content to the override folder. You can very easily change the settings over and over, saving from the same editor instance and seeing what the results are in the game without quitting either.

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